I wanted to take a moment and wish Matt a "Happy Birthday".
I love you!
The Lovely Kelli
I find out tomorrow, March 25th, if I get to go back to work or not. I really have to, as I'm out of temporary disability time. If you pray, please say a prayer for me. I don't want anything special, just a return to work so I feel like a contributing member of society again.
I spoke with my manager this morning and the news was good, if not a little daunting. There are a number of new projects on the horizon, all of which will touch me in some way. The last time I worked was January 9th, which seems like an eternity ago. In our world, it is; all of our big projects seem to start or finish early in the year. So I have to hit the ground running.
You may have seen the story this week about the Muslim man in Italy who was baptized a Catholic by Pope Benedict XVI. As one might expect, this "moderate" Muslim (more on that later) has received death threats because, as a journalist, he has publicly expressed his support for Israel, among other things.
There are people, I'm sure, who do not blame these sort of threats on Islam itself, but on the cruel interpretation of Allah's message. Fair enough. But where are the Muslims who condemn such threats? Where are the Muslims saying that while they certainly don't agree with his conversion to Catholicism, Allam has the right as a free human being to follow any religious practice he desires? And where are the Muslims questioning why support of Israel translates to a death sentence?
As harsh as this may sound, I am more and more convinced that there are no moderate Muslims; there are just Muslims. They may not act on their beliefs, but the feeling is there. You can talk about abuses in Christianity, but you can point to things like the Protestant Reformation and see where Church leaders have at least tried to address wrongs. There is no central authority in Islam---each region of the world has it's own imam and his word carries the weight of gospel to believers. His political views become his adherents' political views, regardless of logic and apparent lunacy. If this doesn't sound like a cult to you, you need to pay closer attention.
It's time that Western nations begin treating Islam as a cult. Imagine the Pope issuing a death warrant on any Catholic who leaves the Church. The uproar would be so loud you would not be able to hear yourself think. Yet this happens nearly every day in the Islamic world. Why do we tolerate it? Is it all in the name of political-correctness? If so, then many people will one day die with thoughts of the "religion of peace" burned into their frontal lobes.
The Lovely Kelli and I were in our local Target store Saturday evening. To get to the checkout aisles, we had to walk down a wide aisle that cuts down the length of the store. At one point, four people (apparently related) had parked their carts in the aisle, completely cutting off traffic. Other shoppers were trying to get around them, but were only able to do so one at a time. All the while, the people doing the blocking were talking about something or other, apparently oblivious to the problem. As we passed them, I said (loud enough to be heard): "There's nothing like blocking the entire aisle." I don't know if I had an effect on the situation or not; I'm guessing no.
I blame events such as this on my belief that most Americans are so wrapped up in themselves and their immediate needs that they are unaware of the world around them. Kelli blames it on people who know they are being rude and simply don't care. What do you think? Plus, is it getting worse, or am I just becoming a crotchety old man?
Today is the 40th anniversary of the My Lai massacre (sorry for the Wikipedia link). Put simply, members of Charlie Company of 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade, 23rd Infantry Division killed between 300 and 500 civilians in the hamlet of My Lai in South Vietnam. Despite the American Left's assertion that the Army tried to cover up the incident, the most the brass can be found guilty of is sloppy investigating. But after 40 years, those who wrote the history have won the day.
Enter Daniel Schorr, the 91-year old correspondent for National Public Radio. Schorr is the last surviving member of Edward R. Murrow's posse, which raises him to the status of demi-god to those who see journalism as not merely reporting the news but a way to shape the world to fit their beliefs. His commentary on this morning's NPR Weekend program mentioned My Lai and compared it to a more recent "atrocity"- Haditha.
Haditha was no My Lai for several reasons. First, the final accusations deal with three Iraqi civilians, not hundreds. That's not to say those three lives were not precious, but it's a lot harder to imply widespread malice with so few innocent deaths. Second, the two Marines with the heaviest charges against them had their cases dismissed last fall. The other accused men are in trouble not because of their actions in Haditha in November, 2005, but because the military believes they tried to cover up events.
Of course, Schorr never mentions any of these facts. Why should he? The pseudo-intellectual leftists in this country want an Anti-American cause of their own to play with and the war in Iraq has given them a whole toy chest of issues. Haditha is just one of them, but it's a shiny one near the top, right there with Abu Gharib.
Schorr is about 20 years overdue for retirement, along with the rest of the fellow travelers from the 50's and 60's who now dominate college campuses and who serve as an inspiration to idiot 20-somethings who make a career out of protesting. The early pinkos like Schorr and their hippyized descendants did and do nothing for this nation; not during Vietnam, not during the Cold War and not now.
At the end of February, my contract with Podshow expired; I have no interest in renewing, nor have they inquired about an extension. If what I saw and heard is any indication, I am surprised the service is still a going concern. What's more, I'm surprised that Adam Curry hasn't lost interest yet and sold his share. Basically, they have about 15 shows they like to promote. If you're not in that group, you are filler.
With this in mind, I have setup an account with Libsyn, one of the largest podcast hosting services in the world. I have actually met one of the big wheels there, a man named Rob Welch. Their customer support is awesome, as I have already asked several questions about the service. The plan I require right now is only $10 a month; they charge for storage, not bandwidth used, and my show files are small. Additionally, their statistics seem very detailed unlike Podshow's, which is sort of a hit-and-miss thing that is updated, oh, whenever.
This move has sort of rejuvenated my enthusiasm for podcasting. It's like version 2.0 is about to set sail. Stay tuned for details as to how to subscribe to the new feed.
I've never been to any sort of mental health expert for therapy. There are probably people I know who would say this is a bad thing, that I am a bundle of contradictions and hypocrisies. But this year has taught me something important: it is not good for a grown man to sit at home without a job and with lots of physical limitations.
My father has lived through three devastating floods in the Ohio Valley: 1937, 1945, and 1964. Each time, his family had to leave their home to escape the rising waters. Each time, they came home to mud, debris and potential disease. FEMA didn't send a trailer. And as is now common, no psychiatrist came by to diagnose PTSD or depression. As dad says, "Therapy was a shovel."
I have spent two months having a lot of free mental time on my hands. This is not good. While I believe we all need to slow down sometimes and enjoy the scenery, too much personal introspection is not healthy. In fact, I believe it's narcissistic. Have you ever wondered why so many people in Hollywood see therapists? So they can make the world about them.
There is a genuine need for mental health professionals and maybe I just don't want to deal with things. But I know that I am much happier when I don't have much free time and my days are consumed by thinking about something other than my place in the world.
I'm very tired of hearing about Eliot Spitzer. Since his revelation about hiring hookers for ten years and spending more than $80,000 to do so, it seems that every newscast leads and closes with the stories. There are two things that make the story interesting: first, Spitzer was a law-and-order attorney general for New York who loved not only finding the bad guys, but ruining them in any way possible. Second, the story is about sex. Of course.
Why does this still surprise me? We move from one sex-related story to another, with occasional serious news in-between. The line between entertainment and news has disappeared almost entirely and the 24 hour news cycle means that there is no time to research really important news.
We are surrounded by issues that are not being fully addressed. Millions of Americans can name the last group of finalists on 'American Idol' but can't name more than two Supreme Court justices. I wonder what Jefferson, Adams and Washington would think.
Windows Vista has been out for more than a year now. If you've bought a PC in that time, chances are very high that your machine sports this latest version of Microsoft ingenuity. But those of us who work in IT have been slow to adopt the operating system for good reasons: poor driver support, lousy performance on basic and mid-level machines, expense, etc., etc.
Now comes word that executives inside Microsoft had problems with the company's "Vista Capable" stickers that were plastered on laptops and desktops sold in the months leading up to the Vista release. The company lowered the minimum system requirements so much that they became a joke, even to those of us who had never seen the OS in it's beta stages. If a guy on the street knows how ridiculous an idea this was, how in the hell did it ever come to be in the first place?
It's just Microsoft. That's probably not a complete answer, but the unique corporate mentality at Redmond has floated so many bad products that the usual responses just don't apply. There are people who will say the company is making billions of dollars so it can't be that far off the mark, right? Well, no. Microsoft is kept afloat, I believe, by two things: first, their monopoly of the desktop. Walk into Best Buy and you will see every PC there running Windows Vista. From a retail standpoint, their only competition is Apple. The Mac OS is a superior product, yet it occupies only a small percentage of the market. Part of this, I believe, is intentional, but we'll talk about that some other time. The point is you can't buy a PC, with rare exceptions, running anything but Windows from a retail store. To millions of people, Windows IS the PC---that is the universe, all there is.
Second, I believe Microsoft is helped tremendously by CIOs (Chief Information Officers) at big companies who have drunk the Redmond Kool-Aid. In my three-person department, we wear many hats. In larger companies, however, the CIO or his equivalent may not have a background in tech. Rather, he/she simply makes strategic decisions and lets the people down the ladder implement the changes needed. With his/her rear on the line, Microsoft is seen as the "safe" choice. It's a company the CEO has heard of; he may even own some stock. In many companies, other solutions, such as one Linux distro or another, are still seen as esoteric and risky, even though, at least to me, Suse, RedHat and many others are mature operating systems capable of amazing expansion.
I'm not completely anti-Microsoft. They have made some great products (I believe Windows XP is one of these) and are responsible along with Apple for making computers user-friendly. But any industry in which a company has even a partial monopoly is always in danger of stagnation.
At the time of this writing, we are under threat of a serious snowstorm that has the potential to dump a foot of snow on Louisville and the surrounding area. This is the same storm that has paralyzed Dallas. The bad thing about snow in Texas is that it happens so rarely most communities have no snow removal equipment. When I lived there in the mid-90's, we received a half-inch of snow and it was lights out for the entire community. Amazing.
I've received a number of e-mails over the past few days about my "Giant Dunce Cap" post. Instead of responding to everyone individually, I will do so here. I would ask that you go back, read my post, then read Travis' excellent refutation in the comments section. His post is the longest and most detailed of the messages I received, so my response is tailored to some of his points.
While I will admit that the title of my post was not exactly in good taste, I do not back away from the fact that I believe people who believe Genesis literally are suffering from a certain delusion. Why do I have a problem with fundamentalists? Oh, now there's a story...
It all started when I was 18 and in boot camp. Many of the men there were devout Christians (none of us was familiar with the term 'fundamentalist' then), as much as I was a devout Catholic. To them, however, Catholicism was NOT Christianity; it was a sort of cult or something more akin to Mormonism. These guys, to a man, knew so little about church history that they didn't even know how the term "Protestant" came into being. To them, Christianity had existed since the time of Christ and Catholicism was some offshoot of that. They did not want to believe, regardless of historical fact, that Catholicism WAS Christianity for the first 1500 years after the birth of Christ. This is why the term "Catholic" was not in common use; it was synonymous with Christianity. The form of the Mass, as it is celebrated today, can be traced back to the Council of Nicene in the fourth century AD.
I realize that not everyone who considers himself a fundamentalist is ignorant. I have close friends who fall into that category and a few of them are brilliant. However, I can not buy into the supposition that anyone who believes in a 6K year old Earth arrives at that conclusion by any other means than faith in the book of Genesis as historical fact. It can be argued that the science behind a New Earth started with a conclusion and worked backwards. For example, consider the theory needed to explain why the light from stars more than 6,000 light-years away reaches our planet today. Russell Humphreys wrote a book entitled "Starlight and Time" in which he argues that gravitational time compression (my term) is responsible. In essence, the universe is billions of years old, but at one time in the past a day on Earth was like billions of years to distant parts of the universe. Another theory holds that the speed of light has changed over the course of time. If this is so, then our instruments today would be able to measure the slowdown because it would have to be exponential in nature. Another idea is that the light we see today was already on the way the instant the universe was created. If this is true, then God must have created a false record of events which never occurred so as to explain things like background radiation.
Another issue I have with a young Earth is the book of Genesis itself. It is believed that the book was Genesis was in existence by the fifth century BC. Fragments of the book exist from the first century AD and the Vatican has at least two complete copies from the fourth century. Some of the texts are in Hebrew, but more are in Greek. The Greek texts, although written within five hundred years of one another, show variations in wording, enough to effect the meaning of some phrases. Assuming this is true, let's look at how many times the Bible has been translated in the last five centuries. If the Bible is divinely inspired, then were all the translations as well? Once again, you have to go solely on faith; there is no way to know the mind of God and how He wants the Bible interpreted.
As a general rule, I agree with most fundamentalists politically. Their stance on pro-life issues, something that is very important to me and how I vote, is almost identical to mine. But I draw the line at science because there ARE ways to observe erosion and animal adaptation. We can recreate the conditions necessary for the creation of fossils. While evolution is not a cold, hard fact of biology, there is more evidence of it than, say, evidence that man and dinosaurs lived at the same time.
I believe part of the problem is the growing divide between fundamentalists and the scientific community. I can't speak for anyone, but it seems as if many believe acceptance of some scientific theories with regard to the creation of the universe today might lead to an acceptance of something like genetic manipulation or cloning tomorrow. It doesn't have to be that way. There was a time when the Catholic Church persecuted men like Galileo for their theories. However, it later embraced the science of the Jesuits in fields like astronomy even though they ran counter to traditional church teachings. In 1996, Pope John Paul II repeated the message of Pope Pius XII in saying that a belief in evolution is not inimical to Christianity. This conclusion was not arrived at lightly, but was the result of years of prayer and study at the highest levels of the Church. I think Protestant faiths could learn a lot by this example.
If Hillary doesn't win Ohio tomorrow, she will be out of the race by Thursday afternoon. I don't believe she can win Texas, although stranger things have happened. One thing I fear is a close race in either place, because it will bring out the lawyers. You might think it doesn't matter because it's just a primary. However, any time the courts get involved in an election because one side or another wants to deny the fact they've lost, it hurts our electoral system.
Barring any legal entanglements, I think Obama wins big tomorrow and Hillary gets out of the race later this week. What will we do without a Clinton around?
John Coleman, the man who founded the Weather Channel in 1982, has put forth the best idea I've heard this week: sue the people who sell carbon credits, presumably for fraud. This would put the science of global warming on trial. I wonder, though, where the jury would come from. If there was ever an argument for professional juries...
“[I] have a feeling this is the opening,” Coleman said. “If the lawyers will take the case – sue the people who sell carbon credits. That includes Al Gore. That lawsuit would get so much publicity, so much media attention. And as the experts went to the media stand to testify, I feel like that could become the vehicle to finally put some light on the fraud of global warming.”