Personally, I'd like to see more evidence be brought out that questions the basis of most, if not all, religions. Maybe that will get the blood-hungry preachers to realize they have no basis for their screeching. Maybe if people can see that it is not our religious beliefs that make us special but our humanity, that we all have our own unique thoughts and that a group of people with similar thoughts does not make them more special because they believe their thoughts have Divine backing.

How else to explain how one minute it looked like most of the trapped miners in West Virginia were alive - Praise Be to God!!! - and the next all but one were dead. "God works in mysterious ways!"

When good things happen, all Praise unto him but when bad things happen - nothing. No invectives against the same deity.

Worse, this God, this all-powerful, all-knowing, all-everything keeps choosing "Prophets" and whiny Preachers to send out his message instead of easily imbuing all of us with His Message. And these messengers have done their part. But, unfortunately for us, most people worship the messengers and forget the messages.

How much less violent would our world be if it weren't for Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, and all other Prophets and Messengers? How peaceful it would be if God, in his infinite wisdom, would cut the crap and the mysterious ways and just reveal himself or herself to everyone. Peace would reign in the Middle East, at least, for a little while.

But, no, "God works in mysterious ways!"

And we have the Jews who claim they are the Chosen People, which guarantees they'll be hated by those Not Chosen. And we have the Christians/Catholics who believe that Jesus may or may not be God or the Son thereof - but please send in your 10% tithe. And we have Islam which states something like killing non-believers equals an eternity in paradise although Jews may or may not be protected.

And we have other religions that simply try to escape the obvious insanity, and others that claim not one deity but pantheons. And Agnostics and Atheists hated by all.

It really is easier to get rid of religion and live a happy life without having to worry whether your neighbors are going to stone you, bomb you, or kidnap your kids because they disagree with your religion.

Removing religion removes a crutch of passing responsibility for your actions on to God. No more killing heathens to attain paradise replete with virgins - you're just a cold-blooded murderer. Or lynching Jews becuase they killed your Savior - you, too, are just a cold-blooded murderer.

In the U.S. we have a set of Laws that are seemingly above religion but it's getting scarily close to where there will be no boundary, that Biblical Law will prevail.

Some of you may applaud and support that and those same folks are the ones who think that the Bible is all you need. Forget Science and everything. The Bible is it - the Prime Source. To you folks, I say give up your Science completely. No more cell phones, medicine, technology - give it all up. Go back to the Stone Age and let God provide for you.

Religion makes me ramble. Achhh. "God works in mysterious ways!"

"If God meant for us to have Faith, he'd wouldn't have given us brains." -- Little Mr Mahatma - 2006

Winter Olympics - 2006
I love the Olympics, having suffered through viewing them for many years. It used to be - many years ago - that the Olympics would be broadcast on TV with minimal interruption. You'd see events followed by more events and it didn't matter whether the event was popular or not, it'd be shown even a little bit. The dramas and tragedies spoke for themselves, written on the faces of the athletes. You could see their efforts, their struggles, their victories and defeats. It was the Olympics - the pinnacle of Sports.

Maybe my memory has fogged. Maybe I'm blanking out the commercials and retrospectives. But it seems that, starting with Olga Korbut, there is more Olympic time spent on showing the stories of the athletes rather than the actual events. Worse, the last Summer Olympics had way too much time devoted to Pro-U.S. stories and propaganda. Sure, I like our teams. I support our teams. But we are not the be-all and end-all of athletics.

Sadly, NBC continues the tradition of having more style than substance but far better than ABC's last effort. If the announcers would stop stating the obvious...

But the reason why most of the entertainment sales are down isn't because of piracy, it's because of time.

There's too much out there and not enough time to take them all in. You have movies in the theater; you have plays, operas, CDs, DVDs, MP3s, PC games, console games, and so on and so on.

20 years ago I had an Apple computer, a TV, and radio. There weren't many games out and when I played a game like Ultima IV, I played it through beginning to end. On TV - no cable or satellite - I had 6 or 7 channels. Radio was the same in terms of channels of music that I listened to. And don't forget books - those papery things that electronics are so desperate to replace.

My kids have choices between:

Point being, to all those in Entertainment, is that you are competing with each other *AND* with your own products. When you release a flood of old TV shows on DVD, you are competing against your releases of new movies. The consumer has limited time (and money) for entertainment. With SOOOOOOO many choices, all of you suffer.

One more point, just focusing on PC games, is that there is an abundance of free games. Not pirated games or abandonware but homebrewed games. Tons of them, many of them remakes of the great games from years ago. Many of them released as Freeware by companies as the sales died out. Combine that with the demos and multiplayer online games, there - again! - you have too many choices and not enough time. *AND* you have mods, gazillions of mods. You buy, say, Neverwinter Nights and you can download 100s of hours of mods.

With that, how many games boast 100s of hours of play time? Too many and that's not necessarily a good thing. Sure, as a consumer, you get great bang for the buck *IF* it's a good game. On the other hand, that about 60 hours that could be spent playing another good game.

Too much to do and not enough time. Where's that darn immortality juice?

A quick run down of the "I. D." situation: you have some religious fundamentalists who fervently believe that evolution just ain't right and that God made everything about 5000-6000 years ago. All evidence to the contrary was also supplied by God for whatever reason because - and remember this - "God works in mysterious ways."

So these Fundies have been having conniptions that Biology doesn't include alternative ideas like Creationism. But Creationism dies because it was too obvious a ploy to get God into the Science classroom where it doesn't belong so the Fundies evolved their strategy and came up with "Inteligent Design". I.D. holds that there are biological entities too complex to have evolved out of simpler structures so they must have been created or designed by an Intelligent Designer. Who that Designer is they won't say but - hush, hush - it's God. And the proof for this, they claim, is because (1) Evolution is only a Theory, (2) Evolution doesn't explain everything, and (3) there are gaps in the Biological record.

I pick up my pen, hold it over the carpet, and let go. It falls to the floor.

I pick up my pen, hold it over the carpet, and let go. It falls to the floor.

I pick up my pen, hold it over the carpet, and let go. It falls to the floor.

This is gravity at work. This is not a theory. It's happening. I think I have an explanation for gravity so I start with a hypothesis. I test my hypothesis and, based on my results, I revise my hypothesis. Others do the same and soon that hypothesis withstands testing. It becomes a theory. In Science, that's as good as it gets. No proofs - that's for Math.

So to say that Evolution is ONLY a Theory is actually quite the compliment and is true. The process of Evolution is undeniable and also demonstrable (think of new strains of flus that mutate to resist antibiotics). Just like Gravity is undeniable and demonstrable. The explanation for the process is the Theory.

Evolution, heck, Science doesn't explain everything and never claimed to, unlike religions which live as if they (or God) are the final authority on everything. Science is a method of exploration, a way of partially quenching our drive to know. Religion seeks to kill the drive.

Yes, there are gaps in the Biological record but so what. The gaps are diminishing as our explorations continue and some gaps may never be filled. Again, so what?

Fact is, ranting against Evolution does not provide proof or even a shred of support for Intelligent Design, not from a scientific sense, not from a logical sense. You could easily and validly claim that because of the "problems" with Evolution, the world must have been created by giant, green tortoise, or a spaghetti monster. It's all the same.

For I.D. to succeed as Science, it must do two things:

That's all. Simple. Get to it.

Or, if the I.D. people don't want to follow the basic principles of science, perhaps science should follow the principles of Faith. Now wouldn't that be fun! Instead of rigorous testing of products, we'll just take it on Faith that they work. Sadly we see that with Homeopathy and other quack medicines and technologies. You get a bunch of nothing and they get something.

A mild suggestion to evolve the I.D. strategy once again, don't go up against Evolution. Instead, go up against the Big Bang Theory because I.D. isn't really about how things change but how they came to be. You might have a better chance against Big Bang. After all, it's only a Theory.

Gonzales Defends Legality of Surveillance

WASHINGTON - Attorney General Alberto Gonzales insisted Monday that President Bush was "acting with authority" both under the Constitution and federal law in eavesdropping on Americans without warrants as part of the war on terror. But his strong defense of Bush's program was challenged by Republican Sen. Arlen Specter, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, who told Gonzales that even the Supreme Court had ruled that "the president does not have a blank check."

But the War on Terrorism, like the War on Drugs (thanks Ronnie!), are these convenient, open-ended "Wars" that do little for the American people except waste our tax money and often put our military unnecessarily in harms way. If the President is to have unlimited power in times of war, what's to keep the President from declaring a perpetual war?

Answer: nothing, especially with a Congress to busy cashing their payoff checks.

And on a related note on terrorism, there was a nice article in the L.A. Times about how difficult it was for the U.S. to muster support for sanctions against Iran because of the fiasco in Iraq. For some strange reason, other countries no longer believe our President when he says the sky is filling with WMDs. That's the problem when crying wolf. Behind an Iraq there's an Iran.

And for those who keep posting quotes from the Clinton Era, trying to make it look like Iraq is all Clinton's fault, remember that 9/11 happened on Bush's watch with bin Laden *STILL* at large and with the costs for Iraq approaching a half trillion - that's *TRILLION* - dollars, our economy is being savaged by corruption and unaccountability*.

* Yes, it looks like the economy is going gangbusters because the most common and obvious way of looking at it is how the stock market is faring. The market is improving becuase many companies are laying off people to improve their bottom line.

Hey, instead of fighting to get Democracy installed in Iraq, can we get it installed here first?