techcafeteria

Well, the end of the world has come and gone and I’m pleased to report that the dead aren’t risen and Game of Thrones is on HBO tonight. But, after all of the jokey links and comments I’ve seen and shared on Twitter and Facebook this week, I got to thinking about why this was such a press-stopper, given that 99.999 percent of the world did not fall for it, nor would we. This was the publicity-grabbing show of a religious freakazoid and we were all happy to oblige him. Why is that?

I think it’s a combination of things. We’re big on disaster lately. Movies like 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow rake it in; shows like The Walking Dead are huge hits. Maybe it’s because disaster is easy to imagine in a world where scientists are all warning us about global warming and the magnitude of natural disasters does seem to be up with all of the recent flooding, hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunamis.

But I think there’s another element to this: The rapture isn’t just about the pious getting their eternal reward. It’s just as much about the sinners getting their earthly torment. How mean-spirited is that? “I’m joining my lord in heaven while that awful next door neighbor dies in an earthquake, hah!”

These are people who can’t just rest assured that Christ will save them—they find the idea of salvation oh so much more delicious if they know that the unsaved will be left with fiery deaths and a zombie apocalypse to contend with while they wait in queue to be assigned their harps. So, maybe a lot of the snarky response to the rapture was spawned by an urge to respond to the insulting premise.

I’ve never taken Jesus in as my lord and savior, and it’s not going to happen, not even on my death bed. I believe that he likely existed, and said lots of good things. like “Judge not, lest ye be judged” and that golden rule of “Do unto others…”. I just stop short of the miracle birth and resurrection stuff—I’m far too good a Unitarian for that. So that makes me all the more dismissive of these people who profess to follow the teachings of Jesus while they snicker at the idea of their fellow humans writhing in a fiery hell. I think that anyone who would condone the mass suffering of others as a fitting counterpoint to their eternal reward as pretty undeserving of that reward in the first place.

So here’s my take: the rapture is a hoot, and those who wish to be raptured are morons who deserve every bit of the ridicule that they received this week. If Christ is their teacher, they’ve never passed the first grade. Here’s my real question for those who would welcome an apocalypse as their reward:

Join me for some nptech chatter on my first NYC trip in 30 years, Thursday night at the Heartland Brewery, Empire State Building location (350 5th Ave.), 6:00 pm to whenever.

Tamara (Tommi) Groen Campbell passed away on Thursday. She was 81, and this was no surprise. A combination of pulmonary disease and heart trouble had created a well-predicted situation. A pragmatist to her dying moment, her death went well according to plan. She saw everyone that she wanted to see, said everything that needed to be said, and, finally, constrained to a chair with the two tanks of oxygen that couldn’t get her quite enough air, she decided that she was done.

She was quite a woman, and her story, which deserves a much broader telling, is one of overcoming extreme adversity to live a life of service and, ultimately, happiness.

She was born Jewish in the Netherlands in 1929, and she was chased out of her home by the Nazis. She recalled being ten years old and wearing the Star of David on her arm; not being allowed to cross the street; being harassed by the SS while playing in a tree.

The trip to the United States was quite dramatic. The day before they were scheduled to leave, her mother received a call from someone claiming to be SS, telling them that their seats on the train had been reassigned. When my grandfather came home from work, he called them back to ask why, and they didn’t know what he was talking about. The next day, unsure of whether they’d be able to travel or not, they showed up at the train station and took their seats. They never learned who had called or why.

My grandmother was ill through the two month trip across Europe and the boat ride to the states. They were turned away at Ellis Island and lived in Cuba for a few months before making it to New York. Once settled, my grandmother left her husband, who had been cheating on her before and after the war. My mother worked through high school, taking care of the house and her younger brother and sister while her mother worked as a seamstress. She worked her way through college doing the same thing, ending up with a nursing degree.

Her first marriage, to Bob Wadsworth, had its challenges. Shortly after I was born, but before my sister was, her father’s second wife died, and their two children (my half-aunt and half-uncle) came to live with us. The elder of the two proved too much to handle, and she eventually went back to live with her aunt. After all of this, my father started drinking, and proved to be a violent drunk. She left him when I was eight.

We moved to Brookline, Mass., where she worked and raised us as well as she could. There were times when we were only sustained by the child support, but she eventually found work as a nurse. By the time I was a teenager, she was running a clinic for pregnant teenagers in downtown Boston. The friends she made in Boston proved fairly Bohemian—long haired astrologers and members of the touring cast of Hair. She ran a coffee house called the Damaged Angel, and met a lot of folk musicians who I still listen to today,. I remember being twelve years old and going with her to Love-ins at the Boston Commons.

Around this time, she also met Chuck Campbell, who proved to be a far better partner than Bob. Chuck was a poet and musician when they met, working a day job as a researcher. They both transitioned into teachers. In the late seventies they moved to New Mexico (where Chuck had grown up) and took jobs at the University of Albuquerque.

In 1987, my sister, who claimed to have been abused by our father (Bob) and had always fought with my mother, cut herself off from the family completely, and remains cut off to this day. This was the gash in an otherwise reconstructed life. Mom had found a lot of happiness, but the rejection of her daughter was a constant pain.

They eventually retired, and took the opportunity to travel. Chuck, who had been moonlighting as a tuba player in a Polka band for years, joined a few more jazz bands. I met Linda, and Mom nagged us to have children (even before we were married!). We did the best we could, giving her a grandson who grew to love her dearly.

The last few years, in and out of hospitals, were hard, but she was stoic. It cracked us up that 80% of the nurses that attended to her had been her students—she told them which meds she needed.

A testament to her is the number of friends she had, a parade of them visiting at the end. She was well admired and loved. For me, she was the best mother I could have hoped for. Not the most affectionate, until she was older, but wise, caring, and always there for me. She instilled a sense of duty to help people in me that well defines my choices in life; choices that bring me happiness.

I love you, Mom, and I’m so grateful for all that you did for me.

Doesn’t it figure that this would arrive after this morning’s post?

This is a public service announcement (aka rant) intended for IT product and service reps. In a nutshell:

If your spam and cold calls haven’t resulted in a business relationship, tracking me down personally on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook won’t work either.

Let’s be clear: it’s not a secret that I have purchasing responsibility for IT at my company, and my business contact info is easy to find (or purchase). Mind you, I don’t hire companies based on their ability to locate that information and email or call me. I hire consultants and purchase products based on the recommendations in my communities. So cold contacting me might be inexpensive and easy for you to do, but all it tells me is that you don’t respect my time or privacy and you can’t sustain your business based on quality and word of mouth. Two strikes against you, whereas, before you cold-contacted me, you had none.

But, in failing to spam me into a relationship, taking it to LinkedIn or the contact form here is taking your pathetic and unprofessional approach to marketing into a whole new realm of sleaziness and creepitude. Cold-contacting me at my business email or on my business phone is annoying and pathetic, but far more appropriate that tracking down my personal, non-business addresses and contacting me at those. It’s called stalking.

I’m looking at you, Server Technologies. The fact that you’ve spammed me in the past does not mean that we have an established business relationship, as your LinkedIn invite falsely indicates.

And local IT Recruiters 58 and Foggy—you take the cake. Within two minutes, out of the blue, you cold-called my work number, emailed me personally via this blog, and sent me a LinkedIn invite. That was so over the top annoying that I not only will never do business with you, I’ll make sure that all of my professional acquaintances are warned away.

Because I seriously question what a company that violates my privacy as a means of introduction would do if I actually relied on them and dealt with them financially. Ethical behavior? Not a safe thing to assume. Professionalism? Already in the toilet.

Social networks offer a great avenue for the type of business promotion that works for me—word of mouth. Sincere recommendations from people who think you’re good at what you do because they’ve used your products or services. You can foster my business by doing well enough with your current customers that they will speak well of you online. You can also demonstrate your expertise by publishing materials and distributing them on Slideshare and other public repositories (including your web site, of course). If you put your energy into establishing your credentials, instead of shoving your uncertified opinion that you’re great into every channel that you can reach me through, you’ll get a shot at my business. But using these networks to harass and annoy potential customers is incredibly stupid and short-sighted.

As a happy, active member of the Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN), I’ve made a difficult decision: family and work commitments are too high this year to afford a trip to DC and NTEN’s annual Nonprofit Technology Conference (NTC). Since most of my family and pretty much all of my wife’s family live 1,000 to 3,000 miles away from us, visiting takes up a lot of the vacation time I get. NTC is, to my mind, a marginally work-related activity, in it that I do bring resources and knowledge back to my employer every year, but the bulk of what I get out of and go to NTC for isn’t all that work-related. Because, let’s face it: NTC is the best party of the year, hands down. And I’m far more likely to be imparting info there, and engaging in what I call my “extra-curricular activities” than focusing on Earthjustice-related topics.

What am I going to miss? Oh my word.

For me, the fun begins about a day before the conference does, with the annual NTC Beer Bash (that Carie Lewis will be organizing in my absence) kicking the conference off. Established two years ago, we get 30 to 50 of the early arrivers together at the brewpub with the best selection of craft beers we can find together and kick off the socializing early.

Day of Service. Another pre-conference tradition, the Day of Service links nptech professionals with local charities for four hours of expertise sharing and volunteer activities. There’s usually some big project, like installing wireless at a community center, and many opportunities for smal consulting sessions.

The Tech Track. Started last year, the Tech Track is a selection of breakout sessions designed for the people that do what i do for a living—install and support the technology that, in turn, supports the mission. NTC is a great place to develop a social media strategy or learn the latest online fundraising techniques, and it’s now also a reliable source for solid advice on how to virtualize your server room or move the whole thing to the cloud.

Holly Ross and the NTEN Staff. Simply put, Holly + Co are to nonprofit technology conference planning as Buffy and the Scoopy Gang are to vampire slaying. They not only nail it, but they do it all with wit, humanity and style. NTC is the best tech conference. Period. And that’s completely attributable to the brilliant work NTEN does combining awesome people, great knowledge, and a wealth of activities into three days of absolute fun. As I always say. you can’t go to NTC and not meet people. I make new friends every time.

Sadly, my ambitious agenda at work and some family matters have left no room for my favorite annual event this year. I’ve made the last six and I intend to be at the next six. So go and have a great time for me!

The above clip is one of the more succinct examples of what Glenn Beck spends just about every day doing: taking historical facts, arranging them in a shady jigsaw puzzle of innuendo, and then identifying individuals that he claims are diabolically plotting to destroy America. It’s the equivalent of taking the noodles out of your bowl of alphabet soup, arranging them into a death threat, and then attributing the threat to someone you’ve never met.

Frances Fox Piven is a Professor of Political Studies and Social Science who, like many patriotic Americans, was a radical in the sixties.  How radical?  She co-authored a paper suggesting that, were the welfare system to be taxed to the point of failure, it might result in a government-backed mandatory wage for all citizens.  If that sounds like socialism, it’s only because it is socialism.  

However, Ms. Piven’s greatest accomplishment was not the destruction of the welfare system or the end of capitalism.  Instead, she is best credited for introducing the tie-in between voter registration and the DMV.  So, the woman who made it easier for Americans to vote is Beck’s poster child for the forces that are out to destroy our country.

So, it comes out that, in the last two years, since Beck started his prime time crusade to malign her, Ms. Piven has received a steady stream of nasty death threats.  Really nasty:

““I got e-mails that said, ‘Die You Cunt,’ and ‘May cancer find you soon,’ ” she tells The Progressive. “And people are posting my address on the Internet with their messages that are really crude and ugly and violent.”

Piven’s politics were radical, but not as radical as suggesting that the founding of the U.N. and the abolishment of slavery were merely pieces of an anarchist/communist plot to destroy America.  But Mr. Beck and his blackboard are perfectly willing to float that hypothesis as if it were fact. And, once floated, he’s happy to then single out Ms. Piven as a key architect of this attack on America. Frances Fox Piven, a woman who cared deeply about all Americans and devoted her life to ending poverty, is a radical anarchist out to destroy our way of life.  Glenn Beck isn’t trying o protect us—he’s just making sure that we know that the plot to destroy our country exists, and Piven is one of the people responsible.

Beck’s acolytes believe him to be sincere, and they’re willing to take his word that Piven poses a threat to their security.  As I’ve been blogging here, Beck fans have loaded up their cars and set off to kill people that Beck identified similarly before.

It’s tempting to equate what Beck does to yelling fire in a crowded theater.  But what he does is far more insidious.  Imagine what your life would be like if you were the constant recipient of nasty, sometimes obscene death threats.  There should be laws against this type of malicious maligning of people whose politics don’t agree with his; there should certainly be human decency that says, “I’m not going to inspire this type of behaviour”.  Beck has no such decency, and he isn’t engaging in political debate.  What he’s doing is far more personal, sadistic, and cruel.  And it will likely result in murder soon. It’s kind of a miracle that it hasn’t yet.

Three things about the recent, tragic Tucson shootings:

1. Clearly, shooter Jared Lee Loughner was not a Tea Party member or Sarah Palin/Glenn Beck acolyte. His political views, presumably inspired by such diverse thinkers as Ayn Rand, Karl Marx and Adolf Hitler, are not mainstream or cliched. He’s an independent thinker whose views aren’t neatly classified as “liberal” or “conservative”. Reports are that he had met Congressperson Giffords at a previous community meeting and wasn’t happy with the encounter. So the odds that his inspiration for the assault had anything to do with Sarah Palin’s crosshair graphic are unlikely.

2. Violent, paranoid political discourse inspires mass murderers. Maybe not Loughner, but Byron Williams was directly influenced by Glenn Beck when he set out with a car full of weaponry to murder workers at the ACLU and Tides Foundation. Kenneth Kimberly was arrested before he killed anyone, but he admits that he was directly inspired by Glenn Beck to start making and stockpiling grenades. And Giffords wasn’t present when the glass door to her Tucson office was either shot or kicked in, hours after her pro vote on health care. With all of the evidence that violent rhetoric absolutely inspires violent actions, how could people not assume that there was a connection in Tucson? I bet even Sarah Palin assumed that Loughlin had seen her crosshair chart when she first heard about the shooting.

3. So conservatives can pout about how unfair it is that MSNBC and all of their liberal critics are calling for more civil discourse in light of this mass murder. And they are technically accurate that Loughner was, most likely, not directly influenced by the cross hairs on Palin’s propaganda; Beck’s paranoid rantings about Obama planning to kill 10% of the population; Michelle Bachmann’s crazed fantasies about communists in the white house; Sharon Angle’s readiness to resort to “second amendment remedies”, et cetera, et cetra, et cetra. But there’s a lot of smoke here, and there’s a lot of ammunition. So the calls for calmer political discourse in light of the violent travesty in Tucson are well-warranted, because we don’t need to follow it up with the next Byron Williams succeeding in killing people that Beck highlights on his blackboard, or the next Kenneth Kimberly lobbing grenades at imagined communists. These people are directly inspired by the right wing rhetoric. There’s no denying that.

Photo by Raymond Mendosa

I’ve been pretty horrified by the new TSA security procedures since I first caught wind of them.  The Boing Boing blog has been doing excellent coverage of the fiasco, providing the best examples of how damaging these new exposing and groping procedures can be to innocent Americans, and why crossing over from threat detection to threat assumption policies is bad, bad, bad for our democracy.

I’ve also been hearing the backlash against the complaints.  A number of people had relatively painless holiday travel experiences last week and are now saying it was all a lot of hype.  But I continue to consider a level of terrorist prevention this extreme to be more likely to traumatize more Americans than the threat they’re protecting us from will.  It’s not about the 95% of the population who, like me, can pretty much shrug and say “I don’t care that much if you photograph me semi-nude” or, “I can tolerate a little more radiation—it’s not like this is the only place I’m exposed to it” or, even, “I get that you’re going to touch my private parts and that this isn’t molestation, you’re not enjoying it either”.  It’s about the rape and molestation victims, past and future, as well as the people who, for personal or religious reasons, can’t minimize the trauma of being exposed to or groped by strangers.  Not the majority of us, but a very significant minority,

So then I see an article like this, which has the top TSA official basically saying to parents (like me), “don’t explain to your children that what the TSA agent is about to do to you is necessary, but should never, ever be tolerated by strangers when Mommy and/or Daddy aren’t right here with you and it isn’t absolutely required for security reasons”, but, instead saying, “tell your kid that the TSA agent is just playing a harmless game that involves touching you”.  Because strangers touching children’s genitalia is, of course, no big deal and the priority here is to make sure everyone is calm and smiling as they submit to these procedures.  Months later, when lecherous Uncle Eddie wants to play the same game, well, Mommy and Daddy know about this game and said it was okay for the TSA agent to play, so they’re not going to consider this a problem…

Security at the cost of the humiliation of abused adults and government approved molesting of children terrorizes citizens.  It doesn’t make us more secure, even if it’s not a “big deal” for most of us.  This is a government-sanctioned human rights violation, and we really shouldn’t tolerate it.