I did have teh lulz...

Slayer goes to church

VP Joe Biden, known for sticking his foot in his mouth, must know a thing or two about how the knee tastes.

Speaking at a fundraiser in Philadelphia, Biden likened Republicans in Congress to people who excused rapists by blaming their victims.

I guess this makes the Democrats in Congress (and the current presidential administration) the rapists.

I know a lot of people had things to say about how stupid Dubya sounded much of the time, but even Dubyah's critics have to admit that he didn't make it this easy.

An article at WND explains that "[t]hat joke in class has Robert Engler, a 12-year sociology professor at Roosevelt University, fighting for his career.

It elicited two written complaints in the spring of 2010 as ethnically offensive, and what followed was a protracted argument that eventually included the termination of his employment from the fall semester."

I think the bigger joke is the administration of Roosevelt University for taking complaints of being offended by this gag seriously. Statistically, English is still the predominant language in this country. If someone doesn't like it, they are welcome to leave.

There are a few things happening around Chez Timex:

• I have IPv6 at home now. It's mostly limited to one system and it's encapsulated over IPv4[1], but it's there and it works.
• I'm playing with Blogs again, though I'm not sure where it's going to go. As you may have noticed, I don't seem to have a lot to say lately. (It doesn't help that for much of last year and this, as far as I know or care, the "Comments disabled" bit seems to be b0rken. I set it to disabled, and people were still able to post.)
• The plague (well, not literally) is making its rounds. It's mostly in the form of nasty colds that don't want to let go.
• Computers in the house are aging and the better ones are threatening to go on strike, if they don't quit outright.
• My employer is in the process of being bought, pending regulatory approval. So far, it sounds like a Good Thing(tm), though anyone with experience in these things can tell you that this can change at the drop of a hat.

It's turning out to be quite the year, and it's barely started. Yay.

--
[1]My ISP doesn't support IPv6 yet and even if they did, my firewall doesn't.

The other day my family was playing Candyland. Our daughter was getting into it so I started playing some classic Star Trek fight music.
The music ends just as she advances to GLORIOUS VICTORY!

YouTube video here

It's awesome, not that I'm biased... :)

WikiLeaks has dumped a lot of information that was considered classified.

What I found interesting is that some chemical weapons were actually found in Iraq. Why the Bush administration chose to keep this information to itself, I don't know. I don't have to guess at why Obama would want to bury the information: to release it would only justify Bush's action(s), even in part, which Obama himself ran against.

If you're of the mind that the quantity of the weapons found makes this whole "revelation" a non-issue, let me remind you that one doesn't need a whole lot of this stuff to hit a target, if the target is well-chosen and the plan well executed. al Qaida has demonstrated their ability to execute plans against US forces, so it isn't hard to imagine that this would be enough to become a problem. It wouldn't be difficult to imagine this stuff being used even as a distraction in an attempt to get more useful weaponry or parts, at the very least.

The last line of the second article quoted above is interesting:

I think that the author is making an assumption-- members of Iraq's pre-invasion government had been meeting with representatives of al Qaida which, to make an assumption of my own, implies the possibility (however slight) that Saddam might have been willing to share his arsenal with terrorist groups, if it suited his purpose. The "Islamists" part is utterly ridiculous. The majority of people living in that part of the world are muslim. Saddam himself, as I understand it, ran a government that was more secular than not, which was a bit out of the ordinary for that region.

Admit it. You knew I was going to write about it eventually.

If you didn't know it, then you don't know me. You must be new here.

Unless you have been hiding under a rock, you've heard about that preacher in Florida that planned to burn copies of the Koran. You heard about it because the adherents of this so-called "religion of peace" around the world have been threatening violence against Americans. It's bad enough that an American general felt the need to speak out against the plan, for fear of the reprisals against men and women in uniform.[1]

To be honest, I am at a lurch on where to stand on this. I don't think that Jones is (was?) thinking straight when he decided to burn the Koran. He is well within his rights to do so as an expression of free speech, but his motives are wrong. As a Christian preacher, he should be aware that in the book of Acts, those that burnt heretical work were not doing so to spite those that practiced those things, but were in fact doing so as an act of seperating themselves from that which they themselves practiced in their past. For Jones to be Biblically justified[2] in burning the Korans, he would have had to have been a muslim in his past. If Jones would stop and think first, he might recall James 3:17 and act accordingly. Inciting riots around the world is hardly "peaceable".

Then there are the muslims in New York City who want to build a mosque near Ground Zero. They too are well within their rights to do so, but as with Jones, to exercise their right in this particular place would be as crass. Forging ahead with these plans demonstrates a complete lack of compassion for the people that live in that area, most of whom were there when the disasterous events unfurled nine years ago. These residents remember the horror they felt as they witnessed aircraft doing what they were never intended to do, ramming into the Twin Towers, killing more than three thousand people. The dust and smoke that filled the air for days afterward, the screams of people jumping to their deaths from the collapsing buildings, the fear of what might happen next, all haunt their dreams still. Rightfully or not, many still associate the terrorist actions of September 11, 2001 with Islam, and for muslims to ignore this fact may be construed to be an act of pride in those horrible actions, a "planting of the flag", if you will.

Of course, there are those that argue that Christians wouldn't understand, because they don't have people burning their Bible. To those people I say, "Crawl out of your ignorance and look." In different parts of the world, there have been occasions where Christian Bibles are burned or destroyed[3][4][5][6], and who says anything about it? Certainly not the Mainstream Press, who seem to be predominantly anti-Christian, whatever they may say.

Islam and the Koran should be respected, but that doesn't mean one has to agree with them. There are severe doctrinal differences between Christianity and Islam. Only a fool can think that they are both "right". There is no middle ground here.

It is complicated, from both sides. I won't pretend it is anything less. The "simple" answer is that both sides need to stop whatever they're doing and examine themselves and their faith. They need to make their action match their faith, not the other way around.

"We didn't boot out King George to settle for Rodney King..."

----

1. I think Obama had something to say about it too, but he's really a non-factor. He apparently can't string a coherent paragraph together without a teleprompter, and I'm not convinced he's the one that forged the words he's reading on them.
2. I use the term "Biblically justified" to mean that one is justified in doing something (or refraining from doing something) because one is following the precedent set in the Bible. This requires understanding the passage in question, in meaning and in scope.
3. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/muslim-boys-urinated-on-bible/story-e6frg6nf-1111112640400
   In this case, the East Preston Islamic College acted to quell an uprising by bringing in a senior imam to tell the student body that the Christian Bible and Christianity must be respected. Similarly, there are many Christian leaders on record saying the same thing regarding Jones and people that agree with him.
4. http://www.speroforum.com/a/17283/Muslims-burn-Bible-in-Pakistan
   Here, the law in Pakistan condemns to death those who offend the Koran. However, nothing is done against blasphemous acts toward the books of other religions. Many of the predominantly muslim villagers attempted to make a statement against the sacriledge by going to the church with the Christians, which I find interesting. Before you start to think that Pakistan's stand is an isolated incident, remember that almost all of the Middle-Eastern nations have something in their laws, either in their nation's constitutions or in the actual laws, making Islam the State Religion at the exclusion of all else. Attempting to convert someone away from Islam to another religion is often punishable by death. Practicing another religion is barely tolerated, if at all.
5. http://mobile.associatedcontent.com/article/285123/christians_in_gaza_fear_for_their_lives.html
   Christians living in Gaza are dealing with persecution at the hand of the likes of Hamas. One doesn't "accidentally" use rocket-propelled grenades to break into buildings. It was an intentional act.
6. http://www.assistnews.net/Stories/2010/s10060047.htm
   The Iranian government is burning Bibles. This is hardly a surprise.

I just received mail notification that a fellow user has bought me a gift subscription to slashdot. I'm already friends/fans with the person but his email address isn't visible so I can't thank the person off-/. (wimp, change your privacy settings and deal with the spam! :P )
 
Not sure what I did to deserve it, but I thank you!
 

Construction is underway for a huge clock in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. It is expected (according to the article) to enter a trial period the first week of Ramadan, on (or about?) August 12. That's tomorrow, for those of you keeping track.

The article discusses the mindset of some that Mecca is the "true" global meridian, that Greenwich time was imposed on the world by Westerners.

Would something like this cause some people to redefine "GMT" to mean "Grand Mosque Time", instead of "Greenwich Mean Time"? Would it be any worse than the interest of others in making Paris, France the prime meridian?

Personally, I think the argument in the first article that "the Greenwich standard was imposed by the west in 1884" is ridiculous. True, the Prime Meridian is purely arbitrary, but it was accepted as the standard at a time when Britain was the world power. Then, as now, the muslim world is (largely) still stuck more than a thousand years in the past. Shy of using force, the muslims haven't had a lot of influence in the world.[1]

UTC (aka GMT[2]) is just fine where it is, thanks.

~~~~~
[1] Islam spread through war since its inception around AD630. The modern world has libraries, Algebra, coffee, and several other things or ideas that originated with the Arabs, true, but whether or not we would have them today were it not for their warring tendencies, we may never know.

[2] As the link to UTC indicates, the difference between UTC and GMT, in a casual use, is virtually non-existent.

True, there are some on both sides like this, but the bulk of the noise is coming from the Lefties.

Words to the wise are found at http://www.youtube.com/v/I3cGfrExozQ.

If you comment here about how my title is a lie without watching the video, you are a complete ass.

If you want to comment to tell me that I'm full of it, get in line and suck it up. I don't care.

Local police in El Reno, Oklahoma have managed to get themselves into some hot water, resulting in a case filed in US District Court.

It seems that Lona Vernon, an 86 year-old woman, was bedridden and had somehow gone off her medications. Her grandson, Lonnie Tinsley, called 911 in an effort to get some medical assistance, and ended up getting ten police officers instead. Before the episode was done, he had been taken to the next room and handcuffed, and officers tazed Ms Vernon not once, but twice. The resulting shock nearly killed her, sending her to the hospital for six days.

One is led to wonder how ten police officers would consider themselves sufficiently threatened by one elderly woman to justify even using a tazer. The fact that it was attempted a second time throws the "it was an accident" excuse out the window.

Let's see. I don't bother (much) going to to the front page of Slashdot anymore because I can read the stories through Slashdot's very own mirror on Facebook.

I see that there are (working) efforts to combine Twitter and Facebook status updates, as well as any number of other "social sites".

What's the point in going to any of the many, when one only needs to go to the one that has them all? It's almost like Facebook is trying to become the One Ring, worthy of just as much trust.

It's a good thing that I'm just a little guy (figuratively). It may improve my chances somewhat of resisting The 3vil emanating from such a beast.

When Diaspora is released, I'm going to give it a whirl. If it turns out as good as it is hoped, FB and Slash may get dropped like so many hot potatoes.

In light of a recent "discussion", I feel the need to remind readers of my JEs of my New Year's resolution for 2010:

I'll go so far as to extend this here and now, take a page from one of Rush Limbaugh's books, and add these points:

* What I write in my JE is, so far as I am aware (unless stated otherwise) my opinion based on facts. I write about them here to give you all something to think about.

* If you don't agree with me, fine. We can discuss it in a civil manner, but I will not bend on certain tenets of my belief. Maybe you can change my mind, but you'll have to work at it. :)

* If you cannot refrain from resorting to cussing or name-calling to make your point, then don't waste my time (or yours) here-- just go away. I am not forcing you to come to my JE, and I'm not going to bother you in whatever little world you call your JEs.

In short: if you care to correct my opinion with "facts", then use facts, not your opinions, and certainly not the opinion of someone else.

(Side note: Slashcode is horribly broken in its vain attempt to do whatever the developers are trying to with it to keep up with various social sites. I'm not seeing the bullets when I use <ul> tags, so I'm compensating by adding them manually.)

Short Flash vid...
http://en.tackfilm.se/?id=1273610622233RA56

Canadian pre-orders started today.

64 GB WiFi version ordered, should be here by May 28. No need for the 3G version, I can tether with MyWi on the iPhone.

My dad picked up the similar model on a trip to the US last week. Was playing with it on the weekend, awesome device. Perhaps not magical but still most impressive.