Am I the only one who’s disgusted by these car commercials touting "28 MPG" and "30 MPG" cars?  My 2000 VW Golf has been getting 28 miles per gallon FOR THE PAST 9 YEARS.  A cynical person might think that fuel economy doesn’t matter one bit to the car companies.

It seems absurd to tag this post as "Tech" when the "technology" involved doesn’t seem to have progressed at all in the past decade.

From Ars Technica:

According to The Seattle Times, a Craigslist ad was placed last week, offering road construction work at $28.50 per hour in Monroe, WA, a city northeast of Seattle.  About a dozen men replied to the ad, and all received instructions to show up outside a Bank of America wearing a yellow vest, safety goggles, a respirator mask, and a blue shirt.

As the men gathered outside the bank within the proper attire, however, another man wearing the same getup used pepper spray on a guard transporting cash from an armored truck into the bank.  The suspect grabbed the duffel bag, ran 100 yards to Wood Creek, and made his getaway (floataway?) on what police believe to be an inner tube.  Seattle FBI spokeswoman Robbie Burroughs told the Times that armored car robberies are "quite uncommon," and that she’s never heard of an inner tube serving as a getaway vehicle.

Pirates.  Real live pirates.

Navy Lt. Nathan Christensen told The New York Times "several destroyers and missile cruisers" had joined a U.S. destroyer already following the Faina, effectively surrounding the pirates.  The Navy’s plan for dealing with the maritime hijackers should they refuse to surrender was not disclosed, the U.S. newspaper said.

I don’t suppose that you need to disclose your plan when you’re the one who’s got the several destroyers and missile cruisers.

This follow-up story has quotes from the pirates themselves:

Mr. Sugule said that his men are treating the crew members well (the pirates would not let the crew members speak on the phone, saying it was against their rules). "Killing is not in our plans," he said.  "We only want money, so we can protect ourselves from hunger."

When asked why the pirates needed $20 million to protect themselves from hunger, Mr. Sugule laughed over the phone and said: "Because we have a lot of men."

Roger Ebert has posted this about Sarah Palin:

I think I might be able to explain some of Sarah Palin’s appeal. She’s the "American Idol" candidate. Consider. What defines an "American Idol" finalist? They’re good-looking, work well on television, have a sunny personality, are fierce competitors, and so talented, why, they’re darned near the real thing.

Does Ebert honestly not realize that he’s describing Obama, or is he just in denial?  I don’t know which would be worse.

Meanwhile, the Lightworker himself claims that he’s got more executive experience than Palin because he’s been running for president for 2 years.  That’s right, Obama thinks that running for president is a good qualification for actually being president.  You can’t make this stuff up:

"Well, my understanding is that Governor Palin’s town of Wasilla has, I think, 50 employees. We’ve got 2,500 in this campaign. I think their budget is maybe $12 million a year. You know, we have a budget of about three times that just for the month. So I think that our ability to manage large systems and to execute I think has been made clear over the last couple of years," Obama said.

Someone needs to tell Obama that after Palin was the mayor of Wasilla, she was the governor of Alaska.

But what do I know; I’m from Pennsylvania, so I’m probably just clinging to my guns and religion.

Quoting Ahmadinejad:

the names of the 3,000 people were never published

Quoting Ahmadinejad:

nobody was able to respond to the main question, which is how is it possible that with the best radar systems and intelligence networks the planes could crash undetected into the towers

Yes, just how did those "terrorists" sneak 2 giant commercial airliners into the US?  How is it possible that they didn’t show up on our radar?

The mind boggles.

From an article titled "Penny Dreadful" in The New Yorker:

Quoting David Owen:

[P]roducing a penny now costs about 1.7 cents. Since the Mint currently manufactures more than seven billion pennies a year and "sells" them to the Federal Reserve at their face value, the Treasury incurs an annual penny deficit of about fifty million dollars...

A modern penny simply isn’t worth enough to worry about.  In 1940, an average one-pound loaf of bread sold for eight cents, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.  That means that a penny in those days bought enough bread to make a good-sized sandwich.  These days, a penny doesn’t buy much more than a bit of crust.  Accurately comparing monetary values (and bread loaves) across decades is impossible, but by almost any economic measure a 1940 penny had more purchasing power than a modern quarter does; in 1940, then, consumers got by, quite contentedly, without the equivalent of our penny, nickel, or dime.  And many people continue to get by without these coins today, since in the actual marketplace consumers tend to treat the quarter as the smallest meaningful denomination.

I never pick up pennies off the ground.  I regularly leave pennies behind if I receive them as change.  And I’ve been known to angrily throw pennies out the window of my (non-moving) car if I find any of them contaminating my change tray, in which I keep only silver change.

I knew I wasn’t crazy.

This week, Apple released slightly-revised new versions of the iPhone and the iPod Touch.  The only change is increased memory capacity: 16 GB for the iPhone, and 32 GB for the Touch.  In a news article about the updates, one commenter said the following:

Quoting nutjob:

I decided - after the iphone pricing initial debacle, where I paid $600 for the 8GB model, which then dropped to $400 after 2 months, and now is being replaced by a 32GB [sic; actually 16GB] model for $500 - that I’m never ever, again doing business with Apple. The iphone will be my first and only ever Apple product.

You can sort of understand his frustration, but the fact is, anyone who buys any kind of technology has to deal with this, whether it’s a TV or a DVD player or an MP3 player or a phone.  For virtually anything you can buy, the price will always go down over time, and a newer better version will always be released.  Does this guy honestly think that Apple has an obligation to never change its prices and never improve its products once they sell one to him?

And this sentiment is not uncommon in forums where people are talking about Apple products.  There are lots of people who get really upset when Apple lowers its prices and when Apple releases improved products.  Any rational person realizes that it’s completely insane to be mad at a company for doing those things, which every single company does.

Another commenter in this particular thread pointed out Matthew 20, in which the owner of a vineyard hires men to work in his vineyard.  He goes out into the street and offers the men some work for a certain amount of pay, and the men agree.  The owner goes out into the street again every few hours and hires more men, who also agree to work for a certain price.  At the end of the day the owner is paying the laborers, and it turns out that he pays all the men equally, even though some have labored all day while others only for an hour.

Quoting Matthew 20:

But when the first came, they supposed that they should have received more; and they likewise received every man a penny.  And when they had received it, they murmured against the goodman of the house, Saying, These last have wrought but one hour, and thou hast made them equal unto us, which have borne the burden and heat of the day.  But he answered one of them, and said, Friend, I do thee no wrong: didst not thou agree with me for a penny?

It’s not every day that you see biblical parables applied to iPhone sales, but the lesson is certainly spot-on.  When you agree to buy a product or sell your labor at a certain price, you are not automatically entitled to the benefits of a different agreement that happens later, just because you decide that you like the new agreement better.

As for me, I just wish Apple would have bumped the iPhone to 32 GB instead of only 16 GB.  SecondRotation will give me $240 for my current 8 GB iPhone, which means I’d have to pay $260 for the new one.  I would do that in an instant for a 32 GB iPhone, but for only 16 GB, it’s harder to justify.  I’d love to have 16 GB in my iPhone instead of just 8, but since my MP3 collection is about 35 GB, a nice 32 GB iPhone would put me much closer to being able to fit my whole collection on it.

My hatred of Verizon started sometime in 2004, when I started hearing horror stories from Kim about the despicable, greedy, and just plain evil things that Verizon did in the course of providing her cell phone service.  And I don’t mean 1 or 2 small issues; it was 5 or 6 or 7 totally unbelievable instances in which they either intentionally or through gross incompetence tried to defraud her of vast sums of money.  I wish I would have written them down.

As an aside, it’s funny to read posts by iPhone haters saying that it’s doomed because it’s tied to the evil AT&T, and if only they could get it with service from Verizon instead, then they would get an iPhone.  I’ve had zero problems with AT&T in the 6 months that I’ve had my iPhone, and their coverage is far better than Nextel’s ever was, and I’m pretty sure that their $20/mo for unlimited data is the best data deal going.  But the fact is, all of these giant telecom companies pretty much just suck if you give them enough time.

Anyway, back to Verizon: the only reason I have a landline at all is for my business.  When I signed up for this business line, we ended up moving a couple months later.  And despite the fact that now you’re supposed to be able to transfer your phone number to a different provider, Verizon couldn’t even let me keep my number while still using Verizon service at the new house.

As if that weren’t bad enough, they also told me they couldn’t provide me with voice-mail at the new house, which makes no sense whatsoever because it’s not like the voice-mail is stored at my house -- it’s stored on Verizon’s servers anyway!  So I actually had to use something called an answering machine -- a physical device used by primitive peoples before the invention of fire or dirt -- to get my messages for the past few months.

Verizon’s website is as terrible as such a terrible company’s website should be.  Literally every time I log in to my account, it displays the following 2 messages:

We are temporarily unable to retrieve information for this phone number. Please try again later.

We are temporarily unable to retrieve current billing information for this phone number. Please try again later.

And most unbelievable and frustrating of all, when you try to call Verizon for support, they don’t put you on hold like a decent company would; instead, you get a recording that says "all representatives are busy; please try again later" and then THEY HANG UP ON YOU.

Now to the bill: it was nominally $30 or $40 per month, but virtually all calls are "local long distance" or regular long distance, so it always ended up being $70 or $80, even though I hardly used this phone line (for outgoing calls) at all.

Of course, Verizon is the local monopolist, so as much as I would have liked to tell them to go take a long walk off a short pier while I switch to another provider, the fact is that there is no other provider that I could use.

Well, I finally found a way to escape Verizon’s evil clutches: I switched to Vonage.  Vonage is a VoIP phone service provider, which means your service comes in over the internet instead of through a phone line.  But it sounds and acts just like a regular phone line: you can plug any normal phone into it, you get the normal dial tone, etc.  They provide all the standard stuff like voice mail, and unlike Verizon, they let me keep my existing number no problem.  They also have some cool and innovative features like sending copies of your voice mails to your email account.  But here’s the best part: Vonage costs just $25 per month and that includes unlimited local and long distance.  There was a setup fee of about $40, but the first month is free, so there’s effectively no setup charge.

But here’s the real best part: Vonage calls your existing phone provider and takes care of the cancellation and transfer and everything, so you don’t have to do any of that.  But once that happened, Verizon called me (of course I didn’t answer) and left a message crying about the fact that I was leaving, and "we’d really like to keep your business" and "we have some very competitive plans that we’d like to discuss with you."  Yeah, like you really have anything competitive with $25/mo with free everything, you scumbags.  And then, a couple days later, I got a "DHL EXPRESS EXTREMELY URGENT" package in the mail, containing a letter from Verizon still begging me to stay.  No wonder their service is so expensive when they’re wasting money on overnight shipping instead of working on, oh, I don’t know, VOICE MAIL SERVICE maybe?

Quoting ABC News:

The Iranian Foreign Ministry, however, called the incident "ordinary"

Yes, a speedboat jaunting around in the wake of another country’s warships is entirely ordinary.  These guys were obviously trained by Baghdad Bob himself.

It’s certainly possible that Iran is trying to provoke us into war, but nonetheless the above statement is absurd.

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting piece on the history of maritime incidents as they relate to the wars we’ve fought.

Quoting Roger Kimball:

To My Democrat Friends:

Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low-stress, non-addictive, gender-neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasion and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all. I also wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2008, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make America great. Not to imply that America is necessarily greater than any other country nor the only America in the Western Hemisphere. Also, this wish is made without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith or sexual preference of the wish.

To My Republican Friends:

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

They killed him, which is tragic, and it was apparently over peanuts, which seems senseless.  But this is just unbelievable:

Quoting the BBC:

The city has long struggled to counter its plague of monkeys, which invade government complexes and temples, snatch food and scare passers-by.
...
One approach has been to train bands of larger, more ferocious langur monkeys to go after the smaller groups of Rhesus macaques.

I’m #9 for the first one and #12 for the second, just behind a page titled "Cameron Diaz Sweaty Armpit."

When you go to Italian restaurants like the Olive Garden or Maggiano’s, they serve you these huge salads with literally two or three tiny tomato slices.  Not two or three tomatoes, two or three slices, for the entire salad.

How is it that Italian restaurants, establishments that owe their very existence to the power of the tomato (in sauce form), are so consistently skimpy when it comes to tomatoes in salad?

What do you get when you take a person with no patience, cross him with someone with no manners, throw in a dash of probably-didn’t-graduate-high-school, and top it off with having eaten mostly Twinkies for about 30 years?

You get this:

On Monday night I’m driving home, it’s about midnight, and I stop for gas.  The BP that I frequent isn’t open at this hour, so I have to go to 7-11 where there are only 4 pumps, one of which is diesel.  I have to wait a few minutes while the person currently at the pump finishes up.

As I pull up and begin fueling, a little sea-green Geo Metro (or equivalent) comes up behind me, waiting for me to finish.  When I do, I get into my car and then write my mileage down on the receipt, as I always do.  This takes 30 seconds tops; the pen is in my center console, the receipt is already in my hand, and the light from the gas station is enough that I don’t have to turn on my lights or anything like that.

I put the receipt into my wallet, and as I’m putting my wallet into my pocket, I see the little Metro is now approaching me from the front, and it comes up right next to my door, so the driver is right next to me.  He seems to want to say something to me so I roll down my window.

Me: (rolling down window, about 25% complete)

The jerk: what the f--- is your problem?  You see I’m f---in’ waiting for you!

Me: I was... (here the jerk instantly cuts me off; my statement was going to be "I was writing down my mileage on my receipt")

The jerk: you want to go?  (from the jerk’s tone it’s clear that this means, "do you want to fight?")

Me: (flabbergasted and trying to stifle a laugh along with my disbelief) No.

The jerk: you want to go right now?

Me: No?  (I begin to drive away)

The jerk: yeah, mother f---er, you’re a f---in’ a--hole.

This guy was seriously angry.  He was yelling, and he cut me off literally every time I tried to respond to his idiotic statements, including my two terse "no" responses.  The first time he asked me if I wanted "to go," he seemed to be starting to open his car door, but he had pulled up in the tiny space between my car and the street so there was maybe 18" between our cars -- not nearly enough for a normal person to open a car door and fit through, let alone this beastly lunatic.

In retrospect the whole episode was pretty funny, but at the time, he was making me really angry.  That anyone could be so freaking stupid and impatient and rude made me mad, but the fact that he kept cutting me off REALLY frustrated me.  I didn’t have 3 seconds to even attempt to say anything.

On the side of a package of paper towels:

OK, they’re PAPER TOWELS, how can there possibly be 50 patents on them??

Those of you who know my dad and/or my neighbor Dan Watkins will appreciate this little exchange that happened in a dream I just had:

Quoting a strange dream:

Dad: Where’s Nick?
Dan: They’re caving, in Holland.
Dad: Where?
Dan: It’s the bomb.

I was up in my room and they were in the kitchen, and Dan had just come up from the basement, where he had been playing my drums -- he was playing a song from Rage Against The Machine’s "Evil Empire" album, and he totally nailed it.  I was in my room banging my head and waving my arm as he played  ( :

OK, back to sleep.

I really hope they don’t re-insert Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube for the third time.  I’m against that on two levels, legally and logically.

Legally, the husband is the guardian, so the decision is his.  Period.  That’s all there is to it.  It’s not President Bush’s decision or Congress’ decision or her parents’ decision.  She is incapacitated (far beyond that, in fact) to the point where she cannot think or make decisions on her own, so her legal guardian -- her husband -- gets to make the decision.

Logically, it isn’t a question of "life" or of Terry Schiavo "dying" because she is no longer alive, according to the doctors, who unlike Bush or her parents or Congress, are actually qualified speak on the matter:

At this point, much of her cerebral cortex is simply gone and has been replaced by cerebral spinal fluid.  Medicine cannot cure this condition ... Theresa will always remain in an unconscious, reflexive state...

Terri Schiavo is no longer a conscious human being.  Reflexive means that whenever she moves, her body is responding automatically to external stimuli without any mental processing of the stimuli nor of her response to it.  The only "life" present in Terri Schiavo’s body is the same kind of simple cellular life present in plants -- they grow towards sunlight automatically, not because they think "hm, sunlight looks good, let me slowly grow in that direction from now on."  It is merely a reflex; it isn’t supported by any conscious decision-making process, because plants contain no such facility, and neither does Terri Schiavo.

It is not morally wrong to "kill" Terri any more than it’s wrong to "kill" a plant, because neither is alive in the Biblical sense.  And this is not the same as killing an unborn baby, because babies are not in a permanent "unconscious, reflexive state" as are plants and Terri Schiavo.

I’m all for "favoring a presumption of life" in unclear cases, and for the first few months, or a year, maybe even a couple years, I would say this MIGHT have been an unclear case.  But now, 15 years later, this case is no longer unclear: "Theresa will always remain in an unconscious, reflexive state."

[Note: this is the record of my attempts to get Belkin to fix a massive flaw in the design of their "routers."  The bottom line is that they refused to even acknowledge the flaw, and the result is that computers on the LAN side of a Belkin router can’t access servers on the LAN using the router’s public IP address or hostname.  Because of this, and Belkin’s refusal to acknowledge, let alone fix, the problem, I must strongly discourage anyone from purchasing a Belkin router.]

I can’t stand tech support.  It wouldn’t be so bad if they weren’t all thoroughly clueless, but they are.

Me:

Hello,

I just bought an F5D72304 router, and I’m having a problem with it.

I’ve got a few computers on the LAN-side of the router that are running services (http, ssh, etc).  From any computer on the internet outside of my LAN, I can access those services without problems.  But any computer inside my F5D72304’s LAN cannot access those services, whether on other systems in the LAN or on itself, through my public IP address.  If I use the computers’ LAN IPs then it works OK, but not if I use the public IP.

Let me use some numbers to make it more clear:

My public IP is x.y.1.194
Belkin router’s private LAN IP is 172.19.5.250
Computer lanbox-1 is IP 172.19.5.1
Computer lanbox-2 is IP 172.19.5.2
Computer lanbox-2 is running http on port 89
Computer remotebox is elsewhere on the internet

These connections work OK:

  remotebox -> x.y.1.194:89 (http over external IP)
  lanbox-1 -> 172.19.5.2:89 (http over internal IP)
  lanbox-2 -> 172.19.5.2:89 (http over internal IP)

But these connections do NOT work:

  lanbox-1 -> x.y.1.194:89 (http over external IP)
  lanbox-2 -> x.y.1.194:89 (http over external IP)

I’ve tried putting lanbox-2 (my http server) in the DMZ, but that didn’t change anything.  I’ve tried different ports than 89, still no success. I’ve looked around the router config but didn’t see anything that would fix this.  I have another router (an older D-Link model) configured exactly the same as the new Belkin (i.e. LAN is 172.19.5.* and forwarding port 89 to 172.19.5.2) and it doesn’t have this problem.

Please help!

Thanks,
Anthony DiSante

Them:

Hi Anthony,

Thank you for contacting Belkin Technical Support.

We understand that you are not able to access the services with the Wan IP from your network.

Anthony, There is a feature called NAT is present in the router. If you are trying to acess the router setup page from the external computer.  When the router see the WAN IP from the external network then it can perform natting that is it will change the public IP address of the external network computer in to  the prvate IP address range, which helps you to view the services. But with in the intenal network natting is not possible since the internal network already has the private IP address. That is why you are not able to use the wan IP to view the services in internal network.

Hope this information helps.

Regards,

[some person]
Belkin Technical Support.

Me:

Hello,

Thanks for your reply.

If I understand you correctly, you are saying that the behavior I am experiencing is the correct behavior?  You are saying that it’s correct that I cannot access services on my LAN from a system on my LAN using the public IP address?

If so, then that is a flaw in the design of your router.  I have used a half-dozen routers from various manufacturers and none of them exhibit this behavior.  When I use the router’s firewall to forward port X to box-2 on the LAN, that means "when a packet arrives at the WAN interface for port X, pass it through to box-2 on the LAN interface."  The source of the packet is irrelevant; all the router needs to know is that it arrived at the external interface, and that I’ve configured a firewall rule that explains how to handle that situation.

This is definitely worthy of a firmware upgrade, but in the meantime I’ll have to remove the F5D72304 from my network and put my old D-Link router in its place.

-Anthony DiSante

Them:

Hi Anthony,

Thank you for contacting Belkin Technical Support.

Anthony, we understand that you are not able to access services in your LAN using WAN IP address.

Belkin routers are enabled with NAT feature. This will not allow you to access the services locally by using the WAN IP address.

When you are trying to access the services from your LAN using the WAN IP address, the request goes upto the router then redirect the request internally in your LAN. The resolution happens in the router itself, hence the request doesnot go the internet and redirect to the router since it is a NAT enabled router.

The same thing happens with all the routers with NAT feature.

We hope this information is helpful. Please let us know if you require any further assistance. We’ll be glad to help you.

Regards,

[a different person]
Belkin Technical Support

Me:

Hello,

> Belkin routers are enabled with NAT feature.

So is every router I’ve ever used.  NAT is the whole point of using a router in a home network, since it allows you to have multiple computers on a private network connected to the public internet, with the router translating the addresses.  This feature is not unique to Belkin routers.

> This will not allow you to access the
> services locally by using the WAN IP
> address. ... The same thing happens with
> all the routers with NAT feature.

That is simply not true.  Every router I’ve ever used has allowed me to access services on my LAN via the WAN IP.  I have two other routers right next to me that I’ve been testing to make sure of it -- the Belkin is the only one that exhibits this error.

-Anthony DiSante

Me, again:

Hello,

> the request goes upto the router then
> redirect the request internally in your
> LAN.  The resolution happens in the router
> itself, hence the request doesnot go the
> internet and redirect to the router

That’s exactly the problem.  When a packet arrives at the WAN interface, it DOES "go [to] the internet" because the WAN IP is an internet IP.  So the router should treat it like any other packet arriving at the WAN interface; it doesn’t matter where the packet came from (LAN or remote system), what matters is that I sent it to the WAN interface.

-Anthony DiSante

ARGH.  How can you work tech support for a company’s router products and NOT KNOW WHAT A ROUTER IS SUPPOSED TO DO?

And it REALLY bugs me how a different person replies to the email every time when you email a company’s tech support.  Each successive person ostensibly reads the earlier conversation, but then just says the exact same thing.  That makes me so mad.  I emailed Dell a couple months ago, asking if I could get a laptop without Windows installed, and therefore without having to pay the $200 Microsoft tax. There were about ten -- TEN -- exchanges where I said "why is it Dell’s policy to force a particular operating system on the customer?" and the Dell rep said "it is Dell’s policy to force Windows XP on the customer" (essentially).  Each time it was a different person, each time I asked "WHY??!?", and each time the response just restated the fact that it IS the case without addressing WHY.

And as if ALL THAT weren’t enough, the tech support responses are always replete with typos and misspellings.

hi
wat r u up 2? les meet up. by tyhe way are all volcanoes bad? i need to know ergent!

The fanatical Muslims despise America because it’s all lapdancing and gay porn; the secular Europeans despise America because it’s all born-again Christians hung up on abortion; the anti-Semites despise America because it’s controlled by Jews. Too Jewish, too Christian, too Godless, America is also too isolationist, except when it’s too imperialist.
- Mark Steyn

During our hike last weekend, we were talking about the religion of Scientology.  I decided to look it up and see just what it’s about.  Here’s a statement from the official website:

Developed by L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology is a religion that offers a precise path leading to a complete and certain understanding of one’s true spiritual nature and of one’s relationship with self, family, groups, mankind, all life forms, the material universe, the spiritual universe and the Supreme Being, or infinity.

Scientology addresses the spirit — not simply the body or mind — and believes that man is far more than a product of his environment, or his genes.

Scientology comprises a body of knowledge which extends from certain fundamental truths. Prime among these are:

Man is an immortal spiritual being.

His experience extends well beyond a single lifetime.

His capabilities are unlimited, even if not presently realized.

Scientology further holds man to be basically good, and that his spiritual salvation depends upon himself and his fellows and his attainment of brotherhood with the universe.

Scientology is not a dogmatic religion in which one is asked to believe anything on faith. An individual discovers for himself that Scientology works by applying its principles and observing or experiencing the results.

The ultimate goal of Scientology is true spiritual enlightenment and freedom for the individual.

Sounds somewhat like a western version of Buddhism.  The fundamental flaw (aside from just being one of those touchy-feely happy religions) as I see it is their belief that man is basically good.  Not only is this the polar opposite of what I believe, but where I live (Earth) it’s abundantly clear that man is not basically good.