Why Secret Societies are kept secret

Here is a really interesting insight about religion and conspiracy theories I found (I think) on Digg:

"However they deck it out with the rhetoric of mystery and wonder, theirs is a universe of blind force," Booth writes, and you don't have to believe in Isis and the philosopher's stone to see his point. Most people will still choose to believe in something "more," whether it's the ninefold path of the Buddha or the pillars of Islam or pyramid power. Chances are that whatever they choose will sound ridiculous to anyone who doesn't also believe. That's something religion has always had in common with sex: If you're not into it, it looks silly. Which explains why all the really clever people do it behind closed doors."

Feyzi Baban’s (2006), “Living with Difference: Cosmopolitanism, Modernity, and Political Community"

Here are some quotes and corresponding footnotes I have copied and pasted from Feyzi Baban’s (2006), “Living with Difference: Cosmopolitanism, Modernity, and PoliticalCommunity,” Studies in Political Economy 77 (spring): pp. 107-128.

cosmopolitan thinking encourages us to rethink how sameness and difference is dealt with in a highly complex globalized world.5 In a series of well articulated books and articles, Held and Archibugi have been defining the blueprint for a world polity that needs to be reimagined outside the scope of state sovereignty.⁶

6. D. Archibugi and D. Held, Cosmopolitan Democracy: An Agenda for a New World Order (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995); D. Archibugi and D. Held, (eds.), Re-imagining Political Community: Studies in Cosmopolitan Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998); D. Held, Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); D. Held, Globalization-anti-globalization (Cambridge: Polity, 2002); D. Archibugi, (ed.), Debating Cosmopolitics (London: Verso, 2003).

Central to these and other works explaining the “cosmopolitan condition” is the need to redefine world politics that cannot be managed by states alone. Held argues that, as a result of the growing number of complex global issues. such as regulation of trade, poverty, and the environment, we can no longer sustain the assumption that nations can control their own destinies alone. He then asserts that, as a result, we either leave our destiny at the hands of the market or try to create new forms of democracy, regulation, and accountability to subject global forces to effective political control.⁷

7. M. Guibernau, “Globalization, Cosmopolitanism, and Democracy: An Interview with David Held,” Constellations 8/4 (2001), pp. 427–41.

Proponents of cosmopolitan theory remind us that we need to reimagine a political community that is not bounded by borders, one that would include all human beings as its members and adopt democracy as a cosmopolitan ideal implemented on a global level.⁸

8. D. Held, “Globalization and Cosmopolitan Democracy,” Peace Review 9/3 (1997), pp. 309–14.

This cosmopolitan democratic ideal requires a paradigm shift in international relations and should base itself not on international law, but on cosmopolitan law that “would guarantee the fundamental rights of every individual human being whether or not such rights were respected by their ‘own’ nation-states.”⁹

9. R. Fine and R. Cohen, “Four Cosmopolitanism Moments,” Conceiving Cosmopolitanism, (eds.), S. Vertovec and R. Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 137–62.

This shift entails removing nation-states from their privileged status in international politics and extends the concept of sovereignty to individuals who would be the legitimate agents of the international domain.¹⁰

10. D. Archibugi, “Principles of Cosmopolitan Democracy,” Re-imagining Political Community, (eds.), D. Archibugi, D. Held, and M. Kohler (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 198–230.

Laying the groundwork for democratic global order is one of the principal objectives of cosmopolitan theorizing.(110)

...cosmopolitanism should be imagined and read within the context of margins, local experiences, and cultures.(109)

Fluxbox clock format

In fluxbox on Slamd64, the clock format commands which suit my liking are as follows:

%A %d %B %Y @ %-I:%M:%S %p

e17 clock module

I am configuring e17 right now and the strftime(3) command for the clock is "%r"

open source text editors

In #e on FreeNode, rasterman suggests using jed as a text editor for coding C++. mekius suggests I use Scite or geany.

"etksm"

I want to code an application similar to the gnome-system monitor which is based on EFL rather than Gnome libraries. This system monitor will be called etksm which stands for ETK System Monitor. etksm will consume no processor resources when idle similar to the Windows Task Manager (unlike its ugly gnome counterpart which consumes 5-15% CPU usage when just sitting idly). There will be a tab which prints detailed information about the PC’s hardware specifications, similar to the way in CPUz for win32 prints all hardware information, including fan speeds. One day I will have the ability to code this application.

KDE 4 and Gutsy

Here is an excellent guide to installing KDE 4 onto Gutsy which I will use later. I can't use that guide now because I am on campus.

Note to self: Ubuntu audio

This is just a quick self reminder. When I get home I must try turning on the bass on the audio mixer, what ever app that is on Gutsy.

Warsow Main Menu Music

I want to listen to the main menu music for the open source, quake 2 based game, warsow, According to the intructions at this forum post, I must locate this file in the directory that warsow is installed in:

data0.pk3 (like rar)/sounds/music/menu1.ogg

So Redf1sh on FreeNode suggested I try these 3 commands:

locate warsow
which warsow
cd /; find . | grep warsow