Satan’s Garden

Christians continue to crack me up.  I haven’t been able to verify if this was a real event, but the pictures and videos sure seem to point to it.

Apparently a group of concerned Christians went down to the wall street bull, in order to pray to God to turn around our economic bear market.

Yes, you read that right.  They prayed over a bronze bull idol. Something about Exodus comes to mind…

Back in February, I took a look at the new KDE4 and what I had found was less than desired. Always willing to re-address an issue, I installed the newer 4.1 version of the beta and dug around a bit.

I found much of what I had complained about has been cleaned up. Configuration is much easier now and previously missing configuration controls have been put back in place. The KDE team has restored my faith in the new version with this alone. I was dreading a Gnome clone.

They also canned the Duplo Lego look, for something not quite as chunky, but still too large. Thankfully, with the re-established controls in place, you can fix it quickly.

The Plasma widgets never really impressed me and they still don’t, though they are getting better. Dolphin is an interesting file manager, but konqueror still holds my heart there. Both are included, of course, so choice rules supreme. (Not that I do much with a graphical file manager, as the command line is where I typically roam.)

Kickoff finally has the ability to revert to the standard KDE3 style menu. Thank you!

Integration with Compiz-Fussion was seamless and I didn’t run into any troubles - rather amazing considering the complexity of it.

However, the one thing KDE4 still lacks is application stability. I couldn’t go for longer than ten minutes at a time without an application crash. Scrolling menus often didn’t refresh correctly. Shortcut settings would change in the interface, but not work. KMail couldn’t empty the Trash folder on my IMAP accounts without dying. The desktop itself never died, but I couldn’t get much work done.

In short, KDE4 is not ready for real work, but it’s getting better - much better. Once the environment is out of beta, I’m pretty confident at this point that it will suit me just fine and satisfy my needs for a completely configurable desktop environment.

Again, I’m thankful. I didn’t really want to move to Gnome.

Addendum: It appears that the newly released Kubuntu 8.10 has abandoned KDE3 and gone exclusively with KDE4.  I can’t imagine why they would do this, considering the issues I’ve seen with lack of stability.  Time to dig up a test machine and try a fresh install, I think.

You just can’t find crazy in politics, like you can in Utah.

If you are a Utah resident, then at some point in your life you most likely saw an advertisement from Dell “SuperDell” Schanze’s infamous “Totally Awesome Computers”. Loud, obnoxious ads performed in spasmodic glory, claiming the fastest built computers, etc.  (I never shopped there, so I wouldn’t know.)

Schanze has found God somewhere along the line in the last few years and from his own words I no longer doubt faith as being a mental illness. In my book when you claim that, “God told me personally that if we end abortion we will be able to discover and use the unlimited supply of oil right here in Utah.” - you have just admitted to schizophrenia.

Anyway, if you need a good laugh and want to see crazy flourish in a blog for a political campaign for Governor of Utah, then you have to check out “Superdell’s” blog. Be sure to read the comments as well - they’re a hoot.  Oh, and try no to be blinded from the excessive use of exclamation points and question marks.

On the bright side, it would be funny to see him win and go up against the LDS church.  That kind of crazy mental tug of war would definately have me running for the popcorn and soda.

(Special thanks to Lackhead for passing this one on to me.)

On another board I got into an argument with a group of Christians who claim that there is no problem with mixing science and religion. The Big Bang could have happened by the instigation of God and science should not have issue with this. Furthermore, it is counterproductive to invoke argument between science and religion, as it may have the effect of turning away the more dogmatically religious, further widening the gap between religion and science.

After reading the various arguments to this extent, I felt myself slipping into the Twilight Zone, unable to understand how it was that a naturalistic system (science) could even begin to add on a supernatural system (God), without corrupting the very nature of science itself. No political persuasion should change this dynamic, as far as I’m concerned.

For this, I was labeled a confrontational “New Atheist”, as if it was somehow worse than being an “Old Atheist”.

Frankly, I wasn’t familiar with the term, I had to look it up. I still haven’t figured out who coined the phrase, but it is a label for those like Richard Dawkins, who feel that not only should science be separated from religion completely, but science should challenge religion for the superstitious nonsense that it is. At first being labeled a “New Atheist” left me feeling confused over the implications, but now that I understand the meaning behind it: I accept the label and thank all you deluded Christians for it! I’m quite happy to be thrown into this new class.

You cannot mix science and religion. The reason is a very simple one (one that those I was in argument with refused to accept as even a possibility) that once you apply any supernatural entity, no matter how petty or large, into a naturalistic system - you have corrupted the system. Science is ruled by evidence and there is no evidence for gods, pixies, unicorns, flying spaghetti monsters, or honest politicians. Once you open the door to that without evidence, you have thrown out science and taken on philosophy. The scientific method starts with observation of the empirical, not mental musings of the ethereal.

Until it can be shown that the interjection of the supernatural into a naturalist system can occur, without corrupting the naturalistic system, there simply is no room for it.  Inserting supernatural answers into a naturalistic system is far more than just being counterproductive - it destroys the system.

I have had many tell me that my “love” of science is my largest downfall - that it leaves me overly skeptical and ignorant of the good that religion has brought to the world.  I counter with this simple test: compare what science has done for humanity in the last 200 years, with the entire history of religion on this planet.  Which has produced more, created more, improved more, furthered knowledge?  Which has ultimately done more for mankind?

Pray all you want, but science landed us on the moon.

As the world market thrashes around like a freshly caught fish, I cannot help but notice just how plainly stupid some of the commentary is on the situation.

First of all, you can point the finger of deregulation at any of the Presidents since Reagan, it’s congress which makes the laws! Secondly, deregulation is not the problem, human greed is. Last, if you didn’t predict some time ago that this was going to happen, then you’ve been asleep.

I won’t pretend to understand all of the nuances of the trading of debt which allowed this chaos to prevail, as examining the nuances merely tells me that you must be totally bat-shit insane to actually understand or follow it. What I do know is that we’ve lost so much more than economic stability in the “solution” and likely “solutions” to come.

The basic point is this: We lost the last of our freedom with the fix.

Our forefathers went to war for less than what we’ve seen in the last few weeks. Our money, or more accurately, your great-grandchildren’s money is being spent at an unprecedented rate in order to bail out a pig’s sty of greedy bankers. It’s not helping the economy, per se, it’s soothing the wounds of the rich bankers who started this mess to begin with, so that they might start trusting each other again and allow the wheels of monetary stupidity to roll as before.

This is not the correct path of action to take. As Ron Paul has pointed out on more than one occasion, it would be far better to let them go bankrupt, deal with the short term of it, than to drag this crap out for a couple more years by injecting their greed with capital. That injection, like a placebo, will fail to cure what Stephen Colbert so accurately referred to as “Business Syphilis”. (If you haven’t seen this video, it is at once both insightful and hilarious - a well needed bit of humor in this mess.)

$700 billion dollars went out the door with this bailout bill. How many homeless could be sheltered? How many schools could be properly funded? How many roads could be repaved, bridges rebuilt, water systems expanded, garbage collected, ad nausium - before you spend tax payer money on bailing out a bunch of mentally unstable, obviously retarded fat cat bankers? If that doesn’t tell you who controls our “elected representatives”, nothing will.  When we do not control in any fashion the public monies, but instead watch them go to bail out or even purchase business interests which used to be private - you have fascism.

Our Constitutional Republic has been replaced with a fully scoped fascism. Now we have to determine if we’ll live under those conditions or fight to get back what we’ve lost.

As I’ve posted before, I’m doing some home remodeling. This has required tearing out the old to make way for the new.

In the process I spent about $12 and purchased a tool that simply amazes me in how well thought out it is and how well it works. I’m referring to the Stanley 55-525 15-inch Super Wonder Bar Pry Bar.

You wouldn’t think of a pry bar as being a wonder in engineering, but this baby struts its stuff at first glance. Ingenious use of bends in the metal produce both safety and power through provision of a built in fulcrum which does not exist on other pry bars.

In actual use it has been nothing short of amazing.  The yellow end (with the 90 degree bend) works like any standard pry bar, but the normally “flat” end is where the beauty of the design shines.  With a built in fulcrum you can apply amazing amounts of power through the lever and not risk hand injury, because the 90 degree bend at the other end hits before your knuckles do.

Simple.  Elegant.  Damn effective.

It’s nice to know that some engineers out there are paying attention to true functional improvments on the old.

This is one of the most concise videos I’ve seen, explaining the US monetary system and why we are in the trouble we are in.

Peter Schiff was laughed at over the last couple of years with his predictions of the US market, both investment and housing as being on the verge of collapse.  Looks like he has the last laugh.

The Corbett Report hits the nail on the head as to why the current bailout bill is a ruse to keep the media in a frenzy over what amounts to nothing.  The dollar is nearly in freefall now and this only going to get worse.

More here at Bloomberg.com.

Stock up on ammo and food, folks.