Terra Incognita

Aronra aka “Bigfoot” aka “Rasputin” aka “son of Wotan, ruler of Asgard,” has made incredible videos in the defense of science against the destructive forces of creationism.  A creationist had some questions for him and he answered them by making an excellent case for science and laying bare why creationism is as ridiculed as it is.

And the creationist misses the point, which makes bigfoot angry.

There’s a tale that says whoever builds, or rebuilds Delhi will see their reign fall.  Shah Jahan built the Old City in 1649 and established it as his capital.  Ten years later, his son Aurangzeb overthrew him and the Mughal dynasty declined until it was overthrown by the British in 1857.

When the British moved their capital to Delhi in 1911, they built New Delhi, and the Raj fell 36 years later.

The Old City, which is to the northeast of New Delhi houses the Red Fort.

The Indian Independence Movement promised one day to raise the flag of independent India over the Red Fort.  They finally did on August 15,1947.  Independence Day.  The Prime Minister still goes on that day and gives a speech at the Red Fort.

I went into the Red Fort through the Lahore Gate (above).  It was named this because it points in the direction of Lahore.  Lahore, like Delhi, was a Mughal stronghold and also has an old city surrounded by the remains of a city wall.

The first building you see once inside the Lahore Gate is the Diwan-i-Am, the Hall of Public Audiences.  This is where the Emperor would sit and hear disputes from nobles and things like that.

Two of the buildings in the inner court are the Khas Mahal (above), the prime residence of the Emperor, and the Rang Mahal (below) where his favorite wife would reside.  Next to that is the Emperor’s Harem where he would keep his other women.

Next to the Khas Mahal is the Diwan-i-Khas.  The Hall of Private Audiences.  It’s made entirely of Marble and the Emperor would have private guests in this place, like diplomats or other stately figures.

On the Khas Mahal is the place where the Emperor would appear before his subjects, and look upon the famous Mughal Gardens.

Near the Red Fort is the Jama Masjid, also built by Shah Jahan.  It is the largest mosque in India.

The next day I took a metro train (I like Delhi’s metro trains!) to the Rajpath, with the India Gate on one side and the Rashtrapati Bhavan on the other.

The Rashtrapati Bhavan was the residence of the Viceroy during the Raj, and is now the official residence of the President of India.

The Lion of the Senate, Ted Kennedy, has died.

Rest in peace.

The one I wanted didn’t work (you suck, Mimbo), but I kinda like this one.

I’ll put up my Delhi stuff soon, but just some quick thoughts about how present we are on the web.

We’re on it, even the really insane among us are on social media. That woman who yelled “Heil Hitler” at a Jewish man during a town hall meeting has a Facebook account. So does the guy who got up at a town hall event a few days ago and said “I’m a proud right-wing terrorist.”

Facebook, to its credit, has some measures of privacy, and you can’t see their walls. What would be on them? Notes from their friends in support, or “what was that all about?”

I can’t imagine what it must be like for these people. They must be suddenly getting dozens of friend requests from people who read their name in a news report (not everyone printed them) and Googled their name (I did).

Then again they might also have dozens of friend requests from people who like them, much like various people joined the “George Tiller is a Douchebag” group that was created after the man was murdered. I haven’t seen the group, but the blogger who wrote about it that I found this out from had a friend who had joined and wanted him to join. He hasn’t talked to the friend since.

It isn’t brand new. That kid in Finland who shot up his school had a Youtube account with video’s on it (it was quickly shut down after the shooting).

Last April, a man walked into a classroom in Dearborn State and shot a fellow student before shooting himself. Both he and the girl he shot had Youtube accounts, and the girl’s video’s were flooded with thousands of views and messages of “Rest in Peace” in their comment pages.

The trapping of the internet is that it is supposed to be free-reign. But now as these people head into the real world, their “other lives” on the internet become affected as well.

called “America the Stupid.”

I’m in Delhi now, by the way, so I’ll have stuff up about that later.  It’s much easier putting up youtube clips since I’m out of the NIE office that banned the site.

Anyway, Bill Maher a few weeks ago had an excellent “New Rules” in which he revisits just how little Americans don’t know.  The video’s below and if you’re Rob (or someone else at the NIE, hey!), here’s a text version

But Mike Huckabee is still a whacko.  He just had dinner with a group of Israeli settlers in East Jerusalem.  The dinner was sponsored by a group that recieves most of its money from US donors that buys up land for Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem - which Palestinians want as a future capital for Palestine.

Pres. Obama wants Israel to stop, while PM Netanyahu refuses.  Huckabee compared telling Jews where they could and couldn’t live to racial segregation in the old south.

Glenn Greenwald criticizes this by applying the same logic to Russia’s attack on Georgia last year: ” Russia should have responded to American objections to its 2008 invasion of Georgia by insisting that the U.S. has no right to ‘tell Russians where they should and should not live.’”  Greenwald also points out there is (apparently) an unwritten rule that American politicians don’t criticize U. S. Policy while overseas and that Al Gore was called everything but traitor for doing this in 2006.

The Jewish settlers see that land as part of Israel, and wealthy US donors do as well.  Some of those donors like John Hagee see all this as a precursor to the end times.

Hagee has gone so far as to say that Palestinians have “never owned the land” that they are claiming, and that what is now Israel and the Palestinian territories have always been “Israel” since biblical times.

Huckleberry’s gotten a lot of good press for being friendly, but its things like this (and his association with the likes of James Robinson among others) that make my skin crawl.

The guy in front of me in line at the supermarket apparently.  I don’t know why.  Maybe it was for an independence day party.  He could’ve just fired his guns in the air like the people down the street.

He also bought 44 kit-kat bars, which adds to the mystery, because that adds up to exactly 200 chocolate bars for…something.

So it turns out a growing number of “Tea-Party” activists are learning how to organize from Saul Alinsky’s book “Rules for Radicals” which they (and their allies) have previously condemned as a handbook for how liberals stay in control of the country.

Dave Weigel cites examples from recent conservative best-sellers by Jonah Goldberg and Jerome Corsi (whom he mistakenly calls a “muckraker”) on how conservatives in the past had villified Alinsky and his supposed influence on Obama.  Weigel doesn’t mention it, but Michelle Bachmann and Bill O’Reilly have done the same thing.

The people who talk to Weigel say that they ignore Alinsky’s more “immoral” parts (they don’t say what) and they plan to adapt his ideas to advance their conservative causes like shouting down congressmen about health care.

Alinsky would roll over in his grave.  The book is filled with references to the “haves” and the “have nots” and how the purpose of the book is to help the “have nots” gain political power from the hands of the “haves.”  If he were alive right now he would push aggresively for government assistance for those without health insurance.

Ben Stein was a columnist at the NY Times until he was fired a few weeks ago for appearing in misleading ads for freescore.com.  He’s now gone to the American Spectator and said that the real reason is because he criticized Obama.

He said that the explanation from the Times that his appearance was a “conflict of interest” was not a conflict of interest.  Maybe not, but Stein’s appearance in deceptive commercials undermines his (and thus the Times’) credibility.

Stein begins his story of how things at the Times went sour by talking about his role in the anti-science propaganda film “Expelled” last year.  He is still completely oblivious as to why people blasted the movie and his role in it.

Not only was it poorly made, and inflammatory (saying that the theory of evolution caused the holocaust) but the scientists who were interviewed were mislead by the production company into thinking they were participating in a different project.  With Stein, this seems to be a running theme.

Stein thinks that he was fired for criticizing Obama.  This even though he has compared Obama to a would-be Fuhrer.  This also seems to be a running theme with Stein.

Sorry, Ben, I’m not convinced.  Maybe you should try making a truthful documentary and I’ll come around, but you’re going to have to do better than coincidences to convince me.

Maybe you could go back to being funny.