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That’s telekinesis, Kyle

That’s telekinesis, Kyle

Last updated on: May 29, 2008 at 8:59 am by Fred Clark

That’s telekinesis, Kyle 2008-05-29T08:59:11-04:00 Fred Clark

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Two headlines I didn’t expect to see but which both, in a small way, make me more hopeful about the future:

“Monkeys Control a Robot Arm With Their Thoughts.”

“Political world abuzz over Scott McClellan’s tell-all book“

The weird thing here is that I’m more excited about the second one.

* * *

The “Christian Worldview Network” is the D-list religious right speakers’ bureau in the conference/tape-series/literature-in-the-narthex racket. It’s an unwieldy agglomeration of John Birchers, anti-evolutionists and Jack Chick-style evangelists. Some of them are painfully sincere, others seem to be cynical liars (see: Barton, David ).

There’s a campy, MST3K-like fascination to the Worldview gang’s stuff. It’s like stumbling across a trove of those old Reefer Madness-style “educational” films, and then realizing that somebody is still producing them today. But whatever amusement their hysteria provides is outweighed by remembering, again, that these loons have real victims, both external and internal.

Yesterday’s e-mail alert from Worldview’s ringleader, Brannon Howse, offers a glimpse of this gang’s overwrought style. Being overwrought is more or less Howse’s job. He manufactures and sells overwrought-ness. Today’s alert is titled: “An Important Financial Report You Should Read If You Don’t Want to be the Typical, Ignorant, American That Just Might Be Financially Destroyed.” That’s the subject line of the e-mail. The alert itself begins:

Acclaimed economist John Williams is getting lots of national press since the first of May 2008. However, how many Americans will really pay attention to his warning? Not many would be a good guess. Most Americans, unlike those that visit this site, are sheeple and will buy the lies of the American government.

As you’ve probably guessed, Howse and Williams are pushing investments in gold and silver. Selling those investments means he needs here to portray America as the Great Satan. At the same time, Howse is also trying to sell his followers Barton’s mythological histories and their home-school curriculum on America as a Christian nation chosen/anointed by God. So the apocalyptic link above — declaring anyone who believes “the lies of the American government” to be “sheeple” — is listed on Worldview’s site alongside other articles condemning liberals for not embracing their divinely ordained American government with unquestioning loyalty.

I can’t figure out if these people are just cynical Elmer Gantry-types, willing to say anything depending on what it is they’re selling at any given moment, or whether they somehow have figured out a way to really believe contradictory things simultaneously.

* * *

Some good news for Philly mass transit. Atrios explains why after-midnight regional rail is a good idea. And here’s another reason why.

I’ll just add that if they’d had this back in 1987, then I wouldn’t have missed this encore because I had to catch the last train.

* * *

Southwest Idaho mobile home park residents fear evictions

That article is about 500 homes near Boise but, again, this is happening everywhere. About 3.5 million Americans own their own home, but not the land it sits on. That land can be sold out from under them, leaving them homeless and houseless.

Here’s the solution.

* * *

I meant to link to this last week, the AP’s Marc Levy looks at the problem of disposing of compact fluorescent light bulbs once they eventually die. The long-lasting, energy-efficient CFLs contain mercury, making them part of our household hazardous waste stream.

The way we handle household hazwaste around here is one of my pet peeves. Delaware County, Pa., has designated days — held quarterly — during which we can drop off our household hazwaste at one of a series of rotating sites (or moving targets). In theory, making the proper disposal of this waste so inconvenient could be seen as providing an incentive to reduce the amount of household hazardous waste we generate, but that’s not how it works for most households here. What this means in practice is that people have an incentive to toss their household hazwaste in with the rest of their trash.

There’s probably a business opportunity in the collection and proper disposal of this stuff, but I doubt such an enterprise could succeed unless there were some incentive for people to use it and some direct consequences for just tossing the pesticides, varnish, batteries and dead CFL bulbs in the big bag in the kitchen.

* * *

Seriously, though: “Monkeys Control a Robot Arm With Their Freakin’ Thoughts.”

Maybe not quite as exciting as this, but still that’s a New York Times headline with A) monkeys, B) robots and C) mind powers. No zombies there, but you can’t have everything.

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