Financial protest

And in another effort of Christians trying to wreak havoc with other people's pocketbooks, we have a Washington pastor urging people to buy Microsoft stock now and then sell it all on May 1 in an attempt to drive the price down. This is after he urged a boycott of the company's products in retaliation for the company supporting local gay-rights legislation.

Rev. Ken Hutcherson, pastor of Antioch Bible Church in the Seattle suburb of Redmond, said the stock-dumping plan had been part of his strategy all along.

"You got to find out how you affect a company," Hutcherson said, conceding that it would be hard to get people to shun products from companies that dominate the marketplace as Microsoft and Boeing do. (Associated Press)

My question is whether this is the way we want to "affect" society around us. Attempting to financially hurt people that don't do what we want strikes me as a bit like the mob offering to "protect" businesses for a small fee. And if it's just a matter of money, how about we start paying people to do what we want? We could pay people to not get drunk, not be promiscuous, not get divorced, spend time with their children, etc, etc, etc.

And then there's the matter of whether this will actually do anything to the stock price. Sounds like a showdown to me. Do you think there are enough supporters of the legislation around the country to go out and buy Microsoft stock on May 1? If Christians want a referendum on their beliefs, they may not like the results!

State of the Union

Unfortunately I cannot watch Bush speeches, so I will be missing the State of the Union tonight. So I must rely on news reports and second-hand analyses. A news release this afternoon says the president will address America's oil problem.

"America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world," he plans to say. "The best way to break this addiction is through technology."

Oil prices are inching toward $70 a barrel, and the president's goal of reducing dependence on foreign suppliers has been issued by the White House over the decades but never realized. Bush's primary proposal is to increase federal research into alternative fuels such as ethanol made from weeds or wood chips, instead of corn.

He also is to push for construction of new nuclear power plants and increased use of wind, solar and clean-coal technologies. (Associated Press)

I'm all for alternative fuels. It's one of the reasons I own a diesel as it is much more flexible as far as where its fuel can come from. (Recycled cooking oil, rape seed, coal, peanuts, etc.) Do I use an alternative fuel today? No, for that I'd have to drive up to Boulder. But I will as soon as one is available closer to where I live.

I'm also all for reducing foreign entanglements in unstable parts of the world. Not only is it risky but we are funding societies that are working against our ideals.

One thing I'd like to see is Bush to encourage America to conserve and to make do with less. Alas, we probably won't hear anything of that. We can have it all. Our grandfathers were asked to sacrifice during WW2; we are asked to spend spend spend to keep the economy going after 9/11. Buying that big-screen TV (made in China, contributing to our trade inbalance) and that new SUV (which consumes said oil) is supposed to be key to our national defense. Weird.

AOL's blasphemies

Some Christians are up in arms about AOL's latest marketing for its AIM service.

America Online is now acting like God – using what some consider to be His very name in a marketing pitch for e-mail, voice chat, video chat, instant messaging, text messaging and other forms of communication.

AIM's new slogan is "I AM."

I didn't know God had a lock on that phrase. He's certainly not what I would have first thought of when seeing slogans such as:

I AM
INSTANT MESSAGING

I AM
VOICE CHAT

Etc, etc.

"You must immediately change the name of your program," [Ian Millar] told Jonathan Miller, the chief executive officer of America Online, and John Buckley, corporate communications officer for the company, in a pointed letter. "I can assure you that you will lose business over this marketing tactic from people who worship the Almighty. But worse, you have offended Him by your actions; whether they are deliberate or ignorant. To treat as common the name of God is wicked. God is patient, but mankind is today making an error of epic proportions by the deliberate actions of mocking the Almighty; particularly in the technologically advanced society. His patience with the mockery of mankind will come to an end."

In the meantime, while God's patience continues, evangelicals can try to wreak financial havok on AOL's pocketbook. Good luck. (It worked wonders with Disney!)

Automobile fatality rates

People love compact cars as gas prices soar, but there's a sobering cost: The government says they have the highest fatality rate.

Compacts had a fatality rate of 17.76 per 100,000 vehicles in 2004, followed by compact pickup trucks with 16.87 and subcompact vehicles with 16.85, according to a report Monday by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Large vans had the lowest rate, 9.34, while pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles had rates of about 15 deaths. (Associated Press)

OK, so we know how many people are killed while driving in certain sized cars. But how many people are killed by certain sized cars? I'd be interested in statistics that tell me how many people are killed when hit by, say, a large SUV versus a compact. I guess in our individualistic every-man-for-himself society that doesn't matter to the purchaser. Perhaps it should.

Americans not saving

Americans' personal savings rate dipped into negative territory in 2005, something that hasn't happened since the Great Depression. Consumers depleted their savings to finance the purchases of cars and other big-ticket items.

The Commerce Department reported Monday that the savings rate fell into negative territory at minus 0.5 percent, meaning that Americans not only spent all of their after-tax income last year but had to dip into previous savings or increase borrowing.

The savings rate has been negative for an entire year only twice before -- in 1932 and 1933 -- two years when the country was struggling to cope with the Great Depression, a time of massive business failures and job layoffs.

Associated Press

Mac viruses to increase?

eWeek has a "news analysis" declaring "Apple's shift to Intel processors will make it easier to create software exploits in Macintosh systems".

"Attackers have been focused on the [Intel] x86 for over a decade. Macintosh will have a lot more exposure than when it was on PowerPC," said Oliver Friedrichs, a senior manager at Symantec Corp. Security Response.

Correction: attackers have been focused on the *Windows OS* for over a decade. I'm not exactly sure what this has to do with the Mac. Red Hat Linux already runs on Intel -- are there a lot of viruses written for it?

I guess Mac moving to Intel means some assembly code compatibility but what good does this do you if the Mac's memory addressing and file system are different and you lack the usual Internet Explorer and MS Outlook exploits? Time will tell!

In any case, if you want to hear how bad viruses on the Mac is going to get, go to Symantec. They have a product to sell, after all. It remains to be seen whether it causes more problems on the Mac then it solves.

Edit Wikipedia, get caught

Members of US Representative Martin Meehan's staff edited his Wikipedia entry, deleting (among other things) a reference to a broken campaign pledge. (Meehan promised to limit himself to 4 terms -- he is now on his 7th.) Now, instead of this bit of knowledge being limited to those who were around in 1992 and those who somehow stumbled onto his Wikipedia entry, the whole world knows! He's got to love this bit of extra publicity he's getting.

From the Wikipedia entry:

On the House floor in 1995 he scolded members who might go back on their promise to limit their tenure in office. "The best test of any politicians' credibility on term limits," he said, "is whether they are willing to put their careers where their mouths are and limit their own service." In the year 2000 when the Congressman ran for Congress, breaking his 1992 pledge, he called it a disservice to his constituents who continued to want him to be their Congressman.

Why Mommy is a Democrat

From the children's book's website:

"Democrats make sure we all share our toys, just like Mommy does."

"Democrats make sure we are all safe, just like Mommy does."

"Democrats make sure children can go to school, just like Mommy does."

Not as bad as Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed!, but then what is?

An interesting aside at Mere Comments:

At first I couldn't put a finger on my discomfort with this until I realized: it's Sunday school material. In Red and Blue America, we've so privatized our religious convictions ("We're going to let Johnny choose whether or not he goes to church, and which one") that all we have left is our political identities.

Since we're not allowed to hate each other based on race or religion(*) I guess all we have left now is politics. (And if you want your child to join the right political party, better start working on them when they're young!) Maybe that explains the increase in venom that seems to pervade political discussion these days. Then again, maybe it's just the increase we have in communication via cable channels and the internet.

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(*) Exception made for the non-religious who want to hate the religious. It's okay to be intolerant of the intolerant, y'know.

Google censorship

In different political circumstances, Google already notifies users of its German and French search services when it blocks access to material such as banned Nazi sites in Europe.

"France and Germany require censorship for Nazi sites, and the U.S. requires censorship based on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. These various countries also have laws on child pornography," [Google co-founder Sergey Brin] said. (Reuters)

Nazis, copyright infringement, child pornography, democracy and freedom: the scourges of our age.

Pro-life = pro-abortion?

What we need is an explicit pro-choice war on the abortion rate, coupled with a political message that anyone who stands in the way, yammering about chastity or a "culture of life," is not just anti-choice, but pro-abortion.

William Saletan on how abortion advocates should turn the argument around and label pro-lifers as "pro-abortion".