A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog.

Jack London.

A thought came to me after reading Redefining Philanthropy: Introducing The Citizen Effect, gratitude goes to Amy Carol Wolff.

As a matter of fact I know pretty much nothing about modern philanthropy and non-profit organizations, yet intuition tells me that something is wrong here.

To begin, non-profits are biased towards helping poor people with their lives.
I haven’t heard of any non-profit that aims to help rich people with their lives. Why? Or maybe rich people do not need help? Well, they are human beings too, they suffer just like anybody else.

In a discussion Dan Morrison argued that poor people spend most of their time satisfying basic needs. But what do other people do most of their time? Just the same: they satisfy basic needs. But basic needs are different: for ones it is water, for others it could be whiskey. Eradicating poverty just means that basic needs will change. It has nothing to do with happiness.

Nevertheless many great people are involved in philanthropic activity and they succeed. And if we imagine a timeline we will probably notice that nowadays non-profit organizations are more successful than they have even been. Considering this fact from system self-organization standpoint among conclusions to made one will be about immunity.

Poverty and richness are diseases of society. Richness parasitizes society but at the same time controls it. That’s why society needs (and produces) enthusiasts to deal with poverty. I can see a sort of analogy between immunity and charity efforts. The stronger the disease the harder the work will be for immune system. And today people work really hard.

In Moscow there are several Starbucks stores. But they are translated into Russian and the magic is gone.

You know, in Paris there is a Starbucks on Champs-Élysées. I once was there and was very much confused. Imagine: a Russian tourist in France goes to American coffee store, Korean assistant says with American accent: “Bonjour monsieur!”, tourists orders Italian cappuccino, gets the cup made in China and really doesn’t know what is that correct language to say thanks.

The only thing that was missing there was a group of antiglobalists. Yet I didn’t check it carefully.

Outstanding song by Milla Jovovich:

If you believe there’s nothing up their sleeve
Then nothing is cool

Words by R.E.M.

Actually this post is about first pregnant woman on orbit. Have you heard about her?… Me too. But let us think for a moment and we will see that any theory of space settlement will break against reproduction.

Many words are spoken about humans who will conquer the space. Well, if you’ll take a look at facts you’ll see following numbers which tell their own tale:

• woman longest single flight is 195 days
• man longest single flight is 437.7 days

Is seems people who want to ‘invade’ space have a lot of work ahead.

People are designed for this planet not for space stations. To be able live at space station new ‘people’ should be designed for that, be born and grown up on space station. And there is only one way to achieve this: survival of the fittest.

Taken from the blog of Stephen Law:

Even though they’re soldiers and know killing is part of their responsibility and duty, a number of them come to me very bothered about it…Our challenge is to assure them that what they are doing is morally acceptable from a Christian perspective and a patriotic one.

Major Eric Albertson, a Roman Catholic Chaplain in Iraq The Times, 8 Dec 2004, p.37

What a words! “Christian perspective“, “morally acceptable“. I almost feel the breathe of eternity and I’m sure I hear the laughter of idols.

Poor people. Ones came over the hills and far away to fight against people they have no idea about, other came to the same place to assure the former that killing is morally acceptable. Both of them are probably tormented by the desire to go home and by the intuition of overall stupidity of this situation.

I think in this case religion is just another pill to take.