Thursday, August 2, 2012

Why I'm Enjoying A Hot, Tasty, Chick-fil-A Sandwich Tonight

A lot of people who think they know me are going to be surprised by this, but I got my dinner at Chick-fil-A tonight. God help me, I never thought I'd side with Michelle Bachman on anything. But just this once, despite the company it puts me in, I don't have a choice.

Dan Cathy's position on gay marriage is certainly politically incorrect but it's founded in his Christian beliefs and it's consistent with biblical doctrine. The Bible makes it clear that homosexuality is a sin and that marriage is a sacred covenant made between a man and a woman. His statement was consistent with and representative of mainstream Christian beliefs on the subject. Furthermore, Chick-fil-A is privately held company that clearly identifies itself in it's mission as a Christian business. They are not open on Sundays, at enormous expense to their bottom line, and they maintain Christian ideals in their treatment of employees and customers alike.

One of those Christian ideals is "love the sinner but hate the sin". There are NO service or employment policies that discriminate against gays in place at Chick-fil-A.

All the man did was give an honest answer to a straight question but since that statement has been made public no less than half a dozen city officials, including the mayors of Boston and Chicago, have threatened to block  the franchise from opening stores and the PC thought-police have chosen to boycott the entire chain.

Now look, I'm not quite as bent out-of-shape about the gay marriage issue as most Christians.

For one thing, as sins go, I doubt homosexuality is a really that big a deal. The bible says it's a sin, so I accept that, but it's not like gays are robbing people or killing people or breaking up families by engaging in adultery. It certainly didn't make the top 10 list. I suspect I am a much more egregious sinner in the eyes of god than a homosexual simply because I so often fail to honor the sabbath. Keeping the sabbath holy DID make the top 10, after all.

Also... I don't consider the licenses doled out by government bureaucrats to be representative of real marriage. Marriage is a sacred religious institution with strictly defined rules and parameters. You can't take God out the equation and still call it marriage. What the government calls "marriage" is really just a secular contract. The ceremony might as well be performed by a pair of lawyers. An "open marriage" isn't a
real marriage any more than a "gay marriage" would be.

More pointedly, I am not inclined to blame anyone for this debacle more than I blame ourselves... the Christian community. It is we who have allowed the government usurp our institution because, in our hubris, we want our faith somehow ensconced in or endorsed by the state.

Well, behold the result of trusting a secular authority with a sacred tradition.

I don't respect the governments right to dictate who can and can't get married any more than I trust them to tell me who can be baptized or permitted to take communion. It's an overt and even shameless violation of the Constitutionally guaranteed separation of church and state. Moral authority over marriage lies with individual churches, mosques, and temples, NOT the government.

This belief further dulls my outrage because with this libertarian model in place gay marriage would still be inevitable. There's always going to be some minister willing to overlook scripture in order to line his pockets.

But I DO feel very strongly about free speech.

I spend a lot of time harping on Republican supporters for their divisive rhetoric and refusal to compromise. Well those ideals need to cut BOTH ways. What's going on with this public outcry over Chick-fil-A is nothing less than a self-entitled political interest group trying to bully dissenters into silence. It represents a much more outrageous attack on tolerance and diversity than anything Dan Cathy said. They, and the PC thought-police who are supporting them, should be ashamed of themselves.

So I'm eating Chicky tonight, and I'm going back on Friday to cross the picket lines.

Friday, June 8, 2012

Why Americans SHOULD Hate the Fed, and Why They Don't

The really insidious effect of the fed isn't so much that we're borrowing our own money from them. That's just kind of ridiculous. What's insidious is the way it redistributes wealth.

Because we have a floating economy the value of the dollar is not set by the value of silver or gold. It has a set value based on the supply of dollar bills. Beyond the intrinsic absurdity of that, there is a profound effect on a floating economy when a new dollar is printed.

Now... keep in mind that the fed is NOT a part of the government. It's a private cartel of bankers. This is important because when money is printed it is distributed to banks.

The act of printing money does not in itself create any wealth. Back in the old days this was compensated for by the storage of gold and silver into "reserve". This gave every dollar printed an intrinsic value. This is no longer the case, and because the gold reserve is not longer used, and because the printing of new money doesn't add any real wealth to the economy, each time a dollar is printed it DEVALUES every other dollar in circulation.

Let's take a closer look at the process of printing money in a floating economy.  Economics of scale is a great way to obfuscate this issue, so we're going to scale it back to make the numbers more manageable.

Say there are 5 people in the country, and each has one dollar. There is also a bank, and the bank has $5 in it. This means there is a total of $10 in the entire country.

In a floating economy each dollar is worth 1/10, or 10%, of the value of the country.

Now, say the bankers print another dollar. This dollar is not backed by gold or silver, and there has been no ensuing increase in the value of the country, so the only real effect is that the value of a dollar has dropped. Where it used to be worth 10% of the country, now each dollar is only worth 9% of the country.

What the fed does when it prints money is distribute wealth to themselves.

Look at the example above. Before the extra dollar was printed the banks had $5 out of 10, exactly 50% of the value of the economy. After the new dollar was printed they had $6 out of 11, or 54% of the economy. They have STOLEN 4% of the economies total value.

The fleecing doesn't stop there, of course. The fed then LOANS us this dollar, collecting INTEREST on it and moving even more of the economies value into it's own coffers.

So why do Americans tolerate this?

Not to put too fine a point on it... because we're lazy. We just don't know any better, and we don't care enough to find out.

Most Americans have no idea what the Federal Reserve Bank is. The real genius of this deception though, is that the vast majority of us think we do.

We all know that the Fed sets interest rates and prints money, but we think the Fed is a government agency. Many of us think our currency is still backed by a gold standard. We have no idea that the value of a dollar is no longer tied to a reserve at all, or that the economy is being controlled by unelected, unappointed bankers with no accountability. And even if we did know, most of us are afraid of the numbers. It's not that we lack the basic mathematical skills to understand what they're doing, it's that the numbers involved are so huge we tell ourselves we can't possibly comprehend them. Once we do get it we often decide it can't possibly be that simple. This is an illusion, though, and our "leaders" take full advantage of it. Most of them don't understand the Fed much better than we do, and the ones that do are more than happy to have us believe it's because they are somehow smarter and wiser than the rest of us.

It's all lies.

You don't need any fancy math skills to understand the way the fed works. It really is that simple.

Sunday, May 6, 2012

Fetal Cells in Soda Pop Research? Really? Is American Business That Out of Touch?

It has come to my attention that Pepsi is being boycotted by pro life groups for using fetal cells. The press releases have been carefully crafted to give the impression that Pepsi is actually putting fetal cells in their products without actually saying so. They are wording it with a brilliant ambiguity that would have made Joseph Goebbels green with envy. They are claiming quite truthfully that Pepsi is using fetal cells "in the development of artificial sweeteners".

Needless to say this has resulted in a firestorm of hysterics.

Do not confuse what I'm about to say as approval of using fetal cells for these kinds of purposes. In fact I find it morally repugnant, but it also doesn't help the cause if what we stand for is histrionics or ignorance, so in the interest of full disclosure, Pepsi products do not contain human fetal cells. Don't run around telling people they do. This is the information age. A lie like that will not stand and it will just make all of us look stupid. It wouldn't be the first time the Pro-Life movement has tarnished the legitimacy of it's position by deliberately spreading misinformation. If this strategy worked the ends might justify the means, but it doesn't. It just makes us all look like ignorant crackpots.

Here's what's actually going on...

Pepsi is partnered with Semonyx, a company that uses fetal cells in testing. I know this might sound unlikely, but this company has probably found a way to use living cells to determine if a given compound contains certain flavor "signatures" (for lack of a better word) that these cells are "programmed" to recognize. This allows them to test literally thousands of compounds, in this case artificial sweeteners, in a very short period of time.

This is not a verified fact. The company has never outright admitted to using fetal tissue cells to test Pepsi products, but neither have they denied it and they have released a wealth of statements strongly indicating that this is the case.

Many companies use these fetal kidney cells, called HEK293 cells, for a variety of product testing purposes. They are a favorite of industrial labs because they have been virally modified. They are very easy to work with and extremely hardy. They live can live pretty much forever in a jar. Human Embryonic Kidney line 293 is between 35 and 50 years old.

None of this is any skin off my butt. I hate Pepsi, but I do find this sudden clamor for a boycott somewhat suspect. It's unclear why Pepsi has been singled out. Semonyx has ties to Coca Cola and Nestle as well.

It is also important to note while this use of human remains is clearly reprehensible, HEK293 has been used in the development of drugs for a LONG time and has contributed to countless medical advances (some of them actually meaningful) which is a much more morally ambiguous function.

Semonyx tries to justify this moral gap by claiming they are also saving lives by reducing the amount of salt and sugar in consumer foods. This is bunk. I'm sure it helps Semonyx execs sleep at night thinking they are engaged in some kind of noble struggle against diabetes or childhood obesity, but we already have a variety of artificial sweeteners and they've done nothing to reverse this trend. This is the exploitation of a dead child in the name of making money on a tastier soda pop, and there's just no moral ambiguity in that.

Sunday, January 15, 2012

What are Your 2012 Christmas Plans? (or "How to Handle the End of Days")

Every three or four years some nit-wit starts waving their arms and running through the street shouting that the sky is falling.

It never does though.

Personally I think the whole 2012 hysteria is a bunch of idiotic nonsense, but if you really believe it here's what I recommend...

  • Quit Your Job: I guess getting ahead is pretty much pointless and you don't want to spend the last year of your life working, do you?
  • Liquidate All Your Assets: Remortgage your house, sell off your 401k, and cash in the kids college fund.
  • Lose The Dead Weight: Unless you're blissfully happy get rid of the wife and kids. Go out wenching and don't bother with protection. You won't live long enough for it to matter.
  • Party Your Ass Off: There's no point in trying to leave behind a legacy or make a difference. Just party party party! Live for the moment because tomorrow will not come at all!
Oh... and if the world doesn't end expect a few awkward moments. I for one, when I see you destitute and wandering the streets alone, unloved, and in the throes of addiction and the early stages of penicillin resistant syphilis, am going to LOL. And don't come looking for help. I'm just going to tell you to "kiss my ***" if you come around begging for change.

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

The Root of All Evil is Evil

I was on the GoG.com general forum today when one of the posters made a declaration that I hear a lot.

The original poster was referring to a statement by the pope that gay marriage is a threat to the survival of humanity.

"Religion," said one of the respondents, "Is the root of all evil."

Another poster almost immediately agreed with an equally tired cliche, "Indeed my friend. Indeed. How many thousands of innocents have been slaughtered in the name of 'God' in the past?"

That's crap. It's a common mantra of secularists trying to hold themselves above or apart from the atrocities of their heritage.

Greed is the root of all evil, and greed is a vice shared by secular society just as prevalently as it is among the faithful. Perhaps even more so as all the major religions condemn the excesses of greed while certain pockets of secular society accept greed as a necessary engine to drive progress if not an outright virtue.

In every case of "religious" warfare, oppression, or persecution greed (money/resources/land/power/whatever) was the reason. The Crusades, the Inquisition, the witch hunts, the churches support of the slaughter of indigenous peoples around the world were all driven by greed. Religion was just the excuse. Were religion not there to blame some other excuse would have happily sufficed. The reason these abominations occur is not the presence of religion. Rather it is a failure on the part of the faithful to heed the spirit of their faith. It is nothing less than a surrender of the faithful to their secular nature and a failure, I believe, in the eyes of God.

A more fundamental universal religious standard, by the way, is simply "Thou shalt not kill". While I believe a man has the right, indeed a duty, to defend himself if threatened (a basic tenant of the Jewish faith from which Christianity was born) larger arguments of a Just War are catholic Constructs driven by philosophy, not scripture. I'm not saying that it's without merit, but it's a secular social moray that happened to come from the church rather than a true reflection of faith or scripture. While the old testament contains many examples of war in the name of God the Bible is devoid of guidance as to when a war is acceptable barring the Word of God itself. No modern war is or can be fought in the name of God. War is a product of man. Period.

Don't blame God for the weaknesses and failures of His churches. Churches are human institutions and are just as prone to greed and fear as any other. The misdeeds of a church are simply a wholly predictable sum of human frailties. The formula is the same for religious and secular atrocities alike. The flaws, the greed and fear, of men who lead combine with the cowardice and ignorance of men that follow.

Yes religious intolerance has often aggravated personal violence. Men who consider themselves Christian have beaten and murdered Jews and Muslims, but these men are defying the basic tenants of their faith. These attacks trace more to fear than to greed, but again... cowardice is not restricted to men of religious conviction. Secularists have struck out at the religious in equal measure and from the same position of fear, just as they have struck out at other minorities. Not all gay-bashers or racists are men of faith.

Larger conflicts however, invariably come down to greed. A misguided man might be convinced to send his son to war for religious reasons, but no King would pay for such an expedition without some profit to return on his investment. If you remove religion from the equation the war will be fought in the name of king and country instead. Secular society has proven over and over they are capable of atrocities the equal of any Church without religious dogma driving them on. The Holocaust springs to mind... Stalin's purges... the killing fields of Cambodia... the genocide of the Native American Nations...

Trying to lay evil on Religion is an arrogance equal to any other fundamentalist dogma. Greed and fear are basic elements of human nature that religion at least strives to condemn and control. Secular society has no moral high ground where evil is concerned.

Since we're all here I'd also like to throw my two cents in on the issue of gay marriage...

I don't see why the state has anything to do with marriage. Marriage is a religious institution and it doesn't make any sense to me that it's under the control of secular authority. It seems to me what the government calls "marriage" is really nothing more than a secular contract anyway. I don't see why they don't just call it all "civil union" and leave the marriage ceremonies where they belong... under the authority of the various churches/temples/mosques.

That said... while I'm not a big fan of gay marriage the assertion that it threatens the existence of man is just stupid. There are too many bloody people already. If anything couples that can't breed marginally improve the survivability of the species.

Of course in the interests of full disclosure I'm not a big fan of the Catholic Church either.