Randy Cassingham's Blog

It was hard to write true this week. Very hard. It was hard to be funny, though the lead story is definitely not meant to be funny. I consider those two men's comments downright treasonous. But the response to last week's Premium edition (which many did not read until after they saw last Tuesday's morning news), and the response to the free edition Friday night, told me how much people need things to return to normal. How much people need to have something to smile over. So I did my best to meet both of those needs. If I can be one of the people to bring you a smile, I'm gratified.

I've had a lot of e-mail over the last few days. Some of that is great, some of it has been rather a pain. I've probably had 50 copies of an "editorial" usually attributed to "a newspaper in Toronto" called "The Americans". Most imply that it was published Wednesday. Nope. While it's a very nice piece, the author of this radio editorial, Gordon Sinclair, died in 1984; the piece was written in 1973. This site has the story, a (not-greatly-accurate) transcript, and a Real Audio recording of the editorial.

Many copies of a "Nostradamus prophecy" purporting to have predicted the attack with uncanny detail. Nope: a hoax, one that was quickly debunked.

Some of the worst inbox junk: an unbelievable amount of spam. Does this give you a bit more insight into just how scummy spammers are, that they can't give it a rest for anything? If not, consider this: I've had a lot of copies of a spam that insinuates that anyone who is against spam is somehow "just like the terrorists" because the people who don't like spam are infringing on the spammers' "free speech" rights. OK, let's consider this: on the one hand, we have a group of innocent, law- abiding, peaceful people who want to be secure from trespass (of their personal inbox, of their servers and relays), and on the other hand we have a group of people who conspire to steal resources under cover of disguised and forged addresses and routing headers in order to force us to view their pornography or their sales messages of fraudulent goods and services, all of which costs the Internet infrastructure billions of dollars of damages (the cost of the increased bandwidth and servers necessary to carry all the spam which you pay for). Now which group of people look more like terrorists to you? Like the sick bastards that struck New York, Washington DC and Pennsylvania, there is a war against the scum that want to dictate how you live your online life.

And I need to say anything about the spam frauds trying to divert your good will and donations from the recovery effort toward their own pockets. Yes, they are that low a sub-human. All sorts of fraud spam is going around right now asking for "donations" to "help" the recovery efforts. Please be very careful that when giving money online you are on a legitimate site (such as RedCross.org, or the special collection sites set up by such notable names as Yahoo and Amazon). Please don't let your generosity not only go to waste, but line the pockets of such "people". (I appreciate info about these scams from the non-profit SpamCon organization.)