Self Promotion
How's the Moon?
moon phases |
2006
2005
--MacBeth V.v.
“Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.”
/|\
Looks like the new pope is already taking up arms against a sea of common sense:
Pope Benedict XVI has responded firmly to the first challenge of his papacy by condemning a Spanish government bill allowing marriage between homosexuals.The bill, passed by parliament's Socialist-dominated lower house, also allows gay couples to adopt.
A senior Vatican official described the bill - which is likely to become law within a few months - as iniquitous.
He said Roman Catholic officials should be prepared to lose their jobs rather than co-operate with the law.
Yeah. I really see that happening. He'll be as successful at this as convincing American Catholics not to use birth control. I have to admit, though, telling Spanish Catholics they should lose their jobs instead of allowing this to happen is pretty damned extreme. Of course, this is also the guy who once said:
But the proper reaction to crimes committed against homosexual persons should not be to claim that the homosexual condition is not disordered. When such a claim is made and when homosexual activity is consequently condoned, or when civil legislation is introduced to protect behavior to which no one has any conceivable right, neither the church nor society at large should be surprised when other distorted notions and practices gain ground, and irrational and violent reactions increase
Translation: Yeah, I guess it's not moral to kill gays, but damn it, they're asking for it.
How Christ-like.
posted by Tlachtga, 11:23 AMJust in time for Earth Day, The Guardian has a nice big story on Peak Oil:
According to industry consultants IHS Energy, 90% of all known reserves are now in production, suggesting that few major discoveries remain to be made. Shell says its reserves fell last year because it only found enough oil to replace 15-25 % of what the company produced. BP told the US stock exchange that it replaced only 89% of its production in 2004.Moreover, oil supply is increasingly limited to a few giant fields, with 10% of all production coming from just four fields and 80% from fields discovered before 1970. Even finding a field the size of Ghawar in Saudi Arabia, by far the world's largest and said to have another 125bn barrels, would only meet world demand for about 10 years.
"All the major discoveries were in the 1960s, since when they have been declining gradually over time, give or take the occasional spike and trough," says Campbell. "The whole world has now been seismically searched and picked over. Geological knowledge has improved enormously in the past 30 years and it is almost inconceivable now that major fields remain to be found."
You know, a year ago folks laughed at the idea of Peak Oil. Now, it's getting coverage. Guess that SUV's becoming kind of a burden, eh, reporters?
posted by Tlachtga, 11:00 AMApparently, Microsoft is caving in to right-wing pressure:
The Stranger has learned that last month the $37-billion Redmond-based software behemoth quietly withdrew its support for House bill 1515, the anti-gay-discrimination bill currently under consideration by the Washington State legislature, after being pressured by the Evangelical Christian pastor of a suburban megachurch. The pastor, Ken Hutcherson of Antioch Bible Church in Redmond, met with a senior Microsoft executive in February and threatened to organize a national boycott of the company's products if it did not change its stance on the legislation, according to gay rights activists and a Microsoft employee who attended a subsequent April 4 meeting where Bradford L. Smith, Microsoft's senior vice president, general counsel, and corporate secretary, told a group of gay staffers about Hutcherson's threat. Hutcherson also unsuccessfully demanded that the company fire two employees who had testified in favor of the bill.[snip]
An African American, he strenuously objects, in public appearances and writings, to the equation of gay civil rights with the African-American civil rights struggle in the 1960s. For instance, in an op-ed in the Seattle Times on March 29, 2004, Hutcherson wrote, "It has been said loudly and proudly that gay marriage is a civil rights issue. If that's the case, then gays would be the new African Americans. I'm here to tell you now, and hopefully for the last time, that the gay community is not the new African-American community." He has also said that he does not tolerate known gays in his church.
I can't help but wonder if Hutcherson tolerates wife-beaters, alcoholics, and, if we want to be Biblically correct, menstruating women and folks who eat pork and shellfish, or folks who marry outside their own race. But that's besides the point. How he runs his church is the business of himself and his congregation. How he lives his life and what he believes are his own concern.
But, typical of the right wing (and the left wing, let's be honest, and being honest, I'll readily admit I'm more sympathetic to the left wing, Liberation Theologists and whatnot), his personal beliefs must also manifest itself in government, in law, and his bigotry has to be not only sacrosanct, but legislated.
The cowards at Microsoft capitulated. And this won't be the last time, either.
Oh well--if Hutcherson can threaten a boycott, I can vote with my dollars, too.
posted by Tlachtga, 2:11 PMIf We Don't Report On It, It Didn't Happen
From an administration that has ceased to shock me:
Bush administration eliminating 19-year-old international terrorism reportThe State Department decided to stop publishing an annual report on international terrorism after the government's top terrorism center concluded that there were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since 1985, the first year the publication covered.
Several U.S. officials defended the abrupt decision, saying the methodology the National Counterterrorism Center used to generate statistics for the report may have been faulty, such as the inclusion of incidents that may not have been terrorism.
Last year, the number of incidents in 2003 was undercounted, forcing a revision of the report, "Patterns of Global Terrorism."
But other current and former officials charged that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's office ordered "Patterns of Global Terrorism" eliminated several weeks ago because the 2004 statistics raised disturbing questions about the Bush's administration's frequent claims of progress in the war against terrorism.
Ya think? Man, this makes the "War on Drugs" look like LaserTag.
posted by Tlachtga, 11:20 AMIn what is probably the coolest news I've heard all year:
For more than a century, it has caused excitement and frustration in equal measure - a collection of Greek and Roman writings so vast it could redraw the map of classical civilisation. If only it was legible.Now, in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed.
In the past four days alone, Oxford's classicists have used it to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia. They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the earliest books of the New Testament.
They believe that up to another fifth of the total of known classical literature could be added. This is absolutely monumental. Go and read the whole article; it even includes some of Sophocles' lost work on the siege of Thebes, which occures between Oedipus Tyrranos and Antigone.
posted by Tlachtga, 11:20 AM