Is the slow motion death of religion in America more the fault of the Republicans than it is the fault of outspoken Atheists? Could be.

As all of you know the only thing that fascinates me more than politics is religion. And I spend an inordinate amount of time reading about its origins, evolution, and its decreasing popularity in America, and increasing popularity in other parts of the world.

Seriously I could write, debate, and learn more about it every day and not grow bored of the subject.

So when I happened upon this article from Salon I had to share it.

It sets out to essentially understand what is behind the increase secularization in America today.

It does discuss the Atheist movement led by Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and others, as well as the Catholic church scandals, the rise of the internet, and a few other contributing factors.

However the one that caught my eye was this one:

For starters, we can begin with the presence of the religious right, and the backlash it has engendered. Beginning in the 1980s, with the rise of such groups as the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition, the closeness of conservative Republicanism with evangelical Christianity has been increasingly tight and publicly overt. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, more and more politicians on the right embraced the conservative Christian agenda, and more and more outspoken conservative Christians allied themselves with the Republican Party. Examples abound, from Michele Bachmann to Ann Coulter, from Mike Huckabee to Pat Robertson, and from Rick Santorum to James Dobson. With an emphasis on seeking to make abortion illegal, fighting against gay rights (particularly gay marriage), supporting prayer in schools, advocating “abstinence only” sex education, opposing stem cell research, curtailing welfare spending, supporting Israel, opposing gun control, and celebrating the war on terrorism, conservative Christians have found a warm welcome within the Republican Party, which has been clear about its openness to the conservative Christian agenda. This was most pronounced during the eight years that George W. Bush was in the White House. 

What all of this this has done is alienate a lot of left-leaning or politically moderate Americans from Christianity. Sociologists Michael Hout and Claude Fischer have published compelling research indicating that much of the growth of “nones” in America is largely attributable to a reaction against this increased, overt mixing of Christianity and conservative politics. The rise of irreligion has been partially related to the fact that lots of people who had weak or limited attachments to religion and were either moderate or liberal politically found themselves at odds with the conservative political agenda of the Christian right and thus reacted by severing their already somewhat weak attachment to religion. Or as sociologist Mark Chaves puts it, “After 1990 more people thought that saying you were religious was tantamount to saying you were a conservative Republican. So people who are not Republicans now are more likely to say that they have no religion.”

These are very good points that I agree with wholeheartedly. 

In fact, as I have shared many times before, the factors above have quite a lot to do with your ability to visit this blog today.

It was in response to that Republican branding, and the attempt to paint themselves as the moral superior of every other political group, that pissed your favorite Alaskan blogger off so much that he started channeling his frustration through a keyboard.

However as much as I agree with authors about how the Republican Religious Right poisoned the well, I still think that without the internet we would not be seeing the changes we are witnessing today.

Anybody care to disagree?

Sony decides to release "The Interview" after all. Online.

Courtesy of The New York Post: 

Sony’s current plan for “The Interview’’ is to release the controversial comedy for free on Crackle, the streaming service it owns, sources said Sunday. 

Following Sony’s decision to pull the James Franco-Seth Rogan movie after hackers working for North Korean threatened violence, President Obama criticized the studio for being “intimidated by these kind of criminal attacks.’’

I have to admit that I had no idea that Crackle even existed since I really don't like to watch movies on my computer.  (It actually has quite a lot of content. And it's all free.)

However I feel that at this point it is almost my patriotic duty to watch this film which might explain why Reince Priebus, Chairman of the RNC, has been pushing for its release as well.

As for whether or not this movie is even worth watching, well as least one film critic thinks that it is:'

He also is bewildered as to what the North Koreans found so objectionable:

As Skylark's (James Franco) interview nears, their assassination attempts fail and ethical quandaries mount. Skylark and Kim ("a cool guy," pleads Skylark) become fast friends, palling around together and shooting off tanks. If anything, the film, written by Dan Sterling from the story by Goldberg and Rogen (their second time directing after the better "This Is the End"), verges on making Kim too likable. 

And while the movie leads to a fiery end and a slow reveal of the famine Kim inflicts on his people, most who see "The Interview" will say to themselves: THIS is what prompted an international incident? There's nothing scandalous about "The Interview," unless you happen to believe Kim is a god who rides around on unicorns.

Sounds potentially entertaining,  I for one am going to watch it.

So just in case the North Koreans are planning to hack the computer of every single person who watches the film online, I have placed all my nude selfies and scandalous e-mails in a folder on my desktop entitled "Kim Jong Un lease don't look in here."

What can I say, I like to be neat and tidy.

The internet continues to pound that stake through the heart of religion.

Courtesy of Alternet: 

While the burgeoning atheist movement loves throwing conferences and selling books, a huge chunk--possibly most--of its resources go toward the Internet. This isn’t borne out of laziness or a hostility to wearing pants so much as a belief that the Internet is uniquely positioned as the perfect tool for sharing arguments against religion with believers who are experiencing doubts. It’s searchable, it allows back-and-forth debate, and it makes proving your arguments through links much easier. Above all else, it’s private. An online search on atheism is much easier to hide than, say, a copy of The God Delusion on your nightstand. 

In recent months, this sense that the Internet is the key for atheist outreach has started to move from “hunch” to actual, evidence-based theory. Earlier this year, Allen Downey of the Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts examined the spike in people declaring they had no religion that started in the '90s and found that while there are many factors contributing to it--dropping familial pressure, increased levels of college education--increased Internet usage was likely a huge part of it, accounting for up to 25 percent of the decline in religious belief. While cautioning that correlation does not mean causation, Downey did go on to point out that since so many other factors were controlled for, it’s a safe bet to conclude that the access to varied thought and debate the Internet provides is persuading people to drop their religions. 

But in the past few months, that hypothesis grew even stronger when a major American religion basically had to admit that Internet arguments against their faith is putting them on their heels. The Church of Latter Day Saints has quietly released a series of essays, put together by church historians, addressing some of the less savory aspects of their history, such as the practice of polygamy or the ban on black members. The church sent out a memo in September telling church leaders to direct believers who have questions about their religion’s history to these essays, which they presented as a counter to “detractors” who “spread misinformation and doubt.”

The Mormon church made the case that the websites which were causing a crisis in faith among its followers were disseminating "disinformation" but in fact the converse was true, and the websites were providing historically accurate information that the church could no longer hide from its members.

The posts made on the Church of Latter Day Saints website were really an attempt to put into context embarrassing information that the church had denied was true for decades.

Having such recent historical facts working against, kind of makes the Mormon church the low hanging fruit, however information is being shared which also challenges the very foundations of Christianity, and which has resulted in some rather startling converts to Atheism.

It is no secret how I feel about all of this, and why I think the internet may be the best thing since...well it sure beats the hell out of sliced bread.

By the way Bill Maher had some good fun with this Joseph Smith story Friday night on Real Time, and it evolved into a rather interesting, and entertaining conversation about religion in general.
You know I sometimes feel badly for Andrew Sullivan. He is so right about somethings (Like Trig's birth) and so wrong about others.

Alex Jones comes out against Net Neutrality and in support of Ted Cruz. Which essentially tells you everything you need to know about both.

Courtesy of Raw Story:  

“This has been the plan for a decade – free-quote-Wi-Fi that’s paid for by taxpayers, but you have no rights on that Wi-Fi, and you can’t get to InfoWars.com or DrudgeReport.com, that the White House officials have said they want to shut down, basically,” Jones warned this week on his radio program. “So this is it, they’re coming.” 

Jones, who claims to be nonpartisan, promoted a widely mocked statement by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who misrepresented the president’s statements on regulating Internet service providers like utilities to claim “net neutrality is Obamacare for the Internet,” reported Right Wing Watch. 

“Bottom line, ladies and gentlemen: Obamacare is now moving to the Internet,” Jones said. “Federal regulation and control written for select corporations, right out of the FCC to shut down all of their competition, and Republican leaders – to their credit, have now come out with statements … saying that it is Obamacare for the Internet.” 

“That’s what Ted Cruz has come out and said,” the broadcaster said. “I like Ted Cruz, he knows what he’s talking about.”

Okay so Jones, who has also been quite chummy with another potential 2016 GOP presidential candidate Rand Paul,  has COMPLETELY misrepresented net neutrality here. What it does is the exact opposite of what he says it does, which of course is how the Right Wing addresses things they don't like of don't understand.

I think Alex Jones promoting Ted Cruz is a good thing, in that it allows rational people to realize just who is drawn in by the message Cruz is putting out.

I mean hell if crazy people like your crazy message, than it would be crazy NOT to run for President of the United States. Right?

President Obama's move to protect net neutrality is good for everybody except powerful service providers, so that means the Right Wing is coming after him with torches and pitchforks.

Courtesy of The Washington Post:  

President Obama on Monday called for the government to aggressively regulate Internet service providers such as Verizon and Comcast, treating broadband like a public utility as essential as water, phone service and electricity. 

Such a move would have a dramatic effect on cable and telecom firms that have fought vigorously to keep their highly profitable Internet businesses free of regulation. 

This is Obama's most aggressive statement yet in favor of a free and open Internet and against allowing Internet service providers to charge content companies like Netflix for faster access to their customers. The president's statement, released online Monday while he traveled to Asia, calls for the FCC to adopt the strictest rules possible for ensuring so-called net neutrality, or the principle that all Internet traffic should be treated equally. 

"I believe the FCC should create a new set of rules protecting net neutrality and ensuring that neither the cable company nor the phone company will be able to act as a gatekeeper, restricting what you can do or see online," Obama said in a statement.

Of course for somebody like me, whose entire day is spent on the internet and who has a local service provider trying to bleed me dry, this is incredibly welcome news.

We absolutely need more regulation to protect us from monopolies that have customers in a vice grip, and to protect online businesses from having to pay extra money to stream their content, the cost of which invariably gets passed on to the consumer.

So because this is clearly a great idea for most Americans, conservatives hate it.

Of course most are not quite as batshit crazy about it as Ted Cruz:

"Net Neutrality" is Obamacare for the Internet; the Internet should not operate at the speed of government.
— Senator Ted Cruz (@SenTedCruz) November 10, 2014

I don't even know what the hell that means.

However the folks over at The Oatmeal have made an effort to educate Ted Cruz.

Here of course is the real reason that big telecoms and their political surrogates like Ted Cruz are going to fight this thing, and why it could ultimately be a godsend to folks like you and me: 

Right now, no one is really talking about rates: The main concern is balancing access to the internet with investment by the private sector. The FCC wants to make sure it can prevent internet service providers from discriminating against traffic, and US courts have made pretty clear that the best way to do this is to classify the internet as a “common carrier,” as Obama endorsed today. The FCC has the powers to regulate common carriers across a variety of arenas, including preventing unreasonable discrimination. 

But one other thing that the FCC can do with a common carrier is ensure that its rates are “just and reasonable.” For instance, the FCC doesn’t allow phone companies to charge more than $6.50 for a single line, so that all Americans can afford access. Similar pricing rules are in place at electricity plants. If the internet is regulated under Title II, the government could come up with a similar cap on how much companies can charge for internet access.

Of course currently there is no mention of this in what the President is suggesting, and I understand why, but ultimately I would like to know that such regulations on how much providers can charge customers might be in the offing.

However even without that component to this change the idea is still very sound and would protect companies, and their consumers, from the type of abuse that we know is coming soon. And in some cases is already here.

A Sarah Palin news roundup: The Sarah Palin Channel receives fewer visits than wealthy neighborhoods on Halloween, Sarah sees God in the clouds, and Garry Trudeau tries to figure out what in the hell she is talking about.

Occasionally an intrepid reporter puts on their mooseshit resistant galoshes and trudges on over to the Sarah Palin Channel just to see if their is anything worth discussing with their readers.

Recently Lloyd Grove of the Daily Beast did just that.

What he found was a video of Todd beating Sarah at a game of HORSE, Sally's "Word of the Day." a link to Brancy's blog, and not a whole lot else worth mentioning.

Though he did have this to report: 

The goal, (TAPP owner) Klein says, is to try to replicate, or at least approach, the astonishing success of former Fox News personality Glenn Beck, whose subscription-based Web TV operation, TheBlaze.com reportedly boasts hundreds of thousands of paying customers and is said to be minting money. 

Yet while it’s impossible to know, absent hard figures, whether the Sarah Palin Channel is succeeding in attracting an audience, it’s significant that the channel’s Web traffic, expressed in terms of unique visitors, is a tiny fraction of The Blaze’s 15.3 million in September (the most recent available numbers from Media Trend). The Sarah Palin Channel, by contrast, had a barely measurable 36,000 visitors in September, according to Quantcast.

36,000 visits in one month?  Not to brag folks but this little defunct blog of ours gets ten times that much traffic in a month. Maybe TAPP would like to invest with us?

Man that is just sad, there is NO way, despite the protestations to the contrary from Klein that the Sarah Palin Channel is seeing a profit. No way!

I imagine that there will come a day in the not to distant future where the channel will simply stop posting any new content, and then one day it will simply disappear from the web as if it was never there in the first place.

Which, by the way, is very much like I hope will happen with Palin herself one day. Poof, no more crazy out of Wasilla.

And speaking of magic this was the latest post on Palin's Facebook page:

This picture paints a thousand words – hope it does for you – illustrating rays of hope that peek through the clouds to light a right way forward. With thankfulness for the wisdom of involved Americans this week, I know we can count on the guiding illumination our nation needs when we look up. My brother photographed this glorious open sky while walking with his baby girl along Alaska's Cook Inlet shore. In our eyes, anyway, we see the hand of God in this, and we are grateful. 

- Sarah Palin

It is interesting that the woman who can see no man made impact on the climate, cannot help but see the work of an invisible presence in a simple cloud formation.

You know perhaps I spend a little too much time on the internet, but this was the first thing that popped into my head when I saw the image.

Actually that's the cloud formation I would expect to see directly over the Palin compound. You know if there were a God.

Speaking of convoluted reasoning ability, Garry Trudeau the creator of the comic strip Doonesbury found himself baffles by a recent quote from the Wasilla Wendigo:

SAY WHAT? 

"Despite your view -- and policies -- that government must lord over women, in keeping with radical liberalism, you have to fake support for our equal rights; so you do it in a militant sort of way to compensate for your confusion. On pretending to know what's best for us you've got nothing but a silent scream demanding, 'Hear me roar!'" 

—Sarah Palin on President Obama

As you know I have a doctorate in Sarah Palin Word Salad from WTF University, and I dearly love Doonesbury, but I got nothing on this one.

However if I had to venture a guess I would go with a bad batch of meth?

You know elections come, and elections go. But Sarah Palin will never lose her crown as the most ridiculous political figure of all time. Never.

Here is Turn Up the Night's Halloween show that was interrupted by a DDOS attack last night.

Kenny Pick mentions IM a few times in the beginning of the show, and a few times in the middle, but for most of you I think you will be most interested in his revisiting "Thonghazi" and Carol Costello's remarks starting around the 3:28:36 mark.

So many of you probably noticed that the internet feed for the show went off somewhere around the halfway point. (They first mention it around an hour and thirty eight minutes into the broadcast.)

Strangely enough that was right around the time that they noticed they had a visitor from Wasilla, though I would not want to jump to any conclusions.

However I will say that apparently this program had never had anything like this happen to it before, and they were incredibly puzzled as to why it was happening now.

Yep another coinkydink.

Just to set the record straight on who attracts the ugliest comments, this blog or Right Wing blogs.

As everybody who visits here regularly already knows, one of the consistent charges leveled at commenters here and myself, is that we lie about conservatives and are hateful people who attack people "we don't even know."

The point is also made that liberals are the worst when it comes to saying hateful things on the internet.

Of course that is completely false.

I am not saying that liberals are always paragons of virtue who never say a cross word about anyone, because of course that would be a lie. However if you REALLY want to see some ugliness you have to go no further than any number of Right Wing news outlets and blogs all over the internet.

Which is exactly what a writer over at a site called Propaganda Check did.

They went to Breitbart.com. And this is what they found in the comments section:

Oh and did I mention the racism? Yeah, there is a LOT of racism.

Conservatives 4 Palin might be a dying website in America, but the Kiwis LOVE them!

Okay for the record I actually NEVER visit C4P these days, as they stopped being relevant about four years ago.

However somebody recently sent me some links which I found kinda interesting.

As you all know there is a site called Alexa which analyzes website traffic and ranks them based on popularity.

I also never visit there myself because according to my therapist constantly seeking validation by checking a website ranking your blog is "A cry for help Jesse."

Anyhow based on an e-mail I received I went ahead and visited Alexa to check out the rankings for C4P. And what I found there was a little strange to say the least.

As you can see the vast majority of the internet traffic going to C4P comes from New Zealand of all places.

They are ranked only 175,754 in America but a rather incredible 1,521 in New Zealand.

By contrast the Sarah Palin Channel is ranked 162,949 in the US and 61.3% of their traffic comes from America. Which seems about right.

Soooo, what explains the fact that C4P has so many Kiwi visitors?

Is this fake internet traffic that was purchased by C4P? Is there a glitch in Alexa's algorithm? Or is it possible that Palin is wasting her time in North America and should take that 15 hour flight to the self proclaimed "God Zone" where she could apparently reign as queen?

I
But if they DID buy visitors off of the internet, why did they buy so few that they still only rank 306,239 globally? That's not going to impress anybody.

Yep, it's a mystery alright.

By the way for those who are curious this is how IM ranks over at Alexa.

Not bad, not bad at all.

Howard Stern, Apple to Sign $600M Deal for Internet Show

Howard Stern

The web is perky with rumors of a multi-millionaire deal between radio host Howard Stern and Apple. The deal would be for a total of 600 million dollars and would have Stern as the host of an Internet/itunes show.

The rumor started after a tweet made by SITI_STOCK a Twitter account “Following SiriusXM satellite radio stock SIRI”. This is what they posted:

“Howard Stern on the verge of signing $600 million 3 year agreement with Apple to host an Internet/TV/iTunes broadcast. $SIRI”