Penny Hero (dot) Net

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The Corvallist recently wrote about Nathanael Blake’s recent anti-islam piece that yesterday incited peaceful protest by Muslim students on campus. The Corvallist’s blog post is a much more serious criticism than mine is, but I did write about it too in my blogspot blog. I really want to cross-post it here, but I know how annoying that is to some people. So i’m just going to link to that post: (linky)

Bottom line is that I think Blake is like a terrorist of the pen, and while I’m NOT calling for censorship in the barometer, I do wish they’d have a higher level of intelligence and critical thinking standards for their staff.

I’m not sure if Nathanael Blake is guilty of hijacking a religion to hurt people, but he IS guilty of hijacking a pen (or an apple computer in Snell Hall) to instill anger and hate. Although the article I’m writing about is almost a month old, the Corvallist drew my attention to this and I’m not going to just sit still and say nothing.

Because I’m supposed to be studying, I’m mostly just doing link-plugging here, but there is no way that I can just say nothing. The Corvallist recently wrote about Nathanael Blake’s recent anti-islam piece that yesterday incited peaceful protest by Muslim students on campus. (Go read the Corvallist’s blog post. It’s much more informative and analytical than mine. quote: “Maybe Blake should start by picking up a history textbook. Maybe then he would learn that his statement “Christianity grew on the blood of its martyrs; Islam grew on the blood of its enemies,” is truly laughable. Maybe he hasn’t heard about the Crusades? Or maybe he is blinded by the rose-colored glasses of his own religion, which really makes him closer to the Muslim extremists than to peaceful folks in any religion.”)

I’ve read all of this and of course I’m pissed beyond belief. Nathanael Blake has a ginormous reputation for having the gall to take very non-peaceful and very anger-inciting positions on many issues. Occaisionally, his view is sound and keeps me from taking an extreme liberal side of things. I do sometimes (secretly) enjoy his articles because it reminds me that my viewpoint isn’t the only one on campus. However, most of the time he misinterprets or re-interprets facts and information apparently just to add to the sensationalism of his argument. I’m convinced he creates these columns with the sole purpose of pissing people off, and not with any redeeming motivation like solving any kind of problem or helping people to think more critically about world issues.

This article on islam is exactly the case. It does NOT help people see Islam in a fair light and it contributes to the already huge problem in this country of mistrusting people from the middle east. It looks like he maybe googled for Koran verses frequently cited as in support of violence against women and violence against others and went no further into the book. Instead of writing about how perhaps some of these terrorists are misinterpreting the core values of their religion with the lines he quotes, his article drops a bomb into a race-hate situation that has always been very unstable in the US since 9-11.

Not to suggest that Blake is ever going to be read extensively by many people outside of this little college community… but I’d say he represents what a lot of hate-filled ill-informed christians people really want to believe about their place in the world in relation to Islam.

I am angry at the barometer for being so irresponsible and letting one of their columnists be this racist and ignorant about the world’s largest religion. He’s a victim of his own ignorance if he thinks that Christianity is built on peace and martyrdom.

I am not calling for censorship, but I do wish that the barometer would have a higher standard of intelligence on their staff and when someone wants to post a column like this, that they do it responsibly and NOT attempt to encourage hate for a people who are already hated enough in this country.

Last night (this morning?) around 3:30am, I was woken up by this insane thunder-like noise. Only it didn’t sound like thunder at all… it sounded like an explosion. It lasted long enough to have me frozen to my bed, looking around. I had vague dreamy memories of a bright flash and the sense that the noise had been happening for a while…

My roommates and I all got up because we all were really freaked out. Marci said she looked out the window and had seen that it was weird and foggy, which is odd for a lightning storm, and she said that when she openned the window, the sustained sound of the “thunder” was unbearable and hurt her ears. She had to cover them. She also said that the wind suddenly picked up intense speed.

Immediately after the noise, the rain came down in absolute buckets! I’ve never seen a downpour that intense before, and I used to live in Hawaii where sometimes you had to pull off the side of the road because you couldn’t see anything in front of the windshield. This was insane heavy rain.

I was totally scared, and still half asleep. My other roomie Cody made some joke about aliens and I actually screamed out loud. It was pretty stupid.

Anyway, when I’d recovered some of my sanity, and after Cody said that he’d seen two bright flashes a few minutes apart just before the explosion noise, I started thinking about what it could be.

I checked online at Lj_Oregonstate to see if anyone else saw it in other parts of corvallis, and yes! People saw it and heard it all over town. I’m on the south end of campus, and people saw and heard the same intense flashes and explosion sounds as far away as Shari’s about a 5 minute drive away and as far north as Witham Hill! This wasn’t fucking lightning. The guy at Shari’s said that it seemed like a flash-bulb went off, and shari’s is a well-lighted family restaurant, which would mean it was more intensely bright than a regular lightning strike… especially since it woke people up all over town.

Anyway, so I came up with this theory: What if it was a mid-air meteor burst? I started googling.

Stories like this one from Komo News describes similar events that were suspected meteor explosions in 2003 in the Seattle area. Then there’s this one from Alaska in 2000 and this one in New Zealand from ‘99 .

none of these describe the intense rain that we saw though… the rain really was just what made me think that this might be a meteor explosion because of the “red rain” phenomenon that some people think is triggered by exploding meteors (like this one in India where they found the red rain was a large concentration of fungal spores in 2001) and because the X-Files used to have episodes where colored rain was explained by meteor activity rather than alien activity (and Mulder was never completely convinced of course). It shows that my leap to a “meteor explosion” is based on pop-culture myths about unknown phenomenon (our first reaction was ALIENS!! afterall), but still… could end up being the truth, right?

Anyway, I have no idea how completely crazy any of this is. I just think it would be exciting to discover that it really was a mid-air meteor explosion or something cool like that. It totally wasn’t lightning. no fucking way. I hope something gets revealed about this.

Local peeps:

Did anyone here get woken up by some odd thunder and lightning…? like, a flash as if it was going off inside your own room, and then these ear-piercing explosion sounding thunder?

Happened around 3:30am as far as I can tell. my whole house woke up and we were pretty scared.

it didn’t sound/feel/seem like normal lightning/thunder….

edit: I was thinking this morning, and came up with a theory: I’m starting to think maybe it was a tiny meteor exploding in the atmosphere above corvallis. It’d be fucking rad if that was it. It totally wasn’t lightning.

The rain/wind behaved really really violently right after the noise… and my other roomie said she saw a weird fog… atmospheric stuff like that could be explained by an explosion in the atmosphere… so… maybe it was an air-bomb, or maybe it was space junk!

Also wrote a longer entry here.