Here's a quick 4-minute project to get you thinking about the topic for my next entry: Go watch this video. Don't worry about the actual pretty pictures, just listen to the song and actually think about it. Lots of good stuff, but here's the thing I want you to think about:
Can we really trust a man who puts his words in the mouth of God?
Sunday, November 2, 2008
Monday, October 27, 2008
PRO-RIAA
Well here's that promised post for tonight; I apologize again for letting "regularly" fall by the wayside. I'll try to pick up the pace, but classes SSBB and Psychonauts have been sucking up most of my free time.
First off, I'd like to make a quick note: When did we get rid of tabs to open new paragraphs? I just noticed that even I've stopped doing it, and I sometimes think Shamus, Yahtzee, and I are the last holdouts of decent grammar and sentence structure on the internet (Shamus doesn't use them either, I see). I've even seen some recent books that don't do it, so if it started as an internet thing (which I can believe, since in many forum and blog softwares "tab" will move to the next item on the page) it's spreading into everything else. Oh well, another casualty of convenience I guess.
Now onto the meaty liberal goodness of this entry. Hopefully I'll be able to pull myself away from Nintendo's childish but incredibly addicting little white menace long enough to continue my Ubuntu series later tonight or tomorrow, so hang in there if you were waiting for that (as if anyone reads the entries I don't mirror on Facebook). So here goes this week's discussion topic: The PRO-IP act and the sorry state of politics in America in general.
Now, I imagine amidst the financial crisis, Wall Street bailout, oil prices being sky-high (yes, I know they've come down a lot recently but they're still three times what they were when Clinton left office, though whether this is Bush's fault is debatable), and of course the election, you haven't noticed some of the lesser evils working their way through our government. One of the most notable of such evils, at least in terms of my concerns, is the laughably named Protection of Intellectual Property Rights Act of 2008, known more commonly as the PRO-IP act. This act was signed into law this week by President Bush after passing the House in a landslide and the Senate with nary a nay (meaning that yes, both Captain Change and Senator McSame voted for it - more on this later).
Now, since I imagine that taking the time to look up the wording of this act - and then get out your dictionary to figure out what the legalese means - is not in your schedule, I will explain what it does, in broad and accurate terms (not the narrow "it helps the poor starving artist" crap that the official summary says). The PRO-IP act will create a division of the Department of Justice solely devoted to the pursuit of "pirates" and other violators of US copyright law, headed by an "IP Czar." If that last part sounds familiar, it's because the pointless "War on Drugs" in the 90s had this same inane system set up, complete with "Drug Czar," which of course has accomplished nothing but waste millions of taxpayer dollars hunting down, arresting, trying, and imprisoning stoner college students. Well it seems that DrugsTM didn't stick as well as CommunismTM as an Evil Enemy of America®, and TerrorismTM is fading as well, so it's PiracyTM's turn in the limelight. Furthermore, it gives the Justice Department the authority to seize your computer without a warrant on the grounds of "suspected copyright infringement," with no provisions requiring that it ever be returned, even if you are found to be innocent. Apparently no one in Congress found this to be at odds with the fourth amendment, which reads:
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
Now I'm not a legal scholar, but it seems to me that this clause of the PRO-IP act flies directly in the face of the fourth amendment, but then again the fourth is our most trampled on amendment recently anyways, with anything from “suspicion of terrorism” to “the President asked nicely” being good enough reasons to spy on you, seize your belongings, and imprison you without warrant or probable cause.
So how did such a travesty get pass our glorious bipartisan Congress? Why didn't the liberals stand up to stop it because it violated our civil rights? Where was McCain and his anti-“pork barrel spending” maverickiness while the U.S. Senate voted to waste taxpayer dollars doing the **AA's dirty work for them? Well there are a few reasons.
The first, and most shocking, reason has to do with the numbers that the RIAA and MPAA produced to show the massive negative effect that piracy was having on our economy. I'm sure everyone is familiar with the industry's claims of billions of dollars in annual losses to piracy (based on dodgy-at-best statistics that hinge on the idea every single piece of pirated material would have instead been purchased were it not for the evil pirates). Well, according to the MPAA/RIAA, 750 thousand American jobs have been lost to piracy. The surprising part (unless you've listened to anything that any RIAA/MPAA/BSA spokesman has ever said before, in which case you'd probably be more shocked if they weren't lying) is that the numbers used by the RIAA to support the bill were completely made up.
The second reason is that tired old line about “what's good for big business is good for all of us” that the conservatives love to spew. That's another subject for another post though, so I'll be generous for now and say no more about it other than that it's a gigantic load of horse dung.
Finally, we come to the deepest reason: lobbyist money. The big record labels, film studios, software companies, etc. are among some of the largest individual donors to political campaigns. They've donated millions to the campaigns of the major presidential candidates and several big-name senators. Obama has received over 5 million from them; McCain about 1 million. Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton found themselves receiving similarly large windfalls when they had a chance. Oddly, the RIAA/MPAA seem to be more interested in Democratic candidates than Republican candidates, though whether this indicated some sinister side of the Democratic party or simply that they're more expensive to buy off is yet to be seen. Note that they're essentially equally happy to throw money at both McCain and Obama, though since Obama began pulling ahead they've heaped money on him – covering their bases pretty thoroughly, aren't they?
The gist of the issue? Lobbying like this has turned American politics into Alien vs. Predator – no matter who wins, we lose.
First off, I'd like to make a quick note: When did we get rid of tabs to open new paragraphs? I just noticed that even I've stopped doing it, and I sometimes think Shamus, Yahtzee, and I are the last holdouts of decent grammar and sentence structure on the internet (Shamus doesn't use them either, I see). I've even seen some recent books that don't do it, so if it started as an internet thing (which I can believe, since in many forum and blog softwares "tab" will move to the next item on the page) it's spreading into everything else. Oh well, another casualty of convenience I guess.
Now onto the meaty liberal goodness of this entry. Hopefully I'll be able to pull myself away from Nintendo's childish but incredibly addicting little white menace long enough to continue my Ubuntu series later tonight or tomorrow, so hang in there if you were waiting for that (as if anyone reads the entries I don't mirror on Facebook). So here goes this week's discussion topic: The PRO-IP act and the sorry state of politics in America in general.
Now, I imagine amidst the financial crisis, Wall Street bailout, oil prices being sky-high (yes, I know they've come down a lot recently but they're still three times what they were when Clinton left office, though whether this is Bush's fault is debatable), and of course the election, you haven't noticed some of the lesser evils working their way through our government. One of the most notable of such evils, at least in terms of my concerns, is the laughably named Protection of Intellectual Property Rights Act of 2008, known more commonly as the PRO-IP act. This act was signed into law this week by President Bush after passing the House in a landslide and the Senate with nary a nay (meaning that yes, both Captain Change and Senator McSame voted for it - more on this later).
Now, since I imagine that taking the time to look up the wording of this act - and then get out your dictionary to figure out what the legalese means - is not in your schedule, I will explain what it does, in broad and accurate terms (not the narrow "it helps the poor starving artist" crap that the official summary says). The PRO-IP act will create a division of the Department of Justice solely devoted to the pursuit of "pirates" and other violators of US copyright law, headed by an "IP Czar." If that last part sounds familiar, it's because the pointless "War on Drugs" in the 90s had this same inane system set up, complete with "Drug Czar," which of course has accomplished nothing but waste millions of taxpayer dollars hunting down, arresting, trying, and imprisoning stoner college students. Well it seems that DrugsTM didn't stick as well as CommunismTM as an Evil Enemy of America®, and TerrorismTM is fading as well, so it's PiracyTM's turn in the limelight. Furthermore, it gives the Justice Department the authority to seize your computer without a warrant on the grounds of "suspected copyright infringement," with no provisions requiring that it ever be returned, even if you are found to be innocent. Apparently no one in Congress found this to be at odds with the fourth amendment, which reads:
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
Now I'm not a legal scholar, but it seems to me that this clause of the PRO-IP act flies directly in the face of the fourth amendment, but then again the fourth is our most trampled on amendment recently anyways, with anything from “suspicion of terrorism” to “the President asked nicely” being good enough reasons to spy on you, seize your belongings, and imprison you without warrant or probable cause.
So how did such a travesty get pass our glorious bipartisan Congress? Why didn't the liberals stand up to stop it because it violated our civil rights? Where was McCain and his anti-“pork barrel spending” maverickiness while the U.S. Senate voted to waste taxpayer dollars doing the **AA's dirty work for them? Well there are a few reasons.
The first, and most shocking, reason has to do with the numbers that the RIAA and MPAA produced to show the massive negative effect that piracy was having on our economy. I'm sure everyone is familiar with the industry's claims of billions of dollars in annual losses to piracy (based on dodgy-at-best statistics that hinge on the idea every single piece of pirated material would have instead been purchased were it not for the evil pirates). Well, according to the MPAA/RIAA, 750 thousand American jobs have been lost to piracy. The surprising part (unless you've listened to anything that any RIAA/MPAA/BSA spokesman has ever said before, in which case you'd probably be more shocked if they weren't lying) is that the numbers used by the RIAA to support the bill were completely made up.
The second reason is that tired old line about “what's good for big business is good for all of us” that the conservatives love to spew. That's another subject for another post though, so I'll be generous for now and say no more about it other than that it's a gigantic load of horse dung.
Finally, we come to the deepest reason: lobbyist money. The big record labels, film studios, software companies, etc. are among some of the largest individual donors to political campaigns. They've donated millions to the campaigns of the major presidential candidates and several big-name senators. Obama has received over 5 million from them; McCain about 1 million. Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton found themselves receiving similarly large windfalls when they had a chance. Oddly, the RIAA/MPAA seem to be more interested in Democratic candidates than Republican candidates, though whether this indicated some sinister side of the Democratic party or simply that they're more expensive to buy off is yet to be seen. Note that they're essentially equally happy to throw money at both McCain and Obama, though since Obama began pulling ahead they've heaped money on him – covering their bases pretty thoroughly, aren't they?
The gist of the issue? Lobbying like this has turned American politics into Alien vs. Predator – no matter who wins, we lose.
Boring Technical Stuff
A few updates on the blog itself:
1) I'm going to try to keep this thing updated more often - perhaps even a post a day (ideally). Someone keep me to that.
2) I've enabled anonymous commenting, so feel free to be as mean-spirited as you want from safely behind anonymity. Also, those of you getting here via Facebook or NBR or Twenty Sided or what have you can post without Blogger accounts now.
3) My post on government in religion has apparently been mirrored and/or linked in a few of places around the internet now, so that's pretty groovy.
4) My now grossly out-of-date Notebook FAQ seems to have been mirrored in a lot of places around the internet - sometimes without credit, I might add. Oh well, I don't really care as long as someone gets something out of it, but Technology Guide probably owns the actual copyright on it so the ball's in their court if they care.
1) I'm going to try to keep this thing updated more often - perhaps even a post a day (ideally). Someone keep me to that.
2) I've enabled anonymous commenting, so feel free to be as mean-spirited as you want from safely behind anonymity. Also, those of you getting here via Facebook or NBR or Twenty Sided or what have you can post without Blogger accounts now.
3) My post on government in religion has apparently been mirrored and/or linked in a few of places around the internet now, so that's pretty groovy.
4) My now grossly out-of-date Notebook FAQ seems to have been mirrored in a lot of places around the internet - sometimes without credit, I might add. Oh well, I don't really care as long as someone gets something out of it, but Technology Guide probably owns the actual copyright on it so the ball's in their court if they care.
Another Joyful Adventure in MS Land
I have another post in the queue, should be up later today; it's quite a long one but for now I'll leave you (assuming you exist) with this short rant:
This weekend I got fed up with Vista on my spare-parts "extra" desktop (because one can never have too many computers) and decided to wipe it off in favor of an XP x64/Ubuntu dual boot. So I put the XP Professional x64 CD that I got from Case (well, an nLite'd version that is unattended after partitioning) in the drive, reboot, and go through the usual motions, telling it to delete the Vista partition and create a new NTFS partition in it's place and install to that. It then proceeds to install the system on it's own and I go off to play Super Mario World on my SNES because that's just how awesome I am. I come back about 45 minutes later to the Windows XP desktop and set about installing drivers and basic software, as well as running Windows update. I go through all this nonsense for a couple of hours, and reboot into GPartEd to set up my Linux partitions. Here's where the problems started.
To start, I noticed that, for some completely baffling reason, the XP installer had set itself up as a logical partition inside and extended partition for absolutely no f@#%ing reason. OK, whatever, I can dig it. I deleted my NTFS storage partition too (after backing up my WoW installation directory to a handy 16 GB jump drive I snagged during a sale at Newegg for $25) because almost everything on it is useless. I finalized the operations, ejected the disk, and rebooted.
And then, to my horror, I see "NTLDR is missing. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to reboot." I do as it says and again am presented with an error. I reboot into a Linux live CD and discover what happened: for whatever reason, it seems that NTLDR and NTDETECT.COM had been placed not on the C: drive but on one of the other partitions (most likely the NTFS-formatted storage partition, unless the NT kernel grew an ext3 extension when I wasn't looking). Why in the chuffing hell would it ever do this? I want to know which Microsoft toad programmed this behavior. No one in their right mind could possibly look at this and say "yup, this could never possibly go wrong." It's not like my storage partition was at the head of the drive either - in fact, the Windows C: partition was! There is literally no reason whatsoever for it to have done this.
So I rebooted into GPartEd, rewrote my entire partition table again, and made sure to leave the would-be storage partition as free space until after reinstalling Windows. I just told Windows to use the NTFS partition I made for it with GPartEd this time, and everything worked out - NTLDR is on C:, which is a good old-fashioned primary partition. I would just like to thank the Microsoft installer team - I really needed some totally frivolous way to spend those 4 hours I would have otherwise spent doing something you know, productive.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
The Ubuntu Experience Part I: Installation and (Minor) Irritations
In this series, I'll be chronicling the experience I've had with installing, setting up, and using Ubuntu primarily on my desktop, with notes about my laptops when appropriate.
I decided to use the standard desktop live install CD for the first time, having always used the text-mode isntallation CD in the past simply because it was faster. I have to admit, live CD distribution has come a long way in the past few years. The install was mostly painless - all of the critical hardware (except sound) was detected right off the bat and I had no issue with any of the setup steps, bar one. The partitioning in the live CD installer is scarcely better than that of the text-mode installer - in order to do anything other than let the installer wipe away chunks (or all) of your drives as it sees fit, you must set up the partitions manually by typing in the numbers for the sizes of each new or resized partition. What? That's just inexcusable with GPartEd already being a native GNOME application that's small and not exactly hidden. It's even in the Ubuntu repos, so why use this partitioner? I suppose I'm just being a tosser though, because it's still leaps and bounds better than the partition tools included with Windows and OSX, which can pretty much only do "wipe partition table and make a new one, taking out all of your data."
From there the installation was pretty painless, just putting in my user info and waiting. The entire process took under and hour and when done, quickly rebooted me into a (nearly) fully functioning operating system - a pleasant change from Windows, where your first reboot after installation a) takes eons and b) lacks any drivers for anything on modern hardware, meaning I hope you saved networking drivers somewhere first...
The graphics card had 2D support under the open-source "nv" driver, but I installed the official nVidia binary blob through the restricted drivers manager for full hardware 3D - two clicks, a reboot, and I was ready to roll. On my Gateway, I corrected the missing Broadcom and ATi drivers in the same way, no problems (though I did need a connection to the wired ethernet to get the wireless driver). The sound issue on my desktop was remedied by following these instructions, which left me with fully functional stereo sound with hardware mixing after only about 10 minutes and one more reboot. Overall, I can't complain about the installation and set-up procedures, by and large.
What I can complain about, however, is that ALSA doesn't support my damn X-Fi. The X-Fi came out in August of 2005, meaning by now the chipset is over 3 years old. It's also one of the most common dedicated sound cards these days, and until about 6 months ago, the most powerful. Creative even finally open-sourced the drivers back in June of this year. Sure, some of the blame lies on their heads for holding back the source code and releasing only a buggy, unstable binary blob that wouldn't compile on 95% of systems for years, but now the ball's in someone else's court. Since ALSA supporters love to talk about how OpenSound is "deprecated" and that ALSA features "better support for more systems," perhaps it would behoove them to at least catch up to OpenSound on this. Oh well.
As for the experience post install/basic set-up? More on that later/tomorrow, but I will say that I'm writing this in Ubuntu right now, so perhaps that's a hint.
I decided to use the standard desktop live install CD for the first time, having always used the text-mode isntallation CD in the past simply because it was faster. I have to admit, live CD distribution has come a long way in the past few years. The install was mostly painless - all of the critical hardware (except sound) was detected right off the bat and I had no issue with any of the setup steps, bar one. The partitioning in the live CD installer is scarcely better than that of the text-mode installer - in order to do anything other than let the installer wipe away chunks (or all) of your drives as it sees fit, you must set up the partitions manually by typing in the numbers for the sizes of each new or resized partition. What? That's just inexcusable with GPartEd already being a native GNOME application that's small and not exactly hidden. It's even in the Ubuntu repos, so why use this partitioner? I suppose I'm just being a tosser though, because it's still leaps and bounds better than the partition tools included with Windows and OSX, which can pretty much only do "wipe partition table and make a new one, taking out all of your data."
From there the installation was pretty painless, just putting in my user info and waiting. The entire process took under and hour and when done, quickly rebooted me into a (nearly) fully functioning operating system - a pleasant change from Windows, where your first reboot after installation a) takes eons and b) lacks any drivers for anything on modern hardware, meaning I hope you saved networking drivers somewhere first...
The graphics card had 2D support under the open-source "nv" driver, but I installed the official nVidia binary blob through the restricted drivers manager for full hardware 3D - two clicks, a reboot, and I was ready to roll. On my Gateway, I corrected the missing Broadcom and ATi drivers in the same way, no problems (though I did need a connection to the wired ethernet to get the wireless driver). The sound issue on my desktop was remedied by following these instructions, which left me with fully functional stereo sound with hardware mixing after only about 10 minutes and one more reboot. Overall, I can't complain about the installation and set-up procedures, by and large.
What I can complain about, however, is that ALSA doesn't support my damn X-Fi. The X-Fi came out in August of 2005, meaning by now the chipset is over 3 years old. It's also one of the most common dedicated sound cards these days, and until about 6 months ago, the most powerful. Creative even finally open-sourced the drivers back in June of this year. Sure, some of the blame lies on their heads for holding back the source code and releasing only a buggy, unstable binary blob that wouldn't compile on 95% of systems for years, but now the ball's in someone else's court. Since ALSA supporters love to talk about how OpenSound is "deprecated" and that ALSA features "better support for more systems," perhaps it would behoove them to at least catch up to OpenSound on this. Oh well.
As for the experience post install/basic set-up? More on that later/tomorrow, but I will say that I'm writing this in Ubuntu right now, so perhaps that's a hint.
Sunday, October 12, 2008
The Role of Government in Religion
I hope you'll excuse me while I put on my new "political punditry hat" for a moment.
After my recent foray into the roles of religion in government (which I concluded to be: "none", see here) I thought some about the roles of government in religion. Before I leap headlong into statements that will make me very unpopular with one side or the other of this heated debate, let us start by examining the role of government in general.
I would hope a reasonable plurality of us could agree that the primary roles of the government in a society are thus:
While I'm sure that we can all agree that the current administration is doing a decent job with part a, its efforts with parts b and c can be described as "deeply flawed" at best, and as woefully disrespectful of the very foundations of human decency at worst.
So what was I getting to with all this? Well, that simply put, organized religion as it exists today (and has for centuries) seems to be directly at odds with the role of government. I'll pull out a quote from Thomas Jefferson again here:
"History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government."
So I suppose I'll go out into ultra-liberal territory for a minute. I think the government needs to step in and put an end to, or at least drastically reduce, the exploitation of the masses by organized religion. I'm not anti-religion/anti-God here; I uphold the right of every citizen to believe in whatever claptrap^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H faith they choose, but there has to be a point at which the line between "leading people on to make them feel better about themselves" and "leading people on to make them finance our new $12 million mega-church and 12-person jacuzzi in the pastor's mansion" is drawn. So what do I propose?
Step 1: Stop giving tax breaks to churches.
This seems obvious to me. It boggles my mind why the government thinks it's okay to give tax breaks to churches and religious organizations. This seems to be directly at odds with the establishment clause - I bet if I wanted to set up a center to teach people about why not to believe in God, I'd find myself paying full taxes on the property. And somehow I imagine if I ran a non-profit organization that devoted most (if not all) of its money to paying its management and building new fundraising centers, I'd find myself in a wee bit of trouble with the IRS. Yet churches get by with these things as though it's business as usual.
The most lampoonable examples of this are the Church of Scientology and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormon church); two "religions" that 99% of humanity can agree are obviously made up entirely by their founders for the express purpose of duping the weak-minded into forking over their cash, valuables, and social status. But when you dig deeper, how is the CoS requiring you to pay your way to higher ranks any different than the Southern Baptist Association's demand that you "tithe" part of your earnings to the church? In case any of you have seen Star Trek V: The Final Fronteir, let me remind you of Kirk's most famous quote from that film:
"What does God need with a Starship?"
What does God need with a Starship indeed? And what does he need with United States Dollars? Nothing, that's what. Your pastors/bishops/rabbis/televangelists/E-Meter maids/Pat Robertson, however, can put that money to great use buying themselves new gold-laced vestments and yachts.
Step 2: Arrest religious leaders who abuse their position for political or monetary gain.
I've covered the "monetary gain" part pretty thoroughly above, so I'll focus on the "political" part here. Put simply, it should be illegal for religious organizations, especially if they insist on calling themselves "non-profit" and being given tax breaks out the wazoo, to officially endorse political candidates...oh wait, it is. Yet they do it anyways. Maybe not by passing out "McCain/Palin '08" buttons during the sermon (in return for a nominal fee, of course), but they do it. I can't tell you how many churches I've driven past with signs that subtly (or not-so-subtly) endorse the Republican party as the party that "supports Christianity." And all of the FUD about Obama being a Muslim? Yeah, something tells me that probably originated in the Bible belt, coming from the mouths of pastors. Because who but religious zealots should give two shits if he's a Muslim or not? As long as he keeps his religion out of his policies - which he does - I don't care if he believes in the ancient Norse gods.
(For the record, Obama is NOT a Muslim, nor has he ever been. And OF COURSE he's a born US citizen, you kind of have to be to run for President. Props to McCain for taking on some of these misconceptions among his base Friday night, and boo to dumbass Palin for stoking the flames of hate.)
Step 3: Shut down repeat and particularly egregious offenders.
I kind of hate to say it, but the government should step in and shut down the more obvious scams like the CoS and the Mormon church, after a thorough bi-partisan review of course. The reason is obvious: pyramid scams are illegal, and the CoS and those like it are nothing more than pyramid scams. I'm not the first to suggest it; the Church of Scientology is actually already in hot water throughout the rest of the world. Maybe this would make other churches that lie further down the "obvious scam" list sit up, take notice, and knock it off. Okay, probably not, but it's worth a shot.
A key part of the government's job is to protect people from those who would exploit them; and indeed we have no problem with the government coming down on cults, scammers, slavers, and sub-prime mortgage lenders. What then, if you'll excuse the horrible pun, makes mega-churches so sacred? There's a quote attributed to Anthony Campbell, "[A] cult is a religion which you happen to dislike." What do the Baptists, Muslims, Catholics, etc. so quick to call out Scientology but so remarkably slow to find fault with themselves have to say to make themselves seem any better? Because I thought "I was here first" and "we have more friends" went out the window as reasonable defenses when you entered middle school.
And to the politicians so afraid to do anything about these issues: remember, it's the government's job to do what's right, what's in the best interest of the poeple, even if it isn't what's popular. Not just to get re-elected to another 6 years of passing earmarks and piddling away tax dollars on tax breaks to Tom Cruise.
After my recent foray into the roles of religion in government (which I concluded to be: "none", see here) I thought some about the roles of government in religion. Before I leap headlong into statements that will make me very unpopular with one side or the other of this heated debate, let us start by examining the role of government in general.
I would hope a reasonable plurality of us could agree that the primary roles of the government in a society are thus:
- Protect the welfare and safety of the populace.
- Protect the basic human rights of the populace.
While I'm sure that we can all agree that the current administration is doing a decent job with part a, its efforts with parts b and c can be described as "deeply flawed" at best, and as woefully disrespectful of the very foundations of human decency at worst.
So what was I getting to with all this? Well, that simply put, organized religion as it exists today (and has for centuries) seems to be directly at odds with the role of government. I'll pull out a quote from Thomas Jefferson again here:
"History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government."
So I suppose I'll go out into ultra-liberal territory for a minute. I think the government needs to step in and put an end to, or at least drastically reduce, the exploitation of the masses by organized religion. I'm not anti-religion/anti-God here; I uphold the right of every citizen to believe in whatever claptrap^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H faith they choose, but there has to be a point at which the line between "leading people on to make them feel better about themselves" and "leading people on to make them finance our new $12 million mega-church and 12-person jacuzzi in the pastor's mansion" is drawn. So what do I propose?
Step 1: Stop giving tax breaks to churches.
This seems obvious to me. It boggles my mind why the government thinks it's okay to give tax breaks to churches and religious organizations. This seems to be directly at odds with the establishment clause - I bet if I wanted to set up a center to teach people about why not to believe in God, I'd find myself paying full taxes on the property. And somehow I imagine if I ran a non-profit organization that devoted most (if not all) of its money to paying its management and building new fundraising centers, I'd find myself in a wee bit of trouble with the IRS. Yet churches get by with these things as though it's business as usual.
The most lampoonable examples of this are the Church of Scientology and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormon church); two "religions" that 99% of humanity can agree are obviously made up entirely by their founders for the express purpose of duping the weak-minded into forking over their cash, valuables, and social status. But when you dig deeper, how is the CoS requiring you to pay your way to higher ranks any different than the Southern Baptist Association's demand that you "tithe" part of your earnings to the church? In case any of you have seen Star Trek V: The Final Fronteir, let me remind you of Kirk's most famous quote from that film:
"What does God need with a Starship?"
What does God need with a Starship indeed? And what does he need with United States Dollars? Nothing, that's what. Your pastors/bishops/rabbis/televangelists/E-Meter maids/Pat Robertson, however, can put that money to great use buying themselves new gold-laced vestments and yachts.
Step 2: Arrest religious leaders who abuse their position for political or monetary gain.
I've covered the "monetary gain" part pretty thoroughly above, so I'll focus on the "political" part here. Put simply, it should be illegal for religious organizations, especially if they insist on calling themselves "non-profit" and being given tax breaks out the wazoo, to officially endorse political candidates...oh wait, it is. Yet they do it anyways. Maybe not by passing out "McCain/Palin '08" buttons during the sermon (in return for a nominal fee, of course), but they do it. I can't tell you how many churches I've driven past with signs that subtly (or not-so-subtly) endorse the Republican party as the party that "supports Christianity." And all of the FUD about Obama being a Muslim? Yeah, something tells me that probably originated in the Bible belt, coming from the mouths of pastors. Because who but religious zealots should give two shits if he's a Muslim or not? As long as he keeps his religion out of his policies - which he does - I don't care if he believes in the ancient Norse gods.
(For the record, Obama is NOT a Muslim, nor has he ever been. And OF COURSE he's a born US citizen, you kind of have to be to run for President. Props to McCain for taking on some of these misconceptions among his base Friday night, and boo to dumbass Palin for stoking the flames of hate.)
Step 3: Shut down repeat and particularly egregious offenders.
I kind of hate to say it, but the government should step in and shut down the more obvious scams like the CoS and the Mormon church, after a thorough bi-partisan review of course. The reason is obvious: pyramid scams are illegal, and the CoS and those like it are nothing more than pyramid scams. I'm not the first to suggest it; the Church of Scientology is actually already in hot water throughout the rest of the world. Maybe this would make other churches that lie further down the "obvious scam" list sit up, take notice, and knock it off. Okay, probably not, but it's worth a shot.
A key part of the government's job is to protect people from those who would exploit them; and indeed we have no problem with the government coming down on cults, scammers, slavers, and sub-prime mortgage lenders. What then, if you'll excuse the horrible pun, makes mega-churches so sacred? There's a quote attributed to Anthony Campbell, "[A] cult is a religion which you happen to dislike." What do the Baptists, Muslims, Catholics, etc. so quick to call out Scientology but so remarkably slow to find fault with themselves have to say to make themselves seem any better? Because I thought "I was here first" and "we have more friends" went out the window as reasonable defenses when you entered middle school.
And to the politicians so afraid to do anything about these issues: remember, it's the government's job to do what's right, what's in the best interest of the poeple, even if it isn't what's popular. Not just to get re-elected to another 6 years of passing earmarks and piddling away tax dollars on tax breaks to Tom Cruise.
Friday, October 10, 2008
Free at last, free at last.
So as I'm sure some of you know (I say that as if anyone is actually reading this), I'm a pretty avid supporter of Linux, but have run into my fair share of issues with it over the years. Most notably, my desktop's X-Fi sound card suffers from painfully poor driver support, and my laptops' wireless cards are a parade of unsupported failure (Braodcom 4308 and Atheros 5418). But I'm happy to say I now run Ubuntu 8.04.1 side-by-side with XP x64 on my desktop, and 8.04.1 and 8.10 Beta2 exclusively on my Gateway 7422GX and ThinkPad T61, respectively. I'm still on Vista on my cobbled-together "extra" desktop, but I'll be wiping it clean tomorrow.
The most significant advancement is that v4.1-RC2 of the OpenSound System, once thought to be deceased and deprecated by ALSA, supports stereo output out of my X-Fi with full hardware mixing, out of the box. Similarly, my Gateway's Broadcom wireless card works with two clicks in the restricted drivers manager (Jockey), and my ThinkPad's Atheros card is supported natively by the Ath9k driver as of 8.10 Beta 1.
I'll write more tomorrow, after I scrub the foul stench of Vista from this last holdout.
The most significant advancement is that v4.1-RC2 of the OpenSound System, once thought to be deceased and deprecated by ALSA, supports stereo output out of my X-Fi with full hardware mixing, out of the box. Similarly, my Gateway's Broadcom wireless card works with two clicks in the restricted drivers manager (Jockey), and my ThinkPad's Atheros card is supported natively by the Ath9k driver as of 8.10 Beta 1.
I'll write more tomorrow, after I scrub the foul stench of Vista from this last holdout.
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
That's What HE Said!
So a short political post to round out the morning:
McCain and his vacuous sock-puppet Palin, continuing in their fine traditions of making stuff up and misquoting people, have trotted out the old out-of-context quote from Obama that our troops in Afghanistan are "just air raiding villages and killing civilians." But even setting aside that the quote was taken completely out of context, it turns out that - surprise! - that's exactly what's happening.
As McCain's polls plummet and even the conservative pundits bemoan his fade into irrelevance, I have to wonder: will the Republican party ever pull its head of its collective ass?
McCain and his vacuous sock-puppet Palin, continuing in their fine traditions of making stuff up and misquoting people, have trotted out the old out-of-context quote from Obama that our troops in Afghanistan are "just air raiding villages and killing civilians." But even setting aside that the quote was taken completely out of context, it turns out that - surprise! - that's exactly what's happening.
As McCain's polls plummet and even the conservative pundits bemoan his fade into irrelevance, I have to wonder: will the Republican party ever pull its head of its collective ass?
A Brand New Day
I've long been considering writing a real blog, and upon logging into my ancient Blogger account remembered that this one is still around. Rather than delete it and start over, I'm repurposing this one. The link to the notebook FAQ will hang around over there to the right at least for a while, if you're interested. Not sure why you would be since it's so old it it refers to "Vista" as "Longhorn" and the Go7x00 series as "coming soon" but there you have it. I might get around to updating it, but since "updating" at this point would mean "completely rewriting" it'll be a while if it does happen.
So on to the meat of the post: what is this "repurposing?" Well I'm going to throw my hat into the already overcrowded blogo...okay, I can't finish that word with a straight face, so I'll say "world of online psuedo-journalism" instead. So if you've got a few free minutes a day/week/however often I end up updating this thing, join me now, won't you, in an adventure into politics, science, technology, and games. Okay, mostly games.
If you notice any similarities, at least in layout and themes, to Shamus Young's Twenty Sided Tale, it's not a coincidence, as his is one of the only blogs I regularly read and I have no shame in admitting it's my major inspiration here. And if you don't already read his blog, you totally should, at least if you're anywhere near as interested in technology, gaming, and the politics around it all as I am.
So on to the meat of the post: what is this "repurposing?" Well I'm going to throw my hat into the already overcrowded blogo...okay, I can't finish that word with a straight face, so I'll say "world of online psuedo-journalism" instead. So if you've got a few free minutes a day/week/however often I end up updating this thing, join me now, won't you, in an adventure into politics, science, technology, and games. Okay, mostly games.
If you notice any similarities, at least in layout and themes, to Shamus Young's Twenty Sided Tale, it's not a coincidence, as his is one of the only blogs I regularly read and I have no shame in admitting it's my major inspiration here. And if you don't already read his blog, you totally should, at least if you're anywhere near as interested in technology, gaming, and the politics around it all as I am.
Tuesday, May 2, 2006
Temporary Redirect
As you may or may not have noticed, Blogger/Google decided that a comprehensive guide to notebook PC's constituted spam and deleted my blog. Until I can get that set back up here, here's the link to the thread at NoteookReview.com:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=25451
Thanks for bearing with me.
-Philip "lowlymarine" Kiser
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=25451
Thanks for bearing with me.
-Philip "lowlymarine" Kiser
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
