Sunday 14 March 2010
The majority of mortals, Paulinus, complain bitterly of the spitefulness of Nature, because we are born for a brief span of life, because even this space that has been granted to us rushes by so speedily and so swiftly that all save a very few find life at an end just when they are getting ready to live. Nor is it merely the common herd and the unthinking crowd that bemoan what is, as men deem it, an universal ill; the same feeling has called forth complaint also from men who were famous. It was this that made the greatest of physicians exclaim that “life is short, art is long;” it was this that led Aristotle, while expostulating with Nature, to enter an indictment most unbecoming to a wise man—that, in point of age, she has shown such favour to animals that they drag out five or ten lifetimes, but that a much shorter limit is fixed for man, though he is born for so many and such great achievements. It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested. But when it is squandered in luxury and carelessness, when it is devoted to no good end, forced at last by the ultimate necessity we perceive that it has passed away before we were aware that it was passing. So it is—the life we receive is not short, but we make it so, nor do we have any lack of it, but are wasteful of it. Just as great and princely wealth is scattered in a moment when it comes into the hands of a bad owner, while wealth however limited, if it is entrusted to a good guardian, increases by use, so our life is amply long for him who orders it properly. Seneca ☀
My Bankruptcy – An American Story, Part 2 ☀
On the personal side, I’d like to talk about the strange split in reactions you get when you tell people you are going bankrupt. For the most part people say they are so sorry, kind of like you told them an Aunt died or you have a serious illness. There is a strange little club as people (often in sotto voce voices) tell you they have been there. I am really amazed at the number of people I know who have gone bankrupt and I never knew.
For the most part people are very supportive (and I thank all of the ones that have offered support since I started writing this), but the ones that are not more than make up for it. Maybe it is the guilt and shame I feel for screwing up my financial life so badly that makes their reactions sting so much. I don’t know. It is hard to say that I am blameless, since I made the choices that got me here. Sure there were events beyond my control, but my reactions to the were part of what lead me here.
Still there are those that look at me as a cheat, as a failure, as fool who could not manage his money and now has to rely on the forgiveness provided by the Courts to get out of debt I willingly took on. The fact that it will kill my credit for years, that it will raise my insurance rates, that it will complicate getting a new job does not seem enough punishment for these folks. I don’t know if they want to lord their superior money management skills over me or if they are just striking out to make themselves feel like they are not as close to my position as they really are. It is still pretty traumatizing.
Given the usual assumption that Jesus and ‘Judaism’ belong in the category of religion and not politics and economics, Christian interpreters tend to downplay, depoliticize, or explain away his dramatic confrontation in Jerusalem. Jesus is thus usually seen as (only) a religious reformer, attempting to purify the Jewish religion centered in the Jerusalem Temple. But the Temple, along with its high-priesthood, stood at the political-economic as well as the religious head of Judean society in general and was an integral institution of the imperial order, from the Temple’s origins under the Persians until its destruction by the Romans in 70 C.E. Thus we can hardly continue to pretend that Jesus’ demonstration against the Temple was only a religious ‘cleansing’ or merely an attack on the cultic/ritual religion of bloody sacrifice to prepare the way for the more ’spiritual’ worship of Gentile Christianity. Richard Horsley ☀
Human beings don’t digest complex ideas readily - that people, cultures, countries, have both good and bad elements. It takes real intellectual depth and penetration to come to grips with that complexity. The founders were great, but their ideas - our leaders - needed to evolve. And that was only possible because the country and our culture evolved. Think we’re fully evolved? There are still presidential candidates (like Mitt Romney) who campaign on passing a Constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. That won’t happen and, in our lifetimes - quite soon in fact - most people will consider people benighted who think that homosexuals don’t have the same rights as heterosexuals. It is impossible for us to fathom how different the country - the world - were in the Colonial era, when the Constitution was written, from how we are now. What Intelligence Means ☀
Developed by Republican strategists like Harry Dent and Pat Buchanan during the rebuilding of the GOP in the post Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act era, the Southern Strategy’s goal was to win over southern whites by demonizing blacks using subterfuge, dog whistles and coded language. As I mentioned last week, the late Republican mastermind Lee Atwater described the use of the Southern Strategy as being all about the use of “abstract” issues that imply race without explicitly using direct racial epithets or even the words “black” or “white.” Atwater described some of the abstract issues of his era as “forced bussing” or taxes, and framing these issues in a way that subconsciously fuels white resentment towards blacks, and serves to coalesce white votes around Republican candidates. After all, Republicans will readily admit that trying to win over black voters has been a lost cause since LBJ, so why not exploit that loss by playing to white racial bias and thus locking down larger chunks of the white vote? The Tea Party Is All About Race, Part 2 ☀
Saturday 13 March 2010
I’m pulling this directly out of my butt right here… Glenn Beck ☀
markellison asked: Are you informing Tumblr staff directly of all the bugs?
All, except for the most recent gripe (concerning Outdent/Indent and blockquotes) about the bookmarklet. But I’ve reported the preexisting bookmarklet bugs. Months and months ago. Repeatedly.
Typically, Tumblr support folk attend to and address the issues submitted in a competent and timely manner. But, for some reason, my reports about flaws in the rich text editor have been met with numb indifference. Or worse, an instinctive put-off that “we cannot provide technical support for HTML customizations” and a link to w3schools.com! My followup email asking if the Tumblr support representative actually read the bug account was met with a “our developers are aware of these issues and will fix them as soon as they can” reply.
Comments (View)
Tumblr Rich Text Editor Borked ☀
Those funky IE-only
<iframe>attributes we were injecting in themes have been adjusted to be 100% valid XHTML. Same for the Submit, Ask, and Answer forms.We also switched the Rich Text Editor to use
<em>and<strong>tags instead of<i>s and<b>s.
Changes weren’t tested very thoroughly, and a couple of new bugs were introduced to an already glitch ridden editor.
- Indent/Outdent no longer work. With the occurrence of “blockquoted” text. Frustrating to have to consistently pop into HTML source to “blockquote” some text or worse, unable to “Outdent” out of cited text. Kind of defeats the purpose of a “rich text editor”.
- Re-added href attributes stripped. Bad enough that selected text drops the href attribute (but somehow, other attributes, like “title” for example, remain unadulterated). But problem is compounded and vexation squared when after adding them back in manually, they disappear again. Might be a sporadic problem, as it seems as if I edit and add again from the Tumblr dashboard, they stay. Or it might be a browser issue — affecting Google Chrome as I haven’t reproduced it yet on Firefox — but have only attempted once, and the behavior does appear to be sporadic on the manual re-adding of “HREF” attributes.
These were piled on top of existing issues, in unresolved status for quite some time now. Of which some or all of these may be fixed — haven’t retested or the aforementioned snafus preclude resolution verification.
- Outdent/Indent actions butchers lists (of both the “OL” and “UL” variety). May still exist but impossible to ascertain after the recent change.
- Superfluous stripping of attributes on image tags (“IMG”). Have not attempted a floated image in some time now.
- Extraneous insertion of unwanted block tags (basically wrapping “P” tags around edited content). Mitigated by stylesheet modifications to treat such unbidden tarted tags as inline elements, instead of block elements.
Cosmetic changes to opt for the logical “<strong>” and “<em>” tags over the “<b>” and “<i>” counterparts is a nice touch, but I’d prefer that the text editor be repaired to functional working status first.
Really hate writing this, as lately it seems I’ve been frequently griping over the state of administering Tumblr posts.
Broadband.gov ☀
Check your broadband speed.
It’s nice to know just how fast your broadband is, but there’s another reason to check your connection at home, writes Ryan Singel of Wired: The U.S. government is trying to learn more about broadband speed in the United States.
By using a simple tool on the Broadband.gov Web site, you can determine how fast your Internet connection is and report it to the Federal Communications Commission. Why would you want to do such a thing? The FCC wants to know whether the speeds you’re getting on your connection are really what your Internet service provider (ISP) is promising. This comes just five days before the National Broadband Plan is presented to Congress.
Singel said that ISPs aren’t usually frank with the government when asked about the speed of their networks. Public input should help the FCC determine exactly what’s going on.
(via BrianStuff)
You [Glenn Beck] may think that your ranting and raving, first on CNN and then on Fox and on the radio is promoting valuable discussion of important issues, but in fact all your doing is adding to the coarsening of discourse in our culture and the closing of the American mind. I suggest you go back to school for a while and not open your mouth again until you have something well-informed, carefully researched, peer-reviewed, and of general value to the public to say. Until then—- silence is golden. Recite this mantra to yourself before breakfast tomorrow—— ‘bombast won’t last, but God’s concern for justice for the poor and oppressed will’. Ben Witherington ☀
Though Bush 41 and Bush 43 often disagreed, one issue did unite them both with Bill Clinton: protectionism. Globalists all, they rejected any federal measure to protect America’s industrial base, economic independence or the wages of U.S. workers. Together they rammed through NAFTA, brought America under the World Trade Organization, abolished tariffs and granted Chinese-made goods unrestricted access to the immense U.S. market. Pat Buchanan ☀
Busy, my friends, is a cop-out. It’s a euphemism for everything from “I’m frantic with deadlines” to “I just don’t wanna” to “I feel bamboozled as to what to do next so I’m checking Twitter obsessively to tell people I’m busy.” It’s what we say when we can’t be bothered to unpack what we’re feeling or what we’re working on (or what we’re avoiding). Skeptical? Try this for three days straight: don’t use the word busy. At all. Find other ways of describing what your day was like or what you’re doing or how your to-do list shaped up. You may be surprised to learn how often you resort to that word, and what a plethora of emotions and activities it’s covering! (And report back–I’d love to hear how the experiment goes and what insights it might provoke.) Why I Stopped Working With Busy People ☀
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