Boondocks Bluetooth
.. and no, I don’t have one of these ridiculous things. But I do find it ridiculous to see grown men walking around with beeping blue lights on their ears.
… and why do the manufacturers make them blink? Surely the wearer can’t see that’s it blinking… perhaps its a DORK-BEACON!!
The last two and a half months have been ridiculously busy… finished school and have been playing oodles of Rock Band. The biggest thing is that we’re moving to Seattle! Rochester has been fun for the last decade (omfg, has it really been that long?) but its time to move on to a bigger city with more industry and a state with lower taxes.
Plus, I’ll get to chillax with my bro over at sacrilicio.us. I can’t begin to tell you how many “bromance” jokes and the like I’ve had to endure since giving my notice at Xerox … but its been pretty bad. Where am I going? Let’s just say I ask everyone reading this blog to do all of their shopping for books and electronics at the online site of a certain Seattle company… 
As anyone who has read this blog will readily admit, I am no fan of religion… at least, religion as it seems to be practiced today. As a set of mythologies (in the original sense of the word), religion can be used to inspire individuals to great acts of courage and enforce the values of a given (and by necessity rather monolithic) society. It is only the desire of people to move their various “faiths” beyond this realm that really bothers me - especially when that intrusion hampers the progress of science and rational thought. Among the world’s current religions, those coming out of the turbulent middle-east seem the most determined to account for explanations of the natural world, moving well beyond the aforementioned “realm” of inspiration.
… they are failing miserably…
Having said this, of all the religions most maligned, least understood and most feared - not entirely without reason, I might add - is Islam. Not being a fan of this sort of hysteria, I decided to educate myself about Islam in the interest of seeing it with as clear an eye as I could muster, i.e., its triumphs and its failures. I found a lucid, highly enjoyable introduction in Reza Aslan’s No God But God.
Aslan begins with an analysis of the pre-Islamic societies that existed in the Arabian peninsula during the Jahiliyyah or “Time of Ignorance” and continues to modern times. His assertion is that we in the West are witnessing an “Islamic Reformation” between the forces of modern progressiveness and the forces of medieval thought (both of those are my terms).
This idea of a Reformation is intriguing - Aslan’s account of the development of Muslim thought clearly shows that as religions go, Islam had a strong “rationalist” tradition. This tradition was squelched by the Ulama, the so-called “learned ones,” in the centuries following the first Caliphs. Ironically, it was the separation of secular and religious authority adhered to by the Rashidun (the first four Caliphs following the death of Muhammed) that enabled them to rise in power. To paraphrase Aslan: caliphs came and went, dynasties rose and fell, but the Ulama were always there. Obviously, this was only “separation” in the sense that in the 7th and 8th centuries, most of the rival empires (Zoroastrian and Byzantine) were explicit theocracies - we would consider them all to be theocracies by today’s standards.
I’d encourage anyone with an interest in world affairs and The Middle East to give this book a read. Whether you love Islam or hate it, there is no doubting that it is having a major impact on today’s world. To be sure, I’m mostly amazed at how far away (in the wrong direction) from its origins Islam seems to be and how much the forces of groups like al-Qaeda, the modern-day Kharijites, seem to be exacerbating that phenomenon. I don’t believe this to be an opinion held only by the “infidel” who wrote this.
Need I say more? 
Muslims appear to be far more concerned about perceived slights to their religion than about the atrocities committed daily in its name. Our accommodation of this psychopathic skewing of priorities has, more and more, taken the form of craven and blinkered acquiescence.
Sam Harris: Losing Our Spines to Save Our Necks - Politics on The Huffington Post
A really good article - in truth, we in the West must ask ourselves what we’re willing to sacrifice in the name of political correctness (I’d say cowardice were I in a more cynical mood). Though I tend not to care for Conservatives - Social Conservatives especially - I have to wonder if we aren’t looking at the “broken clock being right twice daily phenomenon regarding their warnings about Islam. While we bend over backwards to accommodate hyper-sensitive pockets of Muslims, we are willing to dial down the very rights that make the West different: free speech, resistance to autocratic regimes and religious pandering.
The title of Harris’ article is on point: what portion of our society will we give up to avoid inflaming a group of people who become more sensitive by the day? Perhaps we should all read a little Gibbon
Microsoft CFO: Maybe we’ll shop elsewhere
I haven’t been more likely to keep using Yahoo search and to actually fire up Yahoo Messenger than I was when I found about M$ hostile takeover bid.
hmmm.. maybe that was the plan all along… 
Blogged with the Flock Browser
I was never particularly turned off by John Paul II although I’m far from supporting the Roman Catholic Church. The current Pope, however, makes me very nervous - not just because he served in the Hitler Youth, I’m willing to cut someone some slack for doing stupid things as a child. He makes me uncomfortable because of his alleged obstruction of justice in the international sex scandal his priests have inflicted on the rest of us. Specifically:
It spells out to bishops the church’s position on a number of matters ranging from celebrating the eucharist with a non-Catholic to sexual abuse by a cleric ‘with a minor below the age of 18 years’. Ratzinger’s letter states that the church can claim jurisdiction in cases where abuse has been ‘perpetrated with a minor by a cleric’.
Are you kidding me? Jurisdiction over the laws of the nation in which his priests live? Then I came across this article on “No God Blog” and was positively disgusted. To be sure, it’s a long one, but well worth the read. Here are Dave’s top reasons to protest:
1) The Catholic Church is a country with a seat in the UN. They are the only religion allowed to do this. It allows them to influence the world and foist their archaic opinions on every member country.
2) The Catholic Church sponsored the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, helped the Nazis in the Holocaust (here’s where they admit it), and still meddles in world affairs regularly.
3) The Catholic Church demands tithing worldwide, forces all its employees to take vows of Poverty, pays no taxes, and still claims not to have money. They whine constantly about their loss of revenue, while the Pope sits behind golden doors. The Church has never revealed how much its worth, but they could probably cure world hunger.
4) The Pope himself helped Hitler, and advised JPII to hide pedophiles instead of throwing them in jail. In this way, Pope Benedict directly placed US children in harm’s way, to avoid scandal in the Church. The sex scandals in Africa and other countries have gotten little to no resolution because there is no media coverage, and therefore no scandal. This makes him an international criminal.
5) He really doesn’t like Atheists, and warns the world about us. He has chosen to make us his adversary, in an attempt to make people think WE’RE the bad guys.
6) Priests are required to have first allegiance to the Vatican, and second to their home country. Sound like a recipe for treason? It is!
That’s some frightening information. And for those of you who dislike the idea of extraneous spending:
The Pope, the Vatican, and the Roman Catholic Church are right now receiving a special US Government issued tax incentive, essentially a financial assistance grant, courtesy of the American taxpayers. Whenever a Pope visits America, tens of millions of American tax dollars are spent on public church services he celebrates, which obviously the extremely wealthy Vatican doesn’t need, but receives anyway. This violates state/church separation in a huge and unmistakable fashion.
Only one image does this justice …
So it looks like we’re all paying for Pope Palpatine’s nonsense-spreading visit to the US in preparation for his fully-operational battle-station
…Enjoy the 24 hour news coverage this weekend …
(Via NoGodBlog.com.)