silveradept | Ready for new input

Saw the end movie of Final Fantasy XII tonight. The game itself is not 100% completed, with all the sidestuff all finished and completed, but I went ahead and finished the story mode. Left a lot of things unsaid and potentially open-ended. Did not, however, end with any sort of crowning, marriage, or other ceremony segment, which was interesting, but it could have stood to resolve several threads in the end segments. I do, however, agree with one of the main character’s assessments of the story - he’s the leading man, and the game might have been better had it been so.

My meetings are not like this, but if yours are full of jargon-words that you suspect are being slung about with no idea of their meeting, you may want to check out another possible buzzword bingo game. Except in this case, when you get five in a row, you’re supposed to say “bullpoop” - or something like it. I think the people in my meetings would rahter work on making duct-tape skirts (or shorts) so that they could get something productive done while they were also getting things productively done in the meeting. Yeah, librarians are multi-taskers. We’re figuring out ways of getting good deals on drinks while also working out what we want for story-telling programs.

The “Stu-pid” award goes to the gentleman that tried to pass off a $1 million USD bill to open an account with. The problem is that there never has been a $1 million note in circulation. Period. So the forgery there is kind of obvious.

Internationally, right after peace accords are agreed to, Saudi Arabia releases 1,500 Al-Qaeda members from prison after they promise not to wage war in the Arabian Peninsula. At least, we think that’s what happened. In any case, that’s another 1,500 Qaeda operatives out. Maybe they’ll be heading to Iran, where an "alternative" to the Annapolis meeting is being held. Well, at least Musharraf resigned as the head of the army today.

Is there anyone honest in Washington, D.C.? Although the following unit may resemble a retaliation investigation, the person responsible for investigations into Karl Rove's possible illegalities may have done some illegal data deletion himself. And he called a computer help team to get it done, leaving a record of what occurred. And then the American Red Cross president and CEO was ousted after his relationship with a female subordinate was discovered.

Jason Whitlock blames the death of football player Sean Taylor on hood culture, calling it the “Black KKK” and saying that the hip-hop culture encourages murder, ignorance, and incarceration. Even if the police don’t actually know everything yet, Whitlock is willing to bet that there was a another black man behind the trigger, and that the steady diet of hip-hop and rap made him into the killer he is.

Less speculation and more reporting, Sudan is charging a British teacher with insulting Islam when her students voted to name a plush bear Mohammed. Because I’m sure that the prophet would be so very pissed off that students decided to name something in his honor. I guess this is one of those occasions where living in a place where the dominant religion has been shamelessly marketing and making graven images of its prophet has an advantage. When the Christians complain about blasphemy, it usually means that someone was working relatively hard to do it.

Like, say, the swirling anger around the Golden Compass movie, His Dark Materials, and the rather Gnostic conception of G-d and institutional religion that it has - it goes back to the root of heresy, the point where someone can make choices about what they believe and interpret. Pullman’s characters are always choosing. The columnist chooses to say “liberation theology” is the thing in question, but there’s all sorts of Gnostic language there, if the writer wanted to admit it was there.

The Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal regarding a monument with an open Bible outside a courthouse. The suit brought was successful on separation of church and state grounds. The choice quote, however, comes from the County Judge.

“Some (separation of church and state) rulings are silly. We carry money around that says ‘In God We Trust.’”

Ah, Judge, that statement can be argued to be religiously-neutral, as most religious beliefs have at least a god figure that could be substituted. What you’re doing narrows things down to to a specific interpretation of God, the monotheistic YHWH. That’s where the violation appears. Myself, I would be fine with a Bible-as-law book appearing in a display with other law codes and proclamations. Say, Hammurabi, Confucius, the Shogunate’s, the Constitution. Y’know, showing that it’s there as a book of law, not as a religious statement?

Mitt Romney doesn't see a Muslim in his Cabinet, were he elected, because Muslims are too small of a population for consider their placement. Talking Points Memo says this isn't the first time Mitt's said no to Muslims, and for much worse reasons than that. He doesn’t see the value of installing a Muslim into good federal positions when the country is repeatedly being whipped up into anti-Muslim fever. Perhaps he intends to continue doing that stirring.

Dennis Prager says that all around the world, the left hates America, while the right adores America. Well, with the hero narrative that Prager applies to America and its values, no wonder he thinks those who disagree with that narrative hate the country. And he can’t conceive of any alternate options, so he says that the left has to provide them. What would it take, a copy of the Liberal Agenda?

The Marriot chain of hotels is using non-logical filtering technique, blocking Americablog because of the presence of the word “lesbian” and classifying it as a porn site. This has been confirmed in New Jersey, and also in Chicago. It would make so much more sense for someone manning a filter to actually look and see whether there was anything that warranted a ban.

But winning tonight’s thwack in the face (and boy, there were a lot of good candidates), is the United States government, that made a request for 24,000 Amazon.com customers' names in trying to get witnesses against a governor who ran an unreported used book store through the Amazon service. The judge said, “Um, no. Amazon’s customers have a right to their privacy.” As it turns out, after the subpoena had been submitted, the prosecutors recovered the data they needed, so the subpoena wasn’t even needed.

If it should pass, however, H.R. 1955 may steal that crown away and win a semi-permanent place in the big quiche, along with USA PATRIOT and others of its ilk. It’s bad enough that we have an office of the government that intends on making our lives difficult in the name of “security”.

Cool Things tells us that Homebrew DS software has struck again, turning the DS into a portable sketchbook by using stylus and pressure to make it a tablet. They also note, perhaps with a little trepidation, that Google is expanding into the renewable energy market. But they’ll cover that fear with Idaho Rave Flyers. And claim some sort of scientific necessity for the previous by reporting on clinical trials of MDMA and other psychedelic drugs to treat post-traumatic stress disorder. And they’ll try and get out of this mess with 10 real-life super-heroes.

And after all that infodump, I’m sneaking off to bed.