One week before Easter I find myself reflecting on what I consider traditional religion. My mother taught us to never discuss politics and religion. This advice was before the existence of blogs and before she knew how opinionated I would become. So, against the advise of my Mother and my better judgment here I go…

I am not an expert of any religion yet I have very strong opinions on the subject. I do not go to Church, at least not normally. I will go to Church next week on Easter Sunday to please my wife. I will go and worship God in my own way among other friendly people that no doubt feel much differently than I.

Whether you practice Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism or another religion altogether I respect your belief. I even respect the irreligious and atheist’s rights to their beliefs. The key word is belief. I have no problem with one’s beliefs, it’s when our arrogance takes over and we begin to believe we have the answers that gets my blood pressure up.

My personal beliefs are very simple. Life is far too perfect to be an accident. No one is ever going to convince me the we are the product of amino acids and lightning strikes millions of years ago. With that said, no one is going to convince me that we are the only planet with abundant and intelligent life on it. How do I know? I don’t! That’s the point. No one knows what’s true, we simply have our beliefs. The next time some one walks up to me and asks me if I’ve heard the truth or the good news I have this post to direct them to.

Simply put, we are a small planet in a very small solar system. Our solar system is among billions of stars to make up our galaxy. Our galaxy is just a dot in the universe among countless billions of other galaxies. Certainly one capable of creating such a place is beyond our comprehension. I am content to believe there is a God and I can not begin to comprehend what that is or what it means. Why is that so hard for so many to accept?

To understand just how small we are I highly recommend this video:
Journey to the Edge of the Universe

Here are a couple more related videos:
The Hubble Deep Field: The Most Important Image Ever Taken
The God Theory

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

I just had an ordeal with Amazon.com’s Associates (Affiliate) Program that left me fuming. I thought I would just paste the actual emails below and let them tell the story. I added images just for effect and I will admit I should have allowed myself a few minutes to cool off before I replied but I didn’t.

Just to set it up a little one of our Ad Tracking member’s abused Amazon.com’s affiliate agreement and Amazon.com jumped to conclusions and suspended my PERSONAL account. That account is in my personal name and has nothing to do with  YourAdTracker.com. I have never promoted any of their products on that domain. Here’s the exchange, you be the judge:

Greetings from the Associates Program.

We recently noticed your Associate links are appearing as sponsored links on search engines under the term “kindle” and variations of this term using incorrect information (i.e. “FREE BONUS”).  We have also found that you are framing the Kindle detail page with the URL 4u2bn.com/ih46.  Please note, per the Operating Agreement:

[Exerpt of Amazon.com terms removed]

As you have failed to comply with these terms, your Associates account has been closed.  Thank you for your interest in the Amazon.com Associates Program and best of luck in the future.

Best regards,
Thomas – Associates Account Specialist
http://www.amazon.com

Hello Thomas, Thank you so much for taking the time to check into things and not jump to conclusions and closing my account. Oh wait, what was I thinking, of course you are so much busier than the rest of us you shouldn’t have to take the time to check your facts or ask a question.

Anyone with half a brain should be able to tell that 4u2bn.com/ih46 is a short url and ad tracking link. A simple view source would tell you the affiliate link is: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00154JDAI?tag=YOUR_ID_HERE-20

I assure you it’s not my affiliate link but since you didn’t bother checking a single thing before you closed my account you know where to stick your Associates Program!

BTW, The next time I want to buy a book I’ll gladly go to borders.com It will be a cold day in hell before I spend a dime on your site again. I have to go blog about this now,

Good day and KMA,
Brian D. Hawkins

Hello again from the Associates Program.

Thank you for writing back to us. We did notice that the link was incorrectly tagged; however, because you are the domain holder of 4u2bn.com, you were held responsible for the advertising content which used this domain as the referring URL and also frames our web site. Based on the multiple violations occurring using your domain, your account was closed without warning. We regret any frustration or inconvenience that this may have caused for you.

The person using your domain has since contacted us about this issue and confirmed that they were responsible for the violations.  As a result, we would be willing to reinstate your account if you so choose.

Please let us know how you wish to proceed.

Best regards,

Edward – Associates Account Specialist
http://www.amazon.com

Hi Edward, With thousands of members it is impossible for me to check every tracking URL that is created on our site. I have kept a very clean service and I’m proud of our reputation. We made the very unpopular decision last year to stop offering free accounts and go to an all paid membership site. We did this to help prevent our service from being used as a spam and phishing resource.

It clearly states in our terms that we require all members to only shorten and track URLs to third party sites that allow such activity. It’s funny, the same people that are violating your terms are violating ours as well yet you want to punish me because I own the site.

Have you canceled the personal accounts of Kevin Gilbertson of tinyurl.com or Ben Braman of shorturl.com? When an affiliate violates your terms do you go after their ISPs and hosting companies? I seriously doubt it and no one would expect such an unreasonable reaction.

I don’t know if that’s the official policy of Amazon.com or if it’s simply your discretion. In either case there is obviously no way for me to prevent future Amazon.com term violations from our members short of closing the site so I must decline your reinstatement offer.

I have updated our TOS and posted an article on our blog clarifying the relation of our ‘cloaking‘ feature and ‘site framing‘. A notice will be sent to all members this weekend as well.

Sincerely,
Brian D. Hawkins
http://youradtracker.com/

There you have, now wasn’t that interesting?

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

So far I like President Barack Obama and I have a lot of hope for his administration. Are we expecting too much from the Government? Are we counting on miracles from President Obama? I like this quote from Dave Ramsey about President Obama, “He’s your president, not your savior“.

By criticizing the plan I might look anti-energy, anti-education, anti-health care and anti-jobs but I assure you I am not. I’m just not sure we need to keep the knee-jerk actions of throwing good money at a bad problem. Honestly, if we do get the 3 million new jobs over the next few years like Obama says, what’s the cost? Three million jobs for close to a trillion dollars? Is anyone doing the math here?

2008 Stimulus Plan: Early last year congress passed a $152 billion stimulus plan to jolt our sluggish economy. This economic-growth package, the 2008 Tax Rebates and Economic Stimulus Plan, gave 130 million U.S. families and individuals tax rebate checks from the Internal Revenue Service. The result: Almost nothing!

Banking Industry Bailout: Then we see Congress and President George W. Bush hand out $700 billion for a banking industry bailout. The Result: Bank abuse in the Billions including lavish parties and huge bonuses to top executives.

Auto Industry Bailout: Lets not forget about taxpayers flipping the bill for a $15 billion auto industry bailout. All that so-called loan achieved is some temporary relief to keep one or more of the big three out of bankruptcy. Now they need more cash!

2009 $819 Billion Economic Stimulus: People all over the world are struggling and need financial assistance. Is a $819 billion economic stimulus package really going to help? Look at the track record I just outlined above. Blindly throwing trillions of dollars around hardly seems like an intelligent solution. President Barack Obama’s stimulus is bigger than the Pentagon’s entire budget and more than the United States has spent on the war in Iraq.

You know, I just have to say one more thing. The Republicans really blew it by acting like stereotype Republicans and running the Country into
the ground. Now they have lost the entire government to the Democrats. So what do the Democrats do? It looks like they are going to blow it
now by acting like stereotype Democrats with high spending and big government. And oh is this expensive and big. Look at some of the numbers
going around:

• $8.4 billion for clean drinking water.
• $30 billion for highway construction
• $13.1 billion for other forms of transportation, including mass transit
• $89 billion for Medicaid, the health-insurance plan for the poor
• $13.3 billion of health-insurance assistance for the unemployed
• $38 billion in emergency and extended unemployment
• $188 billion in tax reductions
• $20 billion for direct spending on school facilities
• $20 billion to computerize health records
• $79 billion to help stabilize state budgets, beyond the allocations for things like infrastructure, Medicaid and schools.
• $87 million for a single icebreaker ship to be used in the Arctic
• $150 million for producers of livestock, honey bees and farm-raised fish.
• $20 million for fish barriers.
• $430 million for the SBA to use toward its lending programs
• $335 million for programs that help prevent sexually transmitted disease
• $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts
• $70 million for a supercomputer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
• $75 million for smoking-cessation programs.

Has so many hands ever been greased so quickly in the United State’s history? I sure hope those idiots in Washington know what they’re doing
because America is going to be in debt for generations.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!