Susan Jacoby talks about her book "Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism"

Freethought Revival
Susan Jacoby, author of Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, dissects the history of secularism in the U.S., and argues the time is right for a new secular hero.

A great quote from the article:

The secularist strain in American culture has been very strong since the beginning, but the nation's secular heritage is virtually unknown to people. A secular government was developed to protect the rights of religious minorities. Most Americans don't know that God is not mentioned in the Constitution. It was a coalition of religious Evangelicals and freethinkers or deists who joined together to get this ratified. And why did the Evangelicals want this then? Because they were a minority and they deeply feared government interference with religion.

Mr. Jobs You Need revMobile

Seriously, why lock out revMobile? It sounds like these guy were willing to bend to your every whim in order to create a product that would allow revTalk developers to create iPhone and iPad apps that took advantage of the native UI kit.

In fact, by being willing to create a product that would take revTalk and generate Objective-C which then made calls to the iPhone/iPad API's, the apps created by this tool would have been indistinguishable from those written in an 'approved' language.

I love Apple, and I love Apple products and I am also a Revolution Runtime hobbyist. I spent 7 months plowing through a book on programming for the Mac using XCode and Objective-C. However, as a hobbyist, I don't spend enough time coding to make Objective-C and the Cocoa/iPhone/iPad frameworks ever feel intuitive, friendly, or even comfortable. I find myself, when I have the time to code and when an idea needs explored, using Revolution because RevTalk is intuitive and fun to code in.

Hell, revTalk is just a 3rd party implementation of a brilliant idea that Apple created, promoted, and then unceremoniously abandoned- HyperCard + HyperTalk. I'm sure you have your reasons for your decision, but not only does this decision feel wrong, it also seems to carry on a grand tradition that Apple needs to one day exorcise- namely, alienating key members and advocates from your user base with what seem like arbitrary decisions that only work to prolong the impression that Apple cares about elegance and future technologies, even to the expense of those with a significant investment in the current state of Apple technology. We saw this with the transition from the Apple II to the Mac. It seemed like maybe Apple had learned the lesson somewhat in the 68K to PowerPC transitions, or the transition from the Classic OS to OS X. However, this decision to not allow revMobile on the platform seems like another 2 steps backward. Please reconsider and find a way to right this wrong.

http://www.runrev.com/products/revmobile/overview/

Sarcasm punctuation mark aims to put an end to email confusion

It seems to me that we could all just agree to start using the @ symbol ('cause it's already on your keyboard and in all of your fonts) at the end of sarcastic sentences. Of course, each and everyone of us paying these guys $1.99 also seems so totally worth it@ <- See how that works, that last sentence was sarcastic.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/6995354/Sarcasm-punctuation-mark-aims-to-put-an-end-to-email-confusion.html

U.S. Term Limits

This is something that I think the United States also desperately needs.

Wikipedia summarizes it this way: "Congressional stagnation is an American political theory that attempts to explain the high rate of incumbency re-election to the United States House of Representatives. In recent years this rate has been well over 90 per cent, with rarely more than 5-10 incumbents losing their House seats every election cycle. The theory has existed since the 1970s, when political commentators were beginning to notice the trend, with political science author and professor David Mayhew first writing about the "vanishing marginals" theory in 1974."

http://www.termlimits.org/

Instant Runoff Voting

We need this in the United States. Like, yesterday.

http://www.fairvote.org/instant-runoff-voting

And the nut jobs in this country call Obama a socialist?

As I compare the UK's Conservatives, Labour, and Liberal Democrats on issues it seems to me that their Conservative party is more to the left than our Democratic party and their Liberal Democrats (who have 57 seats in Parliament after today's election) seem like our Green Party.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/election_2010/parties_and_issues/default.stm

World Cup Fever

Hey, hey, hey, I got it...

http://popup.lala.com/popup/1225260582294176710

Adidas Comercial +10 Dream Team !!! Complete

For those of you who remember it from last time, and for those of you have never seen this amazing piece of film making- this is one of those rare times that advertising becomes art. '¿Jose, jugamos?'

Short list: What's Wrong with Factory Farming?

Here's a nice concise list of data that I would hope people would read and consider as they make their dietary choices each day.

FTA: "Cost of hamburger meat if water used by meat industry was not subsidized by US taxpayers: $35/pound"

http://www.organicconsumers.org/foodsafety/shortlist031604.cfm

Ecclesiastes 3:19-21

Man's fate is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other.
All have the same breath; man has no advantage over the animal. Everything is meaningless. All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return. Who knows if the spirit of man rise...s upward and if the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth?

About the Upcoming 2010 World Cup in South Africa

I was having a conversation with a coworker about the upcoming 2010 World Cup in South Africa (starts in 34 days, 22 hours, and 35 min). He was saying that the USA team is not good enough to be a contender. I disagree. The current US team took 2nd in the 2009 FIFA Confederations Cup (considered a dress-rehearsal for th...e World Cup it precedes). The final game was Brazil 3 - USA 2. Maybe this info will help you start to catch World Cup Fever.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_FIFA_Confederations_Cup