Ongoing Process

I’m getting far too much amusement out of this.  OKCupid! has this thing where you answer an endless series of questions and it computes them and slowly adds "personality awards" to your profile.  I keep answering more questions and refreshing my profile to see if I’ve gotten any new ones.  It seems to be reasonably accurate.  So far, I have been awarded:

Less Aggressive, Less Cocky, More Compassionate, More Dorky, Less Energetic, Less Giving, More Introverted, More Kinky, More Literary, More Desiring of Love, Less Old-Fashioned, Less Optimistic, More Spiritual, Less Spontaneous, Less Political

I particularly love the "More Introverted" icon. 

It’s 3 degrees outside.  Too cold! 

There was a boy
A very strange enchanted boy
They say he wandered very far, very far
Over land and sea
A little shy and sad of eye
But very wise was he

And then one day
A magic day he passed my way
And while we spoke of many things
Fools and kings
This he said to me
"The greatest thing you’ll ever learn
Is just to love and be loved in return"

- Nature Boy by eden ahbez

There is a troubling resolution that passed the house and is on its way to the senate.  H.R. 1955, the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007, is aimed at squashing internal "terrorism".  Among other things, it declares the following to be so:

"VIOLENT RADICALIZATION- The term ‘violent radicalization’ means the process of adopting or promoting an extremist belief system for the purpose of facilitating ideologically based violence to advance political, religious, or social change."

Note that one need not actually engage in violence, it is terrorism to simply hold a belief that someone could call violent. Further, though the words violent and violence appear repeatedly throughout the bill, they are never defined.  Which means the Department of Homeland Security gets to decide what constitutes "violence".

This is how democracy ends.