Here’s a song I wrote and recorded a few years back. It’s called Forward Arrow. It’s mostly me (I even ‘sing’ in one part of it), though I did get some guitar and vocal material from Chopdeli. It’s a slightly experimental electronica. I’m interested on your feedback, good or bad. Give it a listen and let me know what you think.

The above comic is created and licensed by xkcd.com.

Thanks to Shaze for bringing this great comic to my attention.

Sometimes, Christian fundamentalists really scare me. The asshole in the picture is one such fundie. His name is Bruce Ware, a professor of Christian theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Another is the president of said seminary, Albert Mohler. They’ve abused both their educations and the Christian Bible to support the most abhorrent theological conclusions. Their beliefs make them downright sexist and possibly even racist.

First the sexism. Like most evangelicals, Ware believes that women should be submissive to their husbands. That is, of course, because the Bible was written at a time when women were considered inferior and were expected to be submissive to men in all instances, so there are plenty of verses to support that theological conclusion.

Ware takes an already sexist belief to extremes. First, he blames the victims of domestic abuse. Basically he claims that non-submissive wives force their husbands to react one of two ways: to become a wimp or to beat the crap out of her.

“And husbands on their parts, because they’re sinners, now respond to that threat to their authority either by being abusive, which is of course one of the ways men can respond when their authority is challenged–or, more commonly, to become passive, acquiescent, and simply not asserting the leadership they ought to as men in their homes and in churches”

The above image of the jackass was created and is licensed by these other jackasses.

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This is the hardest time for me in the presidential election cycle. One of the democratic candidates wins the primary and then waits a few weeks for party unity to start to take shape. Then he/she rushes to the political center. The week of the 4th of July was when Barack Obama decided to start that process. Last week, he indicated that he would expand Bush’s faith-based initiatives, gave his support to a FISA capitulation compromise that grants retro-active immunity of civil rights violations, and stated his opposition to late-term abortion.

The first move to the center, his desired expansion of federal grants to religious charities isn’t all that bad, if looked at a little more closely. The government has always given money to religious organizations, as long as they meet two criteria: they don’t use the money for programs that proselytize and they don’t discriminate on the bases of religion for receipt of aid and for hiring. The Salvation Army was one such organization. What Bush’s faith-based initiative did was to turn a blind eye to discrimination in hiring by charities and aid groups.

Obama wants a restoration of the anti-discriminatory policy. He said, “First, if you get a federal grant, you can’t use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help, and you can’t discriminate against them — or against the people you hire — on the basis of their religion” (emphasis mine). Thus Obama simultaneously appears to support faith-based initiatives while actually returning to pre-Bush policies. Furthermore, federal law is actually ambiguous about funding organizations that hire based on religion so Obama’s position is actually a liberal one.

The above image is created and licensed by dbking.

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