Your Social Networking Behavior is Tantalising Knowledge that Employers or Colleges Will Find Irresistible

It's very true: This US government feels strongly that they have a homeland security interest in seeing our private lives. Now it's very clear that the private industries are using those digital lives as tests of possible merit to prejudge prospective students, employees, contractors and the imagination goes on from there. You may not get into that school if your profile is "questionable."

On the Huffington Post today, March, 3, 2015, a story is revealing what could have been predicted by an online behavioral analyst beginning some time ago. The future is arriving very quickly!

Regarding: Facebook Passwords Of Applicants Demanded By Colleges, Government Agencies Please return! 

 
     Booo FaceBook! Not reasonable. Publishing under attack in the twenty-first century. What's old is what's new again as society again fails to recognize the repetition of history's mistakes as we gain access to the ability to write more. 

    But, we all must consider that all of our digital presences on all of these commercial for profit social networks today is tantalizing knowledge to an institution we may need in our lives. Government is one of those institutions that we have some control over, if we can turn out to participate and protect ourselves. 

    That knowledge is like holding water in front of a dehydrated animal and so it is incredibly seductive for purposes of managed quality control and the unstoppable urge to make your institution successful. 

    That your social networking accounts can strongly reveal the quality of human you will make and your behavioral predictability can be critically examined, is but a sad truth we should all get used to. 

Copyright Reserved: James G. Mason, March, 2015 

12:00 pm -5

Related exterior links: 

July, 2013: Microsoft Cooperated with the NSA: Sample: "The NSA allegedly listened in on numerous video calls made via Skype, which Microsoft bought two years ago. And Microsoft also worked with the FBI this year to give the NSA easier access to its cloud storage service SkyDrive, which has more than 250 million users worldwide, according to the Guardian's report, published Thursday." 

 Google quirie images and links "privacy." 

  

#privacy #facebook #nsa #socialnetworking #amwriters #weblogs #sol3 

Missed Opportunities to Tell the Moral of the Story - and Teach Our Kids

"It seems these days there is something about almost everything that should be criticized boldly in the face of widespread denial." - James G. Mason.

Father James on a Moralistic Bender 

The following is a moralistic jump into the air, waving my hands about to get your attention on an issue I find relevant to all of us. This style of opinion is a common theme for an editorialist. It is a form of an outlet of frustration and one of the least admitted reasons many editorialists write. If you read the same writer's opinions regularly I think you'll find this generalization a truism. So here I jump! 

~~~~~~~ 

We are a country that will proliferate vast amounts of news articles about a Hollywood star's latest inappropriate behavior as entertainment news and let it pass as such. We simultaneously present our politician's public mistakes also as entertainment and we largely react by pretending we don't ever act like that and then we let the absurd sound bites pass as careless mistakes to be forgotten quickly.

We let those celebrities incidents and political brain-farts become old news fast without dissecting the moral within the story and  then not explaining to our kids why that inappropriate behavior was news to begin with. Worse, we tend to not seek consequences for many actions we see, we let them pass without a moral to the story.

It's not that moral escapes us, it's uncomfortable to us to explore behavior we all know most of us are capable of and many of us have done ourselves. And when a thing is vastly entertaining we adapt to immorality within those forms of entertainment. So before we know it, the previously immoral is normal behavior. 

We are the nation that just allowed a multi-billion dollar national sport to step two rungs down the ladder of morality because we loved it so much and the Super Bowl was coming. "Well it's a mystery to me," we said collectively. Then we watched the game in record numbers and we emptied our wallets and drove up our credit card bills for that entertainment, despite. In denial we evaded a moral moment to have a great discussion.

Before that most recent sporting news we allowed college students to play a football play-off game in the context of a multi billion dollar producing entertainment medium several days after numerous horrific indictments of that team's coach and mentor's very disgusting and very immoral actions against children were loudly proclaimed to us. Some students wore special colored t-shirts for that televised game to show they cared - so that was okay to our comfort seeking minds.

These publicly personal mistake stories and each of these recent events, that were truly entertainment were surrounded by days and weeks of time of missed opportunities to face our morality in the wind of a public storm of denial. Opportunities to present consequences.

It would have been very uncomfortable to actually take action to demonstrate consequences for immorality or even to revisit and prolong our discomfort to learn and to teach our young. 

Now I'll pretend that we did the right thing for each of those occurrences above. Because I also love to write fiction especially when it has an important moral to the story. 

Celebrity news: Beginning with using celebrities personal mistakes as way of then explaining to our kids; "Kids, sometimes adults show us who they really are inside. They get drunk or they get emotional for other reasons and then say and do things that your and I should never do or say. So, when you hear about a star doing something like that it's because we need to learn a lesson from those public mistakes. The lesson is usually keep your ugly thoughts to yourselves and protect your dignity and the perception that every one else has of you." 

The Penn State coach child molestations: "You see kids stopping that game from being played that week was very important because we must see big consequences for big wrong things that people do. Sometimes those consequences need to be shown to every one all at once in a big way. Especially when something really bad happens to children. So that's why that play-off game never happened and that's why the Penn State football program was shut down for a year." 

The mysteriously under inflated footballs: We may have had to explain to our boys who also love the sport of football that "We had to cancel that Super Bowl because adults can be great cheaters too and it's very wrong. And we needed to share the consequences of that with the whole world.  So that maybe, you and  your friends wouldn't grow-up to be a person like that.  A person who seeks sneaky advantages when they think no one will find out."

  

Let's be brave when the next opportunity to explore our morality occurs. Lets be brave mentors to the future, our kids, our young adults and especially to the grown-ups by facing that uncomfortable wind in our faces. Let's recognize when we enjoy a thing, we'll compulsively try to bury the immorality that may occur within that thing.

Copyright Reserved: James G Mason, Feburary, 2015.

#amwriters #weblogs #morality #opinion #editorial #MoralStory 

Je Suis Charlie Hebdo

BBC News: "At least 12 people have been shot dead in Paris - 2 of them police officers - after masked men stormed the offices of a French magazine. 10 others have been wounded - several critically - at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical weekly which has printed cartoons deriding the prophet mohammed. Gunmen burst into the magazine's offices in the centre of Paris."

"JE SUIS CHARLIE." 

My sympathy is strong for the deaths of the humorists and editorialists in Paris, France, last week. My emotion is also strong as I share a major commonality with the murdered in this horrific event. It is an offense to my normally good-feeling empathy. Empathy because it is the expression of opinion we shared, and mutually loved. So, to a lesser degree than their survivors, I feel the loss and the veritable stabbing of the heart as I can only imagine the reality. Living in America as I do, the stabbing is dull for me, detached.

I'll save my many quarrels with religion in general and Islam in specific for a better article. This essay is opinion about the offense to the world's freedom to communicate.

My empathy is greatly offended by this attack because many of us practice free expression also. Many of us also satirizing the culture around us. Some were not expecting to have to have pay with their lives, or by any physical harm. But the passions of individuals can not be policed. Because when distributing our opinions, it can not be known when and how to what degree others will react to our expressions. We who publish edgy opinion, humor and such, walk a tight-rope submerged just below the water level of our heads. We bob up out of the water as we breathe the freedom of each publication, hoping not to get shot at in these periodically occurring times. In the U.S., we have become accustomed to offending others with our speech and not expectant of retribution, for the most part.

Guess what most of America? It is not the American Constitution that protects Americans' speech. That document only informs the government that IT may never infringe on our speech and in particular our religious and political published speech. It is just us that protects our free speech. It is a community standard that is all. Apparently, among radical Islamist, the community standard in westernized nations is frustrating to a strong degree as its' standard is far below their own religiously inspired morality, and they can stand it no longer.

Writers, cartoonists, and all those expressing opinion should acknowledge and keep a couple of important concepts in mind: That first, knowledge of our fragile cultural condition and the nuts that lay within must be realistically understood. Secondly we combine this understanding with a very careful measure of the risk in each instance of publishing. Because there is now more than ever, to allow us to function safely in this modern day as artists and opinion communicators, reason to be worried.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Free speech warrior credentials earned: Myself, the author (left) at Radio Free Monterey, circa 1999, It was a Low Power FM radio, community, and worldwide FM radio and internet "netcasting" station. Built from scratch, owned
and operated by myself, mentioned in Who's Who in the United States, 1999, for community radio advocacy. The station was progressive and activist and advocating for FM radio freedom from corporate take-over in the United States.
Successful, an LPFM license can now be legally obtained by economically small stations, as RFM was.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

January, 2015:


Thanks a lot "Americans." 
Read the damn First Amendment. Then think about it.

Timely: ABC News, January, 16, 2015.

Copyright Reserved. James G. Mason, January, 2015. JamesGMason.com


#‎RADICALISLAM‬ ‪#‎ISIS‬ ‪#‎ISSL‬ ‪#‎terrorism‬ ‪#‎jesuischarlie‬ #charliehebdo