My Quiet Life

It's becoming a tradition for me to spend NYE sick. But who am I kidding, anyway? Midnight is way past my bedtime these days anyway.

I used to read the RISKS digest quite a bit. It details "Risks To The Public In Computers And Related Systems" and that sort of thing. I've got one for them. I've been using drugstore.com lately, rather than the traditional pharmacy. For the most part it's quite convenient -- you just place your order and a few days later you get your medication.

My problem is that I waited a while before ordering a refill -- waited until the day I ran out, in fact. "No biggie," I figured, "I'll just overnight it." Well, unfortunately, overnight shipping does not mean overnight order processing. Sadly it's been 4 days now, and they still haven't shipped it. Annoying for me, potentially disastrous for someone more dependent on a medication. I guess there's still something to be said for good old brick and mortar.

When I first read this story about violence against women in Pakistan, I knew it wouldn't take long for someone to make a snide "religion of peace" post. Odd that this story gets top-billing, considering we have a little problem right here at home that sadly doesn't exactly make the headlines:

Every day four women die in this country as a result of domestic violence, the euphemism for murders and assaults by husbands and boyfriends. That's approximately 1,400 women a year, according to the FBI.

The AP story about Pakistan only references "hundreds", but even with a generous estimate of 500/year, the US's per-capita problem by comparison is still a lot worse not exactly stellar either. I wonder if we can expect Mark to make a followup snide post next condemning Christianity for betraying its roots as a "religion of peace"? I expect not.

UPDATE: To clarify, I edited out where I said that the US was "still a lot worse" -- that was based on a cursory calculation based on NOW's 1400/year figure and the AP article's "hundreds/year" for Pakistan. In retrospect, it's obvious that Pakistan's incidents of domestic murders of women are no doubt hideously underreported. But I believe my point stands that while the US still has a problem with domestic violence towards women,whether or not it's worse than Pakistan's, we're not exactly in a position to cast stones.

Check it out, Future Relic is having a photo contest, and I am shamelessly pimping it. Win a t-shirt, or just rub your friends' noses in your victory:

RULES:
1. Take a photo

2. A Future Relic (t-shirt, print, hat) must appear in the photo

3. Email your photo to photocontest@futurerelic.com before DEC 31st
w/ subject line "Photo Contest"
and keep images 800 x 800 pixels or smaller

4. Submit as many times as you want.

5. Most amusing photo wins the prize.

Winners will be announced early January.

Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer ("If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him")

If there were ever one time in humanity's history where one might be tempted to wish the love and compassion of a God had been invented where it didn't already exist, it was probably World War I.

I've been reading lately about the Christmas Truce. Somehow, amidst the horrors in the trenches of WWI in 1914, the English and the Germans, battle-weary and moved by the sacredness of the Christmas holiday, initiated a front-line truce. There's a true lesson to be learned in this -- one that's more important than any fabrications or theological wankery you might derive from a story about a messiah being born in a manger.

Christmas is what initiated this truce, but what sealed the deal was a remarkable phenomenon -- a spontaneous recognition and expression of empathy, sympathy, and common humanity. This is the redeeming power of religion -- that it can spur such aberrations and outpourings of compassion. If only it had lasted, and if only we could harness this sentiment globally without silly religious fabrications to guide us. If there's a "true meaning" of Christmas I could get with, it's this. The consumerist cornucopia of Christmas is over, and I could give two shits about it, but we'd all do well to learn a lesson or two from the Christmas Truce.

S-TownMike is on a roll lately. (Maybe it's the eggnog. I hear it's brain-fuel.)

First up is an interesting post about some earlier secularization of Christmas by the likes of Irving Berlin.

Today he focuses on Bell Buckle's predicament.

There's an increasing rhetorical false dichotomy of "liberty" versus "security" being employed in public debate, and it really makes no sense. Presumably it makes sense to our would-be-fascist leaders because they freely associate "security" with "order", and thus spare no amount of liberty in its pursuit, but it's rather lame that everyone has taken it for granted as well.

Matt Welch has noticed this as well, and is appropriately alarmed:

Why do these smarter-than-me people so frequently assume there's some kind of perfectly balanced scale of a country's foreign affairs, with one tray marked "liberty" and the other "security"? The idea is bogus on its face.

...

.. I would suggest that a fella can believe with perfect sincerity -- even without succumbing to libertarian panic -- that liberty and security are complementary, not mutually exclusive.

I Know Him!!!

Over at NiT, AC links to a blogger's list of 10 pieces of art that he/she liked this year. #3 is Will ClenDening, a good friend of mine from high school. That's pretty awesome, and it sounds like a cool piece, too.

I've taken the probably premature step of upgrading to Wordpress 2.0.

Most all of the plugins, surprisingly, seem to work fine, including WordVerify, so I've gone ahead and added it to the list of plugins that work with WP 2.0.

One plugin that doesn't appear to be working was one that did feedburner redirection of my RSS feed. I've gone ahead and fixed this with some manual .htaccess redirection. If anyone notices any problems with my RSS feed not updating via feedburner (or anything else), let me know.

EPI has a good summary of what's wrong with the economy. The bullet-points are:

1. Profits are up, but the wages and the incomes of average Americans are down.
2. More and more people are deeper and deeper in debt.
3. Job creation has not kept up with population growth, and the employment rate has fallen sharply.
4. Poverty is on the rise.
5. Rising health care costs are eroding families' already declining income.