MonthOctober 2008

Esozone is imminent. Free gallery opening tomorrow

If you haven’t bought your ticket to Esozone, what are you waiting for? The event begins a week from tomorrow so buy now!

Tomorrow night at Watershed will be our gallery unveiling and free movie night. Come by and check it out – assuming everything goes according to plan on their end we’ll be screening Zeitgeist 2 which is coming out tomorrow. If it doesn’t actually come out tomorrow, we’ll show something else.

Esozone

Creation Science Wiki: Behold the LULZ

Visit the Creation Science Wiki

For the first 10 minutes I spent bouncing around this website, I assumed it had to be a joke.? The internets have provided us with the too-funny to be real antics of the Landover Baptist Church, and the too-real to be funny hatred of the Westboro Baptist Church. However, the Creation Science Wiki is a very earnest and straight-faced contribution to the field of…well, polite euphemisms have never come easily for me.

They offer a very classical version of Creationism, complete with charts detailing the Biblical age of the Earth, detailed discussion on the Center of the Cosmos, our 6000 year old Universe, and the inspirational story of Robert Gentry, whose career as a nuclear physicist convinced him to become a Young Earth creationist.? (Apparently, this is not a typical path for nuclear physicists to take.) It’s also a wealth of hilarious quotes:

“The age of the universe is far beyond what a typical creation scientist would countenance. In response several young universe creation cosmologies have been proposed.”

Anyways, I don’t present this as smug mockery.? You owe it to yourself to get into an altered state and really immerse your head in this material…suspend your disbelief and open yourself up to the “What If.” It’s fun.

To really up the ante, consider making the pilgrimage to the Creation Museum over in Kentucky. For a less theological and reality-intensive version of the trip, check out The Anatomy of Gummi Bears and Balloon Animals.

Retro-futurist space travel posters

venus by air

mars travel poster

More at Steve Thomas art

(via Brass Goggles)

Palin’s Small-Town Snobbery: Why it’s time to bury the myth of rural virtue

Steve Chapman has a piece in Reason looking at the reverse-snobbery of rural dwellers, and provides some uncomfortable facts about small town life to suggest that small town folks are in no sense “morally superior” to their urban and suburban counterparts.

You can read it here.

Towards the end he acknowledges that crime rates are higher in denser populations than in the country, and cites some reasons that may be.

I have another question though: what about unreported crime? How much assault and domestic abuse occurs in small towns that never gets reported? My personal experience of small town life is that bar fights occur frequently and without warning, and sometimes the people involved are neither thrown out or even cutoff at the bar. In my experience drinking in bars in big cities, bar fights are rare and when they occur the offending patrons are thrown out and sometimes the police are called.

And I have the feeling that in places where licensed counselors tell women that they should accept domestic abuse because the bible says so, there will be considerably fewer reports of violence than in an area dense with apartments with neighbors calling in domestic abuse calls whenever someone raises their voice.

Japan Holds Diaper Fashion Show- For Adults

One after the other, the models strutted across the stage to bouncy ’80s dance tunes, all showing off designs of the same article of clothing-adult diapers. Japan has one of the world’s most rapidly aging societies, and the fashion show Thursday proved the country’s diaper producers are intent on keeping the elderly clean and dry.

“Diapers are something that people don’t want to look at,” said Kiyoko Hamada of the Aging Lifestyle Research Center, a leading organizer of the show. “But if you make them attractive, then people can learn about them more easily,” she said. Indeed, adult diapers are an increasingly common item in Japan, home to one of the world’s longest average lifespans. More than 20 percent of the population is over 65, and the country is forecast to have the globe’s largest number of centenarians-1 million-by 2050, the U.N. says.”

(via Breitbart. Thanks CP!)

Wasilla, Alaska, Gadfly Goes Viral

“The woman behind the infamous e-mail that aired criticisms of Sarah Palin to millions across the cyber-globe sat at a computer screen scrolling through unread messages, as dozens more popped into her inbox. “Let’s see, what is the next one?” Anne Kilkenny said with a smile, killing time before her family attended a Saturday evening church service. She clicked and skimmed the words: “Hateful liar.”

She opened the next one: “I think you are nothing more than disgruntled and jealous in some way!! Be truthful now. Are you pro-abortion? For gay marriages? Embryonic stem cell research? Euthanasia?”
“Blah, blah, blah, blah,” Kilkenny said, chuckling and shaking her head, moving on to the next e-mail: “Get your own life Anne and leave hers alone.” “Shame on you Anne Kilkenny, that is if you really do exist!” one person wrote. “You are probably fake.”

Kilkenny, 57, lives with her husband and son in a one-level home surrounded by raspberry bushes, crab apple trees, birch and fireweed. She speaks in a high-pitched voice, cheerful as a grade school teacher, pausing for deep breaths between thoughts. She parts her steel gray hair down the middle, wears ankle-length skirts, irons meticulously and grows potatoes and asparagus in her backyard.

After Sen. John McCain named Palin, the governor of Alaska and former mayor of Wasilla, as his Republican vice presidential running mate on Aug. 29, friends of Kilkenny’s in other states began asking, “What do you know about her?” Two days later, Kilkenny decided to set down her observations about Palin in a 24,000-word sober critique, e-mailed to 40 of her friends in the Lower 48.”

(via The L.A. Times)

No Money Down: Rushkoff on the rigged credit system

It all started to make sense to me when I attended Learning Annex’s Wealth Expo earlier this year-a seminar where teachers of The Secret, the hosts of Flip This House, George Foreman, Tony Robbins and former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan [pictured above in banner from Learning Annex website] purportedly taught the thousands in attendance how to take advantage of the current foreclosure boom.

Using language borrowed from today’s more money-centric New Age spiritualists, as well as the get-rich-quick books of the early 1900s ‘New Thought Movement’ on which these pyramid schemes are based (such as Elizabeth Towne’s The Science of Getting Rich or Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich), they encouraged their mostly black audience to get on the ladder to success by purchasing educational DVDs and wealth-building ‘systems.’

These courses all promised to teach the properly motivated American how to find homeowners down on their luck and approaching foreclosure, as well as how to buy those homes from under them and resell them at a great profit. What made the spectacle doubly outrageous were not the dancing girls or indoor fireworks; it was the fact that most of the participants were themselves desperate former homeowners, whose illnesses, divorces, fires, and floods had put them in to foreclosure, too. Get it? They were paying to learn how to feed on people just like themselves. […]

Participation in business or, in most of our cases, land or home ownership, means helping put those wheels of the credit industry in motion. And the more we push, the more momentum they gain, and the more influence they have over an increasingly large portion of our experience. Reality becomes defined by credit sectors, and our time is consumed more each day with wondering how we’re going to pay back what we’ve borrowed.

Every once in a while, though, we break the rules and get to see the possibility for another kind of economy. Whether it’s an alternative currency, an open source software solution, or the simple good faith gifts we make to one another for creating value in each other’s lives.

Full Story: Arthur Magazine

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