According to Canadian Customs, you are looking at what is apparently one scary guy. He was on a tour today, as part of a vacation with his dad, and when the tour bus pulled into the customs station, the Canadians made him get off the bus and spent about 5 to 10 minutes asking him various questions such as how much money he had with him, what his camera was for, and a number of other things.

Now, I may not be a customs agent, (and I'm probably a bit biased since I'm married to the guy) but generally if I see a tourist on a tour bus as part of the tourism-related tour, well, I figure they have a camera with them to take pictures, but maybe all the training that agents receives tells them to be suspicious of long-haired guys with a camera on a bus.

A few days ago, I wrote a piece about the upcoming FX show, American Candidate.  This has been the quite the talk of the Blogosphere, and now Phil Bowermeister from the Ace of Justice has an idea he'd like to share.

His goal is to get Stephen Green from VodkaPundit nominated to be one of the potential-Candidates on the show.  Be sure to read Phil's piece, and if you agree with his idea, send a letter to FX (address provided) and we can see what happens from there.

Sorry, Thinkofthechildren.co.uk has been torched by an angry mob.

On Monday 23rd September, the Metropolitan Police (acting with the support of The Internet Watch Foundation) contacted my web host, Webfusion (aka Host Europe), and requested that thinkofthechildren.co.uk be 'removed from the public domain'.

Thinkofthechildren.co.uk was a site that satirized the British tabloids coverage of child murders and paedophiles.  Now, granted, those are likely to be fairly sensitive topics to try and write satire about, and, in all honesty, I had not seen the site before it was taken down.  The issue here, though, isn't if the site was actually funny, its that it serve a legitimate purpose in criticizing the way that some people - particularly those running tabloids - were making a fair amount of money by writing about (and writing about and writing about) paedophiles and child murders.

If you want to read the full story of what has happened, and find out how to get updated as the webmaster attempts to find a new home for his site, be sure to check out http://thinkofthechildren.co.uk

Be sure to take a few moments to read the article "Failsafe" by Elaine Scarry.  It's a very well written and well-thought-out evaluation of our National defense system in light of what did and didn't work on 9/11. 

The article focuses particularly on how so much of our national defense system is based on the idea that decisions will have to be made and actions taken in a very short period of time - "a matter of minutes" as the saying goes.  Yet even with as much warning as was available about the potential for hijacked planes and the knowledge that if a plane was hijacked that day there was a very good possiblity that it would be crashed into a building, none of our high-tech, super-fast planes were of any use.  Our military was unable to defend us that day, in spite of decades planning for the President to be able to make quick decisions and have them carried out immediately.

What did work was a group of ordinary citizens who made use of whatever resources they had available, including their own personal courage, and were able to prevent yet another tragedy that day.

Scarry provides an interesting breakdown of how much notice the Pentagon had in regards to the plane that plowed into it and what actions (or lack thereof) were taken.  She then compares that to a breakdown of how the passengers of Flight 93 made use of their time and the actions they took.

She also takes the time to comment on the excuses that some have given as to why the government had a difficult time getting anything done that day - and why the situation would be largely the same if we were looking at missles instead of airplanes.

So take some time to read it - agree with it or not, I'm sure it'll get your mental wheels working.