This is a great excerpt from an interview with open-source entrepreneur Eric Sink, of SourceGear:

Welcome to the MSDN Library: A Weasel It seems like ancient history now, but during my AbiWord and RADish days I really wanted to get some outside capital funding. I was watching the dotcom bubble produce ridiculous valuations and I wanted my company to play, too. I pitched my business ideas to all kinds of investors. When that didn't work, I decided to hire someone to do the fundraising. This turned out to be a big mistake. I should have heeded the advice of Doug Colbeth. Prior to starting my own company, I worked as a programmer for Spyglass, where Doug was the CEO. Around the time of the Spyglass IPO, Doug humorously explained to us the hierarchy of the world's true scumbags: * At the top of the scumbag pile, as the lesser of four evils, are the lawyers. * Just below that you've got the people who cheat senior citizens with scams. * A bit further down, you find the pimps. * Finally, at the very bottom of the scumbag hierarchy, you find the investment bankers. Of course, not all investment bankers are bad eggs. Still, there is some irony in the fact that Doug's joke turned out to have a grain of truth in it in my experience. When I was in my "funded company" funk, a guy whose firm specialized in raising private placement capital for small companies contacted me. I ended up signing an investment banking agreement with this guy who promised to connect us to some investors who had a whole bunch of capital. As you can already guess, this guy's help gained us no investors. Lesson learned: The negative connotations of the word "middleman" are often deserved. Believe it or not, this tale gets even worse. I failed to have an attorney review this agreement, and it had a big problem in it. We ended up paying this guy $40,000 cash to cancel the agreement.

This was the article that first led me to Sam Sloan's site: All Unmarried Japanese Girls are Virgins. It came up in some random google search.

The most interesting, convoluted, compelling and wierd web site I've seen in a long long time is Sam Sloan's Home Page. I'll see if I can summarize:

Sam Sloan was born into a well-off family in Lynchburg, Virginia. His mother was a psychiatrist, and his father a prominent lawyer. Sam was gifted academically, and was an excellent chess player. He went on to become a professional mathematician and computer scientist. Sam traveled around the world, and apparently changed is name to "Mohhamed Ismail Sloan" for a while. He married frequently. He managed to enter Afghanastan the day after the 1978 coup, where he was eventually arrested. He escaped from jail, and somehow met one of his wives, Honzagool, who was from somewhere in the Hindu-Kush mountains. They had a child, Shamema Honagool Sloan. Apparently they decided to give her an Islamic upbringing. At some point they came to America and apparently lived in Virginia. Sam's father was prone to drink, and after a few he would often tell a story about $50 million worth of GM stock that had been in the family since 1913. Everyone liked that story, including a handful of lawyers and judges who were associates of Mr Sloan. They conspired, so the story says, to aquire this money. In conspiracy with these lawyers, a woman endeered herself to Mr Sloan, and married him shortly before his death. Immediately upon his death, they sued to acuire the $50 million, which apparently had never existed. Meanwhile, the Sloan family had employed a pair of radically conservative Falwell Baptists (the Roberts) to babysit Shamema. These Baptists fell in love with the child, and couldn't accept that she would be raised into the Muslim faith. They wanted to see her grow up Christian, and hoped that their influence would make that happen. As the litigation intensified over the vaporous $50 million, the Sloans decided to evade the problem by fleeing the country and traveling to Thailand. Sam's mother (Mrs Sloan) went with them. The already comlicated story becomes much more complicated at this point. Sloan's brother Chreighton, purportedly in conspiracy with the interested lawyers, obtains stewardship over Mrs Sloan by claiming she has Alzheimer's disease. Her bank accounts were frozen by the court. Suddenly the Roberts appeared in Thailand and began stalking the Sloan family. Presumably bankrolled by the lawyers' conspiracy, the Roberts succeeded in covertly removing Mrs Roberts from Thailand and transporting her to Virginia, where she was placed in a mental hospital of ill repute. She was overmedicated and unable to speak until her death. To escape the reach of the now well-funded Roberts, Sloan and his wife and children fled once again to the United Arab Emirates. The Roberts pursued them there, and eventually succeeded in kidnapping Shamema. They brought Shamena back to Virginia to give her a good Christian upbringing. The lawyers' consortium hoped that this would bring Sloan -- and his $50 million -- back into their jurisdiction. Sloan made every effort to recover his daughter, but the Virginia courts tolerated the Roberts' custody of his child. The matter is now predominantly under the control of the conspiring lawyers, who now sit as judges. Meanwhile, Shamema has grown up. Upon turning 18, she left Virginia and joined the marines. She restored communications with her father, while distancing herself from her captors of ten years. Shamema is now free from her abductors, but Sam Sloan seeks justice for those who conspired to abduct her. His current effort is to have them prosecuted for kidnapping in a New York jurisdiction, where Shamema was born. He fights an impossible battle against otherwise upstanding citizens shielded by untouchable corrupt public officials.

That's the best I've been able to figure out. Reading the site is a bit like knowing the man in person. Every link is another random bit that you might catch in conversation. I don't know whether any of it is true, but it sure makes a powerful story. On his site, Sloan also manages to weave in the FBI, the Pope, and an international chess conspiracy. The site is worth many hours of head-scratching amazement and amusement.

I'd forgotten all about this: a student newspaper at The University of York, the York Vision Online, quoted me in an article a couple years back, as the "creator of the anti-Bush website bushforpope.com". The article is here. Bushforpope.com is no longer up, of course, and I've long since let my ownership of that URL lapse. (It now belongs to a satirical page for something called the Cretin Coalition, a parody of the Christian Coalition. More power to them.) The author of the article, Gareth Walker, emailed me soliciting comments for an article he was going to write about online opposition to Bush in the U.S. So I commented. And then I never heard anything about the article. But now there it is. Circle of life, I guess. It's nice to be quoted correctly.

Finally the religion industry is speaking to me in a language I can understand...

NCBuy Weird News: Pastor Fighting Porn With Midgets - 2003-12-24: "Pastor Craig Gross -- who runs an anti-porn website called xxxchurch.com -- has just completed the world's first anti-porn TV commercial. The 30-second ad details the adventures of a midget named Eddie and the moral is 'porn stunts growth.' It's not politically correct but Gross says, these days, even the Lord has to use the 'Jackass' mentality to get His message across to the young men most susceptible to pornography addiction. He insists he asked the midget for his input before filming and the midget said he had done more degrading things."

This page has an interesting collection of articles on God and neuroscience:

God and the Brain: "A group of neuroscientists at the University of California at San Diego has identified a region of the human brain that appears to be linked to thoughts of spiritual matters and prayer. Their findings tentatively suggest that we as a species are genetically programmed to believe in God. The researchers came upon these cerebral revelations in the course of studying the brain patterns of certain people with epilepsy. Epileptics who suffer a particular type of seizure are often intensely religious, and are known to report an unusual number of spiritually-oriented visions and obsessions. Measurements of electrical activity in the brains of test subjects indicated a specific neural center in the temporal lobe that flared up at times when the subjects thought about God. This same area was also a common focal point overloaded with electrical discharges during their epileptic seizures. Could this heretofore unidentified part of the brain -- nicknamed the 'God module' -- actually be some sort of physiological seat of religious belief? The scientists who discovered it believe it might be. They have performed a further study comparing epileptic subjects with different groups of non-epileptics -- a random group of average people, as well as individuals who characterized themselves as extremely religious. The electrical brain activity of the subjects was recorded while they were shown a series of words, and the God module zones of the epileptics and the religious group exhibited similar responses to words involving God and faith. No word yet on whether the brains of atheists and agnostics might flatline the monitors, but the parallel results among the strong believers are considered impressive. 'There may be dedicated neural machinery in the temporal lobes concerned with religion,' the research team announced at a conference for the Society for Neuroscience. 'This may have evolved to impose order and stability on society.'"

Some current poll numbers on gay marriage:

NYT: Strong Support Is Found for Ban on Gay Marriage: "Attitudes on the subject seem to be inextricably linked to how people view marriage itself. For a majority of Americans — 53 percent — marriage is largely a religious matter. Seventy-one percent of those people oppose gay marriage. Similarly, 33 percent of Americans say marriage is largely a legal matter and a majority of those people — 55 percent — say they support gay marriage. "The most positive feelings toward gay people were registered among respondents under 30, and among those who knew gay people. "The nationwide poll found that 55 percent of Americans favored an amendment to the constitution that would allow marriage only between a man and a woman, while 40 percent opposed the idea."

So let me get this straight: those who don't think marriage is a legal matter are the biggest supporters of having the law deny gay marriage... Apparently they also believe that religion is not a private, personal matter but a public one, worthy of a Constitutional amendment. [Sigh] The arguments have all been hashed to death; the anti-gay position is obviously vaporous, but no one cares. On the other side:

CNN.com: Poll: Young not in step with 30-plus crowd: "While a majority of younger Americans -- 53 percent -- support same-sex marriages that are recognized with equal rights under the law, 32 percent of the older group backed such a concept."

So the youth generally support gay marriage. I wonder whether a particular tolerance gained in youth -- in this case towards homosexuals and their right to marry -- is easily lost later in life. I tend to think it isn't. Age can reinforce a prejudice but I don't think it so often reverses the specific sympathies of youth. A Constutional amendment, were it to pass (which it wouldn't), would in effect be a slap in the face of the youth. It would be a doomed amendment, one which the next generation would surely want to repeal in thirty years or so. It would be just a stupid clod of mud on the Constitution, and a vast waste of government effort. Another thing that troubles me with suchy petty Constitutional meddling: if one day 80% of Americans happened to be evangelical Christian, or Jewish, or Atheist, or Libertine, or Gay, the Constitution, as it is today, would still make sense. If, perhaps due to some mysterious virus, almost everyone turned homosexual, we would have to have gay families raising families. The Constitution wouldn't make sense. It would be broken. Of course nobody these days is compelled by reductio ad absurdum, because nobody gives a shit about things making logical sense. One last thing: it is interesting to me that Christians today are aligning themselves with Muslims and other groups to oppose gay marriage and adoption by gay couples. They say, "We approve of this immigrant family of Islamic fundamentalists; let them have all the children they want. But you gay Americans had better not come near any children!" Which of those two groups is likely to cause more trouble in the long-run? Fundamentalists or homosexuals...?