Globalization hates you, so meditate

From Global Guerrillas, two depressing thoughts.

The major internet companies are built on a model of cognitive slavery.

Globalization has brought about a set of sociopathic ethics wherein the only tests used to judge someone's behaviour are:

# Does it make you money or its equivalent? The corollary is that the greater the amount of money acquired, the better the behavior is.
# Did you get away with it? This test is merely based on legal enforceability (were you caught in a place that matters) and the degree of punishment (will the punishment negate or exceed the benefit of the behavior). Morality, virtue, ethics, shame, actual legality, etc. aren't considered factors.

This is because these are the only behavioural tests which can be agreed on globally.

Pretty nasty thought.

On a lighter note, a weird digression in the comments section gives us two meditation exercises.

Science!!! Alternative life, love hormones, and pole-vaulting dinosaurs

Since I've been (rightly) accused of posting many depressing things on here of late, I bring you...

COOL SCIENCE!!!

This was all over the news, so you probably saw it, but scientists make life that replaces phosphorous with arsenic. I have been overjoyed by how many people have illustrated this with the Horta from Devil in the Dark.

For those of you sick of people throwing the damn stuff around in every EvPsych discussion of why women are "like that" (whatever "that" may be this week) in relationships, Oxycotin is not the simple love hormone people say it is.

Pole-vaulting dinosaurs!

And even further back, scientists glimpse the universe before the big bang.

Some more Sunday Randomness : Happy examples, 17th century slang, and the Rapture

Still clearing out old links:

I appreciate an authority figure who can remind someone that women and girls are important too, so when a lawyer asked for special dispensation if his daughter's child was a boy, so he could attend the bris, Judge Kimba Wood said fine, as long as he understood that if the child was a girl, there would be a public celebration of the fact in her courtroom.

And as long as we're talking gender, a three-year old shows us you can handle gender and its many variations with class at any age.

Off to France, where there is a group called La Barbe, who protest the lack of women in positions of authority in France by showing up wearing fake beards. (I know a God of Knowledge who would approve.)

And while not steampunk or Strowler, let me point you to The First English Dictionary of Slang, in case you want to speak like a 17th Century dandyprat.

This idea of pleasure activisim sounds a lot like what I thought Epicurianism to be before I read any Epicurus.

Screw you, 2012! Billboards in Tennessee say the Rapture is May 21, 2011! (Good Christians aren't going to let a falsely interpreted Mayan prophecy steal their eschaton!)

The logic is simple math, according to the people who put up the billboards.

According to Camping's prediction, the Rapture will happen exactly 7,000 years from the date that God first warned people about the flood. He said the flood happened in 4990 B.C., on what would have been May 21 in the modern calendar. God gave Noah one week of warning.

Since one day equals 1,000 years for God, that means there was a 7,000-year interval between the flood and rapture.

Interestingly, this is right after an annular solar eclipse.