SALVATION

What is the big deal with Salvation? Some religions seem obsessed with it. But what if there isn’t any salvation? What if God just gives us the gift of life for a time and then takes it back? Aren’t we being just a little bit greedy (and ungrateful) in wanting the gift of life to be permanent? Maybe it’s not. Maybe our obsession with Salvation is just a waste of time. Maybe we should just go smell the flowers, hug our kids, kiss our spouses, play with our dogs and thank God for His gift of life. It reminds me of a line in one of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels  - “He was grateful that he was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around…” Why isn’t that enough for us? Why do we want more?

I hate Facebook.

I hate Facebook. Not just the Big Brother aspect, but the fact that FB tries to control everything I do. I would pay for a FB subscription if I could do away with ads, configure the screen the way I want, and have full control over my account. I don't know whether there's a movement to establish paid FB accounts but there should be. That was the way it was done in the early days of the Internet - and the way it is now on tablets and smartphones - you can have an app for free but you see ads or you can buy the app and the ads go away. Why doesn't FB do this?

• Nancy Ward Dock You're right Rich. What possible motive would FB have for collecting huge databases on the posts and comments of its users?

   

  Rich Conti There's an apocryphal story about Zuckerberg that when he conceived of FB he just wanted a way for his college friends to keep in touch. I tend to believe he was following the famous dictum, "There's a sucker born every minute." He knew that if he made something free people would flock to it and give him terabytes of personal info which he could then monetize and sell. I think he should be in jail for stealing this information from us. He's definitely NOT a hero. I refused to see his movie. So there!

Happy July 4th!

7/4/2013

This whole NSA spying scandal seems to get sillier every day. People are ‘shocked’ when they learn they are being spied upon, as if they didn’t already know this. (If they didn’t then they are incredible naïve, or stupid.) Senators and Congress people are appalled – yet they all knew and just kept it quiet. Now US allies are whining, “But we’re your friends…” It’s so pathetic. They knew. They have intelligence services, too. If those intelligence services didn’t already tell them about the spying, then their spies were not doing their jobs and should be fired! It’s like that scene in Casablanca when the Claude Rains policeman says to Rick: “I’m shocked to learn that there has been gambling going on in here.” And Rick says something like, “I’ll look into it. Here are your winnings.” Wake up, people – it’s not ‘1984’ but it might be ‘1983’ and a half! (If you get my meaning.) No matter what people do, how much they protest, how much they decry this betrayal of the 4^th Amendment, it’s not gonna stop. It’s never gonna stop. It just changes form. That’s what it has been doing at least since the end of World War 2. It’s a fact of life. Get over it. Happy July 4^th!

GERMANTOWN HS, RIP

My High School closed this week. It was nearly 100 years old. I graduated 49 years ago. The size of the current student body (in all grades) was not much larger than the size of my graduating class (534.) Students, teachers, parents and alumni are all upset. But I think it had to close – there was no other option.

When the closing was announced in December, I was struck by the fact that the school building was described as ‘crumbling’. There were parts of it that had been closed off for safety reasons. Test scores were low. There was a standardized test cheating scandal a few years ago. A teacher was stabbed right in his classroom. Yet the students and parents and teachers and community were fighting to keep the school from closing. Why?

Is this how low our expectations have sunk? Do we prefer a school that’s a disaster to no school at all? Why are we not fighting for state of the art schools with the newest technology, excellent teachers and exemplary support staff?  You would think that with reduced numbers of school-age kids we would have the money to provide each of them with a top-quality education. But, no.

It seems that money exists but it’s just not flowing to the places where it’s most needed in our society – schools, neighborhoods, public transit, infrastructure, etc. So where is it going? Money does not flow to where it’s needed – it flows to where it’s wanted. It flows to segments of society that are valued by society. Everyone has their own particular segment of society to blame – the Rich, Corporations, Corrupt Government, etc.  Unfortunately, schools are not valued, kids are not valued, neighborhoods are not valued, people are not valued. Whole segments of our society are just being written off, left to wither and die.

So this school closing is really just a small part of a much larger social problem – who gets to decide what is valuable? Who gets to decide what is written off or what is saved? Why are the people who are being written off not rising up (as folks are right now in Turkey and Brazil) to demand justice?

It’s too late for Germantown High School. But it’s not too late for the People.

We live in an electronic world - almost everything we do has an electronic aspect and can therefore be spied upon. That's why I can't believe everyone is so shocked about the NSA eavesdropping. When I first learned about the NSA I read that its purpose was SIGINT (Signals Intelligence) - electronic spying. That's what the NSA does - that's what it's for.
What interests me about this debate we're now having is that nobody has yet mentioned COINTELPRO - which was a notorious FBI program from the 1960s. It was used to not only monitor and spy on activist groups and individuals, but to also disrupt their actions. The current hand-wringing about the NSA just concerns passive data-mining - there is no engagement or disruption going on, as far as we know. So it's really not a big deal. Not yet, anyway. Stay tuned.