Hatemail

Since I'm getting a bunch of messages whining about how I'm not making Christians feel welcome here on IAM, and how it's not fair for me to say anything negative about Christianity (in a “don't judge my beliefs and I won't judge yours” kind of way). So I'll just write my response here, to save people the effort of sending me messages on it:

Christianity, as a historical whole, is evil. You want that backed up with facts? It's not hard. You want me to list all ways and times Christianity has declared a destructive xenophobic and genocidal war on other cultures and other ideas? It's not hard.

Christianity long ago declared this war on the rest of the world, and I — and all other people who value their freedom — have a responsibility to speak out against this scourge when called to.

After you're done realizing all the evil that Christianity has committed — and continues to commit — try and list the “evil” that the body modification community has forced on others. Good luck finding anything. And I'm not interested in hearing the ridiculous “but we've changed” arguments about modern Christianity. I'm no more cool with Neo-Nazis than I am with Nazis, nor am I OK with the 21st century KKK, and attempting to transform a by definition evil empire into something benign simply isn't possible.

Nor am I interested in hearing any “but you're blaming Christianity for the Church's evils”. The Church is who created and molded this mythos and you can not separate the two. The world won't be a truly pleasant place until Christianity — and every other misguided destructive religion — is wiped off the face of the planet.

Hello, good morning

I'll make my “hello good morning” quick, because I'm planning on doing a big image update today, plus a pile of software work as well… I know that there are a number of you that are just desperate for custom layout. I have to be careful though; since I sped up the software, IAM usage has almost doubled! Of course, when the dead-account bot is run for the first time, it'll delete I'm guessing around 3500 dead accounts.

Oh, and is it just me, or is Afghanistan turning into Vietnam? I can certainly tell you from first hand knowledge that the US and Canadian troops that are being sent over there are impressive humans. These guys are certainly top of their game, but I really feel they may be getting asked to do the impossible — they're certainly fighting against the odds, and because these men are so remarkable and could do so many good things in the world, it breaks my heart to see them killed.

It goes on. I found this particular quote quite disturbing, “A bloodied, outnumbered band of US servicemen held off a determined al-Qa'ida force on frigid, rocky terrain at least 8,000 feet above sea level.”

A while back I wrote about how profoundly upset I was about seeing Tibettan Yaks at a zoo. When you take these animals below 10,000 feet, you cut their life in half. Your metabolism has to work very differently at high and low altitudes… Western troops are simply not trained for these environments, and what little training they have is, in my (uneducated but overconfident) opinion, ineffective. I should also remind people that when they see reports on the news about “8 American Soldiers Killed” that this is just the American news. Remember the Olympics? “American Blah Blah Blah won the Bronze medal” — if there was no US victor higher up, they just weren't mentioned. Point is, yesterday two Germans and three Danish were also killed (disarming a missile). Western losses are starting to grow…

If you prefer not to have your heart broken, but still want to talk about the politics behind all this war, I thought this article in the Mirror was good… It's another in the long stream of articles deconstructing the “Evil Axis” comment. The specifics of the words I really don't care about, obviously Bush is a moron and his handlers have used these terms like “evil” because it's the only way he can understand it. The big concern to me is why isn't Saudi Arabia in this evil axis? Why isn't Pakistan? Hell, why isn't CHINA? China certainly sells missile technology as indiscriminately as the North Koreans. And if you're going down that road, why isn't Kissinger up on war crimes (and is it just me, or does he look like Ben Stein)?

Finally, this article on Al-Quaeda “regrouping on the net” is interesting… It's no surprise they're using the net, obviously, but what is interesting is when you start asking — how are they intercepting this traffic? Those of you who are technically minded, think about what it would take… (and I wonder if things like this are related?)

OK, I know I just said “finally”, but there is some interesting science news from the last week two… In ancient history, they've finally showed much stronger and much more convincing dinosaurs with feathers proof, and then of course there's the 3.5 BILLION year old bacteria fossil (maybe). The one that I personally find the most interesting is the sonoluminesence/tabletop nuclear fusion experiments… I find it interesting on a religious level — almost every faith has held that there are “holy sounds” that weild enormous power… Could they just be memories of some sort of early sonoluminescent technology?

Now off to work…

Child abuse

I'm watching a documentary on “Christian Rock” (last year a BILLION dollars in sales in the US) — It's on CBC right now for anyone with Canadian TV access. It's literally making me sick. The footage they're showing is disgusting and utterly dishonorable… A bunch of artificial celebrities telling kids that if they don't buy these records and if they don't buy their church memberships they'll die and burn in hell.

Sometimes I wish I was living in China. At least China has the commonsense and moral courage to execute these parasites for their crimes against humanity.

I don't care if you want to believe in Christian Gods, or a single Christian god, depending on which myth structure you adhere to. I don't care if you want to believe in Odin and Thor. I don't care if you want to believe in some kooky Wiccan made-up modern pseudo-religion. I don't care if you're in the Church of Satan… But when you start fucking with kids heads like that, you really deserve to be burned at the stake. It is never acceptable to abuse children like that.

Dialex!

We went up and checked out the Dialexes today (a copy of the film made sort of like a blueprint, so it's all blue and smells real bad)… The book looks AMAZING! All the photos turned out like they should (I was worried that at high res all of a sudden all kinds of blemishes might show) and I'm very happy.

Here are some shots. Again, the final book is NOT BLUE. These are Dialexes:

Even more good news: The book gets printed this weekend, and it may well be totally done binding and everything next week, so those of you that have pre-ordered (and paid) will be getting your books potentially two weeks early!

Now the bad news: Once we have books in stock, the price goes up to the full retail (ie. add $5) from the pre-order price. So if you would rather pay the cheaper price, you should click here now to pre-order.

Title goes here

First, today is a snow day… Lots of idiots in their pretend four by fours sliding through intersections… If I hadn't been driving a car built using proper all wheel drive technology, I'd have gotten in a couple accidents (although I'm not really sure how much damage a Tracker can do to a brick like the TT).

That reminds me, I'm far enough along on it now that I can talk about it publicly… Those of you who've read my pages over the past years know about my company that built 355 replicas — I'd always fiddled with my parent's Beetle, and at about age eighteen I built my first prototype car. Not that either of these projects got anywhere, but I've started a new car company. It's aim is to market a full car that prices at under $3000 and gets 100 mpg. More later.

Now some bad news. William at Lazarus hasn't had any luck getting our drive back, even using the bits from the new drive… We've fallen through that 1% crack. He's sending me the complete report on the damage, when it gets here I'll share it… Otherwise I have to keep putting up with accusations that I just made the whole thing up…

This also means that the data in BME/risks is scrapped… So… I'm going to make a few changes in the software, and then I'll be writing a handful of the professionals that I know both on and off IAM to help. (It will be a small handful, so if a week passes and you don't hear from me, please don't be offended). I'll post more on this soon of course.

I'm sure a lot of you have seen this story already, but for those that have not, let me summarize. At a recent Bush speach (including telling kids at a school how important prayer is), a few blocks away at the perpetual protest that follows him there were a bunch of jokers with pretzels throwing them up in the air and pretending to choke on them, making fun of Bush. They were of course arrested. When asked what the charge was, the police chief told them, “attempted murder”.

Nice. Obviously they're going to get released from this bogus charge, but does making fun of the president really deserve an afternoon in the back of a truck with your arms behind your back, followed up by a night in prison?

A few other links:

  • Preparing for perpetual war – I understand why the office of disinformation and the shadow government are important. What boggles my mind is WHY was the public told about it? This article proposes the answer that it's because the US public is being prepped for a 1984-esque “perpetual war”. Scary notion.
  • Americans must stand firm against 'war' – Convincingly asks the question, “are we living in a democratic republic, or are we living under a system of corporate fascism?”
  • Bush's policies give allies reason to worry – The part of this article that interested specifically is the US/Saudi double standard.

As you know, the US is building a huge oil pipeline for the Alaskan reserve drilling. Now, all the geological evidence suggests that there is simply not that much oil in Alaska. Most of that oil deposit is in Northern Canada. Simple geological fact. So why does the US want to build a huge pipeline for oil they don't even have? There is only one logical answer: It is for Canada's oil.

Middle East relations are deteriorating. America is a resource-poor country and can not produce enough of it's own energy or water to supply itself. Thus they buy it from places like Saudi Arabia… But… If that falls apart, the pipeline is already in place to just take over that part of Canada and steal our oil. Given that now the US is pushing itself into a trade war with Europe over these steel tariffs, I really think it's getting more likely every day that a hostile invasion of Canada is coming…

Oh, and today is the 118th anniversary of Susan B. Anthony and about a hundred other suffragists came to President Arthur demanding to vote.