A national ban on an architectural element seems silly but the vote to stop the construction of minarets in Switzerland is a real accomplishment. The people of a mature country have peacefully expressed a strong collective feeling against what they perceive as a grave threat. The tragedy is that they identified the threat as the Islamic religion.

The real threat is more general, more widespread, and more dangerous than Islam. It took something as extreme as Islamic extremism to trigger a cultural awareness of it. Unfortunately, like the ringing of an alarm clock, the first thing to awaken consciousness is for a time the only piece of reality about which we are aware. Islamic extremism is the alarm clock.

The supporters of the minaret ban see the growth of the Muslim population as an aggressive cultural invasion. They don’t see an immigrant minority that deserves state protection. They see settlers from a destructive culture claiming their country. They feel vilified within their homeland by outsiders and they are afraid that their politicians will continue to insist on irrational “religious tolerance” despite the intolerant attitudes spread through Islam.

National Islamophobia is a phase whose time has come. It is extreme, prejudiced, and wrong, but it is the natural reaction against the wrong actions of extremists trying to universalize Islam. Two wrongs do make a right when everyone learns a lesson. The lesson here is that no protection for status, be it religion, race, sex, or what have you, is deserved when it is used for harm.

Religions have been invoked to excuse atrocious behavior since ages before the life of Muhammad. So have other statuses such as race, color, nationality, and sex. The world tends to absolve these harmful trends after a reform and some generations. And the human race eventually learns a lesson.

I see the minaret ban as a sign that the world is just beginning to reject religion as an excuse for bad behavior. Peaceful Muslims will work with non-Muslims to prevail over the radical perversion of Islam. This time will pass into history and be replaced by a time of rational discrimination and careful tolerance. I hope I’m right, the sooner the better.

1. Fry bacon over medium heat. Remove bacon and set aside.
2. Place bread slice in pan to absorb half of fat and set aside.
3. Place second bread slice in pan to absorb remaining fat.
4. Add cheese slice and cover for a few seconds to promote melting.
5. Add bacon and second cheese slice and cover for a few seconds.
6. Place first bread slice on top with greasy side up to make sandwich.
7. Turn sandwich to brown both sides and remove from heat.
8. Advise paramedics before enjoying.

Thing in a Place 1

The credit for this switch belongs entirely to the lovely erlang-mode. (I tried TextMate’s erlang mode but I couldn’t get past TextMate’s strange navigation keys, etc. I wish there were standard navigation keys in OS X. Too bad. I’ve heard TextMate is great.) The emacs erlang-mode helps me write beautiful code. Now that I’m also learning to use emacs in php-mode I rarely become disoriented and type “:w” to save a file. (I don’t miss vim.)

Not everything about emacs is perfect. It doesn’t understand my Mac’s right-delete key. Left-delete (backspace) won’t delete a tab; it converts it the tab spaces and deletes one of them so that I have to hit backspace many times to delete a single tab. And in php-mode, the indentation rules are far more complex than the WordPress coding standards; I just want tabs in php-mode.

Even though I have these problems, you have to hand it to emacs for being customizable. It took a couple of hours to find all the solutions, but I solved all of the above problems above by adding these lines to my .emacs file:

;; Map OS X Terminal SSH delete key
(global-set-key (read-kbd-macro "ESC [ 3 ~") 'delete-char)

;; Backspace should delete, not convert tabs to spaces
(setq c-backspace-function 'backward-delete-char)

;; In PHP, never indent; always insert TAB.
(require 'php-mode)
(defun my-php-mode-hook ()
  (local-set-key (kbd "TAB") 'self-insert-command))
(add-hook 'php-mode-hook 'my-php-mode-hook)

This works for me even though I understand less than half of it. There is so much to learn.

Judeo-Christian fascism is the equal and opposite reaction to Islamic fascism. Only intelligence can act other than how physics dictates.

In lieu of a Bible let’s see inauguration’s hand placed on the United States Constitution or a textbook of Mathematics or Logic. Nobody swears on anything they haven’t read or can’t understand or don’t believe.

If we think the Constitution and Amendments need to be modernized we should gather the required majority and amend them. Where is the platform of playing by the rules?

If we had first evolved as pure Turing machines and then copied our neurophysiology for the basis of inorganic computing, this would not be a problem; either we would simply reverse engineer ourselves or we would never be so inventive as to wonder how we work.

If you want a computer with real intelligence you will not be satisfied by waiting for computers to evolve into higher life forms. You will give it any push you can. You will try to make it in your own image.

Personally, I think that gun ownership is stupid. Guns don’t stop crime and all it takes is looking at other countries with strict gun laws to see what the result is.

You not wish to own a gun. That’s fine. I am a gun owner. Calling gun ownership stupid is a personal affront to all gun owners. Luckily for you, dueling is out of fashion.

It is fashionable to rest an argument entirely on favorable statistical analysis. This trend signals bad times for individualism. To rely solely on aggregated data for governance is to settle on “the greatest good for the greatest number” with the added delusion that causes are known. If anything can be decided from crime statistics it is the question of where one can feel safe without firearms.

Both sides find studies to back up their case. Both sides fund studies to back up their case. In deciding whether to own a gun, I have as much interest in crime statistics as the founders did. They were ready to kill for their beliefs. They understood that when your time comes, statistics are no more vital than table manners.

I don’t care about gun statistics because I am not fundamentally invested in preserving every human life. I am interested in preserving some and I believe that I would use lethal force to do so. Lethal force comes in many varieties. A person who would take away my right to choose a gun is not sensible to me. Such a person is antagonistic to my instinct and to my reason.

We don’t only disagree about gun rights. Heavier things are moved beneath the surface. The underlying disagreement may be somewhere in these statements:

• I do not value all lives equally.
• Some things are worth killing for.
• I would rather kill than be killed.
• I would rather kill than let a loved one be killed.
• Individuals are typically good judges of their own circumstances.
• A collective of toothless individuals is worse than a toothless collective.

Pull out your own teeth but leave me mine. They might help you some day.

“Gun control is like trying to reduce drunk driving by making it tougher for sober people to own cars.”

Notice I didn’t tag this as “humor”.

It’s often said that you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression. I just now realized that I have always arrogantly believed my intuition about people based on a mere first impression, a momentary experience that will be tainted by microsecond subconscious attempts to match you with others from my memories.

You haven’t ever spoken to me or met me but I have heard you and seen you. You made an impression. Everything you did, your look, your words, and your tone reminded me of people I have known who were complete assholes. Thus my intuition was that you were a complete asshole.

Wait. Let me back up a little. Those people might not have been assholes in their lives, but they were assholes in my life. Some of them became assholes over time and some became some of the best people in my life. First impressions are not permanent.

See, what’s happening for me right now is that I’m becoming less of an asshole myself because I am giving us another chance to see eye to eye. I reviewed my entire experience of you and I see now that there is room for doubt. For all I know, you could be the nicest person in the world.

That’s why I want to know you. Take my card. If you don’t want to talk to me right now, talk to me when you do. I’ve invaded your time and space enough. Please just tell me your name.