Sorry for my absence in recent weeks; I’ve been job-hunting after finding out that the government grant which was paying for contract work I was doing had gone away rather suddenly, and I haven’t often mustered up the right combination of time and inclination to get a post up here, even with all the interesting things that have happened in the world lately.

So what’s happened to finally break my silence? Conservative-pundit-inspired shooting? Nope. The irony and hypocrisy of the Bush admin trying to tell Russia that invading a sovereign nation is a no-no? Nope.

It’s this horrible, horrible website. Somebody found one of those list of web design “don’t”s and tried to squeeze in as many of them per page as possible. It burns.

… and his name is Beaker.

… and by “behaving badly”, I don’t mean “being gay”, I mean “being hypocrites”, and not the ancient Greek doctor guy, either.

Yes, it seems that another Republican anti-gay crusader has been exposed as - you guessed it - gay. The “It’s a sin unless it’s me” party has a rather sordid recent history in that regards.

The alleged perpetrator this time is Alabama Attorney General Troy King, who it seems was caught in bed with his male lover by his wife. It’s all rumor at this point, of course, but Troy has not publically addressed the issue yet and there is rampant speculation that he’ll resign over the brewing scandal.

Is there anyone in the Grond Ole Homophobic Party who doesn’t have a gay lover?

It’s a frequent tactic of theists to post video “refutations” of atheism to YouTube but to either turn off comments altogether or so systematically delete any rebuttal that didn’t share their viewpoint.

The video you’re about to watch was one of those, but thanks to a new service called BubblePly, I was able to create a point-by-point “live” reply!

(It’s my first attempt at pop-up video, so forgive me if there are quality/timing issues)

The cracker controversy goes on. Though PZ Myers has received multiple death threats over his stated intention to desecrate a wafer, it’s apparently the Catholics who fear for their lives - so much so that Bill Donohue and his Catholic League have felt the need to ask for increased security at the upcoming Republican convention to defend them from those “hysterical atheists”. Apparently atheists’ inability to grasp the obviousness of the bread-product-to-sacred-meat transformation is a sign of violent, unpredictable personalities.

It’s absurd, of course, to expect some sort of atheist-vs-catholic pogroms to break out at a political convention. But, really, I have no problem with the idea of beefing up security. In fact, I think every single attendee at that particular gathering should have his or her own dedicated team of highly paid professional bodyguards… because every dollar they spend on paranoia is a dollar they don’t spend on their election campaigns.

I wonder if the domain name “ChristOnACracker.com” is taken? It could become a Jesus-recipe swap site - I’ll post my Broccoli Savior Casserole! I also wonder at what point during the digestive process the transubtantiation happens. If a low carb dieter, for instance, was to toss down a handful of properly blessed Eucharists, would they turn to meat in time to avoid spiking the eater’s blood sugar? And should there be a “Before/After” type nutritional label to go with those things? I mean, how is anybody supposed to know how many grams of protein and fat are in a single serving of Jesus?

Jeremy Hall, a two-tour Iraq veteran, was raised as a baptist. But somewhere along the way, he outgrew the fairy tales of his youth and became an atheist.

That’s where his troubles allegedly began. It seems that many of his comrades-in-arms and the officers he served under didn’t care for his lack of belief.

When Specialist Jeremy Hall held a meeting last July for atheists and freethinkers at Camp Speicher in Iraq, he was excited, he said, to see an officer attending.

But minutes into the talk, the officer, Maj. Freddy J. Welborn, began to berate Specialist Hall and another soldier about atheism, Specialist Hall wrote in a sworn statement. “People like you are not holding up the Constitution and are going against what the founding fathers, who were Christians, wanted for America!” Major Welborn said, according to the statement.

Major Welborn told the soldiers he might bar them from re-enlistment and bring charges against them, according to the statement.

This and other incidents lead Hall to file suit against the army in March for discrimination on lack-of-religious grounds. This is of course not the first recent controversy over religion in the military; the generals who made a commercial in the Pentagon for a Christian group spring to mind, and accusations of evangelists running the show have come out of both West Point and the Air Force Academy. (Though, to be fair, the law suit at the Air Force Academy was thrown out in part because the plaintiffs failed to provide information on any specific instance of discrimination.)

But there are certainly groups within the military who are openly pushing for strength through mythology:

the Officers’ Christian Fellowship, has representatives on nearly all military bases worldwide. Its vision, which is spelled out on the organization’s Web site, reads, “A spiritually transformed military, with ambassadors for Christ in uniform empowered by the Holy Spirit.”

Mike Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, says that his organization has heard thousands of complaints from soldiers who feel they’ve had religious beliefs pushed on them from within the structure of the military. Weinstein’s summary of the goals of the OCF and its ilk is chilling:

“Their purpose is to have Christian officers exercise Biblical leadership to raise up a godly army,” he says.

So to every theist out there who uses the phrase “militant atheist” to describe non-believers who speak out about their non-belief, I send this message:

Stop it. For your own good. Because if there is magical deity up there in the sky and he/she/it is as just and fair as you seem to think, there’s likely a lightning bolt headed your way as punishment for the sin of hypocrisy.

There’s a new social networking site geared toward atheists, agnostics, etc., called The Atheist Nexus. I’ve never had much interest in these things, but maybe I’ll hang around this one a bit and see how it goes.

Catholics worldwide are apparently up in arms about a guy trying to walk out of a church with an uneaten communion wafer. And while it’s not even clear what his motivation was for doing so, it hasn’t stopped the death threats from rolling in. As summarized by PZ Myers over at Pharyngula, after evading attempts to physically wrest the God-cookie from him, Webster Cook has been accused of a hate crime, his actions compared to kidnapping by one priest.

Sometimes I wish I had my own news show (I’d call it somethng like WTF?TV) to cover stories like this. Here’s how the talking head on my station would read this news:

Blasphemy or a simple search for steak sauce? That’s the question being debated tonight after UCF student Webster Cook fought his way through a throng of worshipers to carry off a poor, defenseless bit of transubstantiated Savior-flesh.

Church spokesman His Holiness Reverend Father Cardinal Bishop Patsy O’Nambla, himself no stranger to oral consumption of small bits of male meat, had this to say about the incident:

“I just don’t understand what would motivate a person to do something like this. I mean, here we are in the middle of our ritual cannibalistic devouring of the flesh of the big guy on the stick, and this kid decides to leave church property without finishing his portion? What is this guy, crazy or something?”

Said Cook, in his defense:

“I really didn’t mean anything by it. It’s just that… well… the eucharist is kind of bland, and I like my Jesus-loin with a little bit of Wooshter-… Worstecesterer-… Worchest-… uh, some A1. Was going to come back and eat Jesus, I swear! I guess from now on maybe I’d bring a little plastic bag with some seasonings to avoid this kind of mix-up in the future. ”

In related news, Catholic League president Bill Donohue’s head exploded today on national television. Again.

(Wow! Three posts in one day!)

There’s really nothing to say about this picture, but I couldn’t not post it.

There was a time, back before parenthood set in, when I would get up early a few Saturdays during the summer and spend most of the day applying multiple coats of polish to my car. It was, oddly enough, a zen-like, stress-relieving exercise for me.

The old Mustang needed some repainting on the front end after some local kids (or so I assume) decided to draw some pictures on the hood with a sharp object a few weeks ago, and I’ve been meaning to re-apply a few layers of protectant to help extend the life of the new finish and prolong the life of the old, so over the course of the last two days I’ve slathered it in all the best the Zaino Brothers have to offer.

The picture below doesn’t really do it justice (today was a grey, overcast day - when it’s sunny the car is a mirror!) but it does hide the myriad scratches along the sides, water spots and fading on the roof, and my horrible, horrible attempts at patching some minor scratches and paint dings. Still, I think it looks pretty good for a 13 year old car that’s been driven in all sorts of weather on all sorts of roads (many of them de-surfaced by DelDOT to provide a convenient source of tiny pebbles for my own and other motorists’ tires to fling around) and never seen the inside of a garage in its 150,000ish miles.