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What the cloud should be about is both freeing us from being locked to local data, and also freeing us from having that data locked to a particular service. I should be able to keep my data in one spot and then access it via a variety of cloud clients — and the clients and the data shouldn’t necessarily be directly connected or held by the same party. If I don’t want to listen to my music via one app, I can just connect a different app to my personal data cloud and off we go. If Google Reader shuts down, no problem, just point a different app at my RSS data. No extraction, no uploading. Just go. There are, of course, plenty of players around which sort of do this. DropBox, Box, Amazon’s S3 and even Google Drive are setting themselves up as personal data clouds, and there are a growing number of apps that run across them. Projects like the Locker Project are thinking about how we store personal data separated from apps as well. And I know there are a bunch of other projects either around today or quickly approaching release, that also seek to do something in this space. But, for the most part, all of the stories that people talk about concerning “cloud” computing almost always involve services that tie together the app and the data and all you’re really doing is trading the former limitations of local data for the limitations of a single service provider controlling your data.

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Why, that is, is marriage even regarded as a political issue? Marriage, fundamentally, is of natural and divine origin, while any given government is merely the creation of some group of persons (or, perhaps, a person) at a given time, claiming some legitimacy with longevity. I realize there are many issues involved with homosexual unions in terms of practicality and logistics, such as a company, a school, or a voluntary association being forced by law to provide insurance benefits for partners, etc. And, in America, according to Article IV of the U.S. Constitution, one state must recognize the legitimate acts of another through comity. But, these are material concerns, and they will pass, just as all man-made laws and governments pass. As St. Augustine warned, we should never attach our fortunes to a government. Governments and politics rise and fall, but the Church remains a constant. Second, as Roman Catholics, should we spend our time worrying about issues such as same-sex marriage when other issues–such as the continuing issue of abortion, or the fact we now are waging three simultaneous wars (none with the consent of the one war-making branch under the Constitution–Congress). These issues are matters of life and death, and we continue each at our own peril as a culture and as a people. Third, shouldn’t the real response come from the priests, rather than the laypersons? A priest can, with certainty, deny the sacraments to someone involved in a situation acting counter to the spiritual health of the person, the couple, or the community.

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On a global level, we already have more than enough food to end world hunger. In 2008, the United Nations released a report detailing that, for $30 billion a year, starvation could become a thing of the past. Furthermore, after ten years of this, the structures would be in place to allow for complete sustainability, thus ending the price tag forever. Altogether, the cost would be $300 billion over the course of ten years. Expensive? Certainly. However, let’s put this into perspective. In 2010, the United States spent $683.7 billion on our military. That’s more than double the entire expense for eradicating world hunger.
Over 75% of the world’s resources are consumed by the wealthiest 20%. That means that only a quarter of consumable resources are available to be shared by 80% of the world’s population.
It is estimated that in 2012, 30% of US corn production (FOOD!) will be used for ethanol production. This means that a full 30% of a viable food source will be used to fuel our vehicles, rather than feed the hungry.

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Russell Kirk, noted time and again that the left-right divide is truly a propagandistic means employed by ideologues to divide humanity against humanity. “The tactics of totalitarianism are to weld every difference of opinion and tradition… into an absolute ideological opposition which disintegrates society into hostile factions bent on destroying one another.