Same-sex marriage is a pretty perennial issue, and it's the second most annoying of all the perennial third rail topics. There's always an extremely bitter fight between "SAME-SEX COUPLES FOR ALL!!!" and "CHRISTIAN VALUES FOR ALL!!!" (whatever that means).

Before I start, I'd like to make one thing clear.
If you make homosexuality illegal, will it stop happening? No.



Whether or not you believe in allowing same-sex couples to be married, there is an even bigger question. Why should the government care what people do in their personal lives?

Even better: what right do YOU have to tell someone else what they can or can't do?

I mean seriously, why do you need to have a license granted by a judge in your local government as proof of marriage? If you don't have that, how come people can't officially consider you to be married?

Why are there so many financial incentives (tax breaks, for example) that you can only get if you're married?

What right does the government have to determine which values of religious institutions it can and can't follow?

Why do we have such complicated adoption laws? The stupidest people living in the worst conditions have as many children as they possibly can, and that's not much of a problem. However, adoptions are almost impossible unless the people adopting are married, heterosexual, upper middle class, and a whole list of other things.

Why do we even need complicated inheritance laws?

Or rather, why do we need complicated laws at all?



If you're a Christian and you have your own idea of marriage (which is inconsistent considering many biblical marriages were one man with many women), do you have the right to impose that on anybody else? You might justify a Christian state by saying that the Founding Fathers were Christians. No, they were mostly Deists and Freemasons.

Freedom of religion is part of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, and most of the 50 states also have freedom of religion written in as a fundamental human right.


To the alternative relationships out there:
Why are you trying to get the government to grant you rights? If you believe you have the right to get married, then that right has to come from you. You don't have to be given rights. You have them already, and the government just refuses to recognize some of your rights. THAT is your real problem.



So how do you end the debate about whether or not same-sex marriage should be legal? By asking serious questions about whether or not the government has any right to interfere with people's relationships at all.



Think outside the box.

Dual-posted on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=440932770750

I can't talk about energy nowadays without mentioning the recent oil spill. Well, I know what kinds of stuff people are saying all over the internet and frankly, I don't give a fuck. This incident is the perfect example (just like Hurricane Katrina) that no one in big business or the government (together they make FASCISM, not CAPITALISM) really cares about anything except the bottom line profits. I am NOT going to speculate anything about peak oil, carbon taxes, or any of that nonsense. What I WILL do is talk about various methods of power generation and which ones will work the best in the long run.

Again, I refuse to speculate on anything involving the recent oil spill on the Gulf of Mexico. It's a mixture of bad business practices with bad political leadership. Yes, the two sides are in bed with each other, but what isn't nowadays? Stop looking deep into it and finding things that aren't really there. That's all this situation is.

Oh, and it's not an excuse to start imposing carbon taxes (which BP will BENEFIT from because they're involved in the carbon trade). Don't jump in favor of "alternative" energy because... well... you'll see.



Here are some common energy sources and the basic ideas within them.

1. Coal
It's available as needed, but the environmental costs make it prohibitive in many cases. But it's a catch-22 because there is so much coal available, and shutting down the economy is destructive. Clean coal technology can minimize pollution. Unfortunately, almost all of clean coal technology is devoted ONLY to carbon capture while doing nothing to reduce the real, legitimate threats to the environment.
2. Oil
Oil is cleaner and more effective than coal, but the environmental problems are probably equal due to accidents that can happen. Peak oil is mostly bullshit because there is still a lot more oil in certain areas of the world where you can't dig it out. For example, the California coast. The best way to get this (which is safer to reach than the oil in the Gulf of Mexico) is by lifting the bans on offshore drilling, which you can't do or else Greenpeace will dump all of the oil on the west coast to prove their point. There is SOME clean oil technology just like clean coal, but again, it's being used to capture carbon and not really clean up the smog.

3. Gas
Gas is cleaner than oil, but is much more expensive. The amount of environmental damage is also, comparatively, very low. Remember the combustion reactions in Chemistry classes? Yeah. And gas is about as clean as you can get from a traditional fuel source. The biggest worries are that you need a pipeline to constantly support the plant, and even the slightest accident could cause an explosion. You can also get this gas from both farms and landfills, which is a way of recycling energy and making things more efficient.

4. Hydroelectric
-Really hard to build
-Doesn't generate much power
-Disrupts too many ecosystems
-Not enough rivers to build on

5. Geothermal
It's overall a really good power source, but how many people live in places like Iceland? Almost none. The only threat is a volcanic eruption, and that alone can stop a lot of people from living anywhere near these power plants.

6. Biofuel
This is the biggest bullshit I ever heard of. If you spend a lot of time in a supermarket, you've probably noticed that food prices have more than doubled in the past few years. Why is that? The conventional idea is that global warming is causing droughts, which is reducing crop yields. That's why they want us to replace the edible crops on farms with more biofuels. But wait! Didn't food prices go up in the first place because of biofuels? And now they want the farmers to replace the food they grow with MORE biofuels? Won't that raise the food prices even more? Won't that make people in third world countries starve to death?

The environmental laws say that biofuels are carbon-neutral. Why? Because it's the law, that's why! Well, these biofuels are usually horribly inefficient and they do more damage than they benefit. A farmer will grow only ONE crop (corn or soy) all the time instead of the crop rotation and mixed farming they learned about, because farming regulations are prohibitive and there's a lot of money to be made selling biofuels. This will ruin the soil in the farmland and all surrounding areas. Then the biofuel will have to be processed, which will probably use energy from coal or oil-powered engines or power plants. Then that has to be transported to a new location, in an oil-powered truck. Then it will be stored somewhere where the storage facility is maintained by fossil fuel-powered power plants. Then it will be burned at an efficiency rate LOWER than fossil fuels! In every step of the way from growing crops to using the fuel, people will need to be heavily subsidized by the government because otherwise, it would take more energy to grow, process, and ship the fuel than you would receive from actually using it. Carbon-neutral my ass.

"But if we don't keep up this nonsense, too many people will lose their job!" ~ John Maynard Keynes

7. Solar
The technology is behind many other power sources by several decades. Also, it's really hard to get enough solar power unless you live in a tropical arid place. It's also overly subsidized so it uses up more energy than it gives you back.

8. Wind
There are two kinds of places where wind power is a viable option. One is TORNADO ALLEY. The other is coastal regions. You can't put them in coastal areas because Greenpeace will destroy them. Many people say that the wind mills pose a significant threat to migratory birds, but the ones who get killed are the weaker ones who die on migration routes anyway. And most birds will never migrate at a height of 50 metres, which is a typical height for wind mills.


9. Nuclear fission
Nuclear power is overall the cleanest, safest, and most effective electricity generation system ever designed. There have only been two disasters. Chernobyl was a horrible failure of the USSR and that thing was built sub-standard by every definition. Three Mile Island wasn't as bad as the media (AND GREENPEACE) made it out to be; the farmers near the plant got the equivalent radiation of a chest X-ray. It was handled really well, and is the kind of disaster that only happens once in a lifetime. The containers that nuclear waste is stored in are indestructible, and science is progressing so rapidly that people will find ways of using the waste in only a few decades. The terrorist threat is more hype than reality, because the real threat is statistically negligible compared to everything else that goes on. But if you really need a new place to dump the nuclear waste, I recommend feeding it to Greenpeace members.

10. Wave
Power from waves of moving water. It sounds like a great idea, but it hasn't been extensively studied. No one wants to attempt it because the initial costs are astronomical and no one knows what the returns will be. We're better off only studying it for a while.



Okay, so fossil fuels are destroying the environment, most of the "clean" energy sources cost more than they benefit, and Greenpeace is making everything worse. What do we do? Well, we need to get rid of Greenpeace, first of all. Then what?


Have you ever played SimCity? Remember the Microwave power plants? Believe it or not, we actually have that technology. I'm not sure why no one really talks about it, but several countries (including the United States) have space programs capable of capturing massive amounts of sunlight and beaming it back to giant Microwave satellites on Earth. You can read about it here.
[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_solar_power ]

If there's anything that will get us out of a horrible depression quickly, it's microwave power. It's also the one solution that will completely replace petroleum for electricity generation. And the power source is unlimited; you can easily send more orbiters out to space to beam to more parabolic dishes on Earth. Electric cars will go on the mass market within the next 20 years or so, and with good batteries, that eliminates the need for oil (or hybrid technology, which just doesn't work).

The technology is still in its infancy, but just like SimCity, it will be available by the year 2030. Even the Peak Oil people think we will run out of oil by then.



Before oil, people were using coal and horses. Well, the horses were pooping all over city streets and it became a serious health and environmental hazard. In a way, the automobile replacing the horse and buggy cleaned up the environment. Now, space-based solar power replacing fossil fuels will help to accomplish the same thing.

This is just another example of an impossible problem being solved by humans with relative ease. I don't pay attention to all the nasty things that people say about humanity. There are good things and bad things in all of us, and I don't think we appreciate the good things enough.



Your thoughts?

Some people will tell you that nothing original has come out of anything in the last ________ (unit of time), while others will continuously marvel at human innovations for all of eternity. Well, I'm going to settle this once and for all.

First, I'd like to ask you one question. What does World of Warcraft have to do with Christianity?

Are you stumped? You should be.

Let's start with World of Warcraft. For the record, I refuse to play this game because I've heard how addicting it is. Anyway, one of the races you can play with in this game is the Orcs. It's a very original game, right? Well, no. There have been countless MMORPG's before WoW, and there were countless video games before MMORPG's. Before that, there was Dungeons and Dragons, and before that, Chess. The Orcs are original, right? Wrong! They were created by Tolkien.

So now we're back to Tolkien and his Middle Earth collection. It's very original, is it not? Let's just take the Dwarves for example. They're from Norse mythology. And then there's the one ring, which is based off of the opera, Der Ring des Nibelungen, composed by none other than Richard Wagner. And that's based off of the Nibelungenlied, which is an old German epic poem.

The Nibelungenlied is a story about the German migration in the 400's AD, where the Germans were being massacred by the Burgundians and the Huns, which happened in the interim period between when the Roman Empire had collapsed and the Christian Roman Empire had emerged.

So, in a way, Christianity was the trigger that made World of Warcraft possible.

I could give you countless other examples, but I think you get the idea.

Did I just prove that there are no original ideas? Well, yes and no. World of Warcraft is similar to Middle Earth, but it's not the same. Middle earth is similar to Norse mythology, but it's not the same.

The truth is, every new idea is based on some other existing idea. That's just the way things are. However, at the same time, every new idea is unique, despite being based on everybody else's ideas. Why? Because every human being on this planet who thinks of such an idea is a completely unique individual in every way.

THAT's how different people can have ideas all based on the same roots and still be real innovators. After all, it's through such an exchange of ideas that human progress is made.