Category: Uncategorized

This weirdness is just the merest frost on the tip of the iceberg of third world insanity that would be an Obama administration:

A former Army Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, who was cleared of spy accusations is now a Democratic National Convention delegate pledged to Sen. Barack Obama.

A Muslim pledged to B. Hussein Obama. Imagine that! Fortunately, I still don’t expect him to win either the nomination or the presidency. As for Yee, South Texian points out that the well-traveled delegate wasn’t exactly exonerated of the various charges he was facing. Now, I’m no fan of the Bush administration’s various violations of due process and habeus corpus, but there’s something very odd indeed about a man who decides that it’s important to travel to Syria to talk about these abuses.

Dr. Helen seems to be missing the point of right-wing disgust and even hatred for the current Republican Party:

I am often discouraged when I read various right-leaning bloggers and pundits and see them mention over and over that the Republicans are doomed to lose this presidential election. If the Democrats want to feel this way and talk about what losers Republicans are, let them, but why add fuel to the fire?

Why? Because we WANT the current collection of fake republicans and fake conservatives that today run and represent the party to lose! At least a Democratic victory preserves the possibility of an opposition. What, precisely, is the point of supporting a party that has literally nothing in common with your principles? I simply could not care less what letter a politician who supports the expansion of central state power, U.N. sovereignty, and open migration happens to have before his name.

Spengler makes the case that the financial shenanigans are actually the lesser evil:

It is fashionable these days to blame the Americans for borrowing instead of saving. In effect, Americans borrowed a trillion dollars a year against the expectation that the 10% annual rate of increase in home prices would continue, producing a bubble that now has collapsed. It is no different from the real estate bubble that contributed to the Thai baht’s devaluation in 1997, except in size and global impact.

The monster is not the financial system, crooked and stupid as it may have been. The monster is the burgeoning horde of pensioners in Germany and other industrial countries. It is easy to change the financial system. The central banks can assemble on any Tuesday morning and announce tougher lending standards. But it is impossible to fix the financial problems that arise from Europe’s senescence.

It’s interesting to see how often basic economics lines up in opposition to the secular narrative. Regardless, the evidence is rapidly accumulating that the progressive vision of the inevitable Shiny Secular Science Fiction Society requires far more faith than any religious fundamentalist has ever had to muster. The religious fundamentalist at least has the comfort of knowing that he cannot know what comes after this lifetime, whereas the secular fundamentalist is forced to deny the material events that are taking place right in front of his eyes. No wonder so many of them appear to be wearing blinders as they resolutely ignore everything that surrounds them.

Justice arrives, confounding the kidnapping apologists:

In a ruling that could torpedo the case against the West Texas polygamist sect, a state appeals court Thursday said authorities had no right to seize more than 440 children in a raid on the splinter group’s compound last month. The Third Court of Appeals in Austin said the state failed to show the youngsters were in any immediate danger, the only grounds in Texas law for taking children from their parents without court action…. The decision in one of the biggest child-custody cases in U.S. history was a humiliating defeat for the state Child Protective Services agency.

Here’s hoping that the Texas Supreme Court doesn’t attempt to revive this abhorrent travesty of justice and the rule of law. And in case you weren’t sure that the CPS leaped before looking, note the following bit: “Of the 31 people the state initially said were underage mothers, 15 have been reclassified as adults, and one is 27.”

The antigun crowd that attempts to use gun suicide as a rationale for firearms bans might have a few second thoughts once they consider the alternatives. Especially considering that some nations with higher suicide rates than the USA favor pesticide beverages as their exit ticket of choice:

A Japanese farmer who committed suicide by drinking pesticide vomited the poison at a hospital before he died, releasing toxic fumes that sickened more than 50 people, the hospital said Thursday. Doctors were trying to pump the 34-year-old man’s stomach when he threw up, spraying his rescuers with chloropicrin, causing 54 doctors, nurses and patients to develop breathing problems and eye sores. Ten of them were hospitalized themselves, and 90 hospital personnel had to be called in to help with the emergency Wednesday night, said Tomoko Nagao, spokeswoman for the Red Cross Kumamoto Hospital in southern Japan.

Also, there is a fair amount of evidence that more than a few fatal auto accidents are actually cases of suicide-by-car.

I think the planet will be a much safer place if all the politicians in charge of world’s nuclear weapons were female, don’t you?

Assemblywoman Francis Allen is facing battery charges for allegedly stabbing her new husband with a steak knife. The two-term Republican was arrested May 17th after Paul Maineri checked himself into Summerlin hospital claiming Allen attacked him during an argument in the couple’s home. According to the arrest report, Maineri said Allen accused him of embarrassing her in front of friends.

Embarrassed her in front of friends? I can’t believe they even bothered arresting her. She should receive a medal for her self-restraint, for as we know, she would have been well within her rights to shoot him in the back when he was sleeping. Seriously, I wouldn’t be surprised if she not only didn’t resign, but was re-elected with a bigger majority than before.

After eviscerating an AlterNet reviewer of the film, Catkiller takes a welcome swipe at the execrable Pullman, who can look forward to five more billion-dollar beatings at the box office before the sequel to his flop appears:

In stories where creators of worlds love their creations so much that they sacrifice themselves, death is better than life? Boys are better than girls exactly how? Did Jones and Pullman not consult on Lucy’s piety? How is Lewis racist? The lightest colored person in the movies is the *ahem* White Witch, the very character Jones roots for. In A Horse and His Boy the main character meets good dark skinned people and bad dark skinned people. How is that racist?

At least Pullman can rest in smug assuredness that his books spawned a great movie like The Golden Compass. The fact that it taught Speed Racer how to flop is proof that it’s the superior film because it stands to reason that an authentically good film could only be appreciated by a small number of “brights” while the masses enjoy the typical big Hollywood productions like Prince Caspian.

I probably won’t see it for a while myself, being less than terribly interested in movies. I haven’t even bothered seeing The Dark is Rising, a series I liked even better than The Chronicles of Narnia. But I have little doubt that I’ll enjoy it when I do get around to seeing it. While Spacebunny was certainly correct in pointing out that the long battle scenes in The Lord of the Rings were strictly extralibral, I think they fit well within the context of the stories and make welcome additions in the alternate medium.

These days, the free ebooks are getting to be more interesting than most of the books published by the literary gatekeepers:

At its simplest, The Secret History of Star Wars is a new full-length e-book exploring the writing and creation of the Star Wars saga. Culled from over 400 sources and filled with quotes from people such as George Lucas, Gary Kurtz and Mark Hamill, it traces all the way back to 1973 to examine how the first 14-page treatment that began the series came to be and was slowly built, draft by draft, year by year and movie by movie. Covering a period of over four decades, you will discover how George Lucas got his ideas for the original film, how Darth Vader was made into Luke Skywalker’s father in 1978 and forever altered the arc of the story, what happened to the infamous third trilogy in the series and how the prequel stories came to be. The book also reveals the style and method of Lucas himself and how his personal life affected and shaped the story, for better and worse. This is a book which challenges many legends surrounding the series and places the films in a new light. For the more casual fan this will be a mesmerising read and for those who think they know everything about the series, prepare to be surprised!

This reminds me of one shining moment of my life. It was my 30th birthday, when Spacebunny gave me a Ms Pac-man machine and a fair portion of our social circle was witness to the epic humbling of Big Chilly. He is STILL bitter about the fact that my team did the unthinkable and defeated his team in a game of Star Wars Trivial Pursuit. I haven’t dared to risk losing my crowing rights in a rematch, but I may consider putting them on the line after reading through this historical tome.

That’s why I don’t play backgammon either. Big Chilly and Goatrider played daily backgammon for ages. After being subjected to repeated blandishments for about five years, I broke down long enough to beat both of them in succession one afternoon, then promptly retired with an undefeated record. Sometimes, you just have to quit when you’re ahead.

I have seen the future… and it contains both Preview and Quotes. Both features work rather nicely; the carriage-return-inside-tags issue has been fixed as well. I made a few minor recommendations that they’re in the process of implementing, so you should be able to take the new-and-improved version out for a whirl tomorrow.

It seems that if you scratch an atheist deeply enough, all too often you’ll discover an individual who really doesn’t have much regard for the basic concept of democracy:

I am now officially fed up with this public bending-over-backwards to be respectful and sincere towards superstitionists of every stripe, to the point that religion trumps freedom of speech, as this case demonstrates so clearly. And the religious still aren’t satisfied — they’re out for more. I see no distinction between Christianity, Islam, and Scientology, in this respect: if you give them an inch they’ll try and take a mile, as witness the ambush vote on lowering the age limit for abortion that the god botherers have tacked onto the current embryology bill.

We need to kick the bishops out of the House of Lords, ban the Police and judiciary from taking donations from religious organizations, and get religion out of politics by any means necessary.

First, let me say that I completely agree with Charles Stross that the idea of prosecuting someone for calling Scientology a “cult” is wildly absurd. I think it would be similarly absurd to prosecute Richard Dawkins for calling Christianity any of the many perjorative terms he has directed in its direction, although it might be amusing to do so if this prosecution of a teenage anti-Scientologist turns out to be successful.

Where I depart from Stross is that I do not see this totalitarian absurdity as the result of religious influence, but rather as an entirely predictable result of Britain’s post-Christianity. If I am correct, then we should see such abuses of government power continue to get worse as the influence of traditional Western Christianity declines. I very much suspect that like Sam Harris, Charles Stross is in the awkward position of advocating that which will ultimately bring about precisely what he claims to fear. After all, getting “religion out of politics by any means necessary” has been tried many times before… and it has never succeeded even when the blood of millions has been shed. Ultimately, the separation of religion and politics is not possible so long as you permit any vestige of democracy or allow the people to have any voice in their government. This is but one of the many logical conundrums facing those self-proclaimed “rationalists” that Onfray describes more accurately as Christian atheists.

By the way, if you happen to go over there and comment, be respectful. Mr. Stross isn’t exactly what you’d call terribly fond of me, but I am a fan of him and his work nonetheless.

UPDATE – Mr. Stross has closed the comments. Please don’t mistake this for censorship, as he’s quite clear on how his blog is primarily intended to be a soapbox for him, not a forum for general discussion. You can, of course, argue away to your heart’s content here, if you so desire.