American Al-Qaeda

How close Islamic fundamentalists are to our own God-fearing, other-hating terrorists at home. Lest we forget.

``The fact that I have entered an agreement with the government is purely a tactical choice on my part and in no way legitimates the moral authority of the government to judge this matter or to impute guilt,'' Rudolph said.

Which means, sir, you're a fucking coward.

Thankfully they're keeping him alive. Death could have meant martyrdom.

"the new face of church"

Is 16,000 people in the Houston Rockets' former stadium.

It's Lakewood Church, the biggest in the country. The pastor, Joel Osteen, has a book with 2.8 million copies in print, a TV audience almost twice that large, and, you can be assured, tons of money.

I've actually seen his sermons [broadcast locally] and it's no wonder he's popular, he never talks about suffering or the trials of faith. He's more Tony Robbins than Jimmy Swaggert, more life coach than after-death coach.

So can you even call it church? Maybe.

Still, I'd rather have umpteen million people listening to spiritually innocuous psychobabble than tuning in to Jerry Falwell.

Maybe, in the end, the more venomous strains of evangelical may be done in by the free market, but don't hold your breath.

What kills you makes you stronger

Or vice versa.

Researchers at the University of Utah believe that high occurances of genetic diseases in Northern and Central European Jews [Ashkenazim] has links with their greater than average intelligence.

The greater than average intelligence part, the researchers believe, stems from being hamstrung into managerial positions for centuries. Not allowed to either rule or do agrarian labor, Jews from the early middle ages to the 18th century pretty much had to learn the intellect intensive trade of money-lending and banking. Thus natural selection for intellect was of primary importance. The researchers extend that

Proof that these Jews are smarter than your average homo sapiens? While 3 percent of Americans are decendents of Ashkenazim, 27% of America's Nobel Prize Winners are Ashkenazi.

Half the world's chess champions are too, though none were from America [Bobby Fischer is a self-hating Jew, but whether he was Ashkenazi is unknown].

Whether that equates directly to contracting Tay-Sachs or one of a cluster of other genetic abnormalities that have shown up in that population remains to be seen, but the researchers state that the hypothesis is easily testable: people with these disorders should have higher than average IQs.

The delightful NYTIMES article

Jared Diamond, who wrote Guns, Germs and Steel, forwarded a similar hypothesis in the early nineties, linking the diseases to intellect stemming from having to avoid religious persecution at every turn.

Taken to not sucking

Belle and Sebastian were really great for a few albums. Then, recently, they got really bad. People who know more than me suggest it's because they became more egalitarian with their songwriting. Stuart Murdoch, architect of the early brilliance, began handing the songsmithery over to his bandmates. The result, as evidenced by their most recent LP Dear Catastrophe Waitres, is utter cacophony with the only really good songs being those written by Murdoch. But even those aren't much fun to listen to because they're surrounded on all sides by dissonance and disco-throb.

Point being: Belle and Sebastian have re-released all their non-album EPs in one place, covering the years 1997-2001, when they were great, good, then at least listenable. Here, in one place, are all the songs I found on Limewire but never saw in stores.

Rejoice.

Action: unspecified

Look here--and I'm serious about this--if you keep down the path you're on, there's going to be trouble. I mean it. You better back off, because if you don't--and I promise you this--our actions will be unspecified. The consequences of which have yet to be determined.

And don't expect us to back down either.

A missing theistic link

William Saletan spins a hell of a fossil record metaphor in his description of the evolution of Intelligent Design theory:

Like its creationist forebears, ID is theistic. But unlike them, it abandons Biblical literalism, embraces open-minded inquiry, and accepts falsification, not authority, as the ultimate test. These concessions, sincere or not, define a new species of creationism—Homo sapiens—that fatally undermines its ancestors. Creationists aren't threatening us. They're becoming us.

I wish I'd written that.

No abstinence, no aid

Brazil is now the first country to decline a US grant for AIDS relieve because US money requires that the recieving country not use the funds on any real programs. The money has to go toward promoting abstinence. Quoth FMF:

Brazilian officials feel that condemning prostitution will damage efforts to protect sex workers from contracting and spreading HIV/AIDS, a group that has the highest risk of contracting AIDS.

According to the Associated Press, because Brazil’s prevention and treatment model includes working with sex workers, gay men, and injection-drug users, top Brazilian AIDS officials believe that signing the pledge would only hurt their AIDS efforts.

Hopefully this is a sign that the Bush doctrine of throwing money at poor countries to force them into way-right morality is losing steam.

All the money in the world, applied to a bogus remedy, is no kind of cure.

Now if only that would translate to all of our nation's public schools, we might be getting somewhere.

Microsoft changes stance again

They will now once again support gay rights initiatives before the Washington State legislature.

CEO Steve Ballmer said: "if legislation similar to HB 1515 is introduced in future sessions, we will support it."

Probably had something to do with disproving the argument God plus Hutch is enough.

Cowards. Since not wanting to seem too gay backfired, Microsoft is now trying to not seem too anti-gay.

This is why big companies eventually will stagnate and fail. They stop innovating and become reactionaries.

Probably to be continued later . . .

Holy of downloadable holies

Pitchfork, this very day--Just now, a second ago--began offering downloads of the singles they review daily.

The whole song. Right now.

Sufjan Stevens and The New Pornographers inaugurate the revamp. Both have LPs I'm looking forward to enormously. And now you don't have to take my stupid words for it. Not that I suspect any of you ever did. Except Mike. He'll buy anything.

Since it takes roughly two days after a Pitchfork album review for the various internets to become flooded with whatever obscure band they're calling the next Arcade Fire--from nothing to 12,000 hits on Limewire--this is a nice headstart.

Going vegan

Scientists have discovered a massive cache of dinosaur fossils in Utah that seem to be evolving into herbivores from the line of carnivores that includes Velociraptors.

Over millions of years these beasts went from long-legged, hook-toed Jeff Goldblum harrassers to squat, long-necked grass-gnawers with smaller claws and bigger hips [to accommodate the larger bowel systems needed by herbivores].

Discoveries of such an evolutionary path are fairly rare and are awesome.

Here's a picture of the little dickins. What remains unclear, though, is why every artists rendition of a dinosaur depicts the animal freaking the hell out, tail lashing, screeching, choking on it's own tongue. Falcarius utahensis needs to take a chill pill.

Civilization's death knell

When IGN.com and the new KFC Snacker team up, weeping follows.

The fan-selected IGN/Snacker 100 greatest videogames of all time, it appears, was voted on by a disproportionate number of 5 year olds and blunt-trauma victims with no long term memory.

From a set consisting of all videogames ever created, John Madden Football 2005 is number 22. Meaning that, in the opinion of these mouth-breathers, an updated roster and minor gameplay changes make Madden 2k5 so much better than 2K4 as to essentially render the previous 30 years of videogame history a mere footnote toward the glorious genesis of this lumbering corporate regurgitate.

Everything up to now has been useless, with the exception of the latest Ratchet and Clank.

IGN is a sociological experiment masquerading as a videogame website. Their studious chronicling of America's videogame tastes has changed my opinion of eugenics.

The insinuation of spin

Crap, Britain, you're begining to look like America. Before you respond with, "Fuckin a, 'bout time," note that I mean in terms of the marketting of policy.

Loaves, fish, compact discs

Always and forever catering to the least of these, my bretheren [in this case, those without CD burners], Wal-mart is now offering to burn their digital music selection to CD for you.

The cost for a customized CD of three songs is $5 plus 88 cents for each additional song.

A three song CD is pretty much pointless unless the selections are from The Velvet Underground and Nico, The Tain and . . . say . . . Godspeed You! Black Emperor.

Of course, assuming you have even the crappiest of computers, you could just buy a very good burner and break even [using Wal-mart prices] in like 4 burns.

Whichever.

Manufacturing outrage

William Saletan thinks the dust up over a pharmacist's right to deny prescriptions is being exaggerated by pro-choice groups, not pro-lifers. Scintillating.

It seemed strange such a ground swell was occurring around a birth control device in a country roundly at ease with contraception.

Funny how, while the deceitfulness of the judiciary recall movement reeks with demagoguery and ignorant fundamentalist rancor, this just smells sweet.

Faintly like one's own medicine.

Ask Dr. Bill

During the height of the Terri Schiavo murder fracas, Bill Frist, a doctor, concluded, via videotape, that she was in fact responsive and was not, as a slew of neurologists had concluded, in a 'persistent vegetative state'.

Now you can ask Dr. Bill to diagnose your ailments, presumably contradicting your high paid specialists.

This must be the place

David Byrne has a blog. Like his music, it's artsy and informed and critical and fluid and good without being pretentious. He critiques contemporary art without sounding haughty and offers measured socio-political analyses of current events.

He's still cool.

I smell your lightsaber

It didn't seem possible that an article on force feedback cell phones would contain a candidate for best word ever.

teledildonics

It's better if you put the emphasis on the syllable with the 'O'. Creates a kind of grandiosity.

Dildonics is not a new word, and this is just a spliced compound of that [the quicker we finish shuffling off the Latinate conventions that prevent us from creating words like zeitgeist, the better], but I've never seen it in pseudo-print before. Publication lends a word gravity.

Roosters over women

It will soon be a bigger crime in South Carolina to abuse a male chicken than a female human:

Both cockfighting and domestic violence are currently misdemeanor crimes, punishable by 30 days in jail. If the bill passes, cockfighting will become a felony, punishable by five years in jail. Domestic violence crimes will remain a misdemeanor.

WIStv.com via Fark

Predators and prey

"If we can find its natural enemy, we can control the spread of HIV naturally and cost-effectively, just as we use cats to control mice."

Sweet.

Let there be white smoke

. . . and there was.

Update [9:58]: "Cardinal Ratzinger of Germany Is Elected
265th Pope, Taking Benedict XVI as Name"

God help us all.

Choose them wisely

Honest to God, this is how my friends start conversations with me:

"Want to hear something interesting about logarithms?"

Thing is, I did.

[If you want to hear something interesting too, you're going to have to leave a comment begging for it--let me tell you, it is hella interesting]

You fall, slain

Wired News has an interesting article on the dogged presence of text-based gaming in a graphic oriented world. Accolytes say text-based gaming is analogous to reading a novel:

Elizabeth Price, moderator for OneRing MUSH: "The text-based format for role-playing allows the same kind of immersion in the story as a book does -- with the added ability to interact with it and shape the story as you go along. There are no images on the screen to limit your imagination's interaction with the story and with other players."

'Novel-like,' some say. Others, 'mind-numbing.'

The limits of imagination gandiosity of such games is obviously stunted in some users, like myself, who have no imagination at all.

I was born too late, I think. By the time I got my hands on Zork I'd been ruined by Coleco Vision and the first Monkey Island. Unfortunate, I needed another time-intensive hobby.

I salt and pepper my mango

--MIA : Arular--
MIA has a sultry, flirty voice and an eclectic sound that assembles and deconstructs music from the East, London, Africa, and South America. Breathless and bilingual, she grows this diversity into something that is dissonant and ruthlessly original.

Caribbean beats appear here as well, giving MIA a sound Gwen Stefani might aspire too if she didn't have the burden of cross-promoting her albums with slash-and-wear thrift store couture clothing lines. Lacking that, MIA has found plenty of time to make music that is both danceable and pertinent.

The effect is as hot as Stefani used to be, but not in that pouty, vulnerable way. It's passionate [love, violence, politics], rich and deep. You might find it odd that this girl, talking revolution and populism, is kinda turning you on. Soon though, you'll wonder how you lived without her alluring earnestness. Or that steel drum and those Donkey Kong bleeps.

If you like to shake your ass--and I mean really shake it--you're strange to me and I regard you with suspicion. Normally, body parts swaying in time with a rhythm makes me vomit with embarrassment. This album, though, this lilting, intrepid mish-mash, definitely made a limb or two flail.

Calling MIA's beats infectious is a disservice to both the beats and that word. She's post-infectious. Arular is a retrovirus that fuses to you, leaving you changed in a way you'll be reluctant to tell your friends about. They wouldn't get it. They don't get you. Not anymore. Not after this.

[This is a draft of a capsule review I'm writing. It's real hard to only write a few words . . .]

Falsies to polyurethane

Slate has a pretty awesome pictorial history of American breast enhancement from 1858 to last Tuesday, when a Mr. Matthew Lamar Turner of Gainsville submitted a patent for an accordion-like implant that allows the woman to fill her breasts with any "suitable filling material" and can be "pumped up and deflated" depending on how much back pain she wants to experience.

Finding Bobby Fischer

He's in Iceland now, and various other places, including the internet.

After reading his 8463 word, single paragraph, statement of facts regarding being "Kidnapped and railroaded to his imprisonment torture and death in the Jew-controlled U.S.A." [strangely written in the third person] I can conclude, irrevocably, that motherfucker is Kuh-razy.

Fisher became the world's youngest grand master at age 15. He was world champion by 22, then set off making a more tawdry name for himself by associating with various doomsday cults [becoming disillusioned when 1975 didn't bring the destruction of America at the hands of the United States of Europe] and virulently voicing his hatred for Jews despite, strictly speaking, being one.

Ladies and gentlemen, the official website of America's only world chess champion.

Fisher is rumored to have backed out of an exhibition match with the chess-playing supercomputer Deep Blue saying, "didn't like the looks of that big Jew mainframe."

Hitchhiker's guide: snap!

Besides the movie itself, the best part of Sin City was the extended and quite funny trailer for Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which looked to be coming along nicely. The third best part was hearing the fanboys concurrently loose their bowels in excitement. A sloshing sound, momentary relief, then a kind of nervousness. Not regularly showering, though, they already smelt bad, and this new pungeance wasn't noticed.

But this review of an early screening, by some vaguely British-writing fellow, suggests, like Star Wars Episodes I, II and [inevitably] III, Hitchhikers just sucks ass.

The problem--also like I, II and [inevitably] III--is the abysmal dialogue and nonsensical plot. Mostly, though, it's the dialogue.

If there's one thing fanboys get right, it's passion.

Envy and greed ended communism

Marc Fisher says sins--deadly ones--had more to do with communism's fall in Eastern Europe than sin's arch-nemesis, Pope John Paul II, did.

His personal account of how materialism and a desire to keep up with the Jonesenbachers freed East Germany is at Slate.

[M]any demonstrators felt that they would be shot at that night.
. . .
I always asked: Why are you doing this? And the answers came in a torrent, as if decades of silence had been unplugged. Especially in East Germany, where almost everyone could watch West German TV (though they had to keep the volume way down because it was strictly verboten to watch, and if the neighbor heard, there could be trouble), people talked about their jealousy for the material goods that Westerners enjoyed—the clothes, the shoes, the cars, the food.
. . .
Even when I sat in churches for hours on end, talking to ministers, priests, and the generally nonreligious people who came there because of the more open atmosphere, the talk was of political freedom and consumer goods, not of faith.

Fisher also notes that by the 80's, except in perhaps Poland, the people of both communist and capitalist countries had become "detach[ed] . . . from their religious traditions." The same ambivalence seen in the Bloc countries took root in Western Europe "without any official atheism or overt state antagonism to religion." Kierkegaard surrenders.

Fisher was the Washington Post's Berlin Bureau Chief from 1989 to 1993.

Mormons still baptize dead Jews

Or at least, Jewish leadership is unconvinced that they've stopped, despite a prohibition on proxy baptisms dating to 1995 and a face-to-face last year between Utah senator Orrin Hatch [Mormon] and New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton [anything you want her to be]. Quoth WiredNews:

"We have proof, and we are bringing that," said Ernest Michel, chairman of the New York-based World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors

While utterly pointless and probably deeply unsettling for families of the post-life converted, it's super-hilarious to me, given the stark differences betwen the two religions. Orthodox rules are set in place to specifically discourage conversion to Judaism, while Mormons are so desperate for big name play they'll take people against their will and after their death.

Joseph Smith has a nice ring to it, but it's nothing compared to "Anne Frank . . . Ghengis Khan, Joan of Arc, Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin a Buddha," all of whom are now Mormons.

Lysol makers fight Heroin

Buprenorphine, a drug that is as effective as methodone without the associated high, was discovered by the makers of Lysol, Woolite and French's mustard. Quoth Wired:

He didn't feel high, didn't feel withdrawal symptoms, didn't even feel medicated; he just felt better. "It took away the pain," he says. "It even took away the craving. I had my strength back, and I was eating sooner than I ever had in detox. I got clarity when I took that first pill."

The federal government, unsurprisingly, is dragging its feet.

Rumors have surfaced that 'bupe' was originally intended as an additive for the company's world famous mustard, but was shelved because consumers didn't like its pine fresh taste or its effect on their delicates.

Regarding Diversity

A right-wing blog sponsored by the Spokesman-Review posed the following question: "With students forced to pay exorbitant amounts of money for tuition and books to obtain a sheepskin, should [universities] basic requirements for graduation include a course in diversity?"

There's a decided lack of symmetry in the responses. Make your

You can imagine my response [a minority opinion]:

"College is a little late to try and teach cultural sensitivity."

Right, which is why we should be teaching about other cultures from Kindergarten on. I went to high school in North Spokane County, where indians were called prairie niggers, black dolls could be found hanging from lockers and my brother, adopted from Veracruz, Mexico--an American since 3 months--was regularly accosted.

Hate stems from ignorance, so to combat hate we must first combat ignorance. This should begin in the cradle. Sadly, often it does not. But if not, and we are a nation committed to equal rights and respect for all our nation's inhabitants, we must begin the education in Kindergarten, from day one.

But since education is so woefully underfunded, and we can barely teach our children the multiplication tables, let alone the similarities between Chrisitianity and Islam, then I pray to God that someone, SOMEWHERE, will take the time to get people to learn about something other than their own culture.

We decry the Islamic Madras schools for teaching falsehoods about America, but we allow falsehoods about Islam to penetrate the popular culture without seeking to correct it with education.

I went to Gonzaga, where I had to take two classes in diversity. One was taught by a Native American, the other by a Native Chinese. In them I learned about 6 thousand years of culture, art and philosophy I had never even heard mentioned anywhere before. It was stunning the differences I saw in these cultures, but even more stunning were the similarities.

I learned things about people I honestly wouldn't have taken the time to learn on my own. My life is greatly enriched for it and I was never once chastized for being white.

At the same time I had the courage to admit that Europeans and their decendents haven't been perfect.

Diversity, at its best, isn't about placing blame or glorifying one culture above the other, it is about understanding that, in a world full of so many imperfect people of so many different colors and beliefs, the only way to survive is to understand and respect one another.