Pop Quiz!

A friend calls you at home one evening. She tells you that she received a chain letter email on a topic that both of you are very interested in and she forwarded it to your work email address.

Your friend asks you to read the email when you return to work, and to please forward the email to ten other people to help keep the email chain growing.

What should you do?

1. Run to work, open the email, and forward it to ten people because, like your friend, you too are a complete idiot.
2. Find out what the message is about, read it the next day, then forward it to your mom and your brother cuz they would find it interesting too.
3. Hang up the phone and defriend the person immediately, you don't need anyone that stupid in your social network.
4. Tell your friend that you would rather have her send this to your personal email address and also that you check your email constantly, so there is no need to call you to announce that an email has been sent. Then check the calendar to make sure that you have not gone through a time warp back to the year 1996.

I would probably do number 4, but be very tempted to choose 3.

Is This My Birthday?

Ok, so first, I see the article about Crist, but I skip past it, and decide to read what my dear leader was saying:

Governor Sanford says that he does not want to take the money, the federal stimulus package money. And I want to say to him: 'I'll take it.' I'm more than happy to take his money or any other governor in this country that doesn't want to take this money, I take it, because we in California need it. ... You know, you've got to go beyond just the principles. You've got to go and say, 'What is right for the country right now?'

-Gov. Schwarzenegger (R-CA), "GOP Civil War: Schwarzenegger Slams GOP Govs' Stimulus Refusal"

The visual of Ahnold calling their bluff was pretty amusing and a good pick-me up. The title is pretty corny though. Scrolling doesn, I next saw an article called "Poor Bush: Websites Mocking W. Rank Higher Than His Own Presidential Library Site". It was a nice little 'feel good' piece that served to satisfy our national need for schadenfreude.

The next one down, however, got me thinking about international women's rights and strategies to be effective in more ways than just raising awareness. Those thought processes can get very depressing or frustrating pretty fast. The emotional response can become similar to the kinds of feelings I have when I am worried about my friends and loved ones. So, after I came to a conclusion to the thought process, I really wanted to see actual good things happening instead of work to be done. I decided to go back up top to read what Crist was saying:

The people elected him. And I'm willing to give him a good shot and try to help make this work. We're in a tough time, as we talked about before. I think we do need to be bipartisan. We need to be, in fact, nonpartisan.

-Gov. Crist (R-FL), "There's Only One National Leader, 'His Name Is President Obama'"

And I was shocked. I read the whole post and returned to that phrase in the article. His utterance of 'nonpartisan' reminded me of an awesome Pandagon article that I was unable to locate so I cannot supply a link. It has been a good birthday morning today.

WRONG

Once again, we see that Obama, despite his mention of "non-believers,"* still needs to play to the delusional.

"There is no god who condones taking the life of an innocent human being," [President Obama] said, and all religions teach people to love and care for one another.

Not the god of the Old Testament! That god LOVED killing anyone and everyone. Oh, but I guess because they were living on land that some other people wanted, no one could consider them "innocent". It all hinges on the definition of that word, and few, if any humans (American or not) are actually "innocent" according to these outdated, hateful, xenophobic, and misogynist texts. And I’m talking about the Bible, the Koran, the Torah, and yeah, even Eastern religions have crap about what women should and should not do because guys got all freaked out by us shedding unused uterine lining once a month. It’s easy to put on blinders and think that because one character in a book told us to love our neighbors as ourselves that religion is harmless. Just be careful that you don’t get stoned, set on fire, or cast out of your family for accidentally breaking one of the other asinine rules also written in those mega-violent novels.

*I actually don’t like that term and was not that encouraged by it in the inaugural address. It wasn’t until I read other blog posts that were so happy about our inclusion that I even know that it was a big deal. I don’t like being defined by what I lack. The terms atheist and even godless are less bothersome, even though they mean the same thing. I’d love to start using the term rationalist, but there are so many religious misogynists (though misogynists can also be atheist) that also think they are rational so the word isn’t very descriptive.