Life: Control It

Gee, Facebook does nothing to alter its behavior if it might get in the way of its profits? And we didn’t know that? Facebook is a for-profit corporate entity. It’s what they do.  Maybe folks haven’t been paying attention, but it turns out that commercial firms, which are legal entities owned by rich dudes, or dudes hoping to become rich, actually consider profits more important than morality. Huh, who knew?

Oh and then there’s that cute story about the Church’s involvement in ignoring/covering up the abuse of hundreds of thousands of kids by church officials. Why would they do that?? Well, church profits and church control over humans. Turns out that churches are no more moral than commercial entities.  If action might affect either profits or control, then church officials see no evil, hear no evil.

We humans seem not to understand the role of money in our universe. AND, that role is growing not becoming moderated. Apparently, since nobody ever wishes to entertain the idea of controlling the influence of money, then money continues to grow in influence.  This latest thing about folks parking their money in tax havens, now in places like South Dakota instead of far-off places, only convinces me that we have ALL BUT GIVEN UP ON CONTROLLING MONEY. It controls us apparently.

So, when people get all uppity about Mark Zuckerberg being unwilling to control the nasties on Facebook, et al, because that might interfere with his money-making, I’m sorry, but it makes me laugh a bit.  And apparently Instagram, yet another of Zuckies’ creations, is proving to be hostile to teenage girls.  And everyone is up in arms. Goodness, teenaged girls coming acropper of a social media site that publishes nasty stuff about them. Uhhh, did they ever consider dropping out of that social media site???  Or did their parents ever consider exerting some parental controls over their teenager use of social media? Well, no, that’s all on Mark Zuckerberg. He should be controlling his sites such that they don’t make teenage girls do nasty things to their teenaged girlfriends.  Wow, I never realized Zuckerberg had such power that he could control teenage girls.

Yes, social media sites are potentially dangerous, both to teenaged girls, but also, frankly, to everyone who uses them.  Yes, we have Nazi’s using social media to bad ends (see republican party). Oh and then we have perverted individuals who wish to scam you in some way. They might use Facebook, but there are so many ways we communicate that the scammers of the world have an open field. My wife got a text message, telling her that Person X (someone known to me) had sent her this link. And she was supposed to click on that link. Now who should control that text communique? Shouldn’t the phone company (e.g., Spectrum, or Verizon) be monitoring such texts to assure that they are real? No?? How come? Oh, you mean, it’s up to us to control what we do—to click or not to click, that is the question  . . .

Oh, and then who should control the Trumpies (or their surrogates) who send me 10-12 text messages each day, asking me to join them at a rally, or oh, by the way, how about sending them $25? Me, asking Me, to send money to Trump? Maybe the least likely human on the planet to send Trump money???

So, why doesn’t Verizon, or Spectrum control who sends me such idiotic text messages?  Oh, cuz they expect me to censor my own text messages?

So, yeah, it would be nice if teenaged girls didn’t have to put up with all this social media crap, especially the nastier stuff aimed at making them feel like total POS. It would be nicer yet if the world didn’t contain so many nasty little idiot-malenfants. But apparently it is not to be. If God created all these idiots, then how incompetent is she??? Nope more evidence, as though we needed more,  for Darwin at work here. It does make me wonder actually, why Darwin seems to be so hard at work creating so many total cretins in America. How did we turn into a country of human-haters?  I mean, people actually still support Donald Trump??? Really??? Darwin, you’re really a badass.

And then I was drawn to thinking again about one of my favorite theories: that Nothing Follows Death. See, when we take our last breath, and that light goes out, we don’t know it, cuz nothing follows something. And, you might think, that’s awful right? Yeah, no bus to the heavenly gates, nope. Nothing. We just zero out, almost as though we never existed. Awful, huh?

Well, but stop to consider. We are all stuff that arrived out of nowhere. Yep, first there was nothing. Then suddenly a creature arrived, breathing, and eventually yelling for food and a clean diaper.  See, out of nothing came something. And we are in charge of how that something turns out, and whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing for the rest of humanity.  So think on that before you do something good or bad for humanity.  Sniff the flowers, check out that bumble bee who is wandering around your flowers. Oh, and do talk to your teenaged daughter about the dangers of social media—it’s worse than trying to cross a crowded street in Manhattan, and you talk to her about that, right?  So, remember, you both suddenly appeared out of literally nowhere, and you will eventually return to nowhere. So, all you have is this thing we call life, the here and now. Act like it matters, even if only briefly. Act like you can exercise some control over that life. And smile. You look much nicer that way.