Thank God for these pastors and these churches! I’m not a pastor myself, but as a Christian, I stand firmly with these pastors and pray for the devine favor of God on their lives and on their churches. Thank you for saying almost exactly what I wrote about in my blog post last August, which was prompted by the public performance of “Same Love” during last year’s VMA Awards, and thank you for having the courage to take a stand for God and for what you believe.
Pastors from North Carolina, where we have a similar constitutional amendment, need to come together and set the record straight as well, especially since North Carolina is one of the southern states where the struggle for Civil Rights, that’s the capitalized Civil Rights, as in integration and racial equality, was most hard fought and most painful for those who were forced to endure the horrors and atrocities of racism and slavery. We must let the Church and God be our conscience in this matter, just as the Church and God were the conscience that initially sparked the Civil Rights Movement, and brought many great things to pass, even though the struggle is far from over, pushed into the background by those who would co-opt today’s Civil Rights struggle and cheapen the fight for equality with distractions and false analogies.
I just got a message on my WordPress dashboard that Markdown On Save Improved, a plugin I use quite a lot due to its ease of use and flexibility, will no longer be updated. The following message has been added to the description of the plugin on its wordpress.org page as well: "This plugin is deprecated. Use the much-better-supported and more-frequently-updated Markdown module in Jetpack, by the same author. This plugin will not receive any updates or support from here on out."
Here's the problem. I've looked at this Jetpack plugin, and it appears it does way more than I would ever need or even want, and it appears to rely quite heavily on third-party products and services to do many of the things it does, including some of the things I’m already using other plugins to do, such as e-mail subscriptions and social features, many of which I handle internally rather than using a third-party API, with the obvious exception of the social networking stuff, which communicates directly with the sites involved. If I wanted all kinds of third-party products and services, external API’s and bloat, I would still be using Tumblr as my primary blogging platform, rather than hosting my blog on my own. My entire reason for the move was to be able to host my blog myself and customize it exactly the way I want it, with only the features I need, and none I don’t. However, I feel that I’m being pushed more and more toward wordpress.com and Akismet, which although they are run by the same people who wrote WordPress, are still external products and services that perform functions I should be able to handle internally, either with the base WordPress code or with a stand-alone plugin that performs the functionality I need without an external API.
At this point, I have dismissed the notice on my dashboard, and will not be converting my posts to work with the Jetpack Markdown module. However, as WordPress gets future updates, there may eventually come a time where Markdown On Save Improved no longer works. I can only hope that by that time, someone will fork the code from this quite useful plugin, or just maintain what is already available, so that it can continue to be used without the need for a much bigger and less manageable plugin. Otherwise, I would hope that a better stand-alone ([Markdown]https://daringfireball.net/markdown) plugin becomes available, if it isn’t already. I will be looking out for it.
I just got a petition in my inbox today, stating that I should be concerned with the fact that Google reads my e-mail and uses it to sell targeted advertising. While I do think that reading my email, even via computerized methods, and using it for targeted advertising is a bit shady at best, I just can’t convince myself to sign this one. The problem is not the wording of the petition, nor is it the idea that Google should stop reading email and using it to show targeted advertising based on its content. Privacy is indeed a major concern for me, and under most circumstances, a petition like this would have gotten my signature immediately. My problem, however, is the fact that this specific petition didn’t originate from a group of concerned Gmail users, nor did it even originate from any consumer advocacy or similar type of organization that should be concerned with the privacy of its members. No, this Care2 petition lists its author as outlook.com which is of course a Microsoft website that redirects to a Microsoft Live account login page. I have to question Microsoft’s motives at this point, and even question the validity of their claim that Google is in fact reading my e-mail and using it to sell ads. While I’m sure Google does some shady stuff, Microsoft definitely does shady stuff as well, so I wouldn’t put it past them to do something as underhanded as putting a petition on Care2 that accuses their competition of violating my privacy. "Look here. See? we raised concerns about our competitor's business practices that directly affect you, our prospective customers, even though we don’t give a care that our business practices leave a lot to be desired as well, and even though our competitor may or may not even be engaging in the evil business practices that we want to accuse them of doing." So because of this, I refuse to sign this otherwise worthy-looking petition. I’m not about to sign anything that basically says that a company wants me to agree with them that their competitor is doing something wrong. That is unfair to me, it’s unfair to the competitor, and it certainly gives an already disreputable company an unfair advantage in the e-mail market which, I should add, is an area where Microsoft is definitely struggling, and has been for many years. It certainly does remind me of other ways Microsoft has attempted to grow its market share by trashing the competition, and I refuse to be a party to that kind of dirty dealing.