We are funding science backwards.

We make people pay to have access to databases to read research papers and then allow them to cite applicable papers for free.

It should be the opposite. Reading the papers should be free, and researchers should have to pay a license to cite the papers of others.

Consider an alternative research economy where researchers have to pay to cite prior work. That would better incentivise reseachers to focus their studies on works that are most likely to be cited by others (ie. they would be incentivised to produce more impactful research). The researchers that produce highly cited papers would become their own revenue stream to self-fund more of their own work.

Einstein would have died a very very rich man.

That would allow highly successful reseachers to be much less reliant on outside grant sources, and show those grant sources to spread their resources to more new researchers.

So this is a bit tricky to explain to people, even a lot of people who grew up in an "Evangelical" household. But I'll try to do my best here, because understanding this is important right now.

The Rapture is an even bigger part of the post-WW2 evangelical theology and identity than you think. This is mostly true for baby-boomers, and decreasingly so for subsequent generations. But we are still here because baby-boomers still have a lot of power in America. To understand Baby Boomer American Evangelicals you have to understand that the world they grew up in really did look like the end times.

Consider their lives: they grew up during a time of absolutely unprecedented middle class wealth, AND they had a new unprecedented national mass media/advertising system telling them they are really special (if they buy the right stuff), AND they are growing up in the shadow of the atomic bomb, AND F***ing Israel was refounded! So yeah, the message that Jesus was going to come back during their lives was damn convincing.

Now, the refounding of Israel is not prophesied in the Bible. In fact, that theology is considered by most Christian denominations to be flat wrong. For most denominations, Christ refounded Israel when he instituted the Church at Pentecost. Israel means "Struggles with God", and everyone who "Struggles with God" is a part of the people of Israel. In the mid-1800s a dude misinterpreted scripture and tried to created the concept of "dispensations". Part of this misinterpretation included a reconstruction of the physical temple of Israel (again this was never orthodox theology. Orthodox theology teaches that Jesus' body is already the reconstruction of the temple).

But this wrong theology gained quite a following, primarily in the US, as "Manifest Destiny" was being widely taught. So, Zionists were happy to piggy back on this theology and make it into a self-fullfilling prophecy.

So the refounding of Israel, combined with a number of unprecedented social, scientific, and governmental events, really convinced the baby-boomers that they were special.

Meanwhile, the American Evangelical movement in America, which traditionally taught a more "personal" view of salvation and reverence, was taken over by charismatic sales people that saw an opportunity to mix the "personal" salvation theology with conservative politics and modern mass media advertising to create the Evangelical Right that we know today.

Then came 9/11. Which was also hugely influential. In the boomers minds, 9/11 was supposed to be the great Armageddon war. And there just happened to be an evangelical in the white house to lead the war. This was finally their moment.

...Except it was a quagmire, which they could not explain. Then a black man with African and Muslim names was elected president and they absolutely lost their minds. (Enter the tea party.) Everything for them fell apart.

And here is the real kicker that blows the minds of progressives: they know Trump isn’t Christian. In fact there is a not small minority of American evangelicals that voted for him because they believe he’s the Antichrist and that his ruinous presidency is necessary for Jesus’ return.

That's where we are today. We are being ruled by people that really believe that in order for Jesus to return the world has to be destroyed.

But that's still not the end of it, because this theology has also been adopted by a new generation of atheist techno-utopianists. Just like the Christian Right has decided that the world must be destroyed to recreate it with them as kings, so does the atheist techno-utopianist right. (It's just the method is different. But the results are the same.)

If are an atheist this fact is probably insulting to you, because you feel implicated. But you need to consider the fact. The people in Power are not all Christians Nationalists. Many, if not most, are atheist techno-utopianists that are happily partnering with the Christian Nationalists.

As much as we are being ruled by a Christian Right that wants to destroy everything, we are also being ruled by an Atheist right that wants the same thing.

Well made videos for youth discussing online and other personal safety.

I don't think he knows about second climax, Pip. He's only watched the movies.

Well made videos for youth discussing online and other personal safety.

Youth Internet Safety from Scouting America

Youth Digital Safety from Scouting America

I know this topic, as well as most online topics, is more about emotions than facts. But here we are. You probably don’t understand how Discord's new policy is intended to help protect children because you aren’t trained to think like a child predator. (That’s fine.) I’ve had to take a lot of child safety trainings over the years for professional reasons. Here’s how online child predators work.

They start by finding a kid with a secret. Just like a lion will generally choose to attack the weak gazelle, child predators go after vulnerable kids.

They find the kids with a secret and say “hey want to see some porn?”, and of course the kid is curious. They didn't start with anything bad. This is a process for them. But they will tell the kid, “be sure you don’t tell your parents about this. This is our secret." Then they slowly try to pull into deeper and deeper secrets and start to blackmail the kid. They start to demand that the kid send them nude photos. They trap the kids into deeper and deeper secrets and guilt to get more and more out of them. In the worst cases this results in meetups with the predator in person.

The easiest places for the predators to start this process is porn sites where the kids are visiting in secret to begin with. Especially those on Discord where the messaging between users is the main feature. Those are the kids that are most vulnerable.

How how is Discord's policy supposed to protect kids? The goal is to keep the vulnerable kids out of spaces where they would be targeted to begin with.

So there you go. I’m all ears for how to do this better. That's one beef I have with the EFF right now. They offer no alternative solutions to this. They just didn't want any kind of protections at all.

#Christianity #rituals