Picked this up from Digg, Leaky Cauldron is running the highlights of a recent Q&A with JK Rowling on that series of hers.

Among the usual “who-marries-who” and “what-ifs”, Rowling answered a thoughtful question:
“Did Dumbledore, who believed in the prevailing power of love, ever fall in love himself?” by outing him as gay and revealling that he had at one point been in love with the man who would become his nemesis.

In fact, recently I was in a script read through for the sixth film, and they had Dumbledore saying a line to Harry early in the script saying I knew a girl once, whose hair… [laughter]. I had to write a little note in the margin and slide it along to the scriptwriter, “Dumbledore’s gay!”

Interestingly, she got an ovation from the audience. But I doubt this will go down well with the fundies who’ve already accused her of everything this side of murder. She didn’t shed too much light when asked exactly how much Dumbledore’s brother Aberforth liked goats (come to think of it, what a mental family).

Some may think she’s been reading too much fanfic or that she’s just looking for free publicity, but personally I think it gives you another reason to go through the books again and see if you can pick up anything you missed before :). Poor McGonagall…

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Today’s Star had this bit about the (much belated) police crackdown following the recent bus fiasco:

Konsortium Express Penang manager Albert Chew said his company was having problems getting replacement drivers after 20 of its 140 drivers went missing after Ops Bersih started on Aug 22.

…

A Gunung Raya Express ticketing officer Abadi Abdul Kadir said 30% of its drivers were affected and he anticipated that between 60% and 70% of bus commuters wanting to balik kampung this Hari Raya would be affected.

I’d bet most of you, especially those who studied in uni, would find the names of those companies familiar (I know I do!!) - just think how lucky you are to be alive people. Thank goodness I never came back that often…

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What is it about religion that makes it seem impervious to scrutiny? In many conflicts in the world today: Palestine/Israel, Ireland, Thailand, Iraq, Pakistan, Darfur, etc, a lot of awareness is raised of the violation of civil rights, women’s rights and needless deaths - but you’ll hardly ever catch people criticizing religion. And while none of these conflicts stem wholly from religion alone, when you tiptoe around it or dismiss it as “personal beliefs” or “sensitive” you’re ignoring the elephant in the room.

Take Elizabeth Wong’s post (and I wanna make clear I love her blog) on the Lina Joy case :

To kill two birds with one stone is to have the majority view advocate for jurisdiction be placed in the realm the Syariah court, and the dissenting view aim at satisfying the detractors.

This is, after all, an election year.
…
There were no winners on Wednesday morning, unless we include the Islamophobes who gained an additional dart or two.

Many are saying the Lina Joy decision is a violation of civil rights, which guarantees freedom of religion. And it is, indeed. But few are pointing out that the verdict was hardly political, or what the verdict means. The two Muslim judges voted to reject her appeal, with the non-Muslim judge the sole dissenter. There were hundreds of youths outside the courtroom shouting Allah-o-Akhbar (God is great). The motivation behind the decision isn’t rocket science.

And the reason the Lina verdict is devastating is not just because she is denied freedom of religion - indeed, I think that it is obvious even to the judges that you can’t control what people think or feel - it is because that to officially deconvert, she will have to go through the Syariah court. Islam carries heavy penalties for apostates. In more fundamentalist countries, this means death or imprisonment; in Malaysia it means a jail term or “rehabilitation”.

But because religion is “sensitive” and a “personal choice”, you’ll be hard pressed to find anyone willing to point out that the root of the problem is how Islam handles apostasy. And so time and time again we get trampled by the elephant in the room.

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You may know I hate spam. The practice of selling emails is very common, and while definitely unethical, the number of verdicts actually being passed are few and far between - what more in Malaysia!

Which is why this auction from Lelong.com is disgusting:

Here are few smart reasons to purchase the Email Marketing CD from us today:

1. Our database is of over 50,000 Malaysian emails and growing daily!!!
2. You can run your own email marketing campaign - as frequent as you can - change your email content for different products / services - just relax, the software will send email automatically when setting is done - manual included in this CD
3. Our email list - 50, 000 active email list, user check their email daily - Malaysian email (email from all over Malaysia) - targetted group: Managing Director, General Manager, CEO, Executive…
4. Our bulk mail sender software - delivers emails at 50 times faster than the conventional SMTP server - filters out duplicate & invalid email - generates a report of successful delivery & undelivered mail - supports HTML format email
5. Pricing - RM399 per CD - you are allowed to resell to gain back your RM399 - we will never know if 2 or 3 or even 10 person sharing to buy this RM399 CD for 10 person use
6. SPECIAL BONUS: Additional 10, 000 email is giving away for FREE!!! for the order made within 7 days from today!

Popularity: 33% [?]

On April 20th Pope Benedict XVI reversed an 800-year old Catholic tradition: the teaching of limbo.

Limbo is a place “between Heaven and Hell” and comes in two flavours: Patriach class, for the good people who died before Jesus’ Ressurection; and Child class, for infants and people who were mentally unhealthy. According to wiki: .

Saint Thomas Aquinas described the limbo of children as an eternal state of natural joy, untempered by any sense of loss at how much greater their joy might have been had they been baptized.

So it’s a place of “natural” happiness, just less happy than they could have been.

Limbo is or was basically an ad hoc solution for the question of how God could still be “good” if he sent babies to burn, because of their original sin. The Catholic News Service (CNS) reports:

“People find it increasingly difficult to accept that God is just and merciful if he excludes infants, who have no personal sins, from eternal happiness…Parents in particular can experience grief and feelings of guilt when they doubt their unbaptized children are with God.”

Saint Augustine taught in the 5th century that infants who died unbaptized would go to hell, it was only in the 13th century that the concept of limbo took hold.

The CNS report begins:

After several years of study, the Vatican’s International Theological Commission said there are good reasons to hope that babies who die without being baptized go to heaven.

This is how it ends (emphases added):

“Rather, there are reasons to hope that God will save these infants precisely because it was not possible to do for them that what would have been most desirable — to baptize them in the faith of the church and incorporate them visibly into the body of Christ,” it said.

The commission said hopefulness was not the same as certainty about the destiny of such infants.

“It must be clearly acknowledged that the church does not have sure knowledge about the salvation of unbaptized infants who die,” it said.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, was president of the commission and head of the doctrinal congregation when the commission began studying the question of limbo in a systematic way in 2004.

Questions:

1. How do you “study” limbo “in a systematic way“, over “years“?
2. Isn’t the Pope supposed to be the “bishop of Rome”, the “Vicar of Christ”, “Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church”, and a whole lot of other things? Doesn’t he have a direct line to God?

The whole thing about “hope” is irritating. Since when did “hope” become a synonym for “I don’t know”? I thought the church was supposed to resolve doctrinal matters, not “hope” that it’s right.

And as Slate magazine asks: What happened to all the babies who used to be in limbo?

Oh for all you Protestants out there, don’t get smug: no concrete answers there either - or differing ones anyway, depending on whether you subscribe to Calvinism (God knows whether the babies would have made the choice to believe or not) or Arminianism (Babies go to heaven - in which case the most merciful thing a parent could do is to kill their children). How you define “original sin” also counts.

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Spain is NOT the place to be right now if you’re the typical Internet user.

A drastic move, really, since as pointed out here, you could simply block P2P traffic.

Levying duty on storage media is an alternative often brought up to compensate the music and movie industries. I’m personally against it. The really big losers from piracy right now are the smaller artistes or gaming companies. There’s simply no way to track who’s burning what, making it impossible to reimburse the copyright owner.

Popularity: 23% [?]

I just happened to er, stumble across the Pirate Bay today and they've merged their pirate ship with a Phoenix:

For all the internet-newbies out there, TPB is one of the biggest BitTorrent sites, well-known for thumbing their noses at legal threats made against them. They took advantage of the fact that they were based in Sweden, where US copyright laws don't apply.

The US movie moguls put pressure on the Swedish government however, and TPB's offices got raided recently. Rather than go the way of Napster however, they simply moved to the Netherlands and continued their operations. From their blog:

The big plan is to spread the site on different locations all over the world, so it will be faster and harder to take down. People and companies from various countries have already offered servers, bandwidth and money. 

You can read more about what happened here. The development of intellectual copyright is and interesting debate but I don't have the time to expound on it right now.

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