I get the Skeptic Society's e-newsletter. Sometimes I read it. This most recent issue had the following statement in it in reference to a creation vs. evolution debate that occurred:
at the Skeptics Society we like to divide the world into three types of people: True Believers, Fence Sitters, and Skeptics. True Believers will never change their minds no matter what evidence is presented to them, and Skeptics already agree with us.
That's funny, because I see myself as a skeptic and them as the "true believers". I think it takes a ton of faith to believe in evolution and naturalism. I think they may even have more faith than I do, except their faith is in themselves and "science", but my faith is in God. We're both believing in religions, yet they choose to call theirs "science". I think they're profoundly self-deceived.
Thanks to Phil and Simon, I'm going to be getting my content under control, where "under control" means everything in UTF-8 (plus all old posts upgraded to StructuredText). I've just switched my page encoding to UTF-8 specified in my HTML meta tag, but I also have to switch the HTTP Content-type charset attribute, make sure my language is specified correctly, and serve my pages as text/xml (er, application/xhtml+xml) instead of text/html.
Resources:
- I linked to this at Iraq the Model earlier, but on del.icio.us, not here.
- Steven Den Beste writes about Kerry's European endorsements. All the followup links he posts are good, including accounts of German meddling, great comments from Brian Tiemann, and a completely different kind of foreign endorsement, but for President Bush. Definitely read that last one.
- Roger Simon: Kofi Annanymous
- Captain Brian Chontosh - Someone You Should Know. A real hero. But he didn't abuse Iraqi prisoners, so you probably won't hear about him in the news. I originally read about this on Jeff Moore's blog.
- Iraqis march to protest al-Sadr: "NAJAF, Iraq -- About 1,000 people, including a few women in black veils, marched through the streets of Najaf on Tuesday to urge radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his followers to leave the city."
- And then... Iraqi Shiite Cleric Al-Sadr Offers to End Insurgency
- Michael Ubaldi has great comments:
Securing Iraq — to a point where only borders and wastelands are considered unsafe, the best we could expect for a country surrounded by hostile regimes — is far from complete. Given what has been accomplished after one year, I would consider eighteen months to two years a minimum amount of time necessary for Western military might and emerging Iraqi common good and civil enforcement to grind Ba'athist holdovers and in-country foreign terrorists into the ground. But the two objectives of 2004's Bloody April — capturing Iraqi support in the confusion and shocking Americans into panic and retreat — were not met. Politically, strategically and especially tactically, the Khomeinist-Ba'athist offensive failed
Last three links via Glenn. You should read almost everything else there. 
I've had a huge increase of referrer spamming over the past few days. I realized it's probably all coming from one guy, and I realized that my control panel has an easy-to-use "IP deny manager" that I could easily block his IP with. So, I just rounded up all the IP addresses that are common sources of my referrer spam and blocked them all. Take that!
Tuesday, May 11, 2004
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new⇒Perl 6 1.0 in March?
Doh, my mistake. I'm aware of therelation between Parrot and Rakudobut I'...
Keith: Dec 2, 1:03am