Day: March 23, 2012

A long-time reader of this blog and a fellow St.Louisan Nancy P. offered this brilliant suggestion as to how one should respond to (potential) employers’ requests that one give them one’s Facebook password:

I will consider your request when you have gathered original copies of privacy releases from the “friends” and from any others who may have been seen in a photo on my private Facebook page. I also require you to obtain from Facebook’s general counsel a specifically worded consent for you to access my private Facebook page via password. The action of giving a password to some person other than the registered user is considered a violation of terms of service, and may be illegal. Furthermore, I suspect that you would like to prevent your company from being banned or sued by Facebook. Lawyers in most civil suits take a scattershot method of naming defendents, and any sloppiness on your part in obtaining all consents from “friends” and any people present in photos on the private site may expose you to lawsuits from these individuals, and possibly lawsuits by Facebook corporate defendant in any countersuit. Needless to say, I would be a target of all lawsuits as well, but generally plaintiffs’ lawyers pursue corporate deep pockets, and individuals with relatively few assets are assigned minimal responsibility.

Brava Nancy P.!

Some people should really chew more and speak less. Here is yet another idiotic article on the subject of the Russian performers who vandalized an Orthodox cathedral:

About a month ago, I wrote about Pussy Riot’s exciting brand of activism.

Yes, you did, you ignorant fool who is projecting her own cultural reality onto a completely different country she despises too much to learn anything about before firing off stupid posts.

After the group’s demonstration at Christ the Savior Cathedral, alleged Pussy Riot members Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova were arrested and detained. . . The arrests occurred the day before the election, possibly in an effort to prevent protests after Putin’s election.

A simple Google search would reveal to this idiot that the post-election protests had been planned a long time in advance, and their organizers had obtained official permits to assemble peacefully, which is their constitutional right. They had absolutely no trouble obtaining the permits. The protests took place and the police made no effort to prevent them from happening. (I have a mountain of links to the accounts of people who participated in the protests, in case anybody is interested.) This entire Pussy Riot debacle had absolutely no influence on the protests and was not in any way related to them.

Pussy Riot’s detractors are accusing them of blasphemy.

These money-hungry performers tried to self-promote by violating a place of worship that has a very tragic history and is a sacred space not only for the members of the Orthodox Church but for everybody who has even a modicum of appreciation for the history and culture of Russia. Maybe I’ll write a post about the Christ the Savior Cathedral later on because it has a truly fascinating history. Blasphemy or not, this was an act of vandalism and a hate crime. If you don’t agree, then consider how you’d feel about me if I ran into a mosque or a synagogue and yelled, “I shit on your Allah or your Yahve, you stupid swine!” Just remember that Christ the Savior Cathedral has pretty much the same meaning to the members of the Russian Orthodox Church as the Holy Temple in Jerusalem does  for the Jews.

If the author of this stupid post were, indeed, a feminist (which she claims to be, but which she very obviously is not), she would mention that the truly appalling thing about this entire situation is the number of suggestions that the arrested members of Pussy Riot be released because “they are women and mothers” that has been appearing in the Russian press. This double standard is an insult to women everywhere.

People are asking me why I’m not blogging about the student protests in Quebec, so here is my contribution to that discussion.

The students are protesting the plans to raise their tuition by $325 per year (my links here are in French.) Right now, the cost of tuition in Quebec is the lowest in Canada. Students from the province pay about $3,000 per year to study at McGill University, one of the best universities in the world and my alma mater.

These students are smart enough to realize that this apparently small tuition hike is only the beginning. If they don’t fight this, very soon their tuition will reach the much higher education costs of other provinces.

Now I have to remind you that the people of Quebec pay a whole lot of taxes. I mean a shitload of taxes. They should be getting something in return, such as, for example, accessible higher education for their children. These insane amounts of money they pay in taxes should not be going to feed the fat cats of the humongous and constantly growing federal and provincial bureaucracy. This proposed tuition hike is an absolute disgrace and anybody who has seen a tax return of a Quebecois person will have to agree.

The only reason why my sister and I were able to get a great education in Montreal as new immigrants fresh off the airplane is that the tuition was very accessible. Now we are both very productive members of society. My sister has her own business in Quebec, and you know what? She pays a shitload of taxes and, since the business is growing, creates jobs for other residents of Quebec. Who, then, also pay a lot of taxes. Shouldn’t she, at the very least, have the certainty that her daughter will be able to afford to go to college without incurring a ruinous debt?

This is a crucial moment in the history of Quebec. The people of my beautiful province do not deserve to have the rights they’ve been working so hard to acquire stripped away from them by money-hungry bureaucrats. The suggestion by the government that there isn’t enough money to maintain the current tuition rates is ludicrous. There is money aplenty. And it should be up to the people of Quebec to decide whether they prefer to feed the bureaucrats or educate their own children.