Current Bologs: Page 167 of 167

Come out as atheist!

Here's a couple more reasons to like Richard Dawkins. By the way, if you're one of those people, like Jeremy Hardy, who thinks Dawkins is just another "Religious Extremest" then buy one of his books, read it, and then apologise for being wrong.
He currently has a couple of excellent campaigns. Firstly, The Out Campaign which aims to encourage non-believers to come out of the closet and say they don't believe.

Secondly, Non Believers Giving Aid, aimed at all of those people who erroneously believe that aid can only exist when prefixed by the word "Christian."
Current sounds: silence
Tags: atheism atheist aid haiti dawkins 
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Showing matches to a caveman

From a little blog on the New York times:

We always risk and often achieve a "I just heard this great new band called Vampire Weekend" moment by recommending Internet Things, but it's been a hard day...

And I'm going to take the same risk; sorry if you seen this, done this, know this already, don't care either way, but I'm currently captivated by the simple, powerful, beauty of posterous. It's been around for a while but I've only just appreciated what it does.

If you need to declare, brag, or shout about something and you don't have a blog, just email whatever it is to post@posterous.com and your email, together with any attachments, get instantly turned into a beautiful blog post. For example: http://veghead.posterous.com/. You don't need to set anything up, sign anything, or even think about it. Just send an email, and a few seconds later you get mailed back with the url of whatever you posted. Of course, should you wish, you can maintain the url and keep posting stuff to it - just like a real blog - but you don't have to. Try it!

Whether it will scale, get clogged with spam, or just vanish, we'll see. But I love to see a brilliant idea brilliantly executed, especially when it's so simple.
Current sounds: parrot background noise
Tags: posterous simple brilliant idea blog instant 
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Smashing rebellion

It's really cheering when a website that is brilliant, although offensive to some, gets shut-down, and then gets resurrected. Whether it was by the power of logic or a clue-stick brandished at the censors, we'll probably never know for sure. But I'm glad he's back. Read all his stuff. It's funny.
Current sounds: Wishbone Ash
Tags: 27b/6 27bslash6 27bslash6.com 
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Comfort

According to the "News", we should all be approaching revolution by now, as the worst snow storm ever recorded plunges us all into dark misery. It has been snowing all day, but none has settled (even on the massive piles of snow which remain from the last storm). We even had to work at home today to avoid the return of snowmageddon and all day got to watch the perpetual snow, and its perpetual inability to do any more damage than very light summer rain.

So I've been working at home, which is the same as working in the office except that I get to have a bird on my shoulder, watch The Sweeney, and end up working later than normal. We also got a short lie-in, and a moment of panic when we discovered our cable and Internet were cut off. This only took an hour to resolve tho and, despite that, I still think Comcast are an enormous set of bastards...sorry Matt.

A good friend gave me a copy of A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present, which is a really good guide for helping people who live in North America to feel guilty, ashamed and angry; it certainly has that effect on me anyway. Obviously the people who should read it, won't. But the more depressing it is to read the history of genocide, enslavement, and torture of native Americans, Africans and the poor of any colour, the more difficult it becomes to feel like progress hasn't been made over the last few hundred years. The general feelings of despair, disappointment, and anger I feel normally when listening to the "News", especially when it describes what all of those deluded tards in the "teabag movement" are banging on about , seem a bit silly compared to the state of the U.S. in the late 17th century. There used to be a slave code, explaining how slaves (and "servants" AKA slaves) should be punished for trying to rebel. The "Puritans" considered the act of massacring entire villages of native-Americans as positively Godly. There was also cannibalism amongst the poor - another thing that doesn't get mentioned too often in history textbooks.

Whatever Obama turns out to be, the fact he was elected is something I will forever remember as being one of the most wonderfully significant events in modern history. It reminded me that getting depressed and cynical doesn't help - we have to try to change things! For lazy bastards like myself, that's difficult to acknowledge.

Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point however is to change it

Karl Marx - Theses on Feuerbach.

Alternatively, just make sure you enjoy the nice times - not everyone is privileged to have such a luxury.
Current sounds: Camper Van Beethoven/Big Black/Kate Bush
Tags: freedom comfort tv love nice things marx USA history 
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Quote from Dylan Thomas

It's probably not a good sign when two concurrent blog posts consist of quotations, but my brain's been heavily bogged down with the languages of C, PHP and Python recently, so the English has to be borrowed. This is from Dylan Thomas' "The Doctor and the Devils" (a copy of which I picked up in the Sally Army for about ten bob). It reminds me of the currently amassing army of ignorance commonly referred to as the teabaggers.

To think, then, is to enter into a perilous country, colder of welcome than the polar wastes, darker than a Scottish Sunday, where the hand of the unthinker is always raised against you, where the wild animals, who go by such names as Envy, Hypocrisy, and Tradition, are notoriously carnivorous, and where the parasites rule.
To think is dangerous. The majority of men have found it easier to writhe their way into the parasitical bureaucracy, or to droop into the slack ranks if the ruled. I beg you all to devote your lives to danger; I pledge you to adventure; I command you to experiment.

Current sounds: WHYY
Tags: dylan thomas 
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Quote of the day - history - with attribution

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

George Santayana.

Current sounds: TV: New Tricks
Tags: history george santayana repeat history remember 
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