Bah. Semi-major crisis at client - I might have to stay late.

Unrelatedly, a kid on a bicycle just got hit by a car about 20 feet from our building....

Somewhere around 86 in Boston as of 3pm. But you can tell from the wind that it's going to take a big drop at some point, and probably in a hurry.

cue thunder

the purpose driven live

[link]

very scary

The rhetoric in that article is pretty thick, so I feel the need to break some of it down. It's not a Purpose Driven Life game. It is a Left Behind game. It seems someone in Warren's church sits on the board of the company. [corrected].

The Anti-Dominionists are fast approaching Tinfoil hat time.

The eschatology of Left Behind is scary, and probably way wrong, but is actually IN DIRECT OPPOSITION to the eschatology of dominionists (also I think scary and wrong).

People who buy into the same end-of-days view as LaHaye, think Jesus is coming back any minute, and we have to be ready.

Dominionists (also called Christian Reconstructionists) think Jesus is in no damn hurry, because we're such a mess, and that they have to clean the place up, in order to make it a place that Jesus would want to come back to.

Warren (who is driving me buggy for his ubiquity, more than anything else) is not a dominionist, a probably not a pre-millenialist (ie a Left Behinder). WRT dominionism, I'd put forth his involvement with the "One" campaign (Think the "Live 8" concert of last summer), [link] which as far as I know, seems rather anti-dominionist in agenda, and as far as I know is not religious, although they partner with both religious (and not just Christian) and secular charitable and humanitarian organizations [link] and a lot of celebrities (U2, Brad Pitt, Tom Hanks, Rita and Steve Marley, Fergie (the pee-her-pants-one), Will Smith, Antonio Banderas, Steve Buscemi, George Clooney, Ellen Degeneres, Bob Geldof, Danny Glover, Isaac Hayes, Dennis Hopper, Jewel, Orlando Bloom, P. Diddy, Jamie Foxx, Liam Neeson, Susan Sarandon) were touting it, too.

Christian != Dominionist. Pre-millenial != Dominionist.

Just to point out the INCREDIBLY BLOODY OBVIOUS, the rape statistics show that women 17 or under are most likely to report (or have a report made for them, as is surely the case in almost all of the 30% of 'women' under age 11) rape, as opposed to being more likely to actually be raped.

Because rape is under-reported, because there's a strong 'blame the victim' mentality about rape in our culture. WHICH THIS ASSHOLE IS PERPETUATING.

The kid who was hit was (after the accident) sitting on the curb, holding his head. So he's hurt - but hopefully it's not bad.

Police, ambulance and firetruck have arrived.

Whoa: Chinese BBS-ers congregate en masse to play out morality on and offline.

It began with an impassioned, 5,000-word letter on one of China's most popular Internet bulletin boards, from a husband denouncing a student he suspected of carrying on an affair with his wife.

Immediately, hundreds joined in the attack. "Let's use our keyboard and mouse in our hands as weapons," as one person wrote, "to chop out the heads of these adulterers, to pay for the sacrifice of the husband." Within days, the hundreds had grown to thousands, and then tens of thousands, with total strangers forming teams to hunt down the student's identity and address, hounding him out of his university and causing his family to barricade themselves inside their home.

The Derby guy sounds scarily like a health teacher I had in high school. She believed (and said on more than one occasion) that rape is always the woman's/girl's fault. That something about a woman/girl drives a man to such a sexual peak that he's forced to rape and this "thing" can be anything from the clothes worn, perfume, or even just a man looking at a woman/girl. And that it doesn't matter the age of the victim, that children being sexually molested is caused by the same thing.

She even said, if I walked down the street and some man grabbed me and raped me I must have done something to set him off.

I never actually thought anyone really believed that until I met her. She wasn't a teacher there very long, I reported her to the principal for those statements and other issues and she was fired.

The kid who was hit was (after the accident) sitting on the curb, holding his head. So he's hurt - but hopefully it's not bad.

That's good to hear. One of the scariest things that ever happened to me was once when I was accelerating up a ramp in a parking garage (in a company pickup truck, no less) and suddenly there was a 4-6 year old boy RUNNING RIGHT DOWN THE MIDDLE OF THE RAMP AT ME. He'd decided to race his father to the car, and was ignoring dad's shouting to hold up.

I slammed on the breaks, but there was still an awful thump. THANK GOD it was just the kid running in to the front of the truck. He still seriously knocked himself for good one, and was crying and scared, but essentially unhurt. The father blamed himself, and that was pretty much that, but after I parked the truck and got in my car (I was doing courier work for a summer), I had to sit there for 15-30 minutes before I could stop shaking and breathe normally.

I've lost count of the number of times my dad has been hit while on his bike. Or rather, they stopped considering it news after the third incident. Two, that I know of, required an ambulance and surgery and whatnot.

I'm preemptively cranky about EVERYTHING today. Woe to my apartment complex if they didn't even enter my apartment today. I'm loaded for bear. And it's making me kind of ill.

Hands elephant gun to sara and sits back to watch the show.