Wednesday, May 31, 2006
A trip down Memory Lane
It’s funny how these things happen. We have a half-full 10x10 storage unit and the new management of the facility is trying to sell us a 50% rate hike as a “small rental increase”. If it weren’t for the language, I probably wouldn’t give a damn. Now that I’m annoyed, I figured it’s a good time to investigate options and as it turns out, we can get better deal than what we have now much closer to where we live now. Hmmm.
While doing this, I made a trip to get an idea what we have stashed away in the first place (loads of crap, apparently), but I also took the opportunity to bring home boxes of clothes that our older daughter grew out of. We sold tons of her stuff in a garage sale, but it seemed like we’d be getting close to catching up with what we kept.
All told, it’s good news. Even if some of the smaller stuff we still have is a bit on the large side, we’re pretty much covered from now on. Who cares if a two-year-old wears slightly baggy stuff for a year or so anyway?
But boy howdy, do these clothes bring back memories. By chance or design, we still have the stuff seen in photos and a lot of nice outfits that slipped my memory. But I do recall how sad I was when she outgrew them.
*sniff*sniff*
Our baby is growing up so fast… Then again, we get to see the rerun, so it’s not all bad.
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
NSA wiretapping
Here’s a long analysis from Mark Rasch:
Protection from prying NSA eyes
I have neither the time nor the background knowledge to comment on the legal aspects.
Short answer: If you don’t want the NSA to listen in, don’t use the phone or the Internet.
Crypto in the U.K.
Looks like the U.K. really wants your crypto keys: Government gets tough on encryption
And it’ll be interesting to see how this will shake out:
The Home Office is currently in the middle of a consultation on the Act, amid fears that financial instructions will move their headquarters out of the UK rather than having to give up master encryption keys that could put customer data at risk.
I suppose the author meant financial institutions. I remember hearing about this years ago, which may have been the reason this part of the act wasn’t passed way back when.
Financial institutions tend to not do well with retail banking, which is the kind of customer that is probably the most apathetic about this kind of legislation. Where banks tend to make money hand over fist is in private banking, customers who care very, very much about privacy and confidentiality. The same applies to a slightly lesser degree to institutional customers. It is not unreasonable that financial institutions would have to move their headquarters offshore and outside of the reach of that legislation to protect their cash cows…
What’s up with the Rabbis?
First, somebody dared to write an op-ed piece extolling the virtue of atheism:
Defenders of the Faith
This prompted some Rabbi Shafran to post some anti-atheistic diatribe which I won’t bother to link to. In any case, PZ Myers did a good gob of shredding it, so I don’t need to bother to tell the Rabbi exactly what I think of his execrable article.
Sunday, May 14, 2006
involuntary humor
Apologists are always good for entertainment. Here’s an example:
Atheisms Blatant Contradiction
A short quote, emphasis added:
The argument I will present is not my argument it has been developed and put forth by many others before me. But, even though it is not mine, you may find a few nuances that I have added. It is the argument for the necessity of God based on the existence of knowledge. In a nutshell, I will show that if knowledge exists, then atheism is inherently contradictory and theism must be true.
If you must know, I fought against this argument for a long time because I didnҒt really understand it.
It’s not that I even tried to read it in full (couldn’t make it past the definition of ‘knowledge’), but apparently this so-called argument is a rehash of a few bald-faced assertions with some circular reasoning added for good measure.
I wonder if the quality of apologetics between different Christian denominations is on a par with that article. And never mind other religions…
Nothing says “Mother’s Day” ...
like waking up to a toddler stealthily trying to unhook your bra.
Saturday, May 13, 2006
Romani Ite Domum
Or, Terry Jones takes the piss out of the Romans again.
The unique feature of Rome was not its arts or its science or its philosophical culture, not its attachment to law. The unique feature of Rome was that it had the worlds first professional army. Normal societies consisted of farmers, hunters, craftsmen and traders. When they needed to fight they relied not on training or on standardised weapons, but on psyching themselves up to acts of individual heroism.
Seen through the eyes of people who possessed trained soldiers to fight for them, they were easily portrayed as simple savages. But that was far from the truth.
The fact that we still think of the Celts, the Huns, the Vandals, the Goths and so on as “barbarians” means that we have all fallen hook, line and sinker for Roman propaganda. We actually owe far more to the so-called “barbarians” than we do to the men in togas.
It’s always interesting to me how science shakes out truth, despite centuries of “conventional wisdom.”
The Romans had chariots, but the Britons made significant design improvements and, as Julius Caesar noted, had thoroughly mastered the art of using them. So how come the Romans built roads and the Celts did not? The answer is simple. The Celts did build roads. The “Romans-were-greatest” version of history made the earlier roads invisible until recently. One of the best preserved iron age roads is at Corlea in Ireland, but it was not until the 1980s that people realised how old it is. It was known locally as “the Danes’ road” and generally assumed to be of the Viking period or later. It was not until the timbers were submitted for tree-ring dating that the truth emerged: they were cut in 148BC.
[...]
What’s more, Celtic road building is not necessarily predated by that of the Romans. The first important Roman road was the Appian Way, built in 312BC, but the so-called “Upton Track” in south Wales, a wooden road laid across the mudflats along the Severn estuary, dates back to the 5th century BC.
I really wish I could watch Terry Jones’ Barbarians series as it comes out; with any luck it’ll come out on DVD here in the States at some point.
Thursday, May 11, 2006
A Troika of Thought
THREE THINGS TO THINK ABOUT:
1. COWS
2. CONSTITUTIONS, and
3. COMMANDMENTS
COWS
Is it just me, or does anyone else find it amazing that our government can track a cow born in Canada almost three years ago, right to the stall where she sleeps in the state of Washington? And, they tracked her calves to their stalls. But they are unable to locate 11 million illegal aliens wandering
around our country. Maybe we should give them all a cow.
CONSTITUTIONS
They keep talking about drafting a Constitution for Iraq. Why don’t we just give them ours? It was written by a lot of really smart guys, it’s worked for
over 200 years and we’re not using it anymore.
COMMANDMENTS
The real reason that we can’t have the Ten Commandments in a courthouse has nothing to do with establishment clause. The real reason is that under Title VII you cannot post “Thou Shalt Not Steal,” “Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery” and “Thou Shall Not Lie”
in a building full of lawyers, judges and politicians—it creates a hostile work environment.
Chat-O-Matic Atheist Witnessing Tool
See here.
I have to revive LiselotteBot.
Christianists!
See Time’s My Problem with Christianism
Notable quote:
So let me suggest that we take back the word Christian while giving the religious right a new adjective: Christianist. Christianity, in this view, is simply a faith. Christianism is an ideology, politics, an ism. The distinction between Christian and Christianist echoes the distinction we make between Muslim and Islamist. Muslims are those who follow Islam. Islamists are those who want to wield Islam as a political force and conflate state and mosque. Not all Islamists are violent. Only a tiny few are terrorists. And I should underline that the term Christianist is in no way designed to label people on the religious right as favoring any violence at all. I mean merely by the term Christianist the view that religious faith is so important that it must also have a precise political agenda. It is the belief that religion dictates politics and that politics should dictate the laws for everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike.
Sounds good to me. I think I’ll do my part to circulate the term Christianism.
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