When I am old I will be Santa Klaus.

I just wanted to test this new plug-in I got called Flickr Photo Album, actually.

It seems to work, yay.

Feeling your way around grids : Articles : Mark Boulton

From Atheism, not religion, is the real force behind the mass murders of history:

These figures are tragic, and of course population levels were much lower at the time. But even so, they are minuscule compared with the death tolls produced by the atheist despotisms of the 20th century. In the name of creating their version of a religion-free utopia, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong produced the kind of mass slaughter that no Inquisitor could possibly match. Collectively these atheist tyrants murdered more than 100 million people.

Although D’Souza has a relatively good counter to the anti-religion arguments that Dawkins et. al. are advancing, I think he’s missing a larger picture. Dawkins in particular is advocating for atheism over religion certainly, but more that that he is looking for a world where rational analysis and a population guided by their own internal reason are liberated from the constraints placed on them by irrational and subjective dogmas.

Although axis of evil revision 1.5 (revised at the end of the 20th Century to be Hitler-Stalin-Mao, with Mussolini and Hirohito and others removed by a combination of absolution and amnesia) is on the surface a trifecta of religious eradication, the goal of each regime is better understood as attempting to abruptly replace their own culture’s traditional religions with a secular state religion.

It is unfair from this point of view then, to characterize these modern despots as atheist in the operative sense of the word. While they may have sought to eradicate belief in God, they also wished to infuse the state with a mystical quality and god-like properties - Hitler’s Vaterland, and the Marxist Candy Apple Mountains of Communism as practiced in the USSR and China.

Moreover, many of the conflicts that are counted as “religious wars” were not fought over religion. They were mainly fought over rival claims to territory and power….The same is true today. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not, at its core, a religious one. It arises out of a dispute over self-determination and land. Hamas and the extreme orthodox parties in Israel may advance theological claims - “God gave us this land” and so forth - but the conflict would remain essentially the same even without these religious motives. Ethnic rivalry, not religion, is the source of the tension in Northern Ireland and the Balkans.

Here I think D’Souza is right on target, and I wish this meme would get more play in mainstream news analysis. Most of the conflicts that get play as religious conflicts are most definitely economic, historical and cultural rather than religious per se, but the common wisdom is that the conflicts are religious in nature.To tie this back to my first point, framing the conflicts as religious in nature essentially paints them as irrational, and thus suggests from the outset that resolution is close to impossible, because how can we ever reconcile the beliefs of two different religions?

But in reality, most of these conflicts are resolvable in the long term as long as the actual underlying problems are addressed. Unfortunately the hardest things to resolve are historical — when talking to stakeholders in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I’m often dumbfounded by how historical (and thus divergent) the grievances of the various factions are. And if you can’t even get agreement on what the wrongs to be righted are, then there’s a real problem.

But the first step to solving a problem is to analyze it rationally, break it down into it’s components and attempt to find the best strategy to reach a solution. If I may submit, in most cases, an irrational or emotional player will be able to subvert any attempt to find a solution to a social problem, and although the conflicts being discussed are not religious at their core it is the presence of religion and associated emotional pressures that can keep a conflict from being resolved.

Which I believe in a roundabout is the type of argument Mr. Dawkins is advancing in his book.

OS X Daily » Ten OS X Command Line Utilities you might not know about

8. screencapture
screencapture offers a more advanced way (over command-shift-3) to take screen captures. To use it, open up your Terminal.app and try typing screencapture -iW ~/Desktop/screen.jpg. It will bring up a camera icon that is waiting to be clicked on a window. Once clicked, a file on your desktop called “screen.jpg” will be created that will contain a snapshot of whatever window you clicked on. You can of course, also take a snapshot of your entire screen by typing screencapture -S ~/Desktop/screen.jpg.

Boing Boing called her PJ Harvey + Freddy Mercury. I told Kathy that and she said “you mean like Kate Bush?” And we listened and Kathy said: “interesting. I guess PJ Harvey + Freddy Mercury = Kate Bush.”

But does Kate Bush - Freddy Mercury = Sophe Lux?

TemplateWorld has a page of free website wemplates that are very nice, and have “Valid XHTML And CSS.” I put that in scare quotes since I haven’t really checked myself, but the templates do seem pretty well made. It’s a teaser to get you to buy a subscription to their premium template downloading service but in all honesty, at US$50 for six-months of access, it’s actually not such a bad deal since they have literally tons of templates in their members only area.

Web Page Layout Grid | Smiley Cat Web Design

Nice Grid for doing css design.

On Color « Digital World

So you’d like to build/design your own website. More often than not, choosing the right color(s) may not be so straight forward. Did you know that there are dozens of websites, softwares and online services that would make your job much much easier. Here are a few of those.

Oman3D:

In this tutorial you will learn how to create a reusable flash that can be configured through the HTML of the page displaying the SWF file. Using the technique you will be able to use one single SWF file for all your buttons in a single page.

This is one of those things that I’ve tried to do a couple times, but it never worked out…and truth be told, after reading the tutorial I’m not sure what I was doing wrong (maybe I wasn’t passing the variable to the swf the right way).

Anyway, it’s cool to see it work. Now I need to figure out how to force justify the single word in the button, and actually get the text how I want.

VisualHub: The Universal Video Converter for Mac.

inkBlots
Google Reader FeedBurner: Create The Ultimate Reading List

Zombie Robot » wp_quotes: Random Quote Plugin

This plugin, I like.

I was having trouble with my two-column fixed layout, until I read How To Clear Floats Without Structural Markup over at position is everything.

I found some helpful advice on how to make a submit button into CSS styled text.

Even though I still don’t feel like I totally get descendant selectors, I appreciated the article at maxdesign all the same.

Let me give a quick shout out to the date entry from the PHP manual.

I’m going to point out that I also really appreciated ma ’s pages Listamatic and Floatuorial.
It was east to get distracted by tangents on the Sitepoint CSS Forum.

I was looking for some information on how to style lists and blockquotes (I’m getting a little annoyed with them — I can’t figure out how to change their default indentations, and browsers give them way to much vertical space.

I found this nice site (or 5 sites) by maxdesign that look pretty helpful. At least they should help me figure out my list problems, if nothing else. And the Floatutorial: Step by step CSS float tutorial looks like required reading since I just got a headache from trying to figure out how to clear the floats in the new layout I’m working on.

Nice CSS tutorial, aimed at designers. Mostly nice because it gives tips on how to translate page layout concepts to CSS.

CSS From the Ground Up

Can you tell I’m working on a website?

From Republicans look to Reagan era for inspiration (Yahoo! News):

But Joe Barton of Texas, also considering joining the House Republican leadership race, doesn’t see the party of Reagan as extreme.”Our party does not suffer the affliction of being a boiling mad collection of fringe interests with notions so cockeyed that they ultimately rub each other rawand make average Americans cringe,” Barton said. “Republicans will never be that.“

That is so awesome I can’t even stand it. Good luck getting your party back together — with your eye on the ball like that, nothing can get in your way.

Pete Freitag posted this awesome list forever ago:

1. Rounded Corners
2. Rounded Corners without images
3. Creating a Netflix style star ratings
4. Tableless forms
5. Styling Lists with CSS
6. 2 Column Layout Technique
7. 3 Column Layout with CSS
8. 3 Column Fixed width centered layout
9. Printing with CSS
10. Adding a CSS stylesheet to an RSS feed
11. Footer Stick
12. CSS Element Hover Effect
13. Styling Horizontal Rules
14. Clearing Floats
15. CSS Popups
16. Box Punch
17. CSS Badge
18. Orange RSS Buttons with pure CSS
19. 10 CSS Tricks you may not know
20. 10 More CSS Tricks you may not know

I just discovered his blog, but now his feed is one of my favorite subscriptions.

Thanks Pete!