Tightening the Border

A week from this morning is scheduled to be my first morning in Mexico in almost a year.

So this headline just caught my attention: Dozen die in Mexico clash ahead of Obama trip

I clicked it to see where the latest mayhem happened and where President Barack Obama is planning to go.

In my quick scan (which answered both of my original questions), I saw this:

The Obama administration is tightening the U.S.-Mexico border

Good deal. Maybe that will slow down the illegal flow (of drugs and “undocumented workers”) northward.

But the sentence continues:

to prevent trafficking of U.S. guns to Mexican cartels

Oh.

There Are Ninety-Nine

Well, so says this outfit:

The Ethisphere Institute on Monday named 99 companies it says are the world’s most ethical, its third annual listing designed to encourage ethical practices within the global business community.

The 99 companies, which include Honeywell International Inc, Nike Inc, Patagonia, BMW Bayerische Motoren Werke AG, Johnson Controls Inc and HSBC Holdings PLC, come from 35 different industries.

[…]

This year’s group features 22 first-time recipients including Dell Inc, Thomson Reuters Corp, Best Buy Co Inc and T-Mobile International AG & Co KG. Of the companies on the list, 44 are on it for the third time. They include General Electric Co, American Express Co, PepsiCo Inc, McDonald’s Corp, Starbucks Corp and IKEA AB.

Did You Know?

Three words spoke to my heart this morning. May they continue to echo there:

Father, forgive them

No, you didn’t know that. But now you do. And that fits in with this:

Are you a twit if you don’t want to Twitter?

Last month, Alex Slater took it a step farther. He dumped his Twitter account and stripped the information on his Facebook page to a minimum. Though he has more than 600 “friends” on Facebook, he checks it much less often.

“Being exposed to details, from someone’s painful breakup to what they had for breakfast – and much more sordid details than that – feels like voyeurism,” says the 31-year-old public relations executive in Washington, D.C. “I’m less concerned with protecting my privacy, and more concerned at the ethics of a ‘human zoo’ where others’ lives, and often serious problems, are treated as entertainment.”

Yes, I have a Twitter account. No, I don’t have a raft-load of Facebook Friends. Yes, I think the above article is worth reading in full. No, I don’t plan to announce on Twitter that I had two cups of coffee and two Tylenol so far this morning.

Oh, and speaking of Facebook:

Fast-growing Facebook’s user base hits 200 million

Facebook also updated its display of site statistics.

According to these, more than half of its users log in to the site at least once a day, and the fastest-growing demographic is people over 35. About 70 percent of Facebook users are outside the United States (MySpace still claims to be the nation’s largest social network).

For those itching to know if they are popular enough: the average user has 120 “friends” on the site.

And speaking of friends, do friends let friends over-text?

Hammer time for cell phone used to run up $5K billA cell phone used by a Wyoming 13-year-old to run up a nearly $5,000 phone bill will text no more thanks to her angry father and his hammer. Dena Christoffersen of Cheyenne sent or received about 20,000 text messages over about a month, and her parents’ phone plan didn’t cover texting.

🙄

Meanwhile, some other “friends” are waking up around the globe:

Huge worm stirring to life

The dreaded Conficker computer worm is stirring. Security experts say the worm’s authors appear to be trying to build a big moneymaker, but not a cyber weapon of mass destruction as many people feared.

As many as 12 million computers have been infected by Conficker. Security firm Trend Micro says some of the machines have been updated over the past few days with fake antivirus software – the first attempt by Conficker’s authors to profit from their massive “botnet.”

So, this post begins by featuring a Friend. (And what a Friend we have in Jesus!)

Now it ends featuring someone else’s friend:

Woman finds cashiers check and returns it

But just as she was about to do her part for a cleaner planet and deliver the paper from the parking lot to a trash can, she noticed it was a real cashier’s check with a real signature.

“I couldn’t believe it. I almost passed out,” Curtis, who works as a loan negotiator, told The Associated Press on Wednesday. “I have never seen a check that big. Not in my possession, anyway.”

She immediately set out to find its rightful recipient….

Good day?!

Where’s George

I toyed with using this for the post title:

Attention: Lester, IA

I sent these to a customer there yesterday:

Where's George in Lester, Iowa?

But you’ll have to be on the lookout for them by serial number, not by color (as distinctive as that is). I “adjusted” the color in the image, not on the actual bills.

Oh, and if you want to track/report sightings of these bills, you might be able to do so here and here.

Do you use Where’s George? I think I’ve listed 58 bills there over the years. But it’d been a long time since I’d added any.

Private
Above all, love God!