Is Facebook Bad For Society?

By Reginald Kaigler (DEMCAD)

I was listening to former investor Ann Barnhardt on Warren Pollock's talk about how Facebook is being used to as a domestic spy network. She argued that Facebook is being used by the government as a self-reporting personal database. Essentially, people are sharing deeply personal information about themselves and therefore possibly making themselves political targets.

She draw a scenario where political dissents could be vanished by the government. She even compared Facebook to the Soviet spy program of yesteryear. Whether you think she's paranoid or not, there is a relationship between Facebook and the NSA. Both the CIA and NSA are using Facebook to gather data.

 The CIA and NSA Want You to Be Their Friend on Facebook

 The Soviet Union didn't have a highly armed population. There's 300 million people in this country and there's even more guns than people. Logistically, it would have nearly impossible to implement a national wide kidnapping/assassination operation on every political dissent or critic. Maybe the strategy would be to vanish some and the others will remain quiet.

The problem is that when you're dealing with a culture that is desensitized to violent, people may not hesitate to fight back. After all, do you really think people are going to just let strangers grab family and friends when they have the means to fight back? You start that sh!t in this country and the people will come after your ass. They wouldn't care who you are.

I just visited family in Detroit and I can tell you that if some idiot decides to become the neighborhood spy, he or she will have a very short career. The police are afraid to go into certain neighborhoods. Nationwide, there's probably 500,000 law enforcement officers, no more than 3.5 million active duty personnel in the military and somehow they're going to have a martial law/Soviet Union crackdown in America.

What about the millions of veterans in the country? The millions of gun owners? If only a very small percentage resist this, the campaign would likely fail, since it would require a great deal of logistics. And it would be highly unlikely to all of the police and military would want to participate in this. I think it's easy to overlook the normal cops and focus on the assholes who step out of line. But the fact of the matter is that most cops aren't psychos who want to live in Soviet America.

In my opinion, Facebook is just a hub to sell customer information to corporations.

I don't doubt that the NSA collects data from Facebook and I understand why many people don't want to offer their personal data, but I don't think Facebook is going to lead the way to Soviet America. However, I am concerned that America will gradually transform into a fascist state over time. If that happens, it wouldn't be the doing of Facebook, it will be our fault. It will be our failure to stand up for our freedoms.

But Barnhardt hit on something very important about Facebook. She mentioned how 1/3 of divorce filings have some mentioning of Facebook. She derailed the morality bankruptcy on the Facebook culture. So I will ask you this: Is Facebook Bad For Society?

By Reginald Kaigler (DEMCAD)

The Dow Jones is over 13,000 and the talking heads on television are declaring the U.S. economy to in a recovery. But over 46 million Americans are still depending on food stamps, the weekly jobless claims are starting to decline and unemployment is still stubbornly high despite the Labor Department's attempts to official push millions of unemployed into the non-labor force category. And recently, the factory orders fell off of a cliff in March.

The GDP numbers were obviously a big disappointment. The first quarter of 2012 had an unusally warm season, which made individuals and companies buy specialty items much earlier than usual. This should have really boasted the numbers, but all the labor department could come up with is an anemic 2.2%. Which means there's going to be significantly less growth in the second quarter. Essentially, the purchases that are usually made in the second quarter have already been made for the first.

Factory orders Dropped 1.5% in March
46 Million Americans on Food Stamps
GDP Growth

So it's refreshing to see a clip of someone on CNBC telling it like it is. Boston Properties CEO Mort Zuckerman pulled no punches with his analysis.

"We have the most stimulative fiscal and monetary policy in the history of this country and here we are three years into the recession and it's not ended. I think we may be heading for an even weaker economy this year than people expect." 

He was right about the European economy, too. I especially enjoyed his analogy about the man who jumped out of a 25 story build and yelled, "Nothing's happened yet!"

Right now, I'm focusing on creating secondary income. I want to be as versatile as possible, because I think things are going to get very interesting this year. Don't be surprised when the economy gets worse.