evanmorris.com

Wow. It's clear this wasn't written by the US media:

US evangelist Jerry Falwell dies - Financial Times - MSNBC.com

The Rev Jerry Falwell, whose evangelical convictions and organisational abilities, including as a founder in 1979 of the Moral Majority movement, did much to place religious conservatives in a role of great influence in American politics, died on Tuesday in Lynchburg, Virginia, of apparent heart failure at the age of 73.

He was a figure of immense controversy over the last 40 years, outspoken to the point that his apologies appeared almost as regularly as his thundering denunciations. To him the three great scourges afflicting his country were "atheism, secularism and humanism," and nothing would deter him from defeating his evil trinity.

Most notoriously, he laid the blame for the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001, at the feet of his domestic opponents. "I really believe," he said at the time, "that the pagans, the abortionists and the lesbians … and all those who have tried to secularise America helped this happen." His subsequent recantation attracted less attention.

Early in his career he was an avowed segregationist, frequently featuring the likes of Lester Maddox and George Wallace, the diehard southern governors, on his tele-evangelical programmes. He often spoke scathingly of what he called the Civil Wrongs Movement, a position from which, in later years, he again retreated

He strongly supported the apartheid regime in South Africa, once dismissing Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel Peace prize laureate, as "a phony". He was an equally ardent backer of Israel, believing that turmoil in the Middle East was the precursor of the Second Coming of Christ, with the stipulation that "the Anti-Christ must be, of necessity, a Jewish male."

[more at link, unless MSNBC has pulled it]

Update: Of course they pulled it. You can find it here.

Posted by evan at 4:42 PM | Permalink

Radio Paradise - eclectic online rock radio

Posted by evan at 2:15 PM | Permalink

Blowing the lid off the pet food industry

Aisles upon aisles in stores like PetsMart and PetCo are devoted to shiny displays of brightly colored bags and cans of dog food. A look at the lengthy list of ingredients on the side of the bag could leave the well-intentioned pet owner confused. What is "animal digest?" "Meat and poultry meal?" "BHA and ethoxyquin?"

Ann M. Martin, author of "Foods Pets Die For," will tell you that none of these things are what animals should be eating.

"In my opinion, when we purchase these bags and cans of commercial food, we are purchasing garbage," she said.

The FDA soothingly states that "consumers can take comfort in knowing that pet food is manufactured under a series of standards and regulations," but concedes, in a monumental understatement, that it "contains parts of the animal not normally eaten by people."

The pet food industry, to put it bluntly, uses food unfit for human consumption.

If the buyer envisions plump chickens and choice, juicy cuts of beef going into that expensive bag of dog food, he is in for a rude awakening. "Meat meal" is ground-up slaughterhouse discards, often containing disease-ridden tissue and high levels of hormones and pesticides. Cancerous tissue and worm-infested organs are perfectly acceptable. Whatever remains of the carcass after it is stripped of the muscle meat reserved for humans are ground up into an unsavory mess.

What are known as 4D animals - "dead, dying, diseased or disabled" - are routinely rerouted into pet food. Plastic foam packaging containing spoiled meat from the supermarkets, ear tags and spoiled slaughterhouse meat also make their way into the mix. Restaurant grease is used to coat the outside of pet food, making it more palatable to pets.

The grains included in pet food are those deemed unfit for humans because of mold, contaminants or poor quality; they also can include hulls and other remnants from the milling process.

High temperatures and lengthy processing procedures rob the mixture of whatever nutrients it might contain; to compensate, a long list of chemical additives are dumped in. These are usually added all together as a premix, and if there is a mistake in making up the mix, it can throw off the entire balance, resulting in a potentially toxic imbalance. Dyes (to add eye appeal) and preservatives such as BHT and Ethoxyquin can accumulate in the pet's body, resulting in organ damage.

Posted by evan at 4:39 PM | Permalink

Iraq For Sale - The War Profiteers - Google Video

Can be downloaded as .avi from link.

Posted by evan at 1:43 PM | Permalink

The democracy of fame? - TLS Highlights - Times Online

from the article:

... It is often noted that celebrities refer to themselves in the first-person plural. “For two years,” Garth Brooks recently told the Independent, “we couldn’t find anything that we wanted to be an actor in.” Other famous people have cultivated the habit of referring to themselves in the third-person singular: “I’ve been very careful that Deborah Norville does the right thing”, the TV personality Deborah Norville told the Seattle Times last year; “Deborah has been pretty clever about managing her associations”. The actor Richard Dreyfuss uses both the first-person plural and the third-person singular (possibly, one day, he will start referring to himself as “they”).

Posted by evan at 1:33 AM | Permalink

librarian.net -- do you ubuntu?

Cute video about installing Ubuntu linux on aging PCs in a Vermont library. Nice zydeco music, too. I have Ubuntu installed on an absolutely ancient (266 mHz) laptop, and it runs a bit slow compared to my 3 gHz desktop, but it's perfectly usable.

Posted by evan at 9:14 PM | Permalink

A Black Matter for the King | TPMCafe

But if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make when all those legs and arms and heads chopped off in battle shall join together at the latter day and cry all "We died at such a place"--some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle, for how can they charitably dispose of anything when blood is their argument? Now if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the King that led them to it, whom to disobey were against all proportion of subjection.

--Shakespeare, King Henry V, Act IV, Scene I.

[read the link]

Posted by evan at 7:39 PM | Permalink

Romney Reaches to the Christian Right - washingtonpost.com

VIRGINIA BEACH, May 5 -- Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney (R) did not discuss his Mormon faith as he continued his outreach Saturday to conservative Christians in a graduation speech at Regent University, the school founded by televangelist Pat Robertson.

Instead, Romney, who is intensely courting this key segment of the Republican base in hopes of winning the party's 2008 presidential nomination, expounded on conservative themes such as the importance of child-rearing and marriage and the presence of evil in the world.

"There is no work more important to America's future than the work that is done within the four walls of the American home," Romney said. He also criticized people who choose not to get married because they enjoy the single life.

"It seems that Europe leads Americans in this way of thinking," Romney told the crowd of more than 5,000. "In France, for instance, I'm told that marriage is now frequently contracted in seven-year terms where either party may move on when their term is up. How shallow and how different from the Europe of the past."

Ooo-la-la, those frisky French. What, is he trying to out-nutter Giuliani?

Posted by evan at 9:59 PM | Permalink

This is my computer running Ubuntu Linux 6.06 LTS. See? Not scary at all. Kinda like Windows, in fact, but without all the crapola. Click the pic for a larger version.

It occurred to me the other day that it's actually a tribute to Ubuntu that I'm running a version two generations behind the current release and find no pressing reason to update it (even though it would cost absolutely nothing to do so). With Windows, I was always tinkering with the system to make it work better. This just works, and in the 18 months that I have been using Linux as my primary OS, it has never once crashed.

Posted by evan at 12:16 AM | Permalink

BibliOdyssey

via boing boing

Posted by evan at 11:16 PM | Permalink

A step up for Microsoft rival

There were surely no parties in the corridors in Redmond when Dell Inc. announced plans this week to offer Ubuntu, an increasingly popular variety of the Linux operating system, as an option on consumer PCs.

But one eighth-grader in Shoreline was pretty happy.

Paul Bartell, 13, is looking forward to telling people "Hey, you can go to Dell and you can buy a computer from them" with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed.

"I think that will open up Linux to a lot more people, and a lot more people will learn about it," said Paul Bartell, 13, a devoted Ubuntu user. He's looking forward to telling people "Hey, you can go to Dell and you can buy a computer from them" with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed.

[click on pic for larger version; more at link]

Nice article, but fails to mention that Linux systems are largely untroubled by the spyware and viruses that infest Windows World. Not having to run crap such as Norton Antivirus makes your PC much faster and far more stable.

Posted by evan at 8:46 PM | Permalink

Bush: I'm the Commander Guy - The Caucus - Politics - New York Times Blog

WASHINGTON, May 2–And you thought he was still “the decider.”

President Bush coined a new nickname for himself — ‘’the commander guy” — on Wednesday, as he criticized Congressional Democrats in a speech to the annual gathering of the Associated General Contractors of America, a construction industry trade group.

The man who last year proclaimed “I’m the decider,’’ in response to a question about whether he would fire Donald Rumsfeld as defense secretary, came up with this latest moniker in explaining why he vetoed an Iraq war spending bill that dictated a timeline for troops to withdraw from Iraq.

“The question is, ‘Who ought to make that decision, the Congress or the commanders?,’’ Mr. Bush said. “As you know, my position is clear – I’m the commander guy.”

Posted by evan at 11:36 PM | Permalink