.

Special Comment for August 15, 2010:

A comment on the inaccurately-described "Ground Zero Mosque"...


Damn, I love this man.

I'm constantly boggled by how easily Americans will roll over and do EXACTLY what the insane followers of Bin Laden and others like him want them to do. They work themselves up into a xenophobic lather, willing to shred the Constitution and turn this country into EXACTLY the kind of hateful, dictatorial, bigoted theocracy the terrorists accuse it of being. That any of them can so breezily complain that our standards aren't the same as SAUDI ARABIA? Just...ARGH STABSTABSTAB DIEDIEDIE...

One other thing: as a Spaniard-American, I feel very very sad that the builders of this cultural center felt the need to change the name of the place from "Cordoba House". Cordoba was one of the great cities of Muslim Spain, a beautiful place and a place where many faiths co-existed peacefully, learning from each other. I've been there. I've also been to Granada and seen the Alhambra, the glorious Muslim palace and grounds, filled with exquisite tilework and self-regulating water gardens that still function on their own a thousand years later. I would sooner live there than any tacky American McMansion ever made, no matter how big and swank.

Did you know that it was the Muslims who rescued the knowledge of ancient Greece - the writings of Aristotle and Plato, the geometry of Euclid, etc. - from obscurity? The Christians BURNED it. That the Muslims were the first to develop from it sophisticated forms of mathematics, architecture, and other sciences? That it wasn't until wandering monks sat down with the Muslims in Spain and worked on translating THEIR books (which they FREELY SHARED with everyone, by the way) that Christians even heard of weird concepts like, say, zero? Goddess' own truth - the Europeans had no concept of zero until they learned about it from the Arab sages. They were still using the Roman style of counting, which made their math extremely limited. This is why their architecture sucked so much. The Muslim learning revolutionized the very foundations of European culture. Our numbers - 1, 2, 3, 4...? There's a reason they're called Arabic numbers. Mathematics is littered with words straight from Arabic like algebra, azimuth, and the aforementioned zero, because they had no possible translation in any of the European languages, because the concepts didn't even exist up in the supposedly "godly" countries of Europe. The Muslims GAVE this knowledge to any who were interested. Think about that.

So you see why "Cordoba House" would have been a perfect name for a place dedicated to interfaith dialogue and peace. And the FUCKING IGNORANT YAHOOS that have the ear of the national media in this country managed to scare these folks into changing it.

I could not possibly put into words the utter disgust I feel these days at what passes for discourse in this country. We have no guts anymore. We allow our nation to be hijacked by stupid troglodytes who have no interest in learning or knowing the slightest thing about the real world we live in. They shame this country, they shame their religion, they shame the very human race.

.

Cell phone calls a problem for 911 operators


( Text here )


I've heard people talk about getting rid of their land lines, and I cannot imagine anything more short-sighted. I actually had to explain to a friend of mine with children exactly why doing that would be not only silly but very dangerous. "What if your babysitter doesn't have a cellphone? What if you lose the number? How will you contact each other?"

Looks like I was right. I hadn't thought about the 911 system not being built to work with cellphones, but that just adds another reason to keep the land lines. Besides the fact that they are FAR cheaper than those addictive little toys, they are dependable, built to last, and can't easily be lost or stolen. (Who the hell would ever want to steal your house phone?)

JEEZ, how hard is this stuff to figure out?

.

OK, I'm gonna talk about Day Zero now. Not a full review, just a gathering of thoughts.

( MASSIVE SPOILERS. DON'T WHINE LATER )


Okay, so it is a review. Once I start I can't stop; so sue me. ;)