Pray-in at S.F. gas station asks God to lower prices

I will never understand this. Why are these people praying about gas prices that presumably god *wants* to be this high? Honestly, if god wanted to lower gas prices, he would.

Is prayer like a poll? Does god have a leader board of requests? Most popular prayer for the month of April is lower gas prices, so down they go.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/04/25/BUCN10C1KR.DTL

Rocky Twyman has a radical solution for surging gasoline prices: prayer.

Twyman - a community organizer, church choir director and public relations consultant from the Washington, D.C., suburbs - staged a pray-in at a San Francisco Chevron station on Friday, asking God for cheaper gas. He did the same thing in the nation's Capitol on Wednesday, with volunteers from a soup kitchen joining in. Today he will lead members of an Oakland church in prayer.

Yes, it's come to that.

"God is the only one we can turn to at this point," said Twyman, 59. "Our leaders don't seem to be able to do anything about it. The prices keep soaring and soaring."

Gas prices have been driven relentlessly higher this year by the bull market for crude oil, gasoline's main ingredient. A gallon of regular now costs $3.89, on average, in California, while the national average has hit $3.58.

To solve the problem, Twyman isn't begging the Lord for any specific act of intervention. He is not asking God to make OPEC pump more oil. Nor is he praying for all the speculative investors to be purged from the New York Mercantile Exchange, where crude oil is traded.

Instead, he says anyone who wants to follow his example should keep it simple.

"God, deliver us from these high gas prices," Twyman said. "That's all they have to say."

Rational thought vs. supernatural thinking

"Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the non-existence of Zeus or Thor - but they have few followers now."- Arthur C. Clarke

The Global Incident Map

This site is awesome. It's exactly what it says it is, a "global display of terrorism and other suspicious events". Each icon displayed is a link to a news article describing the incident. The map includes icons for disasters such as chemical attacks, abductions, eco-terrorism and radiation incidents to name a few, and it reloads every 310 seconds. Great for news hounds, not so great for paranoids. Enjoy.

The Global Incident Map

*edit
As of July 16, 2008 this is a pay site. Apparently it's now 99 USD per year. While this IS an excellent site, it is nowhere near worth 99 bucks. Sorry people.

KEEP OUT

In January, 2008, the Hempstead Village Police Department in conjunction with the Nassau County District Attorney's Office began the second phase of their "comprehensive crime reduction initiative". This phase of the initiative resulted in the arrest of 13 people for attempting to purchase drugs. That's really not hard to believe; if you want to buy drugs on Long Island, Hempstead is a place you can find them with very little effort. The town has an obvious problem with drugs, gangs and crime and thus its residents are understandably supportive of increased law enforcement activity in the area. But along with those 13 arrests were an additional 84 cars that were "identified" driving the streets. These cars were observed 'on the streets' of Hempstead, apparently doing nothing but driving in a town in which they did not live.

Police identified the cars through the use of a License Plate Recognition system. These systems, or LPRs, use lights, cameras and the reflectivity of license plates to take a picture of the plate. Its attendant software processes the images and often has data collection applications. It can have legitimate uses such as access control and parking, but a tool like this was bound to be abused.

During the police department's drug sweep of Hempstead, LPRs were employed to catalog vehicles driving around the neighborhood. Eighty four of those vehicles were identified as registered to people not living in Hempstead. The registered owners of these vehicles were sent letters from the Hempstead Village Police Department notifying them of the drug activity in the area and subsequent investigation. It also notified the owners of the department's "knowledge of their automobile's presence" in the town.

Read the press release: Nassau County New York Office of the District Attorney

Predictably, District Attorney Kathleen Rice used the 'keep kids off drugs' angle and stated that the action was aimed primarily at parents who may not have known that their children were using the family car to purchase drugs. A noble intention, to be sure, no one with any sense believes that kids should be buying or using drugs. But neither Ms. Rice, nor any member of the police department involved in the investigation had or has any knowledge of what these cars were doing there. It's obvious that the occupants of these vehicles were not committing any crimes or violating any traffic laws, they would have been arrested or ticketed otherwise. Their only 'crime' was to be in a neighborhood in which the police didn't think they belonged. For that they're harassed and intimidated and cataloged.

Have these people been put on some sort of watch list? Will their other movements and activities be monitored? Is this an isolated incident or is this happening all over the county? Will other towns in Nassau be determined to be off limits? These questions will likely never be answered by Kathleen Rice or the Hempstead Village Police Department, but it's not hard to draw conclusions.

It's interesting to note that the overtime pay received by police officers involved in the action came from the District Attorney's forfeiture fund. Theses funds are recovered from defendants convicted of crimes.