Cell Phone Cams - No Event Left Secret

I am proud of the person standing by who pulled out their cell phone to ensure this police brutality did not go undocumented. This is an amazing world we live in. A Cellphone cam brought us the Hussein Assassination, the waves decimating a hotel 2 years ago in the Tsunami,and other important events.

I wonder how history would remember some other events if they too had been caught by the lens of cell phone cam!

The Non-Violence of Christ

I was asked to teach the teens at church last night. I wanted to honor the memory of Martin Luther King Jr, by looking at Christ and Non-Violence. I based stole most of the material for the class from William Willimon and a sermon series by Rob Bell (who I think stole from Willimon). I also got some other reference material from various web sources. I did not Bibliography since it was for a teen class.

What I love about Christ is he exposes the foolishness of violence and pacifism. He demonstrates the very essence of the message of redemption in providing a structure to claim one's dignity in conflict. In the cross Christ showed amazing strength and yet was nonviolent.

I challenged the kids to understand that Jesus' strength was in his commitment to redemption of the human condition.

You can view my class notes here

I HATE EVERYTHING ABOUT PAYPAL

I used to love Paypal, in fact I am over a 5 year veteran customer. I (and my wife) have a Paypal trust score over 400 and an Ebay Feedback rating over 900. We have NEVER had a bad transaction on Ebay or Paypal until a few weeks ago.

We went into a short term money making transaction with a good friend of ours. He had bought several PS3 and Nintendo Wiiis and we were running the auctions. After we sold the first 3 Paypal without any warrant LOCKED our account and initiated an account re-verification. This was literally the next day.

As I spent 2 weeks fighting with Paypal to reactivate our account, my friend opened a NEW paypal account and a NEW ebay account with NO HISTORY and sold an additional 5 units without any intervention by the Paypal.

Needless to say, I concluded that my business with Paypal was done! Then today to reinforce that idea, I read this news story (explicit language). Paypal is dead to me!