Just found this link at thepublicinterest.com. It describes in good detail the pros and cons of multiple drug policies, and proposes something that may work. Dunno if they’ve convinced me, but it’s interesting, at least.

An article on CNN describes an Austrailan-designed railgun. 1,000,000 rounds per minute with no moving parts. The inventor named it, appropriately enough, “Metal Storm.”

I’ve noticed online that there’s an increasing amount of folks being drawn to the pagan community in reaction to other things. “I’m wiccan because Christianity wasn’t right for me;” or “I’m pagan ’cause my mom was abusive.” Gamers, especially, tend to be drawn into paganism as a means of living in the world the wish existed. (Faeries, dragons, etc) I’m here to tell you that the world is a harsh place. We have to work hard to even get by, much less ahead.

Disclaimer: I’ve not been working hard enough.

Most of the complaints I have about the pagan community can be summed up by someone else, and so I’ll just link ya there. Now, the page is titled “Why Wiccans Suck,” but with the Llewellyn books about Celtic Wicca and Italian Wicca and Nocturnal Witchcraft and more. It seems there’s a witchcraft book for every ethnic background, and only very recently have they stopped putting “Wicca” in the title of all these.

We’re already working with a culture who has very few time-honored traditions. (Yeah, yeah, it’s the Old Religion that came from Gardner in the 20s. Look it up.) The trend toward eclecticism is further drawing us into our own little individual holes. Me, included… I’m not Wiccan. I’m a “Gaian” pagan, but I do almost all my worship alone. Not that that’s a problem, but you don’t see us banding together often enough.

Oh, one more link, which I found while trying to drum up the “Why Wiccans Suck” site. It’s a pretty well-written reaction to the whole thing.

Allow me to disclaim some more: Lewellyn puts out some good books. Most of their stuff is utter drek. But then again, most metaphysical, pagan-related literature is also drek, and is a rehash of the same old stuff.

I’ll dig into the anti-fluff movement a little later. Until then, click and learn, and keep searching. I’ll be doing the same. Mama knows, I need to.

There’s times when you fight for everything you have. When you work 80-hour weeks and scrimp, save, and shuffle just to get by. Other times you’re working really hard to get ahead.

And then, when you least expect it, the Goddess will stop by and show you where things really come from… I’m about 5 minutes from eating a pie my wife baked. A blackberry pie. Baked from fresh blackberries that we picked this afternoon from native, wild blackberry bushes that grow in thickets in the far part of our back yard.

Folks, we didn’t plant them. We didn’t cultivate them. (You should have seen us wading through the briars to get at the good, ripe berries hidden deep inside the scrub) We didn’t ask for them. Nor did we do anything at all to have such (pun intended) fruitfulness in our lives.

We were just given them, by the bounty that we live within.

Thanks, Mom. I really appreciate it.

Sxtem is a Blogger API (and metaWeblog API) implementation in Ruby.

This is the first release, and as such, only implements a few methods of the API, and those only far enough to work with Blosxom:

blogger.getUsersBlogs (Only gets one, and you set that in the config)
blogger.newPost
metaWeblog.getCategories

Basically, I built the thing to work with w.bloggar, and it does. At least, as far as I need it to.

Please send comments to greenman-@-greenman-.org

Download it here.
(Url is http://www.greenman.org/downloads/sxtem-0.1.tar.gz for those of you using wget.)

[edit] Oops. Forgot to take blosxom into account when I placed the download directory. It works now. =)

For all you American readers, happy 4th of July. I hope the day finds you well, hale, and happy. Please don’t forget all that happened 250 years ago to allow us the freedoms that we have here.

For my international readers (I know there’s at least a few from the UK), I just wanna thank you for not being too hard on us when we do stupid things. Even if we don’t think they’re stupid.

While googling around looking for the stuff I look for when I’m bored and can’t sleep, I ran across this article at www.uscatholic.org.

What’s a pagan guy doing reading a Catholic website, you ask? And no, don’t give me that “most pagan of Christian churches” line. We’re all human, and deep down, we all have the same nuts and bolts in our guts. We’re all pink on the inside. Blah blah. Point is, there’s a lot everyone can learn from everyone else, if you only take the time to listen.

Tom McGrath (The author of the article above) had some interesting things to say.

I have never witnessed men treat each other with such respect and honor as I did as this weekend unfolded—willing to stand by each other as we encountered our shadows, faced our fears, and found our power as men. And as we left, we all knew something more—at depth—about our purpose in this world.

This happens time and time again… any time you get men out away from the everyday world so they can focus on real issues. Notice I didn’t say problems… like rent, your case count at work, making that trouble sale. These aren’t issues, they’re problems, and they must be surmounted. But issues must be faced. You don’t conquer issues… you accept them.

What issues? Can be anything, really. McGrath mentioned the “father wound,” the idea that many of us have that Dad was too busy working or whatever, and was never there for us. (I honestly felt that way at one point in my life. Then I accepted the issue, and was able to look at it objectively. He was there for me, and has never, ever not been there when I really needed him. YMMV, but I got lucky… sorry, just a little reminiscent waxing there). What about confidence issues… are we good enough? Do we deserve that big house, the kids, the beautiful wife? (If your wife isn’t the most beautiful woman in the world, think again… she chose you.)

The one thing that bugged me, though, was early on in the article when he mentioned the Promise Keepers. Promise Keepers is one of the earliest groups to capitalize on the men’s movement. Here, McGrath describes it well:

The first approach and the more common in recent church life has been to round men up, charge them up, give them a noble task, and keep them in check. This is the Promise Keepers model, and it works to some extent because men need two things, says Father Richard Rohr, the popular Franciscan author and workshop leader.”They need respect. And they need a challenge.” The Promise Keepers model respects men’s roles in the family and the world, and issues clear challenges on how to live a good and decent life.

“Charge them up?” “Keep them in check?” I dunno, but has the demonization of all things male hit that hard? If you’re reading this and this bugs you, too… or you think it’s correct… leave a comment. I’m confused here.

One of the things I do for fun and relax is to fly model rockets. Unfortunately, my chosen hobby is one that’s become increasingly regulated by government entities. All rockets over 1 pound must fly under a NOTAM (Notice to Airmen) which must be sent to the FAA. Anything bigger than 3.3 pounds and flying on more than 62.5 grams of propellant weight must fly under an FAA-approved waiver. But that’s not the problem - the FAA regularly works with rocketeers and other hobby groups to allow them access to public airspace.

The real problem is the ATF. They put our favorite propellant (AP… ammonium perchlorate, or, in government terms APCP - ammonium perchlorate composite propellant) on a watchlist of controlled substances. And recently slipped an explosives bill into the PATRIOT Act that makes more than 62.5 grams of AP a controlled substance. I know flying rockets is addictive, but this is ridiculous.

Anyway, Instapundit has linked over to an article on Fox News that’s rather sympathetic to our cause. There’s only a few thousand serious hobby rocketeers in the country. (I’m on a first-name basis with 90% of the rocketeers in my local region. Trust me, there’s not a lot of us) And the ATF is giving us fits knowing there’s not enough of us to put some serious pressure on them. Until articles like the one linked above. Maybe now we’ll get some regulatory relief.

Came across a link to an editorial in a local newspaper that says some good stuff about the politics of virtue and questioning the place of clergy in our society. Not disparaging the clergy, but merely questioning the authority they sometimes seem to wield so heavy-handedly.

Given the biblical quotes, I suspect the author is a Christian. The world needs more Christians like this one. (Author’s name is Cal Thomas… dunno if that’s a male or female name, sorry). Heck, the world needs more people like this one, regardless of faith.

Highlight of the article was a quote… anyone have a link to the editorial referenced here:

As Dinesh D’Souza wrote in Friday’s The Washington Post, virtue has great power, but not if it is imposed - only when it is chosen.

Ocean of Practical Wicca has some amazing things to say about pagan fluff-headedness and the general nature of the Wiccan rede… “An it harm none do what ye will.” Very clear-headed, and one of the reasons that site’s on my blogroll.