Recently in interweb Category

magical fairy dust.

when was the last time American Muslims organized to pull advertisements off the air from shows that do not conform with their faith values (and trust me there are many)?

Stop being ungrateful. - No matter how good or bad you have it, wake up each day thankful for your life. Someone somewhere else is desperately fighting for theirs. Instead of thinking about what you're missing, try thinking about what you have that everyone else is missing.

on giving thanks

check that out.

41% of my fellow Americans think Jesus is coming back by 2050.

I wonder how many of those changed their timetable when Jesus made no appearance in 2000?

Other years in which Jesus was predicted to return, but did not: every single one of them since he died, if he ever actually lived.

if you know any, please send this to them.

heh. heheheehehe.

if the email you have received consists of pictures and large, colored text, it is either a ransom note, a letter from a 2 year old, or a hoax email (it can be hard to distinguish between the last two possibilities).

while calm, presentable, understated text is no indicator of seriousness, a lack thereof is a sure sign that something's far from the truth.

i've been following amanda's blog for a while now. initially, i frequently found her posts boring and focused on things i didn't care about. now, for the last couple of months, i've found her to be incredibly insightful and well written. i dunno if she's changed or i have. this post is perhaps the best of her's that I've read:

The illusion of control. Do yourself a favor and read it.

(It causes me to wonder: I find VD's blog posts horribly illogical and poorly written (in the sense that he usually puts his contradictions in adjacent sentences, rather than separating them by clever misdirections), but AM's well reasoned and well presented. I wonder if this is because I tend to agree with AM's conclusions and don't go searching for mistakes and illogic (or because she tends to write longer posts, and separates her contradictions so the lazy cannot find them). I wonder, yes I do, but I suspect she's just smarter and a better writer than VD, which isn't saying much.)

i've begun following the blog of the angry arab. it's quite the apt title, he does what it says on the tin (in contrast to something like "fox news" where you'd expect... no wait, it works. okay, minus the "news").

amidst copious amounts of knee-jerk israel bashing, he makes some fair to excellent points. one of his more excellent points is how lame it is that the US keeps blabbing about how our pal Mubarak should recognize Egyptians' "human rights". The angry arab says this isn't enough: Egyptians, like all humans, should be free to exercise their political rights as well.

The US is supposedly in a tricky position here. But it doesn't take a genius to notice that the protesters in Egypt are not calling for human rights in general, but very explicitly for Mubarak to leave the government. I was taught to keep silent if I didn't have anything nice to say. Likewise, perhaps the US should keep silent on this issue until it recognizes that the people of Egypt believe the only way to achieve human rights is through the application of political rights.

After all, this is what the founders of our own nation believed.

not by faux news
not by the corporate news network
not by microsoft-comcast-ge-lockheed-national-broadcasting-corporation
not even by comedy central

only al jazeera is on the ground in the midst of it.