This is still my stuff.

I missed an opportunity to take part in a BBC broadcast yesterday regarding the question, “. . . whether religion helps make better politicians.” My answer to that question would have been generally no, it does not. Put quite simply, religions are collections of false beliefs, and false beliefs generally provide a poor foundation for policy…

Pope Benedict XVI exposed a part of his moral character today as a hate-mongering bigot in an encyclical critical of modern atheism. As reported in the International Harold Tribune, the encyclical says that, “[Atheism] had led to some of the "greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice" ever known to mankind.” Hate-mongering involves the selling of hate, typically for a profit or for the benefit of some group or organization that the hate-monger favors…

People are shocked - shocked! - that Facebook is engaging in aggressive, creepy advertising. The complaints around the web community surprised me, honestly. I thought it was clear what we were all getting into with Facebook.Here's how it seems to me: Facebook doesn't exist to be good in the sense that Google wants (wanted?) to be. They don't exist to connect you with your friends, or to build things that help people, or generally to provide social utility as their primary goal…

A nerd needs a project because a nerd builds stuff. All the time. Those lulls in the conversation over dinner? That's the nerd working on his project in his head. It's unlikely that this project is a nerd's day job because his opinion regarding his job is, "Been there, done that". We'll explore the consequences of this seemingly short attention span in a bit, but for now this project is the other big thing your nerd is building and I've no idea what is, but you should…

Back when we had commies to worry about, someone came up with the concept of "engage and contain": eg, rather than avoid them as we'd been doing, we should trade and talk and travel there, and by doing so be able to contain their evil…