Here I sit, all alone...

We played a lot of Boggle! last night. I discovered two new lovely words: quern, which is a small, hand-held mill for grain, and the other of which I can't recall and didn't take with me. The girls tried the unrecommended strategy of spewing out as many three and four-letter combinations as they could, randomly, hoping that they'd be words. It didn't work very well.

After a lovely morning of Omaha and I enjoying our relative youth and health, the girls woke up to compel me to go get donuts. So I did. And then we did chores: I cleaned the kitchen and did some of my own laundry, as well as doing some serious cleaning of my harddrive. I deleted about 15 GB of stuff, and discovered the the biggest space eater on my laptop right now is unread manga. I guess I should get around to dealing with it someday.

I'm going to the Michael Weinstein presentation at 6:00pm this evening. Since it's only a few blocks from from Cafe Vita, I decided to drop in on the Bi-and-Bi social. I was about 15 minutes late, but there was nobody here. I have since found out that it has moved up to the north Greenlake area, by 85th and Aurora-- quite a bit further out of my way. Ah, well. I got a little administrivia done.

Harun Yahya on Buddhism!?

Harun Yahya is the name of a Turkish evangelical islamicist whose big beef is with evolutionary theory. He recently encouraged the followers of his particular and virtual megamosque to bankroll sending a ridiculous big book, "Atlas of Creation," to every university in the country, trying to tear down evolutionary theory with a very poor mishmash of Islamic creationism uncomfortably married to Intelligent Design theory. It's an understatement to call it 'sad.' (Someone did an analysis of one of the photos in the book, of a fly, to discover the the photo was of a fishing lure, hook and all, and the photo was stolen from a website. That's the level of insanity we're talking about here.)

The funny thing is, I've known Yahya for a long time. When he was in college, he was a snot-nosed anti-Darwinist who posted regularly to the Usenet newsgroup talk.origins. I feel a little guilty, even responsible, for the fellow because I was one of the people who helped him refine his arguments. Even if they never became very good arguments, I was one of his whetstones. And now he's rich and has millions of followers and, well, I don't.

I recently installed Miro, which is an "Internet TV Appliance," software that lets you collect internet videos the way Tivo collects your shows, and watch them whenever you want. It's actually a phenomenally cool application, and while I was looking through the list of things to watch I found "The Errors of Buddhism," by Harun Yahya.

Woah, I said. Harun's branching out. Gotta watch that.

I wish I hadn't. It was vicious. Harun's a "kinder, gentler" Islamicist, the face of extreme Caliphate Islam the way Mike Huckabee is a kind, gentle face of extreme Christian Nationalism. The first sentence starts with "The twisted religion of Buddhism is nothing but superstition and error," and it gets uglier from there. It is a non-stop drumbeat about how evil Buddhism is, and it goes on for an hour. Time and again he referred to Buddhism as a religion that "encourages suffering," and conflated the Hindu-influenced Buddhist sects with Buddhism itself and completely ignored the Chinese and Japanese traditions.

It was hilarious to hear him say, "Here they are practicing a strange ritual," which to my unpracticed eye looked unremarkably similar to what goes on in a mosque; people standing, kneeling, kowtowing, praying in a language I don't know. It was equally hilarious for him to keep discussing the "superstitions" of Buddhism without looking his own unconfirmable traditions and narratives in the eye and admitting they were superstitions too.

But the lies and and deceit-- pure Harun, I've seen it before-- were the most obnoxious. His attempt to conflate Buddhism with viciousness were counterpointed with the claim that Islam "discourages self-inflicted pain." Yeah, and Shiite's don't practice Ashura. He kept pimping the "peace" and "loving" nature of all Islam and claimed that no one who was a Muslim did not have it, which made me stifle giggle after giggle.

And he mis-pronounced Steven Segal's name.