(My wife....)

I wish I still had mod points for that.

Whiskey = Ireland

Don't be so naive. When dealing with the external world and categorisation it is not "you" who determines others' label for your religion, but those "other people" who are the majority and make the rules. Those with the biggest metaphorical and physical guns decides who is in the club and who is a heretic.

You may call your religion the one true and holy continuation of Zoroastrianism, but until you are the majority denomination, or the most influential, the rest of the world will consider it to be a loony cult, minor sect, or alternate branch depending on size.

Religious names and categorisation are social constructs, you may even claim to be a Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, but until the rest of us agree to call you that you're still a human. The point your missing is that in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, "The Land of the Pure", Abdus Salam is not considered to be a Muslim. We both agree to call him Muslim, but that does not change his status in Pakistan. If he was Baha'i or Oriental Christian he would most likely still be written out of local history because they are powerless, minority religions and do not follow the national narrative of a primarily Sunni Islamic nation.

Returning to your attempt at logical argument, likewise most "mainstream Jews" don't consider Christians, or Muslims to be Jewish yet they both claim to be the continuation and reformation of that religion and thus subsume Judaism into their traditions. Ahmadism, Baha'i are examples of reform and syncretic religions. Failed reformations and minor branches are not considered part of the main religion by the main religion; Roman Catholicism still claims primacy as the one true catholic faith with Apostolic Succession. Similarly the Eastern Orthodox and Lutheran churches also claim to be the true Christian faith, none of them consider Mormons to be, and in their jurisdiction they can define what is and isn't Christian by whatever criteria they choose.

Many mainstream Muslim do not consider Ahmadis to be Muslims

I don't know where in the world you are, but in some countries there are still some very good newspapers. Germany has some great daily and weekly newspapers/magazines if you can read German such as the Frankfurter Allgemeine (famous for its highbrow nature), Süddeutsche Zeitung, Der Spiegel, and Stern. The Guardian or Telegraph in England are worthwhile reading, and then for me the Irish Times when I'm at home. Ads are not so intrusive in these publications, and normally have reasonable articles and interesting commentary. I remember the Seattle Times being not too bad as well, if a little on the thin side, but stuffed inside it was a bundle of ads thicker than the newspaper.

You need to read better newspapers. Find yourself a quality broadsheet.

That depends on your definition of democracy. During the time of the Famine we were ruled by the landed Anglo-Irish aristocracy, experienced religious and cultural persecution and at the height of the Famine food was exported to England.

This is not meant as a swipe at British of the day or British today, there were of course many decent people who did look after the poor or their tenants, but sadly they were in the minority in Ireland at the time.

The headline rate might be 12.5%, compared to that of 33.3% for France for example which has complained for a long time about the headline rate; but in reality the effective rate in France can be as low as 8.2% which they actively advertise here.

References can be found here (second graph), here, and here.

What brought down Ireland, and will bring down Spain and the rest of the PIIGS is the private banking debt owed to non-indigenous investors/wholesale banks & the ECB that their taxpayers are being forced to pay for by the ECB. In Ireland's case it was three times its national debt, and continuing to cost more. For Spain it could be worse, possibly €100Bn-300Bn. What turned both countries into basket cases was an unregulated credit fuelled bubble and the idiocy in Germany and the EU commission for confusing a banking problem for a fiscal (i.e. sovereign) problem. The fiscal problem was created by forcing unsustainable levels of debt on the taxpayers of these countries.

Used to use it for years, but got fed up with how long it takes to load imap folders so I moved back to alpine.

+1 for pine/alpine. I'm a big fan of that, especially when visiting China where I can still ssh to my old university account and use alpine from there. Plus it's much faster to load than mutt when dealing with huge IMAP inboxes.

Middle click the terminal button will open a fresh instance, or just use a keyboard shortcut. Vanilla Gnome 3 is terrible, but with Shell Extensions, and Tweak Tools you can have a great DE back. Of course we should not have to install plugins to restore functionality, but I have to say it's a pleasant surprise. I started with FreeBSD in 2001, and tried all the major DEs and WMs (tiling and floating) since then. I'm still waiting for KDE4 to reach the dizzy usabillity heights of KDE3.