Linux for Human Beings

Ubuntu Linux 7.10 has been released, and it looks very nice. With each release, it just keeps getting better and easier to use. Ordinary computer users will have no problem getting used to it - the menus and icons are clear and well-organized; however, installation should still be performed by someone who knows Linux.

Really, if you are tired of Windows authentication crap, viruses, and spyware, and want to try something new and exciting, give Linux a whirl. Even though it's currently on only about 1% of desktop computers, I think the day may come when a wave of Linux adoptions inundates Microsoft Windows like a tsunami, through the power of open source software.

Bare butt disrupts release of killing game

Is this story ridiculous or what? This game (Halo 2) already has a Mature (17+) rating, but a single image of a bare backside necessitates an additional warning label for copies already on shelves, a downloadable utility to remove it, and caused a nine-delay in the game's release. Does anyone think that users of a game whose primary object is using more than fourteen kinds of weapons to destroy humanoid aliens are going to be corrupted by viewing an exposed butt? Have we regressed to the Victorian age when nobody was ever supposed to see the human body?

Maybe the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) is concerned that the shock of seeing a bare gluteus maximus would distract the user from his delirium of shooting and destroying. If so, something is wrong with our cultural priorities.

Voting Fraud

This should be a huge scandal, but isn't yet.

This video is long but very interesting. The first half hour is Greg Palast on the same topic as the above link. The second half is a great speech by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Monument to Delusion

Ken Ham's Creation Museum is opening this Monday near Cincinnati. The museum is run by Answers In Genesis, which promotes Biblical young-earth creationism.

This seems to be a manifestation of all that pent-up anxiety and frustration that creationists have felt for decades when visiting mainstream science museums and being exposed to the ideas of geology, astronomy, and evolution that might threaten their Bible-literalist worldview. Now they can visit a "science" museum that won't cause them to question their beliefs at all. They will have to pay for the privilege, though - the adult admission charge is a steep $19.95, more expensive than any science museum I've been to. I guess God needs a lot of money.

While I don't think this museum will convert any adults to creationism, it will indoctrinate children, which the museum is targeted at, into thinking that the earth was magically created from nothing just a few thousand years ago, and that all of Earth's millions of species were preserved on a wooden ship during a global flood, against all common sense and scientific evidence. This will add to the misinformation that these students will need to unlearn when they reach college and need to learn real science.

This museum will also strengthen, in the minds of other people in the world, an image of Americans as anti-intellectual, religious fundamentalist rubes.

Here's a story about a heroic family that is being persecuted because they are atheists. This story makes my blood boil. The christian idiots who inhabit that small town are violating the constitution, are un-American, and deserve to have the full force of the law brought down on them.

It's amazing that the people of the rural heartland, the grass-roots of America, who view themselves as the most wholesome and true Americans, are the ones who are destroying America through their ignorance. They follow fascist religious leaders like Pat Robertson, who claims that we were founded as a "Christian Nation", when it's abundantly clear that the founding fathers intended no involvement of government in religion. They adopt divisive political positions based on the "holy book", forgetting the national motto E Pluribus Unum. The rural south and midwest elected the fascist George W. Bush to the White House twice, manifesting a period of tremendous damage to Americans' freedoms and standing in the world.

Slowly, people have been waking up. We elected a Democratic Congress, and Bush's popularity rating has declined to around 30%. That's encouraging, but what's with those 30%? That's about 90 million people who still don't think beyond what FOX News tells them, who supposedly approve of Bush's corrupt goon squad. They have allowed their "values" to be twisted around against America itself.