Talandi Jesú Action Man - óhæfur sem jólagjöf, skv bandaríkjaher

Jesúiðnaðurinn í Bandaríkjunum er stór bissness, því trúað fólk á ekki að þurfa að neita sér um neitt af neyslumenningunni. Hverskonar fúl kristni væri það? Að þurfa að afneita materíalískri gleði? Reyndar held ég að fílósófían sé sú að það sé hægt að gera fólk kristið og frelsa það með því að hafa nógu mikið af jesú allt í kringum mann. Sú heimspeki kemur hvergi betur fram en í allskonar jesúleikföngum. Fyrirtækið one2belief hefur látið framleiða jesú actionkalla, sem er hægt að kaupa á netinu, stykkið kostar 20 dollara, sem er hreint ekki svo mikið, ef haft er í huga að sáluheill barnanna er í veði!

Action-Jesú er hið frábærasta leikfang:

Product Features:
• 12" tall
• Fully articulated, with 18 points of articulation including hands and fingers that can gasp and hold
• Realistic eyes
• Hand-sewn cloth outfits and sandals
• 63 seconds of Scripture, recorded in an easy-to-memorize style.

Það er líka hægt að kaupa Móse, Davíð og Esther, og svo auðvitað Maríu Mey. Jesú er samt flottastur, langflottastur meira að segja... Samkvæmt vörulýsingunni er Jesú nefnilega mikilvæg söguleg fígura, svona ef við hefðum kannski aldrei heyrt minnst á hann:

Jesus was the most important person in history. Ever.

Móses eiginlega uppáhaldið mitt - aðallega vegna þess að hann virðist vera svolítið rangeygur og svo fer hann með boðorðin tíu. Hann er líka með einhverskonar prik sem hann getur notað til þess að slást við aðra actionkalla. Davíð er með lítinn slöngvivað en Jesú er bara með handklæði. Kannski á hann að bleyta og snúa uppá það? Það getur verið helvíti effektíft vopn í höndunum á vönum mönnum!

Svo kunna þessar fígúrur allar að tala - það er hægt að hlusta á upptökur af þeim á heimasíðunni. Jesú getur t.d. sagt: "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life", og "I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again" - sem er flott að láta Jesú segja þegar hann gerir útaf við hina actionkallana með sprengjuvörpunni... Að vísu er leiklesturinn frekar fúll, sálarlaus og vantar alla innlifun - það hefði verið miklu flottara að láta Samuel L. Jackson tala inná Jesú.

En Marine Toys for Tots, sem er góðgerðarstofnun á vegum bandaríkjahers, sem gefur fátækum börnum leikföng fyrir jólin finnst Jesú hreint alls ekki nógu flott leikfang - one2believe reyndi nefnilega að pranga 4000 jesúköllum upp á Toys for Tots, en fengu þá alla senda aftur til baka:

Toys are donated to kids based on financial need and “we don’t know anything about their background, their religious affiliations,” said Bill Grein, vice president of Marine Toys for Tots Foundation, in Quantico, Virginia. As a government entity, Marines “don’t profess one religion over another,” Grein said Tuesday. “We can’t take a chance on sending a talking Jesus doll to a Jewish family or a Muslim family.”

Michael La Roe, director of business development for both companies, said the charity’s decision left him “surprised and disappointed.”

“The idea was for them to be three-dimensional teaching tools for kids,” La Roe said. “I believe as a churchgoing person, anyone can benefit from hearing the words of the Bible.”

Herinn hefði kannski tekið við Jesú ef hann hefði verið með eitthvað merkilegri vopn en handklæði? Talsmaður Marine Toys for Tots heldur því reyndar fram að ástæðan sé sú að Jesú sé hundfúlt leikfang:

Grein questioned whether children would welcome a gift designed for religious instruction.

"Kids want a gift for the holiday season that is fun," he said.

The program distributed 18 million stuffed animals, games, toy trucks and other gifts to children in 2005.

Pandagon sem fjallaði um þetta Jesúmál um daginn heldur því fram að þessi leikfangagjöf hafi verið úthugsað publicity-stunt: Fyrirtækið hafi fengið fullt af ókeypis umfjöllun og auglýsingu, og svo geta kristnir Bandaríkjamenn notað þetta sem enn eitt dæmið um ofsóknir á hendur kristinni trú og kristnu fólki almennt. Kristnir Bandaríkjamenn eru nefnilega margir handvissir um að þeir sæti skipulögðum ofsóknum! Það er líka orðinn fastur liður þegar líður að jólum að "kristnir" hægrimenn byrji að væla og grenja yfir því að trúlausir vinstrimenn og kynvillingalobbíið haldi úti hernaði gegn jólumum, og reyni með öllum ráðum að úthýsa trú og jesú-kristi úr jólahaldinu. Þetta ímyndaða "War on Christmas" er fastur liður í jóladagskrá Fox news og á öllum AM talk radio útvarpsstöðvum.

 

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ps. Ég biðst afsökunar á bloggleysi undanfarinna daga - það tekur smá tíma að komast aftur í gír eftir kosningarnar!

Góðgerðarsamtök afþökkuðu talandi Jesú-dúkkur

Bill O'Reilly ætlar að fara "inní blogospherið" "með handsprengju" til að stoppa alla vondu bloggarana

Bill O'Reilly sagði í The O'Reilly Factor í gær að hann vissi fyrir víst að forsetinn vissi ekki "hvað væri að gerast á internetinu", og að þar réðu ríkjum dularfullir bloggarar, á háum launum, sem hefðu það markmið eitt að standa í skítkasti og árásum á góða og heiðarlega menn, eins og Bush og O'Reilly. En O'Reilly er með lausnina á hreinu: Hann dreymir um að "fara inní blogospherið" og ráða alla þessa vondu bloggara af dögum, með handsprengju...

I know for a fact that President Bush doesn’t know what’s going on in the Internet. I know that for a fact because I did ask around. ... He is lucky, because these are hired guns. These are people hired — being paid very well to smear and try to destroy people.

I think - I have to say President Bush has a much healthier attitude toward this than I do. Because if I can get away with it, boy, I’d go in with a hand grenade. 

Kannski hann sjái fyrir sér að hann geti einhvernveginn skriðið inní "the worldwide intertubes", því eins og senator Ted "Bridge to nowhere" Stevens (R-AL) benti á í þingumræðum í sumar, þá er "the internet a series of tubes", og um þessi rör öll flæða einhver "internet", og þau geta flækst, enda "net", og rörin stíflast:

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially...

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck.

It's a series of tubes.

And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

Veraldarvefirnir eru merkilegir, og dularfullir. Ekki furða að hugsuðir eins og Bill O'Reilly og Ted Stevens eigi í mestu erfiðleikum með að skilja hvað þar fer fram.

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(Á myndinni er O'Reilly sennilega að sýna hversu lítill maður þarf að verða til að geta skriðið inní veraldarrörin?)

Leynivopn Ísraelshers: Klingon disruptors, Thalaron Cannons - bandarískir vísindamenn hanna "a cloaking device"

Og hver myndi þá verða hissa á að frétta að Bandaríkjastjórn sé að búa sig undir geimhernað? Í morgun las ég frétt á the Guardian: "Gaza doctors say patients suffering mystery injuries". Samkvæmt the Guardian hafa læknar á Gaza verið að taka á móti mönnum með stórskrýtin skotsár:

Doctors said that, unlike traditional combat injuries from shells or bullets, there were no large shrapnel pieces found in the patients' bodies and there appeared to be a "dusting" on severely damaged internal organs.

"Bodies arrived severely fragmented, melted and disfigured," said Jumaa Saqa'a, a doctor at Shifa hospital, the main casualty hospital in Gaza City. "We found internal burning of organs, while externally there were minute pieces of shrapnel. When we opened many of the injured people we found dusting on the internal organs."

At the Kamal Odwan Hospital, in Beit Lahiya, deputy director Saied Jouda, said he had found similar injuries. "We don't know what it means - new weapons or something new added to a previous weapon," he said. "We had patients who died after stabilisation and that is very unusual."

Kannski ekki Thaleron rays? Ísreaelsher neitar því líka að hafa verið að gera tilraunir með ný vopn. En þá sá ég þessa frétt frá AP: "Scientists create cloak of invisibility" - en AP heldur því fram að vísidamenn í Bretlandi og Bandríkjunum hafi hannað einhverskonar cloaking device, og að í fyrstu tilraun hafi þeim tekist að láta koparhólk hverfa. Vísindamenn eru auðvitað hæst ánægðir með þessar fréttir:

the ideas raised by the work "represent a first step toward the development of functional materials for a wide spectrum of civil and military applications."

En gamanið var ekki búið, því þriðja fréttin sem ég las var frétt Washington Post um nýjustu geimáætlanir Bandaríkjaforseta: "Bush Sets Defence As Space Priority":

Bush's top goals are to "strengthen the nation's space leadership and ensure that space capabilities are available in time to further U.S. national security, homeland security, and foreign policy objectives" and to "enable unhindered U.S. operations in and through space to defend our interests there."

Það er augljóst að Mossad og Bandaríkjaher eru að undirbúa sig undir geimhernað: Cloaking devices, Klingon Disruptors, "Space Defence"! Það vantar samt ennþá transporters og Warp drive. En bíðum við. Fyrir örfáum dögum sá ég þessa frétt hjá Reuters: "Scientists teleport two different objects", og nú voru það danskir vísindamenn við Niels Bohr Institute sem fluttu nokkrar efnisagnir yfir stutta vegalengd:

The experiment involved for the first time a macroscopic atomic object containing thousands of billions of atoms. They also teleported the information a distance of half a meter but believe it can be extended further.

"Teleportation between two single atoms had been done two years ago by two teams, but this was done at a distance of a fraction of a millimeter," Polzik, of the Danish National Research Foundation Center for Quantum Optics, explained. "Our method allows teleportation to be taken over longer distances because it involves light as the carrier of entanglement," he added.

Að vísu er vísindamennirnir ekki alveg nógu sannfærðir um að þeir muni geta flutt fólk og stærri hluti á milli geimskipa alveg í bráð, og segja ekkert um "the development of functional ... military applications" eða hvort þessi tækni muni "enable unhindered U.S. operations in and through space to defend our interests there." En semsagt, nú vantar okkur bara Warp drive!

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Þriggja metra háir kannabisskógar valda herjum bandamanna í Afghanistan vandræðum

Rakst á þessa frétt hjá Reuters: "Troops battle 10-foot marijuana plants". Samkvæmt fréttinni eru kanadískar hersveitir í Afghanistan í mestu vandræðum með talíbana sem fela sig inní kannabísskógum. Skógarnir eru svo þykkir að kanadamennirnir þora ekki inn í þá af ótta við að verða fyrir launsátri. Rick Miller, yfirmaður kanadíska hersins í Afghanistan, segir farir sínar ekki sléttar:

"We tried burning [the forests] with white phosphorous -- it didn't work. We tried burning them with diesel -- it didn't work. The plants are so full of water right now ... that we simply couldn't burn them," he said.

Even successful incineration had its drawbacks.

"A couple of brown plants on the edges of some of those (forests) did catch on fire. But a section of soldiers that was downwind from that had some ill effects and decided that was probably not the right course of action," Hillier said dryly.

Nú auðvitað hefur það "some ill effects" að standa undan vindi þegar brenndir eru 3 metra háir kannabisskógar!

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Tekur 200.000 ár að afmá öll ummerki um manninn

Hver hefur ekki velt því fyrir sér hversu lengi það myndi taka fyrir náttúruna að þurrka út öll ummerki um manninn, siðmenninguna, mannvirki, borgir og götur? Treehugger (via BoingBoing) er með gagnlega og auðlesanlega tímalínu fyrir þetta: hvenær gróður muni fela allar götur, hús hverfa og svo framvegis. Bráðnauðsynlegt fyrir alla post-apocalyptic dagdrauma! Verst að þessir umhverfisverndarsinnar virðast ekki skilja að það sem við viljum raunverulega vita er hvenær afkomendur mannkynnsins, sem hafa flúið undir yfirborðið og búa í yfirgefnum neðanjarðargöngum, munu þróa með sér telepatíska hæfileika!

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Hvað segir tölvupósthólfið þitt um þig?

'You are your inbox' Rakst á þessa grein á bloggrúntum dagsins - svo virðist sem yfirfullt tölvupósthólf mitt bendi til að ég eigi mikið að ókláruðum verkefnum eða vandamálum í lífinu... Reyndar er þessi grein alls ekki svo vitlaus. Ég hvet alla sem lifa í gegnum tölvupósthólfið sitt til að lesa hana! Reyndar er greinin upprunalega á Wall Street Journal, sem krefst áskriftar, svo ég kópíeraði fréttina alla hér að neðan:

Hoarders vs. Deleters: What your inbox says about you

By JEFFREY ZASLOW Wall Street Journal

2006-08-10

You are your inbox.

Take a clear-eyed look at how you answer or file each email. Notice what you choose to keep or delete. Consider your anxiety when your inbox is jammed with unanswered messages.

The makeup and tidiness of your inbox is a reflection of your habits, your mental health and, yes, even the way Mom and Dad raised you.

"If you keep your inbox full rather than empty, it may mean you keep your life cluttered in other ways," says psychologist Dave Greenfield, who founded the Center for Internet Behavior in West Hartford, Conn. "Do you cling to the past? Do you have a lot of unfinished business in your life?"

On the other hand, if you obsessively clean your inbox every 10 minutes, you may be so quick to move on that you miss opportunities and ignore nuances. Or your compulsion for order may be sapping your energy from other endeavors, such as your family.

Email addiction, of course, is now a cultural given. But a less-noticed byproduct of that is the impulse of the inbox. Some of us are obsessed with moving every email to an appropriate folder while killing junk "spam" on arrival and making sure Mom knows that we got her email and still love her. Meanwhile, others among us are e-procrastinators, modern-day Scarlett O'Haras who figure we'll deal with old email tomorrow. We're discovering that the disorder in our inboxes mirrors the disorder in our homes, marriages and checkbooks.

A few months ago, Scott Stratten was suffering from what he terms "inbox paralysis." A marketing consultant in Oakville, Ontario, he had 500 old messages in his inbox, all needing responses. "I felt so guilty, I couldn't even bring myself to open my email," he says.

In desperation, he decided to delete all his messages. He then sent an email blast to 400 people on his contact list, telling them a lie. He made up a story that his Internet service provider had informed him that some emails weren't getting through, and that was why friends and clients never heard back from him. "People were very empathetic," he says, "and it allowed me to start fresh."

Mr. Stratten describes what he did as "pure evil," but he also calls it a turning point. He realized he had to find a better way to ease his guilt over not coming through for people. He is now hiring an assistant who will handle his email.

Those who are too nice in other areas of their lives may be more likely to struggle with unwieldy inboxes, says Merlin Mann, creator of 43folders.com, a Web site about personal productivity. Polite people (or those who want to be liked) feel obliged to participate in ping-pong correspondences with chatty friends. They haven't the heart to give anyone the no-response brush-off. But Mr. Mann says such ruthlessness is necessary.

He says he uses a few dozen "templates" to answer email, prewritten form letters in which he inserts a person's name or a personalized comment. He also empties his inbox hourly. "You have to treat your inbox like you treat your mailbox at home," he says. "You wouldn't store your bills inside your mailbox. And leaving spam in your inbox is like leaving garbage in your kitchen."

On the work front, you're most at risk for inbox clutter if you're the type who can't say "no," warns Nancy Flynn, executive director of the ePolicy Institute, a consulting firm. When you're quick to respond with offers of help, "people use email to turn their crisis into your emergency," she says.

In Greensboro, N.C., Internet consultant Wally Bock keeps his inbox down to a manageable few dozen messages. He credits his sense of order to "having disciplined parents who made that a value." Still, he recognizes the downside. Many "Inbox Zero" zealots interrupt their work every time they hear a ping announcing incoming email. "Multitasking is a misnomer," says Mr. Bock. "What you're really doing is switching rapidly between tasks. And every time you switch, you have to start up again. Over the course of a day, you lose a chunk of efficiency."

A saner way to pare down an inbox is to move email into folders, by subject or need for follow-up, and once a week set aside time for inbox housekeeping. That's advice from Marilyn Paul, author of "It's Hard to Make a Difference When You Can't Find Your Keys," a book for the chronically disorganized. She also suggests using the inbox alphabetizing feature, which organizes all email by sender. "That allows you to delete 1,000 emails an hour," she says.

University of Toronto instructor Christina Cavanagh studied hundreds of office workers for her book "Managing Your Email: Thinking Outside the Inbox." One of her subjects, a finance executive, had 10,000 emails in his inbox. She advised him to simply delete the oldest 9,000. Busy people, drowning in email, may have no choice but to kill old messages and suffer the consequences. (Mr. Mann calls this "euthanasia.")

Because "inboxes are metaphors for our lives," Dr. Greenfield says, there's no cure-all solution to inbox management. We're all too different. But he believes an awareness of our inbox behavior can help us better understand other areas of our lives.

"If you have 1,000 emails in your inbox, it may mean you don't want to miss an opportunity, but there are things you can't pull the trigger on," Dr. Greenfield says. "If you have only 10 emails in your inbox, you may be pulling the trigger too fast and missing the richness of life."