Organization “Inside Google” Runs Ads About Google CEO’s Big Brother-Like Attitude

Most parents understand that the Internet is NOT their friend. Companies like Google are making billions by tracking everything you do online… and then selling that information to the highest bidder. Worse, they are tracking everything your children are doing as well… up to and including using the GPS in their cell phones to track their movements.

Fortunately, the public is FINALLY waking up — and fighting back. The organization “Inside Google” is now running ads on the Times Square Jumbotron lampooning Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s famous comment that, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” Schmidt could have worked for the East German Stasi with that attitude. Between corporate sleazebags like Schmidt and Big Brother totalitarians in the U.S. government, Americans will soon have their every movement watched, online and off.

On a more practical level, Inside Google offers a number of privacy tools on its website that can help you get started taking back your life from corporate totalitarians like Schmidt. Go to…

http://insidegoogle.com/takeaction/privacy-toolbox/

It’s not just a matter of disabling “cookies.” Hundreds, even thousands of websites –especially those that use Flash Video — place tracking programs on your computer that monitor everything you do. These tracking programs — known as LSOs or Local Shared Objects — remain in place even when you delete your cookies.

To get rid of LSOs, you can add a special plugin to your Firefox browser. You can get this plugin, Better Privacy, by clicking here…

More later.

Why I Don’t Trust Doctors (or Most “Experts” for That Matter…)

In bioethics, politics and law, oftentimes we must rely upon the opinions of so-called “experts,” particularly those in the medical professions.  But as anyone who has ever dealt with doctors knows, they are frequently wrong — but almost NEVER admit it.

The problem is, their arrogance can get people killed or cause serious harm. That’s one of the reasons why you should never trust doctors or any other expert. Or rather, you should follow Reagan’s Dictum: Trust… But Verify.

Take this recent case from Australia. A woman, Kate Ogg, delivered twins and was told that, after 20 minutes of resuscitation efforts, that the male child wasn’t going to make it. The hospital staff lay the lifeless body of the premature infant on the mother’s chest so she could say goodbye.

The problem is, the baby began to stir. “Just reflexive movements,” the doctor sniffed dismissively.

The parents trusted the doctor knew what he was talking about — always a problematic assumption — and continued to nuzzle the baby as it squiggled around. They assumed he was dying.

They kept asking the doctor to re-examine the baby, but he refused. Repeatedly refused. He had decided. He had made up his (arrogant) mind. Too busy filling out his forms to bother taking another look. This attitude is rampant in medicine.

Here’s what happened next as reported on MSNBC.com:

Jamie [the baby] continued to come around as he lay across Kate’s chest. He began grabbing at his mother’s finger, as well as his father’s. And when Kate put a dab of breast milk on her finger, Jamie eagerly accepted it.

Kate finally began to believe her baby was actually alive. “We thought, ‘He’s getting stronger — he’s not dead,’ ” she said. But the family wasn’t getting any encouragement from their doctor. While the Oggs urged hospital personnel to summon him, they were repeatedly told what they were seeing was still just reflex from a baby already declared dead.

Kate Ogg told Curry they had to “fib” to get the doctor to return to her bedside. “We kept saying, ‘He’s doing things dead babies don’t do, you might want to come and see this,’ ” she told Curry.

But the skeptical doctor still didn’t return. “So David said, ‘Go and tell him we’ve come to terms with the baby’s death, can he just come and explain it.’ That made him come back.”

Kate Ogg told the London Daily Mail the doctor was in disbelief when he arrived back at the bedside. “He got a stethoscope, listened to Jamie’s chest and just kept shaking his head. He said, ‘I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it.’ ”

The problem with experts is not that they don’t have expertise. It’s that their expertise blinds them to what is right in front of their eyes. Their expertise actually creates a bias.

I don’t mean to pick on doctors. My brother is a doctor. I have friends who are doctors. But I take almost everything they say with a gigantic grain of salt… especially when it’s really serious. The parents in this case now worry that the arrogance of this particular doctor may have resulting in their child suffering unnecessary brain damage. Had the doctor bothered to listen to what the parents were saying, the hospital staff might have been able to administer oxygen and take other measures to help the struggling baby.

Trust but verify indeed.

Al Franken is a Big Fat Liberal… and other truths the media don’t tell you…

Well, it turns out Al Franken, the pudgy Saturday Night Live comedian and now U.S. senator from Minnesota, got elected the way most Democrats get elected: through voter fraud.

If you’ll recall, the rabidly partisan Franken’s election in 2008 was so close the Democrats did a re-do of the 2000 election: They kept re-counting and re-counting the votes. This time, their candidate won after the third re-count.

And as they did in Florida, it appears the Democrats were willing to look for votes anywhere they could — from dead people, children under age 10, illegal aliens, and convicted felons. As John Lott put it:

Senator Al Franken likely owes his Senate victory to felons. With a razor thin victory over Senator Norm Coleman in 2008 of just 312 votes, felons convicted of crimes such as murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assaults may have given Democrats the filibuster proof sixtieth vote that allowed Obamacare to be passed. Americans have good reason to ask how this could happen. Consider this:

–A conservative watchdog group Minnesota Majority has gone through voting records reportedly finding that at least 341 convicted felons voted illegally in just two of Minnesota’s 87 counties during the 2008 general election. Undoubtedly other felons voted illegally in other counties.

– After culling through 500 initial allegations of felons illegally voting, the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office told The Minneapolis Star Tribune Monday that they are seriously investigating about 180 cases. Another 28 felons have already been charged. Hennepin county, which includes Minneapolis, winnowed 451 initial cases down to 216 that they are still looking at. Some other felons have already been charged. Both the Ramsey and Hennepin county attorneys are Democrats.

The Democrats wonder why Barack Obama’s poll ratings are lower than those of Jimmy Carter and why most working people think of politicians as little more than professional parasites, sponging off of taxpayers. Well, it’s just this sort of corruption that feeds public rage — and why the American public is going to do to Democrats in November what fed-up Britons just did to the surveillance-happy British Labour Party.

The rotund Franken, who’s put on about a hundred pounds gorging himself in the Senators’ dining room, clearly stole the election. He should go back to writing jokes for TV instead of writing jokes for Congress.

We don’t need another corrupt politician in Washington. We have enough already.

Evolution, Creation and Adam & Eve, Part 1

The debate over Evolution, Creation and Adam and Eve is one of my least favorite topics.  That’s because I’ve accepted the theory of evolution ever since fourth grade, when it was first explained to me in science class by a Dominican nun.

As a result, debating evolution feels a lot like debating the Pythagorean theorem: It’s something I studied 40 years ago… long ago accepted… but makes my head hurt even thinking about.

This is one of the many differences between Catholics and Protestants, I’ve found.  Catholics rarely if ever think about evolution.  For Protestants, it’s one of their favorite subjects, a principal “litmus test” for theological orthodoxy in many churches.

It took the agnostic New Testament scholar Bart Ehrmann nearly 20 years of rigorous graduate education before he could finally come to accept what I learned in fourth grade:  that human beings have existed on the earth for hundreds of thousands of years… and their physical bodies likely developed out of more primitive animal forms.

When I was in high school, one of my Jesuit teachers showed me a copy of Pope Pius XII’s encyclical Humani generis in which the pope explained that “the doctrine of evolution, insofar as it inquiries into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter” is not incompatible with Christian faith as revealed in the Biblical texts.  Here is the key section (36):

For these reasons the Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter - for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God. However, this must be done in such a way that the reasons for both opinions, that is, those favorable and those unfavorable to evolution, be weighed and judged with the necessary seriousness, moderation and measure, and provided that all are prepared to submit to the judgment of the Church, to whom Christ has given the mission of interpreting authentically the Sacred Scriptures and of defending the dogmas of faith.

The key point for Catholics, the pope explained, is that human beings are all descended from a real, historical, single human pair (called in Hebrew ha-adam and Hava, Adam and Eve), however they may be conceived.

Theologically, this belief is known as monogenism, the view that human beings are descended from a single couple.

Ironically enough, scientists in the 1950s were leaning toward another viewpoint, that of polygenism, the belief that the human race developed from many different independent groups.  I have to admit, to my teenage mind, the theory of polygenism seemed much more plausible.  After all, doesn’t it make more sense that there were many different groups of primates all over the world and humans “evolved” independently from those groups?

Nevertheless, I’ve never had any problem believing in both the Genesis account of creation and in various scientific theories of evolution.  Neither of the twin fundamentalisms in this debate — that of some evangelical Protestants or that of atheist scientists like Richard Dawkins — appealed to me.

Pope Pius XII’s explanation made more sense to me:  The first 11 chapters of Genesis, the pope explained, do not conform “to the historical method used by the best Greek and Latin writers or by competent authors of our time” yet constitutes history in “a true sense.”

The inspired text, he added, “in simple and metaphorical language adapted to the mentality of a people but little cultured, both state the principal truths which are fundamental for our salvation, and also give a popular description of the origin of the human race and the chosen people.”

Precisely:  Genesis is …

(1) a “popular description of the origin of the human race,” using

(2) “simple and metaphorical language,” that nevertheless contains

(3) “principal truths which are fundamental for our salvation.”

Godblock: Those Open-Minded Atheists!

I had to laugh at this one:  A browser plugin called GodBlock that blocks any reference to God or religious beliefs on the Internet.  It’s like a porn filter in reverse.

Here’s a quick description:

GodBlock is a web filter that blocks religious content. It is targeted at parents and schools who wish to protect their kids from the often violent, sexual, and psychologically harmful material in many holy texts, and from being indoctrinated into any religion before they are of the age to make such decisions. When installed properly, GodBlock will test each page that your child visits before it is loaded, looking for passages from holy texts, names of religious figures, and other signs of religious propaganda. If none are found, then your child is allowed to browse freely.

Ah, those tolerant, open-minded atheists… so cosmopolitan, so wise, so willing to engage in intellectual debate. They’re such a hoot at the neighborhood block party — not like those intolerant Mormons or Conservative Jews pushing their strange fruit salads on all and sundry!

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