I’d also be curious to know under what conditions a person can be targeted by the CIA for said program. If we’re talking about U.S. citizens on native soil that’s going way too far, though I can’t imagine that’s the case given that we’re talking about the Ninth Circuit. Sill, it would be nice to have it stated explicitly what the boundaries are. Anybody who knows more, please take a moment to enlighten me.

I’m personally not a big fan of burning books insofar as I think the answer to bad ideas is twofold: (1) rebut/refute them with facts and reason, and (2) offer good ideas instead. Burning books accomplishes little per se insofar as it just burns particular texts and does nothing to stop their ideas. It may even put more money in the hands of author(s) in some cases, which may well enable more copies with more bad ideas. But when it comes to Muslims, who threaten beheading at the slightest hint of a Mohammed cartoon, well, they’re practically begging for a thoroughly Life-of-Brian-esque mocking, though it would scarcely reach the conceptual stage before some fatwa would scare off Hollywood.

“But gosh, Phil, how can you say that as a Christian?!” That’s easy. People denigrate my religion all the time. They dip crosses in urine, they burn Bibles, they make portraits of Jesus’ mother out of elephant dung, they make movies suggesting Christ was gay or a pedophile or worse; the church, priests, pastors, and laity are endlessly mocked, lampooned, and are subject to slander and libel regularly. The list is practically endless. The most inoffensive portrayal of Christianity one finds in modern film, television, or literature is as an opiate pack of lies for the unintelligent; far more often it’s motivating the serial killer, abortion clinic bomber, hypocritical drunken/gay/pedophile priest, etc.

But it isn’t meaningful: all such ad hominem attacks are worth precisely dick. They have no bearing whatsoever on the truth or falsity of my religion. They tell me what some very expressive folks think of it, but why should that threaten me? Why should I behave like an Islamofascist idiot and threaten to murder them? Sure, I find such things offensive, I call out the hypocrisy, and I think it’s downright stupid to mock and insult Almighty God, but he’s a big boy who can fight his own battles. I’m happy to argue the truth of  Christianity with anyone who’s interested, but the folk who do such things aren’t; until such persons will listen I leave them alone to reap what they sow.

There is, of course, the argument the government seems to be making: the pastor shouldn’t do it because it will endanger U.S. interests/troops around the world. But that is extremely hypocritical and specious at best. Let’s grant that a Koran burning probably will inflame Muslims around the world and ask the more interesting question: what does America do that doesn’t inflame Muslims around the world?!

Seriously, Muslims around the world hate us for our technology, our philosophy, our morality, our culture, our freedoms, our women, etc. To them, one and only one reason is more than sufficient to hate and kill: being non-Muslim. America has bent over backward to accommodate Muslims and help them around the world, despite the fact that the vast majority of terrorists trying to kill us are Muslim. But the same people who champion the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” on the basis of free expression/religion are the same folks calling for the pastor not to burn the Koran.

The hypocrisy is purely stunning. When Muslims murder in the name of Allah we’re treated to news coverage complaining how Islamophobic Americans are. I realize the media are largely dead above the neck when it comes to anyone who doesn’t share their “progressive” views (e.g., thinking homosexuality is sinful means you’re homophobic, a not-so-subtle way of implying you have a psychological condition in need of treatment), but then isn’t fear a natural and wholly legitimate response when dealing with people who murder over cartoons? At any rate, the pastor of note plans to burn copies of the Koran and receives near universal condemnation amidst multiple death threats. How is such a double standard even vaguely reasonable?!

I’m a Christian, so I think Islam is false, though to be clear I had lots of good reasons to think Islam was false long before I accepted Christ. I also think Islam is an evil religion insofar as it has imperial ambitions to cover the world with a new Caliphate and forcibly convert everyone, killing all who will not submit. I don’t think burning a Koran is going to do much to change that, but if the event comes off as planned I confess I’ll laugh long and hard at all the thin-skinned Islamofascists gibbering with rage, their panties all a-twist.

Of course, it won’t be so funny when said morons go around killing more innocents in the name of Allah, but it’s not like they aren’t doing that already. Almost every day I come across some story about stoning women for such moral failures as wearing makeup, mutilating young girls’ genitalia to prevent them from ever enjoying sex, fatwas pronounced on cartoonists or politicians or authors or others who aren’t Muslim, the Holocaust being a lie, etc. As far as I’m concerned the more those fools show their true colors the easier it will be for the rest of the world to wake up and smell the jihad.

If burning the Koran helps rouse the world from its suicidally PC-dogmatic slumbers, well, then I say don’t forget to bring the wieners. Pork sausage is particularly yummy.

First, the good. Most of the meals I received were at least decent and some of the selections were very good. You may specify which selections you receive via the web, but the shipment cutoff dates mean your palette probably won’t be entirely happy until your fourth week or so. It took me that long to try most of their offerings, so I think my fifth week will be the first in which all my food is good or very good.

Also in the plus column is the simplicity. With only a few exceptions almost all of their selections are prepared in the microwave within minutes. It’s not like we spent a lot of time cooking before because my wife and I usually chose simple, easily prepared meals; our schedules often made it impossible to do otherwise. But these days I typically have a hot meal on my plate in under two minutes, which is terribly convenient.

I have run into some ugly snags along the way, however, most prominent among which is their complete incompetence in handling credit card issues. I provided the details elsewhere in a post entitled “A Bank that Doesn’t Suck”, and I won’t rehash them all here. Suffice it to say that if anything goes wrong with their charging your card, they won’t contact you about it; you’ll just be screwed when your food doesn’t arrive. That’s no good at all. At a bare minimum those bozos should contact you to let you know there’s a problem before it’s too late, but they do nothing.

Their sales force is also populated by liars. No fewer than two separate salescreatures told me that their diet plan was tailored to individual needs. They both explained that you enter your height, weight, and other details on the web site, and that influences the meal selections available to you so that you get the right level of calories and mix of foods for where you’re at and where you want to be. Not surprisingly, that’s complete BS.

My wife and I noticed rather quickly that she was seeing all the same options and receiving all the same food I was. She’s 5’2″, quite petite, and has minimal musculature whereas I’m 6’2″, very large boned, and heavily muscled. It didn’t make much sense to me that a person just over half my mass would be receiving the very same diet, and after contacting one of their nutritionists I got the straight story: the diet is the same for everybody, despite what the salescreatures claimed.

Contacting said nutritionists wasn’t as simple as their web site made it sound either. Prior to signing up for the plan they’re very quick to chat with you online, answer your calls, etc., but once you’ve signed up there is no online chat, and you can expect a four day wait for any email correspondence. There is a telephone number, but I gave up on it altogether after my mobile phone’s battery kept dying while waiting on hold. Their nutritionists do seem to know what they’re talking about, however, and were helpful in suggesting alternate snacks and recipes, so the quality of service is good once you get it.

There are a few lesser complaints to make as well. More often than not my wife or I receive at least one meal each week whose plastic case is broken in shipment. That’s not a big deal because the food was frozen before it left, but you do have to be careful to check it before you put it in your refrigerator to thaw overnight. Otherwise your turkey chili with beans will end up all over the crisper and not in your stomach.

We have also received incorrect selections or extra items on two of the four weeks. These haven’t been major errors, but I sure don’t appreciate having their lame egg “sandwich” (half an English muffin, one egg, and a slice of low fat Swiss cheese) for breakfast when I ordered their yummy cheddar cheese omelet with hash browns. I can live with such things, but such minor inconveniences are magnified when you’re hungry all the time from living in diet mode.

Here’s my verdict: the eDiets.com meal plan definitely works, even if you’re the type who struggles terribly to lose any weight (i.e., me), and it works especially well if you pair it with vigorous exercise. But I don’t think it’s something you want to do long term. The expense and the inconveniences add up over time. In our case we’re using it merely to jump start our weight loss, trusting that we can maintain the changes we’ve undergone in our eating (more fruits and vegetables, less meat, much smaller portions, etc.) on our own.

I’ll let you know if we’re still headed in that direction when the original, eight-week commitment is up.

So it’s interesting to return to simulations today. Games like DCS: Black Shark, Falcon 4.0, Evochron: Legends, Ship Simulator Extremes, and so forth are all very different from my usual fare. But with as much as I’ve been playing them, I decided it was time to break down and invest in a TrackIR unit. It’s an incredibly nifty little gaming peripheral that consists of a camera and sensors, the former mounts at the top of your monitor while the latter mounts on the brim of a hat (or on headphones if you buy the “pro clip”). It reads the motion of your head and alters the in-game camera accordingly for games that support it.

The effect is positively awesome. It’s a game-changing piece of hardware, and I mean that in the most literal sense. I’ve previously been using the hat on my joystick to look around in Evochron: Legends, but that’s slow and unwieldy at best. In a dogfight it’s practically suicide; you’re much better off keeping your view forward and hoping it doesn’t get you killed. After installing my new TrackIR unit and enabling it in the game options, slight moves of my head shift the view in an incredibly natural way. I can look all around my ship, which is a godsend in combat.

The utility is even greater in some other games I play. The virtual cockpit option in Falcon 4.0 is made genuinely useful by the device, so much so that I miss all the live readouts and switches from the default view. ARMA 2 is changed completely, insofar as I can now turn my head and see where I’m taking flanking fire while running perpendicular for cover, which makes my soldier far harder to hit. Wings of Prey is probably the most impressive title I have insofar as all six degrees of freedom are supported; when I move my head around it’s like being right in the bloody cockpit. It’s amazing.

If you’re into simulations, you need to go check that thing out. It’s not cheap (the basic package is $149), but it’s not all that expensive either. The price isn’t at all prohibitive for the serious gamer, especially when you consider that a fair number of folks spend more on their keyboards or mice. Highly recommended.

If some prominent Christian leader called for violence, the differences would be stark. The press would paint Christians with the broadest brush as bloodthirsty terrorists, MSNBC would serve up a week’s worth of programs about the crusades, and somebody in congress would reintroduce the fairness doctrine to silence Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. It would go on for days, despite the immediate outpouring of repudiations by practically every other Christian leader and profuse apologies from the original fool.

But when a prominent Muslim leader calls for a beheading the bulk of the coverage, insofar as it generates any, is usually focused on the dangers of anti-Muslim sentiment and how Muslims are oppressed in the world today. And far more telling, all those alleged “moderate Muslims” out there either say nothing or offer faint condemnation, suggesting that while his choice of words may have been poor their right to jihad is not open for debate as a tenet of their faith.

Don’t let yourselves be fooled, folks: there is no overwhelming majority of Muslim moderates. Islam is an evil and imperialistic religion that seeks to subdue the world through words where possible and through force otherwise. After 9/11 President Bush repeatedly claimed that our war was not with Islam but with terrorists, but that overlooks a painfully obvious fact: the former is precisely what keeps producing the latter.

I played the original Duke Nukem only recently and decided it was probably great at it’s time. But no game could possibly live up to even the smallest fraction of the hype surrounding DNF. It’s no surprise to me that 3D Realms folded after a decade-plus of development; I was surprised only that it didn’t happen sooner.

Today I see that Gearbox Software claims they’ll be releasing it this year or next, having acquired the rights and been working on it since late 2009. In other news, the pope today addressed the faithful, saying “Don’t worry, Jesus will be back soon. Real soon now. Seriously, any minute. Any minute now. Yup, any second. Gonna show up in the sky, sure enough. Any second now…”

Maybe this will help, insofar as those peace-loving Palestinians are again slaughtering innocents, including a pregnant woman! Immediately before peace talks are scheduled! Naturally, fellow peace-seeking Palestinians decried the attack, by which I mean they celebrated the murders with dancing in the streets.

There is no moral equivalence to the middle east conflict, folks. There is Israel and there are monsters who wish her destroyed utterly. That land will know peace only when war has settled the question with finality. If what we’re currently witnessing is the “peace process”, then I’d say it’s long past time to let slip the dogs of all-out war.

With Discover it was fraud. Over and over. In a one-year period I had my cards canceled and new cards issued, due to fraudulent charges, no less than four times. And that means I had to call dozens of vendors, update billing information on dozens of web sites, reconfigure my financial software with the new numbers/passwords, etc. four times in that year. It is a royal pain in the posterior to shift all that stuff, and I got tired of it.

So I switched to what was my backup credit card from U.S. Bank. For the first few months things went comparatively well, but then they started blocking transactions. I’d go to buy a game from Steam and the card would be declined. I thought that bizarre and stupid, because I buy games from them all the time, but it wasn’t a major inconvenience. It was only happening once every month or so, and I could live with that.

Until it screwed up my wife’s life. Wednesday morning my wife came to me in tears, overreacting to be sure but understandably so given the stress under which she’s currently operating, because she had learned that her food wasn’t going to show up this week from eDiets.com. She’s been making progress, losing weight, and she fears losing her momentum and doesn’t need the hassle of trying to assemble a substitute meal plan that won’t reverse her dieting. She wanted me to call and see if I could fix it. I gave it my best shot but failed.

Apparently when eDiets had submitted their charges the previous Thursday one of the two was declined. Nobody bothered to call us or otherwise notify us so the deadline for food packing and shipment was missed. With all the other stress in her life my wife’s out of luck for the food that was supposed to arrive tomorrow. We’ll figure something out. It’s not the end of the world, but I was pissed at eDiets for not doing a bloody thing about the charge being declined.

I was far more pissed with U.S. Bank because they declined the charge in the first place and didn’t bother to notify us as well. When I spoke with their fraud department they tried to give me a just-so story: “Well, sir, maybe eDiets.com is on an upward trend with fraud, that could explain why the charge was blocked.” Oh yeah? So why did you block only one of the two charges? They let my food go through but blocked my wife’s. And why suddenly block them this week when you’ve been approving dual charges for a month?

It became increasingly clear to me that the staff at U.S. Bank have no idea why charges are blocked. And today’s events demonstrate to me that they have very little control as well, because after swearing up and down to me yesterday that the next round of eDiets charges would go through without fail those idiots blocked only one of the charges again this morning! So I had to call U.S. Bank yet again, get them to lift the block, then call eDiets and get them to resubmit, then call U.S. Bank again and ensure they approve it, with all the waiting on hold, speaking/typing various account numbers, getting transferred and disconnected, etc.

I don’t think I’m being outrageous. I think my needs are pretty simple. I want a credit card that I can actually use to buy stuff. I get how they should be blocking online porn purchases, buying really expensive computers from Apple.com, and charges at gas stations and grocery stores thousands of miles from where I live. Those are some examples of the fraudulent charges Discover just couldn’t seem to catch. But when I do business with a vendor over and over, and the bank approves it over and over, and when I explicitly tell them not to block charges, I damned well expect my purchases to go through.

Can anybody recommend a bank that doesn’t suck? Whose fraud department isn’t chock full to the brim with idiots or impotent storytellers?