Friday, December 18, 2009

18 Dec - Late Links

Kotal-e Salang mountain pass in northern Afgha...

I Tell Stories - It's What I Do
"You'll grow up eventually," he said, my old boss from that summer job I had more than a decade ago, "You'll see how silly that is when you get older." He sneered, chuckled and strode into the back. His sentiment was hardly unique. I hear it, in some form or another, to this day.

It seems that a vast segment of America feels Paganism is somehow not real, that it's a joke, live-in performance art or misguided role play. They seem skeptical that people like me actually believe these things.

When I deign to mention my faith in mixed company, which I do with less and less frequency, I get statements like those above. I get furrowed brows, one sided grins and assertions that I'm just being contrary and will come to my senses eventually, that is if I'm not dismissed as a freak or foreigner too difficult to bother understanding. I'm told that it's natural to sample naturalistic, pantheistic, individualistic, tree-hugging bullshit when one is young and that my feelings on faith will eventually gravitate to something more reasonable and self-evident. I'm told that, barring anything else, I'll make a death bed conversion on the implicit knowledge that Jesus is the light and I've been knowingly fooling myself since I was fifteen.

These people must all have had a free spirited sibling that tried on a half dozen religions in their twenties only to come back to the church when they were told they'd be cut out of the will.

I have news for such people; I'm thirty years old. I'm not going to outgrow my religion. This is not a phase, not for me and not for the estimated three million other Pagans in North America. Faith is not a dalliance; it is a way of informing one's interaction with a vast and often hostile world. It is a method of understanding one's self, of building community and of framing the challenges of life, itself. I don't need scripture. I don't need teleological justification. I don't need salvation.

Do Jews experience this? Muslims? Who else's faith is dismissed as a temporary aberration of opinion that will one day correct itself, like we somehow feel that Pascal might go all in and force us to fold because the hand of our faith has been a bluff all along.

Enlightenment is at the end of many roads.

The Gimmick of Prosperity Gospel
For those uninitiated, Prosperity Gospel is the Biblically dubious concept taught at many evangelical churches that god bestows material wealth on those whom he favors. Generally, this is with the explicit instruction that one must tithe to the church in order to receive the lord's good will. Typically, church leaders who espouse this philosophy become very wealthy on the largesse of their congregation and then use this wealth as a validation of this same policy.

Nearsightedness on the Rise in U.S.

Researchers Say 47 Million Americans Age 20 and Over Are Myopic

-the reasons are blurry

Death Of The Internet: Censorship Bills In UK, Australia, U.S. Aim To Block "Undesirable" Websites
nternet censorship bills currently working their way into law in the UK, Australia and the U.S. legislate for government powers to restrict and filter any website that it deems to be undesirable for public consumption.
In the UK, legislation slated as the “Digital Economy Bill“, currently being debated in the House of Lords, would allow the Home Secretary to place “a technical obligation on internet service providers” to block whichever sites it wishes.
Under clause 11 of the proposed legislation “technical obligation” is defined as follows:

A “technical obligation”, in relation to an internet service provider, is an obligation for the provider to take a technical measure against particular subscribers to its service.
A “technical measure” is a measure that — (a) limits the speed or other capacity of the service provided to a subscriber; (b) prevents a subscriber from using the service to gain access to particular material, or limits such use; (c) suspends the service provided to a subscriber; or (d) limits the service provided to a subscriber in another way.

In other words, the government will have the power to force ISPs to downgrade and even block your internet access to certain websites or altogether if it wishes.
The legislation comes in the wake of amplified UK government efforts to seize more power over the internet and those who use it.
For months now unelected “Secretary of State” Lord Mandelson has overseen government efforts to challenge the independence of the of UK’s internet infrastructure.
Mandelson also wants to impose harsh policies, via the Digital Economy Bill, that would see users’ broadband access cut off indefinitely, in addition to a fine of up to £50,000 without evidence or trial, if they download copyrighted music and films. The plan has been identified as “potentially illegal” by experts.

CLIMATE CHANGE: No Water in Copenhagen Talks
In the last two years, the conclusion among decision-makers has been that the only way to solve the climate crisis is to turn carbon into a commodity and privatise the atmosphere.

Similar market-based solutions will be used to "solve" the growing water crisis, warned experts at the Klimaforum09, a parallel meeting a few kilometres away from the official 15th Conference of Parties (COP15) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, held Dec. 7-18 in Copenhagen.

"Corporations do not want regulations and have convinced governments that they can deliver continued economic growth and save the planet," said Maude Barlow, chair of the Council of Canadians, the largest citizens group in Canada and author of several books about water issues.

"It shows the power of the corporate lobby that nearly everyone, including many big NGOs, all see the market as the solution to climate change," Barlow told Tierramérica.

Meanwhile, the climate justice movement is fighting against carbon trading and carbon offsets and advocating for real emissions cuts, while recognising that the commons - air and water - are a public trust, she said.

"I've spent five days in the Bella Centre (the site of the official COP15 negotiations) and the real issues around water and land are being ignored," said Adriana Marquisio, vice president of FEOSE, the union of employees of Uruguay's public water agency. "The little countries who are suffering real impacts (of climate change) are trying to bring attention to this," Marquisio told Tierramérica.

Both Uruguay and Bolivia have pushed hard to broaden the vision on this issue, but the United States is dominating the talks with its agenda of corporate interests, she said.