Hagee: Hitler is saviour sent by God
Watch this clip from Keith Olbermann. It’s about how Rev. Hagee thinks that Hitler was sent by God to kill the Jews so that the Jews could then create the state of Israel so that the prophecies in the Book of Revelations can happen and all the born again Christians can get raptured to the pearly gates. Don’t laugh. The Rapture was George W. Bush’s Iraq exit strategy, although they’ve been a bit stumped when it just plain refused to happen. Seems like a perfect endorsement for McCain.
Hitler - under this crazy theory - is a messanger sent by God, equivalent to Judas. He is a force for good, according to Hagee. He may deny it, but that is the only way one can really read this idea - that the Holocaust was just an inevitable part of God’s salvific plan.
For readers this side of either the Atlantic or in some godless European outpost like New Haven or Harvard Square, may I remind you that 59% of the American public believe that the events predicted in the Book of Revelations will happen (source).
But, of course, in writing this, no doubt I’m just exposing my - oh, what’s it called? - atheistismistic fundamentalism! We should be focusing on happy, friendly religious people like the Archbishop of Canterbury, and not crazy, off-the-wall people like Hagee. Rowan Williams is the true and honest face of Christianity, while Hagee is a fringe element who has managed to sneak in and become the preferred voice of God for John McCain, a man who could possibly be President of the most powerful nation in the world in less than a year. Any discussion of this is just a sign of being a nutty, illiberal atheist who eats babies in his spare time.
FOICamp
I’ve put up a wiki page for FOICamp - FOI being Freedom of Information. The idea is that a bunch of people get together for a day in that lovely city of London to work collaboratively on finding new ways to get access to government data. This means at the very least sending out at least a few megabytes worth of Freedom of Information Act requests to all the agencies you can think of, but also possibly thinking about data structures to better represent information of public interest, and bootstrapping ideas to make governments, public services and the like more accountable to citizens.
If you are interested, please add yourself to the wiki. If you don’t understand how to do that, you can post a comment or send me an e-mail and I’ll add you.
Currently, the plan is one day in July or August, in central London. Maybe if there are people elsewhere who want to run one simultaneously, that’d be great. It’d be even more amazing if we could see if we could set some kind of record for sending out FOI requests. And it’s not just UK-based - maybe if there are people in countries with similar FOI or data protection laws, we could all work in concert to free up government information.
What issues, then? It’s up to you. Everyone has things that concern them - health, education, crime, policing, immigration, housing, social services, welfare, ‘meta’ politics, business, regulation, libraries, museums, culture, homelessness, war, peace, religion, intellectual property - pick an issue, figure out where we have a shortage of reliable and useful data, get together with others and start sending out requests.
I’ll be at BarCampNorthEast in Newcastle tomorrow, so if you are there, feel free to pull me aside and tell me that it’s a stupid idea and you’ve got a way to make it so much cooler.
London, England
A few incitements to drama academe: Newcastle’s reader in evolutionary psychology says working class people have lower IQs, thus justifying current admissions policy, and a nice book review on an Afrocentrist tome, citing Black Athena, in case the claim of the Alexandrian origin of the philosophy of Aristotle needed any further debunking. Then, of course, Bush, neoconservatism and the decline of public intellectuals. Then there’s McCain pulling away from the Hitler-loving Hagee, as if that’ll make a difference. Bugger it all, I’m off to Starbucks to read a big book about epistemology.
Malet Street, London, England
How to get a FireEagle invite. You can bug me IRL too - I’ve got a few to give away.
New Oxford Street, London, England
Michael S. Hyatt: One of my pet peeves is people who pontificate on new technologies but have never actually used them. This is particularly annoying-but common-among CEOs.
New Oxford Street, London, England
