Saturday, December 26, 2015

Convert Or Be Destroyed




State Representative Scott Allen
Wisconsin's 97th District

Wisconsin.gov
Official State Assembly Page

Ballotpedia
Map of his district and other data.

Wisconsin State Legislature
Scott Allen's List of Proposals

Facebook
Facebook

Wisconsin Democracy Campaign
Where Scott Allen got his campaign contributions

If the first article on the list doesn't make your blood boil, the other stuff might. It seems the religious are becoming more hyperbolic and extreme as they look across their Sunday morning church pews and see the backs of fewer heads. Those backs of heads that remain are white-haired and hung low with arthritis and osteoporosis.

They are getting desperate enough to incite violence upon the rest of society, which is leaving them behind.

We simply cannot have people like this in government anymore. Scott Allen is up for election in 2016, and everyone from Wisconsin's 97th district must be presented a progressive alternative. Especially one who supports Bernie Sanders ideas.

Sunday, November 22, 2015

The Road to Hell



Wikipedia
The origins and interpretations of the phrase's meaning.

Madam Noire
"...some charities and for-profit clothing recyclers are engaging in a donated clothing war, with the latter looking to cut charities out as drop-off middlemen..."

Huffington Post
Food imports drove down the price of indigenous produce so much that local farmers lost their land.

Life Site News
Long-lasting contraception is great, but sex without a condom is still very dangerous for other reasons.

Forbes
This is a lengthy interview, look for a link to the audio in the first paragraph.

Source
Some organizations will make the poor jump through hoops before they get the food or clothing held up before them as donations.

Global Research
Scroll down to The Real Story
As the old saying goes: "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions." It seems to be a derived from another saying "Hell is full of good wishes and desires. Heaven is full of good works."

Well this sounds familiar, no? How about praying for the victims of the French terror attacks? Getting on your knees and praying sounds like an excellent candidate for a good intention.

But it gets worse.

What you might think are actual good works, can go terribly wrong. Some works go wrong because they are not thought out very well. Other works go wrong intentionally because of a hidden economic agenda.

Here are some links in the box that may shed some light.

Thursday, November 19, 2015

American Theocracy


Think Progress
This is not just about JGBT rights, it about outright Theocracy. A Radical Fundamentalist Christian State

NBC News
Christians have tried this before. It's called The Crusade.

Anti Media
EX CIA Chief George Tenet gets out ahead of the impending judicial action. He'll be lucky if he gets leniency for throwing Bush, Cheney. Rumsfeld. Rice, Wolfowitz et al, under the bus.

The Humanist
You're basically screwed if you don't read the fine print.


Alternet
The histrionics are designed to distract from the obvious profiteering from the Military Industrial Complex.

Believe it or not, there is a hidden agenda behind the anti-LGBT movement and the Anti-Syrian refugee movement. It's called Dominion Theology. What I call American Theocracy.

It's not really about securing status as a protected class for the Christians, It's about securing Cultural Hegemony.

Saturday, November 14, 2015

David Vitter Still Seeking Redemption After All These Years


The Washington Post
Political Campaign ad for David Vitter Seeking redemption and votes in Louisiana
New York Magazine
Vitter's past is dogging his polling numbers.

Forward Progressives
After rumors of a love-child circulate, Vitter seems to think the Sheriff of Jefferson Parish is out to get him.

VitterTheShitter.com
This site suggests that Vitter has a diaper fetish.

Mother Jones
The interview with an elleged prostitute may be suspect.

The Week (01/22/2014)
This article shows how little the NeoCons cared about Christian values. (BONUS: negative campaign video at the end)

The Times Picayune
The media doesn't want to let bygones be bygones.
Here's a bonus YouTube video clip of Rachel Maddow critiquing the Vitter campaign. It's out of sync, and it's an unofficial video so it might be taken down pretty soon because NBC News rolls that way, so here's the MSNBC link.for more

Saturday, September 26, 2015

ENGINEERED SUFFERING: How Religion Makes Misery



The Daily Beast (01/07/2009)
Efforts to curb AIDS in Africa with science and condoms are sabotaged by abstinence-only efforts.
The New York Times (10/31/2011)
Envorinmental groups promote condom use to rais awareness of overpopulation in relation to Climate Change
Rapid City Journal
Health officials in South Dakota finally admit that Abstinence-Only sex education is a failure.
Mashable
Opinion piece arguing in favor of lifting the Catholic Church's 50-year-old ban on oral contraception.
Breitbart
African Bishops claim that the production and distribution of condoms is a new form of imperialism and slavery.
rrstar.com
An Illinois county faces new challenges as grants expire amid a convoluted state law that widely varies sex education in the state
Global Finance
Chart based on Gross Domestic Product Per Capita 2009-2013
Church Militant
"There are forms of ideological colonization which are out to destroy the family"
Vermillion Plain Talk
Chris Cagle, associate director for the CDC was the first Farber Forum guest lectured on Wednesday. Cagle spoke on the HIV/AIDS Epidemic and what can be done to slow the spread of the disease.
The Daily Nebraskan
An in-depth description of one university's sexual health program.
Huffington Post
The Pope's unwavering support of policies that promote overpopulation, poverty and disease.
Westside Gazette
A major oversight of public health communication.
The toll that religion is taking on the world is almost immeasurable, but the cause is rather simple. Not just a lack of proper education, but a deliberate suppression of education and the spread of misinformation that perpetuates a state of dependence on the charity of the church.

Advances in technology related to food production and health care contributed greatly to population growth, but literacy and education should offset the population growth against the availability of resources such as water.

Without the propaganda of human suffering, the contributions to religious charitable organizations would dry up. Charity Navigator shows the growth of charitable organizations as a firewall solution against population growth. It's also a good resource to find the right charitable organization, as some charitable organizations are problematic. The long renowned Red Cross had its own problem with Haiti.

For more information about population, see Population Connection.

Thursday, September 24, 2015

Ben Carson on Creation vs Evolution: Not So Fast!

Apparently, Ben Carson thinks that non-religious scientists base their morality on "Survival of the Fittest." In his words, it would not be a problem for non-religious people to eat each-other to survive.



What has he told his audience? How many thousands of people did he mislead about morality?

Here is the biological foundation of morality, and it has nothing to do with religion.




,,,and the Bible ranks all other animals as lesser than humans. How arrogant!


Monday, August 3, 2015

The Insidious Manipulation of Perception and Reason

As I was browsing through YouTube I discovered a series of videos with titles that began 'Everything that is wrong with...' and whatever movie they were reviewing. These reviewers find holes in movie plots and there are so many in practically every plot that I became concerned about what kind of effect the media has on the public's ability to solve problems by understanding real cause and effect.

It's one thing to say "God is an ever receding pocket of scientific ignorance" and assume that education and science is progressing, but there are forces out there that seek to exploit ignorant people for profit. These forces are threatened by science and education.

They tried book-burning, they tried overt censorship and they now have taken over state and local boards of education and college boards of trustees. They choose and edit your child's textbooks. They choose your child's college professors. However, this is manipulation on the surface. In the field of Communication we call this "Information Gate-keeping," or more appropriately "Knowledge Gate-keeping."

There may be another, more subliminal form of altering someone's critical thinking skills, by distorting the perception of cause and effect in popular media. Communication students recognize this as framing or contextual manipulation. In Journalism and Cinema they use techniques called Montage (a sequence of images or events that suggests cause and effect) and Juxtaposition (two or more images or objects appearing side-by-side to suggest a relationship). Some of the best examples are the front pages of newspapers. Some of the shocking stories on the front page have a halo effect on how some readers feel about other stories juxtaposed on the same page.

Still deeper down the rabbit hole is recurring combinations of events in cinema and television that literally train our brains to make false assumptions and expectations about our real outside world. I'm struggling here to understand why so many people who don't even have any investments in denying climate change, still insist that it's not caused by people. Maybe they are the most vulnerable victims of exposure to years of contextual manipulation in the mass media that broke their critical thinking skills. Or, as I suggested in previous posts, they just may not have the genes for critical thinking.

Is accreditation arbitrary? How can we find out if allegedly accredited organizations are legitimately accredited?
Can we develop an open accreditation system?

Saturday, August 1, 2015

Left Behind: The Review: More Horrifying Than The Original Motion Picture


I want you to see this in full-screen splendor, so instead of embedding the video here,
I'm just going to provide a link to the original channel.


Ejoy

Friday, May 22, 2015

George W. Bush further validates Davied Kuo's book "Tempting Faith"

knowyourmeme.com
The Humanist posted the article Rules Are for Schmucks: George W. Bush Gets Something Right  about his commencement speech at Southern Methodist University which included a quote that confirmed his true belief in separation of church and state. This also confirms that the GOP is not religious, but has co-opted Christianity for its own political gain.

The article blew dust off some old memories about author David Kuo's experience as head of the "Faith-Based Initiative in the White House during the Bush-Cheney administration. See this 60 Minutes interview with David Kuo:


Saturday, May 9, 2015

Is Teaching Evolution Practical?

The short answer is no, but that's an over-simplification. Teaching Creationism is even less practical. The current curriculum and debate over creationism and evolution is designed to stump education and incite division and fighting on both sides.

 Creationism does not explain how bacteria become resistant over time to antibiotics. Starting a lesson on Natural Selection with Darwin and working your way toward genetic mutations that cause bacteria to adapt to toxins, is backwards.

Our understanding of genetics makes it more practical today to start with the tiny, generational steps in evolution that occur with each cell division and the tiny, almost unnoticeable mutations that occur in DNA with every new generation of an organism.

It's important to understand the impact of environmental conditions on the adaptation and survival of an organism. When a bacteria is exposed to toxins, most will die off, but there will be a small number that, through DNA mutation, survive in the new environment. This raises questions about whether the adaptation to the toxin was intelligent, or random chance.

The statistics involved in calculating how many bacteria survive an attack by antibiotics suggests that adaptive mutations occur not because of the presence of antibiotics, but despite it. In other words, there will always be rare mutations of offspring in any species. Some will be capable of surviving a drastic change in the environment and some will not be capable of surviving in a normal environment.

Biology throws a wide net of genetic mutations when it comes to reproduction of a species.Nature governs which members survive and which members thrive with superior features. The superior members of a species then dominate the inferior members which whither and die. This applies just as much to weeds overcrowding a vegetable garden as it does to human poverty overcrowding the avarice of a civilization's elite, depending on where your social values reside.

The genetic mutations are so small with each generation that it's hard to identify an intermediary fossil between two drastically different versions of the same species.

Tuesday, April 7, 2015

The United Church of Appliantology

David Pakman Discusses Pat Robertson's latest most insane rant:




I thought it fitting to supplement David's video with this gem from Frank Zappa:

 

Thursday, March 26, 2015

Indiana businesses can now discriminate against LGBT community.

Indiana governor Mike Pence signed into law the 'Religious Freedom Bill' that allows businesses to discriminate against the LGBT community on religious grounds. Within minutes, a boycott on Indiana began.

Here is a list of Indiana based companies:
 Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Companies_based_in_Indiana


Friday, March 13, 2015

Threat Assessment

Things are heating up. Religion in the U.S. is losing its influence and people are leaving religion in droves. The remaining extremists are becoming more isolated and marginalized, and more extreme with their rhetoric. The extremists are preparing for violence.

The American Family Association (AFA) published a map of "Anti-Christian Bigots." A tool for mentally unbalanced extremists to find their target. Of course they would deny it's purpose, but what other motive is there?

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) lists the AFA as a hate group. The SPLC has a detailed archive of extremists as well.

We can't ignore them and assume that religions will fight among themselves, like the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. or the Shiah and Sunni conflict, or the ongoing "Armageddon" in the Middle East. Now they are all targeting the non-religious. Their frustration will grow and they will become violent as their ideological influence fades into oblivion.

The first of their "soft targets" has been abortion clinics. Threats and intimidation has dramatically increased since 2010. The LGBT community is slightly more difficult for them to find but when they do, the odds of confrontations getting violent has skyrocketed as more states legalize gay marriage.

It's getting exceedingly difficult to remain tolerant. We face the possibility of regressing into a long, dark period in our history. I hope we can win with only reason and time.

Monday, February 23, 2015

The Bible through the lens of Historical Psychology

What is the true nature and intent of religious writings? In one context it's a compilation of historical tales of supernatural triumphs in favor of one culture over others. Tales which instill in young children the fear of punishment they need to survive until they are at least twelve or thirteen years old, when they begin to develop formal operational thinking skills.

Coincidentally this is roughly the same age that Jewish children celebrate their Bar Mitzvahs or Bat Mitzvahs. Through a lot of research, Jean Piaget arrived at roughly the same period in life when formal operational skills were well into development and children should be capable of enough empathy and reason to take responsibility for their actions, providing, of course, that they were taught proper critical thinking skills. This is one example where science appears to validate a tradition, depending on whether or not you think Piaget was pure in his research or just anecdotal.

There are many examples in the Bible of parables that reflect what the people of the period understood about human behavior. 

In the "Parable of the Wicked Tenants" (Mark 12:1-12) A landlord sets up a winery and rents it to some tenants who later refuse to pay rent. They maimed or killed any collectors who came their way, and finally the son of the landlord came to collect and they believed that if they killed him, they would win squatters rights on the property. I can only infer from this that it was accepted at the time, which makes sense under traditional tribal warlord conditions.

In Mark 12:10 Jesus recounts an existing scripture about a stone rejected by the builders, which becomes a "cornerstone" or in the case of this parable, an integral part of the structure, but this is only mentioned after it is assumed by Jesus that the landlord will arrive on the scene himself and evict the tenants with extreme prejudice.

I found this confusing at first. It might refer to the tenacity of the landlord to hold onto his property despite what has become commonplace at that time, of acquiescing to the brute force of the existing power structure. This tiny paragraph of scripture eludes to the construct of the bureaucracy of it's time, and one man's fight against the bureaucracy. The priests at that time were of course, political appointees.

Tuesday, January 13, 2015

Taqiyya: We can never know

According to the Huffington Post, "Muslims Around The World Condemn Charlie Hebdo Attack." Do they? Really? Huffington Post and other news outlets publishing statements by followers of Islam failed to include the following disclaimer: 
"All statements by followers of Islam are subject to Taqiyya"
What is Taqiyya?

Summary Answer:
Muslim scholars teach that Muslims should generally be truthful to each other, unless the purpose of lying is to "smooth over differences."
There are two forms of lying to non-believers that are permitted under certain circumstances, taqiyya and kitman.  These circumstances are typically those that advance the cause Islam - in some cases by gaining the trust of non-believers in order to draw out their vulnerability and defeat them. 

http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/quran/011-taqiyya.htm
 It's a sad, sad situation to be put in when everyone knows that anything you say might be a lie because your religion makes such an allowance. You can't even openly reject your own religion because that could also be a lie. You cannot even claim to be an atheist if you were formerly a follower of Islam. If you were at any point in your life even a temporary follower of Islam, you are now branded permanently with Taqiyya.

Only your actions count. Your speech is worthless.