That thar is a link, you should click on it.

Toodles.

And while I am glad that computer animation seems to be at a fabulous apex, I am not the type to go see Pixar movies.

What I look for most in film is depth, meaning, insight. The same things I look for in all art.

But my in-laws forced me to watch the Pixar film Wall*E, and despite my reservations it was beautiful.

Forgive me if I spoil anything in the movie, but a general synopsis of this film is that humanity has nearly destroyed the planet through ecological catastrophe and it has gone to hide in abject comfort and apathy in space. The cleaning of the earth was left to Wall*E model robots, of which our hero is that last working unit. The human ship sends is a robot named Eve to take measurements of the home world. Eve is a modern iPodish robot who wins Wall*E’s heart.

As humanists we need to provide alternatives to religion’s claim to a monopoly on meaning.

In my years as a Charismatic Christian I used the persuasive power of meaning to persuade my friends to be more committed to their religion, or to get saved. In the years I have been an atheist, I have seen countless apologists in debates with atheists claim that religion alone gives human life meaning. Meaning and transcendence are what religion sells to people.

Sometimes it is difficult for us, as atheists, to articulate why we find life so exhilarating and that we don’t lack a sense of purpose.

This film captures the basic concepts of love and connection in such a raw and basic way that its transcendent power is undeniable.

There are no mystical concepts of destiny, which often ruin Hollywood fairy tales for me. Wall*E and Eve don’t have some excuse for loving one another, but merely cannot help but identify with each others basic humanity. I say “humanity” somewhat loosely since the main characters are robots.

The ability to care about one another, to empathize, and make common cause is one of life’s most rewarding experiences. It is a marvelous slice of heaven to be found right here in life for us all. This little slice of heaven exists with no need of religion.

We as humanists should reflect on all the great things in life which are available to all humans regardless of creed or culture.

One of the reasons that I don’t think we should leave religion alone is because focusing on the complexities of heaven and God distracts people from living life to the fullest. From relishing and savoring the beauty of life, as they yearn for the afterlife.

At least this was the case for me. When I lost my religion, I gained my life.

The film Wall*E is a beautiful meditation on these wonderful beautiful things in life. I think we could all be enriched by thinking on these things more, especially those of us who would really like to see religion in decline.

The richness of life is the cure for the stupor born of yearning for an afterlife.

Warren sucks. He is a homophobic, fundamentalist, who believes that the purpose of life is to have the magic voice of Jesus inside your head tell you what to do.

This is, no doubt, frustrating.

I am of the school of thought that religion is usually harmful, and that evangelical Christians are a dangerous political force in the U.S.

I am of the opinion that Christianity, in its mainstream practice, should be resisted and that we must write and make creative and artistic efforts to decrease its influence and popularity.

But I am 100% calm about Obama and Rick Warren.

When Obama came into politics in Illinois in the 90s he identified as an agnostic.

When he realized that the political deal making in his district happened in the black churches he conveniently converted to Christianity. These details were reported in the July, 2008 issue of The New Yorker.

Now, I know some of you are appalled at this.

I would argue that Obama is merely performing a political necessity that has been true for thousands of years. Most Americans are Christian, and believe Christianity is essential to good leadership. It is the easiest of things to appease.

See watch, “I accept Jesus as my Lord and Savior.” Pay no attention to the fingers crossed behind my back.

Machiavelli wrote, centuries ago, “in all matters appear to be religious, indeed be religious,” in The Prince.

The famous secularist legal scholar Eddie Tabash points out that Clinton pontificated on the virtues of school prayer when he was on the campaign trail, and convinced the electorate that school prayer was something he believed in strongly.

But when he was elected he appointed Judges that struck it down at every turn, and those same judges held up separation of church and state.

Tabash says we can be confident Obama will appoint secularist judges. Judges who uphold separation of church and state.

I would like to close with this:

It is our job, the job of secularists, to shift the zeitgeist so that religion is not so powerful that all American presidents have to pander to it, or sacrifice their ability to be re-elected.

But instead it seems to me that secularists get bent out of shape when a politician does pander to the religious, and at the same time finds the whole idea of us trying to promote secularism among the religious to be the most abhorrent strategy in the world.

We have a mentality that is destined to fail, and as long as we are so cowardly about our ideas we can expect more and more pandering from politicians to people like Rick Warren.

We should be grateful that politicians who have secularist sympathies, as Obama has expressed on several occasions, has the shrewdness to do what must be done.

The president appoints judges people, that is how separation of church and state is ultimately protected.

Well, we took the long way home, but we finally got here.

And I want to congratulate President Bush, and remove any doubt about where we stand: The primaries are over, the heart is strong again, and the Buchanan brigades are enlisted–all the way to a great comeback victory in November.

Like many of you last month, I watched that giant masquerade ball at Madison Square Garden–where 20,000 radicals and liberals came dressed up as moderates and centrists–in the greatest single exhibition of cross-dressing in American political history.

One by one, the prophets of doom appeared at the podium. The Reagan decade, they moaned, was a terrible time in America; and the only way to prevent even worse times, they said, is to entrust our nation’s fate and future to the party that gave us McGovern, Mondale, Carter and Michael Dukakis.

No way, my friends. The American people are not going to buy back into the failed liberalism of the 1960s and ’70s–no matter how slick the package in 1992.

The malcontents of Madison Square Garden notwithstanding, the 1980s were not terrible years. They were great years. You know it. I know it. And the only people who don’t know it are the carping critics who sat on the sidelines of history, jeering at ine of the great statesmen of modern time.

Out of Jimmy Carter’s days of malaise, Ronald Reagan crafted the longest peacetime recovery in US history–3 million new businesses created, and 20 million new jobs.

Under the Reagan Doctrine, one by one, the communist dominos began to fall. First, Grenada was liberated, by US troops. Then, the Red Army was run out of Afghanistan, by US weapons. In Nicaragua, the Marxist regime was forced to hold free elections–by Ronald Reagan’s contra army–and the communists were thrown out of power.

Have they forgotten? It was under our party that the Berlin Wall came down, and Europe was reunited. It was under our party that the Soviet Empire collapsed, and the captive nations broke free.

It is said that each president will be recalled by posterity–with but a single sentence. George Washington was the father of our country. Abraham Lincoln preserved the Union. And Ronald Reagan won the Cold War. And it is time my old colleagues, the columnists and commentators, looking down on us tonight from their anchor booths and sky boxes, gave Ronald Reagan the credit he deserves–for leading America to victory in the Cold War.

Most of all, Ronald Reagan made us proud to be Americans again. We never felt better about our country; and we never stood taller in the eyes of the world.

But we are here, not only to celebrate, but to nominate. And an American president has many, many roles.

He is our first diplomat, the architect of American foreign policy. And which of these two men is more qualified for that role? George Bush has been UN ambassador, CIA director, envoy to China. As vice president, he co-authored the policies that won the Cold War. As president, George Bush presided over the liberation of Eastern Europe and the termination of the Warsaw Pact. And Mr. Clinton? Well, Bill Clinton couldn’t find 150 words to discuss foreign policy in an acceptance speech that lasted an hour. As was said of an earlier Democratic candidate, Bill Clinton’s foreign policy experience is pretty much confined to having had breakfast once at the Intl. House of Pancakes.

The presidency is also America’s bully pulpit, what Mr Truman called, “preeminently a place of moral leadership.” George Bush is a defender of right-to-life, and lifelong champion of the Judeo-Christian values and beliefs upon which this nation was built.

Mr Clinton, however, has a different agenda.

At its top is unrestricted abortion on demand. When the Irish-Catholic governor of Pennsylvania, Robert Casey, asked to say a few words on behalf of the 25 million unborn children destroyed since Roe v Wade, he was told there was no place for him at the podium of Bill Clinton’s convention, no room at the inn.

Yet a militant leader of the homosexual rights movement could rise at that convention and exult: “Bill Clinton and Al Gore represent the most pro-lesbian and pro-gay ticket in history.” And so they do.

Bill Clinton supports school choice–but only for state-run schools. Parents who send their children to Christian schools, or Catholic schools, need not apply.

Elect me, and you get two for the price of one, Mr Clinton says of his lawyer-spouse. And what does Hillary believe? Well, Hillary believes that 12-year-olds should have a right to sue their parents, and she has compared marriage as an institution to slavery–and life on an Indian reservation.

Well, speak for yourself, Hillary.

Friends, this is radical feminism. The agenda Clinton & Clinton would impose on America–abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat–that’s change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America wants. It is not the kind of change America needs. And it is not the kind of change we can tolerate in a nation that we still call God’s country.

A president is also commander in chief, the man we empower to send sons and brothers, fathers and friends, to war.

George Bush was 17 when they bombed Pearl Harbor. He left his high school class, walked down to the recruiting office, and signed up to become the youngest fighter pilot in the Pacific war. And Mr Clinton? When Bill Clinton’s turn came in Vietnam, he sat up in a dormitory in Oxford, England, and figured out how to dodge the draft.

Which of these two men has won the moral authority to call on Americans to put their lives at risk? I suggest, respectfully, it is the patriot and war hero, Navy Lieutenant J. G. George Herbert Walker Bush.

My friends, this campaign is about philosophy, and it is about character; and George Bush wins on both counts–going away; and it is time all of us came home and stood beside him.

As running mate, Mr Clinton chose Albert Gore. And just how moderate is Prince Albert? Well, according to the Taxpayers Union, Al Gore beat out Teddy Kennedy, two straight years, for the title of biggest spender in the Senate.

And Teddy Kennedy isn’t moderate about anything.

In New York, Mr Gore made a startling declaration. Henceforth, he said, the “central organizing principle” of all governments must be: the environment.

Wrong, Albert!

The central organizing principle of this republic is freedom. And from the ancient forests of Oregon, to the Inland Empire of California, America’s great middle class has got to start standing up to the environmental extremists who put insects, rats and birds ahead of families, workers and jobs.

One year ago, my friends, I could not have dreamt I would be here. I was then still just one of many panelists on what President Bush calls “those crazy Sunday talk shows.”

But I disagreed with the president; and so we challenged the president in the Republican primaries and fought as best we could. From February to June, he won 33 primaries. I can’t recall exactly how many we won.

But tonight I want to talk to the 3 million Americans who voted for me. I will never forget you, nor the great honor you have done me. But I do believe, deep in my heart, that the right place for us to be now–in this presidential campaign–is right beside George Bush. The party is our home; this party is where we belong. And don’t let anyone tell you any different.

Yes, we disagreed with President Bush, but we stand with him for freedom to choice religious schools, and we stand with him against the amoral idea that gay and lesbian couples should have the same standing in law as married men and women.

We stand with President Bush for right-to-life, and for voluntary prayer in the public schools, and against putting American women in combat. And we stand with President Bush in favor of the right of small towns and communities to control the raw sewage of pornography that pollutes our popular culture.

We stand with President Bush in favor of federal judges who interpret the law as written, and against Supreme Court justices who think they have a mandate to rewrite our Constitution.

My friends, this election is about much more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe. It is about what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself. And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton & Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side. And so, we have to come home, and stand beside him.

My friends, in those 6 months, from Concord to California, I came to know our country better than ever before in my life, and I collected memories that will be with me always.

There was that day long ride through the great state of Georgia in a bus Vice President Bush himself had used in 1988–a bus they called Asphalt One. The ride ended with a 9:00 PM speech in front of a magnificent southern mansion, in a town called Fitzgerald.

There were the workers at the James River Paper Mill, in the frozen North Country of New Hampshire–hard, tough men, one of whom was silent, until I shook his hand. Then he looked up in my eyes and said, “Save our jobs!” There was the legal secretary at the Manchester airport on Christmas Day who told me she was going to vote for me, then broke down crying, saying, “I’ve lost my job, I don’t have any money; they’ve going to take away my daughter. What am I going to do?”

My friends, even in tough times, these people are with us. They don’t read Adam Smith or Edmund Burke, but they came from the same schoolyards and playgrounds and towns as we did. They share our beliefs and convictions, our hopes and our dreams. They are the conservatives of the heart.

They are our people. And we need to reconnect with them. We need to let them know we know they’re hurting. They don’t expect miracles, but they need to know we care.

There were the people of Hayfork, the tiny town high up in California’s Trinity Alps, a town that is now under a sentence of death because a federal judge has set aside 9 million acres for the habitat of the spotted owl–forgetting about the habitat of the men and women who live and work in Hay fork. And there were the brave people of Koreatown who took the worst of the LA riots, but still live the family values we treasure, and who still believe deeply in the American dream.

Friends, in those wonderful 25 weeks, the saddest days were the days of the bloody riot in LA, the worst in our history. But even out of that awful tragedy can come a message of hope.

Hours after the violence ended I visited the Army compound in south LA, where an officer of the 18th Cavalry, that had come to rescue the city, introduced me to two of his troopers. They could not have been 20 years old. He told them to recount their story.

They had come into LA late on the 2nd day, and they walked up a dark street, where the mob had looted and burned every building but one, a convalescent home for the aged. The mob was heading in, to ransack and loot the apartments of the terrified old men and women. When the troopers arrived, M-16s at the ready, the mob threatened and cursed, but the mob retreated. It had met the one thing that could stop it: force, rooted in justice, backed by courage.

Greater love than this hath no man than that he lay down his life for his friend. Here were 19-year-old boys ready to lay down their lives to stop a mob from molesting old people they did not even know. And as they took back the streets of LA, block by block, so we must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country.

God bless you, and God bless America.

The struggle for dominance by secular progressives against religious conservatives.

We have all heard this term, and many of us reject it outright.

My buddy Cooper who is a bit of a political mentor of mine says that religiosity in the United States seems to follow a pattern of rise and decline. He says that because of this pattern there is no Culture War.

I take his word for the facts, but how do we know that spotlighting secularism the way we are doing right now wont prevent or increase religiosity in the next wave? I think it will.

Another popular argument against the notion of Culture War is that the center is largely disinterested in these issues. The average person is too worried about paying the bills to really lose any sleep over gay marriage, or the teaching of evolution.

There is another angle to this, there is much argument for what is known as the Elite Theory of History, which is a thesis stating that it is the famous and infamous, wealthy, and powerful who shape civilization. However one feels about the finer points of these issues, in the U.S. the names of the founding Fathers are invoked with reverence in every political cycle. In the science enthusiast culture we name drop like its going out of style, hell my podcast was really all based on interviewing famous science advocates. I believe that if it is important to the elites its important to the world.

Even the great populist movements are known mostly by their charismatic leaders, we speak of Guevara, Marx, Trotsky, Abbey Hoffman, Malcom X, Martin Luther King, and eternally Noam Chomsky.

There is no shame in taking pride in the best of our species.

And there is also no avoiding it.

So, if its not obvious by now, I am a believer in the Culture War.

I am not just a believer, I am actively engaged.

I want gay marriage and the teaching of evolution to be far from peoples minds because it is common place and uncontroversial. I want the United States to cease being so anti-intellectual, and be known for its collective intellect. As Athens once was, as Florence, as Rome, as Paris, as Vienna, as so many places which will always be honored for their contributions to human knowledge and understanding.

I want a humanist ethic to be dominant,  which guarantees all the personal freedom one needs to self-actualize, and guarantees a great mutual tolerance so that everyone who disagrees with humanism can still be free to pursue their own ethical inquiry.

I want a world thats too smart for violence, too smart for poverty, and too smart for religion.

Is this really too much to ask?

This week I will take two finals, which I am confident I will pass, and then I am finished.

I am graduating from college.

My approach to college, like most things in my life, has been unorthodox.

I started college at 25, unlike most college graduates, who begin at 18 or 19.

I dropped out of high school.

After I dropped out of high school I worked a phone job for a year, and then worked as a tattoo artist for several years.

During that time period I did things which would be unwise to disclose in detail in a blog written under my real name.

I also became a born again, charismatic, Sarah Palin-style Christian.

Christianity saved my life in hindsight. If I could disclose all the details I think everyone would agree it was an improvement, but it did not take long for Christianity to present me with its own problems.

I took my religion incredibly seriously, all of it. Including the magical thinking, more popular with Charismatics than anyone. I spoke in tongues, I believed God healed people with my prayers. I also believed the best thing in life was to persuade others to join my in a magical adventure in adoring Christ.

However this clashed with my own background in the punk-rock subculture, and its cynical and existentialist leanings.

I was beginning to feel Christianity had a low ceiling for me. The virtues it rewarded were not my strengths.

In time I became a radical leftist, though I persisted to do so in the name of my religion.

I traveled the US, and found myself active in the leftist youth culture of Santa Cruz, California, where I first got a real taste for politics first hand. Including some very proud actions against the Iraq War.

I returned to Lubbock from my beloved adventures in Santa Cruz ready to start the revolution, which would naturally result in Lubbock, TX. being a tofu eating, recycling utopia, of tolerance and independent bookstores.

It was in my aims to try to politicize Lubbock that I started a lawn business with my buddy Nick Simmons and started trying to organize meetings. A girl I had always known peripherally became my partner in political organizing, and we fell in love. I later married this girl.

My girlfriends mom told me that I was too broke to keep my girl long term. She suggested college. I took her advice.

I started at Texas Tech University as a Psychology major just a few months later. It was then that I began to learn about scientific thinking in my psychology classes. Particularly from Dr. Jeff T. Larsen. I couldn’t get enough.

In less than a year I was accepted into the HHMI Undegraduate Research Fellows program, where we were paid and trained to do professional level primary biological research. It was also the first time that I was in a culture of science, where all of the other HHMI fellows were very forward thinking scientifically informed individuals. I loved my peers in this program and have not felt the same as I did around them until I went to a CFI Leadership conference this summer.

Inspired by a new found love for biology I changed my major to neuroscience, and moved to Dallas with my wife who was getting a graduate degree in neuroscience.

It was shortly after this that both my wife and I read Richard Dawkins The God Delusion and I was persuaded that God did not exist. My wife came around a few months later.

College was an essential part of me coming to the ideas which now guide my life.

The love of inquiry.

A desire for humanity to have a greater cultivation of love for inquiry.

The idea that humanism should replace supernaturalism as the dominant ethics in culture.

The belief that science should have a strong voice in politics.

College was an incredibly positive experience for me. I suspect that most people who don’t go to college shortly after high school never do. I got to do a lot of interesting things in my life, and I count my weird days as a fundamentalist christian among those things. I have tattooed countless people, I sang in bands, I self published comic books, I traveled the country, but I still found great joy in the halls of the academy. It has enriched my life.

But it came up with a friend who is aware of this blog, and I thought everyone might enjoy the discussion.

So here goes, with a little editing:

THE END OF PRIVACY

My friend Mazyar showed me his iPhone the other day. The one feature he was impressed with the most is the way the iPhone can show you where you are on a map at any given time. I suspect this is G.P.S. technology. Which means it is very hard for iPhone owners to stay lost.

I know there are cameras all over my school. There are cameras on the stoplights on the way home. There are cameras in all the stores I shop at. Even places like state parks, which are supposed to provide isolation, require payment and thus detection for patrons of the park. With Google Earth anyone with a computer can watch your house.

If you are on myspace you already provide a lot of information about yourself that would allow any person who closely monitors your page to decipher a great deal about you. You may have security features on your page, but hackers exist, and some work for industry and governments.

So what’s next.

We can still engage within certain activities in our own homes without anyone knowing about it. Can’t we?

What about drug tests at many jobs?

What about drug tests required by workman’s comp if you get injured on the job?

Well at least our sexual activities are still mostly hidden.

Well that’s true if you don’t use the internet for sexual activity. If you look at Suicide Girls on your computer, anyone trained in psychology could accurately discern a lot about your sexual fetishes and predispositions. And I’m told its not hard to decipher to which websites a computer has gone to. If I am not misinformed, that’s precisely the reason why we all need a firewall since autonomous computer programs designed to harass us with advertisement based on our web-browsing history.

Well your sexual behavior is private if you don’t look at internet porn. Isn’t it?

Not if you have ever purchased sex toys or lingerie with plastic.

I think the ladies who read my blog will agree that it says a lot about a girl’s sexuality if she buys her lingerie at Victoria’s Secret vs. Fredrick’s of Hollywood vs. a lesser known lingerie outlet (which always have the trashiest stuff).

Let’s just say I personally need no less than a Fredrick’s of Hollywood girl, I think I would scare a Victoria’s Secret girl.

What about our private social relationships.

Well social relationships have never been very private. They are often only private to the extent that they are boring. If you are doing something worth talking about, and if you’ve talked about it, you can be pretty sure somebody you haven’t told is talking about it.

I saw on PBS’s show Frontline that the phone companies revealed that they have assisted the federal government in recording vast quantities of phone calls. In general I reject conspiracy theories, but this one has been fessed up to by the phone companies. Our phones are really, really, easy to tap. If it hasn’t happened to you its only because no one has wanted to.

My final word on this blog is simply this. Technology is only getting more sophisticated.

So I hear a familiar call in my mind, “Oh God! Please help me.”

WTF?

I don’t believe in God anymore why am I even having that thought?

I think its because to a certain extent, I wish God existed.

At least the kind of God who would help me ace all my finals.

Its kind of like a wish granting sky-genie.

This is a real step down from the way I actually believed in God, which was always as some kind of transcendental being that in addition to granting my wishes, would also help me be a better person, a person who was as the bible says, “in this world, but not of it.”

I guess being an atheist has made my schemas about prayer shallow.

When I was a Christian I prayed for things like a greater capacity for love, compassion, patience.

Now I call out for good grades and then I feel like a douchebag, because I don’t even believe in God.

Its like some sort of strange reflex I have yet to lose.

I find myself using this strange behavior if I have a hard enough time finding the remote or my keys as well.

I don’t know.

I just hope it gets a laugh.

Bare with me.

I am a naturalist. I have come to learn throughout my undergraduate education that science seems to indicate hat the universe has no teleology in of itself. And it seems that evidence, for all the whining about empricists from philosophers, is the best way of knowing.

Stone cold, science pulls out the numbers, and patterns, makes sure anyone can pull them out if they follow the instructions. Its inspiring.

Science is the best bet we have for truth.

But it needs a little help with meaning.

It leaves us in this malediction: being human.

So what do we do? Well, it seems some of our most ancient ancestors jumped first to making stuff up and believing it with maddening intensity.

Sympathetic magic is painted on the cave paintings. The drawing was an attempt at a magic spell to help with the hunt.

It was ritual.

We know that there seemed to be funerals early in human history. Lets face it folks, in the realm of pure reason and utility, funerals are impractical.

They began as ritual.

I think cave paintings, and funerals, have a few important things in common besides their antiquity, they are both ritual and art. Anyone who does not think there is an art to a funeral has never been to a good one. Good funerals are as moving as any painting or song.

Never forget when a classical piece is called a requiem it was intended for a funeral.

I believe our brains have a built in yearning for depth, meaning, and symbols which transcend the strictest reality. I find this in art.

When I first lost my belief in God, I had an existentialist depression that I could not shake for months. I had an imaginary friend for years, and I had to abandon it, in the depths of my adulthood (how embarassing).

For me as a naturalist, and a secularist, the greatest ecstasy comes when I am deeply engaged with art. Either making it or experiencing it. It is pure and real splendor. The closest I come to heaven on earth.

As a humanist I also find art to be an amazing connection with my species, a way to see how far the basic biology has gone, how crazy the organic maelstrom of information and passion that is art can reach from one soul to another. Of course, strictly speaking, by soul I mean brain.

In short I am nominating art for God’s replacement.

Any one second the motion?

Right now the high for the info junkies in the U.S. is the fascinating world of the Somali pirates. According to NPR the Somali pirates are disenfranchised fishermen who have lost their income to larger and larger multinational fishing operations off the coast of Somalia.

We all heard of these guys when they hijacked a Saudi oil tanker with about $110 million worth of oil on the ship.

There are more interesting factors coming out about the Somali pirates all the time. Among them is that NPR reported that the Somali pirates are relatively non-lethal compared to other modern pirates, especially south-east Asian pirates, who seem to kill a ship’s crew as a matter of protocol.

The most recent bit of info, which makes writing about the Somali pirates Edger-worthy, is their new enemy: Muslim fundamentalists.

Essentially groups of Muslim fundamentalists based in Somalia have declared piracy against Saudi Arabian financial interests to be anti-Islamic and have vowed to rescue the tanker from the Somali pirates. Both the Islamic Courts Union and a Muslim fundamentalist group called Al-Shabaab have treated the Somali pirates with varying levels of hostility.

I am a byproduct of pop-culture pirate worship.

I have fantasized about space pirates since I was a kid. I love the Pirates of the Carribean, and it is hard for me not to admire these guys on a certain level.

I do not have deontological ideas about theft. I don’t share my liberterian brother and sister’s consideration for property rights as the basis of all civic virtue.

Every now and then when someone gets their crap stolen, I cheer.

When Saudi Arabia gets their oil tanker stolen, and I find out that the thieves are poor people who are considerably non-violent compared to other pirates, I feel a slight sense of cheering for the underdog.

I also feel like these events have revealed a far more insidious piece of information, which is when Saudi Arabia is losing money, Muslim militants get involved.

I try not to give to much credence to conspiracy theories, but ignoring the link between the Saudi establishment and militant Islam is ignoring the obvious.

I wonder how the perceptions of the world will play out as we see the Somali pirates weather the storm that militant Islam threatens.