How Christian of you to help the poor

This is when I want to go ballistic. The Worldview Times says:

Environmental alarmism is being exploited to chip away at national sovereignty. The latest threat to American liberties may be found in the innocuous sounding Copenhagen Climate Treaty, which will be discussed at the United Nations climate-change conference in mid-December. The alert was sounded on the treaty in a talk given by British commentator Lord Christopher Monckton at Bethel College in St. Paul, Minn., on Oct. 14. Video of the talk has become an Internet sensation.

The treaty's text is not yet finalized but its principles are aimed at regulating all economic activity in the name of climate security, with a side effect that billions of dollars would be transferred from productive countries to the unproductive.

Because it's all their fault that their land was raped by the good and white Christian people and then they get to pay for our transformation of the climate. Repulsive. How's the compassion working over there? Is there any wonder that sane people think that Christianity is a blanket for economically criminal people? As if creationism weren't bad enough they have to be ecologically retarded, invested in the exploitation of "unproductive" countries and their people, and addicted to the growth economy which makes everyone ecocidal and pro-slavery.

Way to love your neighbors guys. Don't forget: Jesus loves you.

Freshwater Redux

Quite a while back I posted some stuff about an Ohio "science" teacher who was teaching creationism and allegedly abusing students with a Tesla coil. In my original post I said he is worse than the most diehard Slayer fan. They just mutilate themselves (pictures at right). This guy thinks it's a holy duty to brand students with crosses. As someone with tattoos and has had multiple piercings, I am not opposed to marking myself. But it's me. Don't scar others. Didn't you hear that bit about doing unto others in your Bible? Oh yeah. God's bidding and all that.

Before anyone gets on me about using Freshwater as an "example" let me say something. I think he has other issues at play here. Maybe even pathologies. I can't way what they are because I don't know him and haven't looked at a professional psychological evaluation. However, he was pretty functional - pathologies or no - and he made bad choices. Really bad choices. Let's just face that the motivator here was his religion. It is pretty clear that the viral nature of his religion mandated that he spread it and that he took that to heart.

There is way too much to go into at this point. But I invite you all to read about the extraordinary and embarrassing lengths John Freshwater has gone to in order to defend himself. The Panda's Thumb has an incredible group of posts available HERE. Suffice it to say, he is losing ground and credibility.

Nature reviews The Greatest Show on Earth

I've just gotten my copy Dawkins' new book, The Greatest Show on Earth and haven't gotten more than two chapters in. But I just thought I'd fan the flames for good reads by posting Lawrence Hursts' review in Nature (also reviews Carl Zimmer's new book).

Advertising in the matrix

I hate the growth economy. Hate it.

There. I've said it. I think it disrupts happiness, destroys communities, and demolishes ecosystems. And I hate a lot of the things associated with it including all of the niche advertising and the weird shadow techno-bureaucracy that's been built up around it on the internet.

While a lot of people might not despise the cancerous globalized economy as much as I do, they don't want it tracking their every move. The New York Times reports:

ABOUT two-thirds of Americans object to online tracking by advertisers — and that number rises once they learn the different ways marketers are following their online movements, according to a new survey from professors at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Berkeley.

The professors say they believe the study, scheduled for release on Wednesday, is the first independent, nationally representative telephone survey on behavioral advertising.

The topic may be technical, but it has become a hot political issue. Privacy advocates are telling Congress and the Federal Trade Commission that tracking of online activities by Web sites and advertisers has gone too far, and the lawmakers seem to be listening. Representative Rick Boucher, Democrat of Virginia, wrote in an article for The Hill last week that he planned to introduce privacy legislation. And David Vladeck, head of consumer protection for the F.T.C., has signaled that he will examine data privacy issues closely.

Good. I am tired of having corporate interests governing us. If we are a nation of individuals, then let us make up our own minds about things instead of being narrowed and winnowed by technocrats into becoming ever more mindless consumers of ever more stuff. We need to recover from our "affluenza," not have the fever kicked higher.

I find it so odd that there are people who will argue about this as an arm of the alleged free market - that this will give people more of what they want. Look behind the curtain and you find a wizard of command economies controlling you. It's a consumerist Big Brother. It's not the government. It's worse. It's a thing that tells you that it fulfills your desires with flash and pizazz and black top and plastic and shiny gold and lots and lots of beautiful sounds. And all of it leads you straight away from your neighbor, your family, good soil, clean water, and fresh air. It's as if the simple fulfilling of immediate desires with material objects is going to satisfy our hopes, our social commitments, or our desire for meaning. In this most Christian of nations (as some wish us to believe) we are crammed full of more unnecessary garbage in a socially Darwinian rat race that pits us all against one another.

Will the FCC actually work for us or will they work for the corporate matrix? Does the matrix already have them? [Is that link just me catering advertising to myself?] I'll take the red pill please.

Or does the matrix have me anyway?