I saw the Father of the Internet at work yesterday. Yeah, for real. He was giving some sort of press conference outside my building. I'm talking about Vint Cerf, obviously.

Today, I got to hear Al Gore speak. For real! He came to talk about his new documentary. He basically went through the next interation of the presentation that was the basis for the film.

I have to say that he really is an engaging speaker. Funny as hell, too. (He introduced himself as "The former next President of the United States".) And the guy's got a darn good grasp on science and a fairly analytic mind. (He was ad-libbing about some slides that he had added to his presentation just that morning to try out on us, and described one chart as depicting "sort of a step function". This wasn't something he had memorized; he knew what he was talking about.)

At one point, he was talking about how much he gives that particular talk, and how each time it's different. He said his favorite time was on a houseboat in Tennesee. He recounts it like this:

So there we were at midnight on a houseboat in the middle of a lake, about 40 drunk rednecks, all completely saturated in Pabst Blue Ribbon. And someone makes the mistake of asking me what I think of global warming. So I opened up my 17'' powerbook and right there on the foredeck went through the entire presentation I'm about give to you here today with them, all still drinking as I went along.

Let me tell you, these people were not primarily Democarats, and not typically aware about environmental concerns. But at the end, they realized the importance of the crisis ahead of us all. After it was over, one of them told me that he never thought about global warming, and said: [In thick "southern" accent] "Well, day-yam... I had no fucking idee-er it was so important..."

Hearing a former V.P of the U.S. drop an f-bomb using a hillbilly accent in front of a few thousand people was very amusing.

His presentation was an eye-opener for sure. He said that one of the main reasons he ran for President was that he believes that it will take policy to effect real change. He said that having someone in the White House aware of the issues and able to act quickly and decisively on them was, he felt, of paramount importance to the entire planet (the U.S. is repsonsible for some 35% of the world's greenhouse gasses, and by Gore's reckoning stands the best chance of showing how real change can make big differences).

There were a few sideways comments about the current administration, and the debt it owes to oil and pharmaceutical companies and the like. Everyone laughed. I felt sort of sad. Our President probably can't spell "global warming", much less think about way to act on it, and here's this guy who's pretty much been devoted to it since 1978 and he never got a shot to "save the world". That's a lofty goal, and I believed him when he said that he felt like he had a moral and social imperative to make life better.

When we got back to the cubes, my coworker was fuming mad. I thought he got bad news on the phone or something. When I asked, he launched into a tirade about how the silver-spoon C student we have for a president is such a sham. Here's this guy that can really engage you mentally and the guy we got instead is basically a high-functioning moron working at the behest of a few influencing businessmen.

But it was a good talk, and I'm glad I got to see him talk. I love the talks at work, and sometimes marvel at the quality of speakers we get. It really is one of the best perks we've got. Heh heh... Yahoo got Tom Cruise and his space-alien antics, we get Al Gore and some really meaty scientific data. Seems about as fair assessment as any of the differences between them and us... :-)

When I was walking in the parking lot at work I saw a bumper sticker on a car that said "Churches Eat Souls". I stopped and reflected on that for a moment, and realized that one little sticker said volumes about what blind faith can do to people. It made me think about my soul, and if I have one.

Of course, this was coming after my previous post about radical Islam, and an email thread started by Greg about patriotism, so it might have been my mood at the time which made me so introspective. But the way I saw it, and how I stopped afterwards, made a lasting impression on me.

Amazing what a bumper sticker can do sometimes.

Islam is an alien society to me. I have a hard time getting my head around how a large group of people can be so fundamentally religious that every part of their society -- including its leaders and its laws -- is based solely on religious ideas. I reckon that it takes either absolutely deep conviction or blind ignorance to throw everything you have (including your very life) to the will of some intangible notion of a god and its supposed will as interpreted by its devoted (yet mortal) followers. I'll never be that pious. I'm not sure if that's necessarily a good thing or not, but deep down I just can't get past the power grab that always seems to come from being the incarnate arbiter of god's will. Though at some level, you have to respect devotion of such magnitude. They have nothing if not a sense of devotion.

I figured that I knew as much as any Westerner about the what makes Islam seem so... angry. I know what the difference is between Sunnis and Shi'ites, and I know why they will never really get along with one another. (Shi'ites lost their true religious leader way back in 931 AD. Osama the Sunni is freshly pissed off about the outcome of the World War I and the demise of the Ottoman Empire.) What I didn't know was why pretty much all Muslim groups seem to be singularly united in that they are looking forward to the demise of Western Civilization.

That's doubtless a very blanket statement, and I feel a little unwilling to paint an entire religion (or, ah, culture) with such a fanitcal brush. Maybe it's Western media, but it's hard to escape the notion that there are large numbers of Muslims who would like to see Europe, and the U.S. in particular, gone.

So I found this story, Islam's Imperial Dreams, very engrossing reading.

Turns out that it's not just because we're heathens (well, that does play a part in it, I guess). It's because they're upset that they still don't have a caliph in Spain. They're upset that their conquer of Europe was stopped by the Franks. They're mad that their dream of a worldwide, theistic hegemony was finally put out of its ailing misery not long after Ferdinand got shot.

Put short: There's a fairly significantly vocal group of Muslims who want to rule the world, and we're standing in their way.

It's not religious conviction, desire for god's glory, land for their people, or any other altruism that's feeding this desire. It's greed. Pure, unabashed greed. These vocal few hate us because they want what we have, and want to kill us to get it. They want to do this under a religious banner of "Convert Or Die". And given that under their religion (which effectively means "in their society") one can be put to death for apostasy, I'm glad we're in their way; I'd be the first to die. I don't even really believe Mohammed existed (beyond a metaphor), much less that he was a prophet of any sort (you can't be a prophet without a god, right?).

I'll respect anyone right to practice a religion -- until I have to face the prospect of death because of it. That goes solidly against the grain of one of my most important convictions: Do whatever you want, just leave me out of it. So life as a subjugate in a fundamentalist Muslim world would not go well for me, and I'm happy that I live in a society that is somewhat more tolerant (though I suspect that this wouldn't be the case if some fundamentalist Christian types here in the U.S. had their way; these clowns are merely the other side of this same fanatical coin).

At any rate, part of me thought that they hated the Western world because we offended their religious sensibilities or were simply amoral in their eyes. Now I realize that I was giving them too much credit. They're merely hiding behind religion, and using it as a tool to further their greedy ambitions -- just like everyone else has been doing for thousands of years. That really doesn't elevate them much beyond the level of common thuggery. Or televangelism.

I kind of feel sad for the jihadists now. I mean, it's a land grab, nothing more.

I'm sure not every Muslim in the world is wringing their hands in anticipation of watching hordes of Westerners being put to the sword in the town square, but those guys burning American restaurants because of a few Danish cartoons haven't really got everything screwed down tight upstairs, if you get my drift. And I'm pretty sure that Ahmadinejad's wanting Israel to be "wiped off the map" isn't exactly a fringe notion. Iran elected the man president, after all, so he has to have popular support. Whether that's tacit approval for a plan to nuke Israel might be too much of a stretch, but I have to believe that the people knew who they were electing -- and what direction his geopolitical ideas ran towards.

So it could be a few vocal (and/or violent) bad apples spoiling the barrel. But it's interesting to know where they're coming from when they do stuff like blow up a bus or crash a couple planes into a few buildings or kill over 100 people because of an off-hand comment about Mohammed and women in bikinis. You have to try to get your head around to that way of thinking to even begin to understand anything as alien as dying and wanting to kill because of a cartoon or a disparaging remark.

I'm just having a lot of trouble coming to grips with people who have that much religious conviction. Their way of thinking is completely inconceivable to me.

For some reason I find stuff like this fascinating. That's a distribution of names from the last U.S. census. Looking at the surnames file, I can see that my last name is the 297^th most common surname in the country, with 0.037% of the population sharing my last name. I thought it was more common than that.

Varga is 6248^th (0.002%), Crawford is 132^nd (0.068%). Brown wins at 5^th place; 0.621% of the U.S. has that name. Lo isn't doing too badly at 3049^th place (0.004%). Suiter is way down there at 7179^th (0.002%), Walker is 25^th at 0.219%. That's more popular than I thought. Marion comes in at 1873 (0.007%). Probably not surprisingly, Kennedy is at 137 (0.067%).

I guess if I had to steal an identity, my new name would be "Brown".