Facebook: Betrayal for Gain

I am not on Facebook and never will be, as it presently works.
I refuse to participate in a business that in its essence is tracking me and what I do and selling this information to the highest bidder.

On January 14, merely fourteen days ago, Facebook announced that it would allow its third-party app developers access to the home addresses and mobile telephone numbers of Facebook members. By January 17, it had to retreat, owing to the outrage of members and security experts.
I am sure a lot of thought had gone into the original plan to allow access. It is very obvious that the highest priority was not placed on the security of the Facebook members. The welfare of the individual members took a back seat to profit.

As long as the business models for the Internet are based on skimming data from people, the Internet is NOT the way of the future. It is a better prison, a better panopticon with which to view our every moment.  The  business model of enticing us, ingratiating themselves with us, and establishing amity with us so that they can sell details of our lives to other people as well as putting our security in jeopardy is debased and unhuman and below any standard of acceptable behavior.

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Being There 01/28/2011

http://www.kdvr.com/news/kdvr-dems-batter-gop-over-school-br-01242011,0,7628659.story

Dems batter GOP over school breakfast cuts, propose bill to restore funds

DENVER - The first big media storm of the 2011 legislative session continues to swirl around last week's decision by three GOP lawmakers to cut off funding for a program that provides free school breakfasts to needy students who don't qualify for a federal program that does the same.

On Monday, a large group of Democratic lawmakers held a press conference at Dora Moore Elementary school vowing to introduce a bill to restore funding for the Smart Start program, which may need an additional $124,000 to operate through the end of the current school year...

"In my opinion, this decision lies outside the principles of our faith and the principles of morality," said Rev. Jim Ryan. "Jesus said if you fail to feed the hungry, you fail to feed me." ...

"It's not a moral issue, it's an accounting issue," said Rep. Cheri Gerou, R-Evergreen.

It is always a moral issue. The religious directives about the poor are quite clear and precise. If we ignore them, then how much more absurd we have made our lives: all of us together - atheists and believers - deny God and together we refuse to accept the burden of morality!
If you did not understand "absurd" yesterday, surely it must be becoming clearer today.

Chance Gardiner says in the film Being There:

" I like to watch the young plants grow... Young plants do much better if a person helps them." 

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Don Giovanni and Don Juan

 Leporello in Don Giovanni

The world - as Camus would have it and I agree - is unreasonable. Our ways of understanding try hard to make various images and icons of the stuff of reality, but we fall far short.

Camus describes how the absurd man may live: revolution, freedom, and passion. Since reality is absurd, there are no ethical rules, and "Everything is permitted" is a statement of fact. Don Juan, the serial seducer, who recognizing these facts, lives the life of the passions to the fullest. "There is no noble love but that which recognizes itself to be both short-lived and exceptional."

With this I disagree, for it is not what I have observed in life, not by a long chalk.
My disagreement lay in the fact that I do not think all that highly of reason in the first place. Hence, a recognition of the irrationality of reality is hardly a major problem. And even though everything may be permitted, it does not follow then that everything may be done, nor must be done; a permission to act is not an order to do so.
(Here the disappearance of moral law is not carnival and licentiousness after all, but a shouldering of the burden by Mankind which no longer may fall back on the old alibi of Original Sin! Whether the devil exist or not, we cannot act like children and say the devil made us do it.)
As children we follow rules; as adults we put away the things of children and order our lives willingly and freely. But we can only do this if we fully engage life. Children do not fully engage with life; they are still in a stage of tutelage and learning:  their passions are schoolboy crushes, their angers are fleeting and forgotten with the new day, their faith is the words of their elders.
Only as adults do we fully engage.
But only then if we have put away childhood toys.....
(Once I had a dream of a Torah scroll spinning like a dreidel..... my understanding of that ancient law was a manufactured toy, like a glorious iPad of spiritual dimensions....
God could not be as small as I!)

We think too highly of sex. Because of its totem power and its taboo and its pleasure, we think that anyone who pursues a life of passion is fully engaged in at least one facet of life: that of bodily desire. But that is not the case. Don Juan's serial fornication was a ploy to ignore life, to maintain himself so busily occupied in passion that he had no time for the long-term of Life.
Don Juan hoarded passion.
If Sex came with newspapers and plastic bags, Don Juan would have been indistinguishable from a hoarder living in a house filled to the ceilings with accumulated junk.

The absurd pursuits of our present age are all obsessively and compulsively aimed at engaging Life in the short-term, gobbling little pieces: seconds, minutes, hours, weeks, and years, but not at engaging Life in the long-term.
Even our businesses run this way; even businesses we believe that we are so wrapped up in and so engaged in during our lives: they are mostly designed to brings short-term Pavlovian stimuli and keep us blinded to the long-term: our futures and the future of the human race.
It is not a matter of saying that we must make a living and who are we to attempt to affect the future of the human race! For the business of all of us is humanity! Not just economic man, but humankind in its entirety: it is a passionate engagement in Life! Not a "job" from which we retire after 30 or 40 years.

Sex today is pornography designed to pre-occupy our passionate minds and waylay them into stupid and futile pursuits.  We have allowed this to happen  just as we have let our commerce and our politics become pornographic pantomimes of themselves.

When I wrote a few days ago that Faith is Water, most readers took that as a metaphor; it was not. It was an experience.
Everything is an experience. Reality does not exist for our pleasure nor as a source of metaphor and poetry: it exists to experience as adults, as the most perfect beings we can be.

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America's Sputnik Moment... Again?

The USSR launched Sputnik in the 1950's. The world situation was vastly different than today. The US was still the pre-eminent producer of goods and was rebuilding Europe and was exploding with growth.

Much of the response to Sputnik was government backed and financed research and development. Nowadays, any such government spending must be immediately balanced by cuts somewhere else.

Ain't gonna happen. It would have been as if Eisenhower and Congress had destroyed Social Security to get money to send a man to the moon...

It brings to mind those spare tire covers on vans that used to say "We're spending our childrens'  inheritance!" I had a picture of one before in September 2008, so I ran it again. The tire cover has a copy of Goya's picture Chronos Devouring His Children:

Of course, people will have the choice between the cute motto: "We are Spending Our Grandkids' Inheritance"  or the apocalyptic motto "We are Devouring the Future"  to be printed on the perimeter.

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Worlds That Lost Control

Snapshot from the Ghetto in Lodz, Poland from a display at Centre d’Histoire de la Résistance et de la Déportation de Lyon until February 13.

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