Sunday, November 13, 2022
Megaprojects And The Curse of Babel
Saturday, November 5, 2022
You Won't Get To Mars That Way
- "Elon Musk, Welfare King!" - Reason Magazine, March 2021
- "After Elon Musk criticized Bernie Sanders' brand of socialism, Sanders took him to task for taking billions of dollars in government support" - Business Insider, August 2020
- "'Total Hypocrisy': Elon Musk Rebuked for Hit on EV Subsidies After Building Empire With Billions in Taxpayer Funds" - Common Dreams, December 2021
- "Elon Musk's Growing Empire Is Fueled by $4.9 Billion in Government Subsidies" - Los Angeles Times, May 2015
Wednesday, November 2, 2022
Focus On The Family Continues to Send Spam Email To People Who Don't Want It
I have to wonder how or why Google blithely gave my email address to people with whom I want no contact. Why, for instance, have they given my email address to Focus on the Family, a right-wing white supremacist arm of the American evangelical church? From the screenshot below, one can plainly see that FOTF does not care about religion per se, nor about the worship and obedience to Christ, but only about helping the Rethuglican Party during this year's midterm elections.
Let me "speak the truth in love" as Ephesians 4 says - but I must warn FOTF that my love is tough love. You thugs supported the presidency of Donald Trump. You are utterly corrupt religious parasites and you have no business trying to tell me how to vote. Don't call me; I'll call you if I ever want to hear from you. But here's a hint - you probably shouldn't waste time hanging around your phone.
Monday, October 31, 2022
Why Is Focus On The Family Sending Spam Email To People Who Don't Want It?
Sunday, October 30, 2022
An Unsurprising Surprise (Coping With Nasty Weather)
- First, have the right world-view. According to the world-view which I hold, we live in a moral universe ruled by a righteous Creator who has promised that the soul that sins shall die (Ezekiel 18:4) , that everyone who exalts himself will be humbled (Matthew 23:12), that the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23), that whatever a man sows, this he will also reap (Galatians 6:7), that those who make themselves great by destroying or oppressing their fellow human beings will themselves ultimately be destroyed (James 5:1-6). This is why I am confident that those who violently push white supremacy will ultimately fail. Even now, I see the outworkings of damnation propagating through these people. Some signs of this propagation I cannot reveal now - although those who read sociological analyses of American society can spot the trends. Even secular sociologists and economists have lately noticed how those who pursue certain goals are frequently destroyed by the very means they use to pursue those goals.
- Second, focus on building your own internal power so that you may reduce your dependence on the dominant society. I am thinking of a passage from Recovering Nonviolent History by Maciej Bartkowski. (Disclaimer: I really like Dr. Bartkowski's book, but I don't anymore like the organization which Dr. Bartkowski belongs to, namely, the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict. If you want to know why, please check out some of the links in the sidebar of this blog.) Page 18 of his book contains the following quote: "...the guilt of falling into the predatory hands of [oppressors] lay in the oppressed society, and, thus, the solution and liberation need to come from that society transformed through its work, education, and civility. Victims and the seemingly disempowered are thus their own liberators as long as they pursue self-organization, self-attainment, and development of their communities."
- Third, and most important, maintain nonviolent discipline. The filthiness of the Right has been made abundantly plain over the last several years. This filthiness has become a powerful liability to them. In order to remove this handicap, they have tried to claim that both they and their intended victims are filthy. Do not give them any help in their attempt to blame both sides for a conflict which they themselves started. By all means, vote. However, no matter what happens afterward, do not answer the violence of the Right with your own violence. Beware of engaging in protest marches, as these can be easily infiltrated by violent agents provocateurs from the Right. Do not give these people any opening for casting blame on you. Please do me a favor and read the posts I wrote on strategic nonviolent resistance under the heading "From Dictatorship to Democracy."
Tuesday, October 25, 2022
A Clarifying of Stance, Part 2
Saturday, October 22, 2022
The Woodcutter's Dull Ax
Sunday, October 9, 2022
Man, You Got To Figure It Out Yo'self
Saturday, October 1, 2022
The Exports of Grandma's House
Thursday, September 22, 2022
A Mistake In The Making
Sunday, September 18, 2022
Equity That Can't Be Rescued
It has been now over six and a half months since the start of Russia's attempted seizure of Ukraine, a seizure which Russian president Vladimir Putin schizophrenically described as "a special military operation to remove Nazis." During these past months it has been Russia which has been revealed to be the fascist thug and it has been Ukraine which has been revealed to be the nation of decency occupying the moral high ground. It has also been revealed that the "mighty" Russian military can be and is in fact being torn to pieces by its intended victims.
Saturday, September 10, 2022
Gantry Collapse
Gantry (noun): "...an overhead bridge-like structure supporting equipment such as a crane, signals, or cameras." - Wikipedia.
Gantry (as in Elmer Gantry): the surname of the protagonist in Elmer Gantry, a satirical novel by Sinclair Lewis concerning a Methodist minister of the American Midwest during the 1920's.
- That we should believe in a god who has decreed that one group of people should rule and dominate the world, subjugating and/or dispossessing all other nations on earth because the favored nation is supposedly pure while all the rest of us are defective.
- That we should believe that when this supposedly favored nation proves by its deeds that it is no more righteous, no more pure, no better than any of the rest of us, it should receive all of the forgiving grace of its supposed "jesus" who dispenses that grace in the form of "Mulligans" for bad behavior (see this also) which serve much the same function as the indulgences which the Catholic Church used to dispense to wealthy penitents.
- That we should believe that the god whom the missionaries of the supposedly favored nation preach has decreed that all the rest of us should be punished forever for our imperfections, whether those perfections are real or only imagined by the members of the favored nation, and that this punishment should consist of enslavement and extermination of us by the members of the favored nation. No grace, no "mulligans" for us! Rather, zero-tolerance, three-strikes, let's-build-a-wall, etc.
- That it is supposedly the "Christian" duty of us who are not of the favored people to submit to such a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose god and his missionaries, and that we should not complain about or attempt to resist our lot in life.
Monday, September 5, 2022
Scapegoat Sins and Denial
Once again, I have a post in the works, but do not have time to finish it. So today's post will be short. This post concerns my observations of the attempts by the American White Right to use religion - specifically Christianity - as a tool of earthly political and economic domination. As one might guess, I think those attempts will ultimately fail, for they are built on an unsustainable foundation. The un-Scriptural elements of that foundation have been the following assumptions:
- That God has chosen religious white America from the foundation of the world to be the absolute masters of the world.
- That God has therefore given these holders of white power and white supremacy the right to murder and enslave all the rest of us because supposedly we are morally defective while the white supremacists are supposedly morally superior to all the rest of us.
- That the proof of this moral superiority is that religious white America upholds Biblical morality and has certain intellectual beliefs about Jesus while the rest of us do not.
- That the sole sum and substance of Biblical morality consists of being monogamous and heterosexual, and that God is absolutely not concerned about how white supremacists treat the poor and the nonwhite.
Sunday, August 14, 2022
You Won't Mind Your Own Business, So Why Are You Trying To Mind Mine?
"The 2022 Siberian wildfires are a series of ongoing wildfires in Siberia, Russia that began in Siberia in early May 2022. Fires are concentrated in the Krasnoyarsk, Altai, Irkutsk, Kemerovo, Omsk, Kurgan regions, Khakassia and Sakha republics. The total area of fires, as of 15 May, is about 20 thousand hectares, and since the beginning of 2022 - more than 100 thousand hectares."
The Wikipedia article also has a map which illustrates how much of the Russian landscape has been plagued by the fires this year. (Click on this link to see or download the map.) From this map we can see that nearly a third of the Russian land mass was affected by wildfires as of May. Russian president Vladimir Putin called for aggressive action to deal with the wildfires, but it should be obvious that his statements are merely a blowing of useless smoke. For the track record of the Russian government from at least as far back as 2019 shows a singular lack of willingness to effectively deal with the wildfire threat. And by spending so many Russian resources in trying to take over other people's countries, Putin has left very little to competently manage the affairs of his own country. Score another point for that thieving little man in his bunker and his piece-of-garbage regime. This is the man who was worshiped by an idiot named Donald John Trump.