Smart Phones: "You are to have no other gods besides me" - by RM

Exodus 20 verse 3  is explicit : " You are to have no other Godsbesides me"

Most Christians in general feel that this is one commandment they can uphold and live by. .

At least that is what we think when taking that commandment literary.. After all,, we would certainly not go and worship the sun, moon or some obscure object.. Really? Well it depends how you look at it.

The other night after I had come back home from a long day on the road I had but one thought -  "Boy was it good to be home". I kicked off my shoes and sat down with a nice glass of wine together with my wife.

I was ready to enjoy a relaxing evening.and I felt blessed and very happy.

Suddenly, as if I was bitten by a poisonous snake, I  realized that I could not find my "smart phone"

The relaxed mode I was in changed abruptly. I became totally panic stricken. What had happened to the phone? Did I lose it somewhere, had someone stolen it. The loss of the smart  phone seemed like the end of the world, like someone had died in my family.

After combing through the whole house and not having found the phone I decided to go to bed and start the searce again the next morning

The first few hours in bed that night were like torture. Tossing and turning and playing the scenario of the lost phone over and over in my head.

After ghetting out of bed and drinking a glass of water for the fourth time in the kitchen that night, I decided on the way back to the bedroom that I was going to pray.

It was worth it,  in every aspect of the word, to taking this time out to pray. For suddenly I came to the conclusion what the meaning of "You are to have no other gods besides me".meant in a broader sense.

My smart phone had become one of those "other Gods" to me.. Once I realized that, I could finally fall solidly asleep.

After I woke up the next morning I also found my smartphone. It had slipped  between the partition of the couch.

It was once again only a smartphone and certainly not "my God" anymore.

EU-Digest

The Internet: Why Seniors Need the Internet More Than Anyone - by Ben Kassoy

Baddie Winkle isn't wearing any pants. But she does have on a giant T-shirt tessellated with images of Queen Bey.

"I nominate Beyoncé for the ice bucket challenge!" the 86-year-old proclaims, dumping a cauldron of frigid water over her head.

Since tweeting this Vine video Aug. 31, it's been retweeted over 1,300 times. No big deal for the badass grandma, who regularly posts hilarious, irreverent, and pop culture-driven material to her 254,000 Twitter followers and nearly 410,000 followers on Instagram.

And while Baddie's cyber stardom keep us rollicking, Internet use can have serious health benefits for people her age. Depression and chronic pain affect more than 6.5 million Americans 65 and older, and research shows that knowing how to use smartphones, music streaming sites and, yes, social media can offer relief.

Thing is, 40 percent of older adults don't touch the Internet at all. And 66 percent of those say they'd need help getting started. If only there were tons of tech experts who have a lot of time on their hands and, for whatever reason, love seniors. But where would we find these kind of people? Hmmm...

"I now know from experience that teaching some of my elders technology is going to change their lives," wrote Megan, a student who showed her grandfathers, grandmothers, and three other local seniors some of the basics. "Ever since my grandmother passed away last year, my family and I have noticed a little bit of depression seeping into my grandfather's life. My grandfather has no one to visit with and is often alone for weeks because no one has time to sit and talk with him. When I showed him the basic rules of a Gmail email account, he was very enthusiastic about the idea of having someone to write to."

Yep, young people, who tweet and Instagram, like, 27 hours a day are technology whizzes from birth who -- surprise! -- adore their grandparents. This holiday season, for the third consecutive year, DoSomething.org's Grandparents Gone Wired campaign will activate thousands of 13- to 25-year-olds to plug their grandparents or other local seniors into social media, smartphone apps, and email. One of last year's participants, Madeline, taught her grandma how to video chat.
 Read more: Why Seniors Need the Internet More Than Anyone | Ben Kassoy

China - Freedom of Speech: Michelle's Message to China about Free Speech gets censored by China

The First Lady’s of the US on a trip through China also spoke of freedom of expression and the Internet during a speech at Peking University. It was a brave step because she knew it’s a hot topic for the Chinese regime.

China consumes a staggering amount of man-hours and money just to monitor, block and filter communications of half a billion users. China is third in the world for throwing journalists in jail, behind Turkey and Iran, with 32 journalists in prison.

She said: “It’s so important for information and ideas to flow freely over the Internet and through the media, because that’s how we discover the truth,” she said. “That’s how we learn what’s really happening in our communities and our country and our world.”

Mrs. Obama's specific remarks were censored by China’s news agency, but circulated in social media. America’s mainstream media praised the First Lady for speaking out on this issue.

Bravo Mrs Obama. 

EU-Digest 

The Deeper Implications of the Snowden Revelations - by Chris Floyd

"No one, anywhere, has been writing about the deeper and wider implications of the Snowden revelations than Arthur Silber. (I hope you’re not surprised by this.) In a series of powerful, insightful essays, Silber has, among other things, laid bare the dangers of the oddly circumscribed ‘gatekeeper’ approach of the journalistic guardians (at, ironically, the Guardian) of Snowden’s secrets, particularly their slow drip-feed of carefully self-censored tidbits from the famous Powerpoint presentation that Snowden secreted from the bowels of the United Stasi of the American intelligent apparat. 

Eschewing the Wikileaks approach, the guardians at the Guardian have not let us judge the material for ourselves, opting instead to adopt, unwittingly, the same approach of the apparat: “we are the keepers of knowledge, we will decide what you need to know.”

As Silber notes, this doesn’t vitiate the worth of the revelations, but it does dilute their impact, leaving gaps that the apparat — and its truly repulsive apologists all through the ‘liberal media’ — can exploit to keep muddying the waters. He explores these ramifications, and others, in “In Praise of Mess, Chaos and Panic” and “Fed Up With All the Bullshit.”

In his latest piece, “‘Intelligence, Corporatism and the Dance of Death,” he cuts to the corroded heart of the matter, the deep, dark not-so-secret secret that our secret-keepers are trying to obscure behind their blizzards of bullshit: it’s all about the Benjamins.

After noting the gargantuan outsourcing of “intelligence” to private contractors like Booz Allen — the very firm that employed Snowden — Silber gives a quick precis of the essence of state-corporate capitalism
Read more: Follow the Money: The Secret Heart of the Secret State. The Deeper Implications of the Snowden Revelations | Global Research

Media: Newspapers around the world clamping down on free digital content - by Simon Houpt

Maybe the Mayans were actually big fans of reading online newspapers for free: While 2012 didn’t usher in the end of the world, the world of free online reading began to shrink sharply, as dozens of North American newspapers erected or announced plans to erect paywalls around their content.

Which means 2013 could be a make-or-break year for many in the industry, as they scramble for alternative streams of revenue to make up for lost print advertising.

Note EU-Digest: This trend is expected to continue around the world in 2013.

Read more: Newspapers clamping down on free digital content - The Globe and Mail

Broadbandcensus: European Union Takes Its Own Open Internet Stance - by Winter Casey

For the complete report from BroadbandCensus.com click on this link

While the U.S. takes steps to make so-called Network Neutrality principles mandatory under official rules, the European Union moved forward this week with its own set of internet access requirements. Under the proposed EU rules, “national telecoms authorities will have the powers to set minimum quality levels for network transmission services” so as to promote Net neutrality or “net freedoms” for European citizens. In addition, owing to new transparency requirements, consumers must be informed – before signing a contract – about the nature of the service to which they are subscribing. Such disclosures must include traffic management techniques and their impact on service quality, as well as any other limitations (such as bandwidth caps or available connection speed).

The consumer protection clause states that “names, email addresses and bank account information of the customers of telecoms and internet service providers, and especially the data about every phone call and internet session, need to be kept safe from accidentally or deliberately ending up in the wrong hands.”

::PeaceJournalism.com - The Internet: the opportunity for the planet? by Philippe Quéau

For the complete report from the PeaceJournalism.com click on this linkThe Internet: the opportunity for the planet? by Philippe Quéau

While the Internet represents a real technical revolution, its social and cultural effects, however, seem ambiguous. The view of two experts: Dominique Wolton, who reminds us of the limits of any medium to resolve by itself the problems of communication between people, and Philippe Quéau, who stresses the need to establish a new form of global regulation to ensure fairness and human development in view of the profound inequalities in access to information. People have forever been trying to communicate, and frequently transfer their concern to improve this often disappointing communication to the methods. Thus in the course of a single century, from the telephone to the radio, from television to the computer, and today to the Internet, the methods have continued to improve communication to the extent that many believe the problem has been solved.

Yet the long history of communication reveals four facts: Each new method resolves a previous communication problem, but creates others. No method supplants the previous one, it is just added to others. Communication methods, designed to cut back on the journeys people have to make, have actually had the opposite effect, creating the need for people to meet physically. No one method has been sufficient in itself to change human and social relations radically.