OneMind

I’ve been watching Ning for several months. I set up a social network there very early on and decided they were way short of the mark of a minimally capable tool so I sort of backed off and just kept an eye on things.

Now it looks like they’ve really come into their own of late, to the point where it seems viable to attempt to put together a social network using their technology. Today, they added a cool Facebook app that enables you to promote your social network on that massive platform. The tutorial video for how to do that is one of the best examples of training I’ve seen.

Are there any other really good social networking tools out there I should be keeping an eye on?

Scientific American magazine is one of my favorite publications. On their Web site, they are currently carrying a fascinating debate between Richard Dawkins (religious skeptic and author of The God Delusion) and Lawrence M. Krauss (a nearly equally skeptical colleague who believes that engaging those of faith in dialog is more useful than antagonizing them).

Brief, cogent and insightful, this makes a splendid read if you are, like me, interested in the intersections of science and spirituality.

Unfortunately, both of the debaters are focused principally on dealing with the religious Right and its anti-scientific positions on such things as evolution and the age of the earth. I find those conversations — to the extent that they even resemble dialog — to be marginally interesting and of little moment.

My interest in this subject begins when the question of the nature and role of consciousness and the observer in scientific experimentation and exploration is raised. I think there are very promising and fertile crossover points when the subject shifts to the higher plain where neither science nor spirituality can yet legitimately claim to have an answer but where both have a vital stake in the outcome.

I have said for years that it is long past time for America to have a female President. I was and am a big supporter of President Bill Clinton. I so want to support his wife, Sen. Hillary Clinton. It pains me that I can’t.

Aside from her obstinate refusal to admit she made a mistake in backing W’s War on Iraq in the first instance, I just have a deep sense that she doesn’t get the American voter and that she is therefore not electable. Here’s a quotation from an interview she did with Salon.com’s Walter Shapiro recently:

I think voters are hungry for people who will explain to them the complexities of the problems we face, the difficult challenges we will inherit.

This is precisely the Democrats’ biggest problem, as I’ve said way too many times. Nuancing doesn’t create 15- and 30-second sound bites. The Right has mastered the ability to oversimplify, focus on a tidbit, create a sound bite and get elected without having expressed a single nuance of even very complex issues. The Left must do the same or it will continue to ride in the back seat of the American Dream.

People don’t want explanations of complexities, they want simplistic solutions. Until and unless we of the Left begin to recognize that and bring the same level of “insight” to the discourse, we will always find ourselves looking like policy wonks who know a lot about what we talk about but who haven’t a clue how to get elected.

Former Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney may be a great human being for all I know. He may be an intellectual giant capable of operating at the strospheric heights of geopolitics that our next president will need to be able to do. Even though he’s a conservative and would therefore never get my vote in any event, it would never have occurred to me in the past to suggest he be disqualified because of his religion.

But I must do so, based on deep personal experience.

Many years ago, I was an active member of the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City. Anyone who thinks the LDS church is more like the Catholic church than it is like a secret sect when it comes to expectations of its adherents is simply wrong. Recall that when JFK ran for president, many people questioned whether a man who practiced loyalty to a religious leader who claimed infallibility in matters of religion, could lead the country independent of that influence. Kennedy proved that was possible.

But the Mormons are not the Catholics. Don’t let yourself be fooled. Members of what people in Salt Lake City refer to baldly as “The Church” must toe the line not only religiously but socially and politically to remain in good standing. I know. I refused to do so and was excommunicated (with my whole-hearted cooperation) as a result.

“The Church” decided, for example, that it would be wrong for me to appear as a protester against the death penalty in the case of Gary Mark Gilmore. I was warned that if I showed up to protest his execution, I would be guilty of violating church edicts and would be disciplined. I went anyway.

“The Church” later decided it was more important to “save” mature adults from exposure to sex in the form of adult theaters downtown than it was to protect society from the violence of capital punishment. I was directed to picket one of the local theaters. I declined.

Make no mistake about it. The Mormon Church exerts a far more powerful and direct and pervasive influence and control over its members than any other near-mainstream religious body of which I am aware. Anyone who is a member in good standing of that church ought by that very membership be considered disqualified to hold national office.

This was a difficult post for me to write. I am by foundational belief an interfaith spiritual teacher, coach, writer and speaker. I do not mean to disparage Mormonism. As a religion, it has much to recommend it. As a social system, it is praiseworthy on many levels. But its insistence on mind control over its members — at least as evidenced by my own personal experience — dictates that it cannot be trusted to allow a Mormon President to function independently of the Church’s extremely reactionary politics and social practices.

Famed poet Sharon Olds of NYU followed in the footsteps of Jules Feiffer three years ago as she declined Barbara Bush’s invitation to attend a festival of readers and writers in Washington, D.C.

Her open letter to the First Lady is eloquent and simple, clear and direct, truthful and honest, six traits I think we can honestly say have never characterized the current administration in Washington.

I am grateful for people of Ms. Olds’ standards and ethics who can say better than I why this war is wrong and why doing anything that even seems to lend support to it is morally unacceptable. I’m going to buy one of her books as a small token of appreciation.

Where does this President get off threatening that he’ll veto Congressional spending bills that represent what in his opinion is runaway spending? In wire service stories, he’s quoted as saying, “The American people do not want to return to the days of tax-and-spend policies,” in his radio address today.

This constant effort on the part of the Right to paint the Left as “tax-and-spend Liberals” has gone on long enough. This incompetent has spent this country into deeper debt than his last four predecessors combined. He and his Haliburton and oil company buddies spend like drunken sailors or, perhaps more accurately, drunken Air Force deserters. When was the last balanced U.S. budget? When was the last surplus? Hmmm. Seems to me those were Democratic Party achievements.

I can’t wait for this yahoo’s term in office to end. Worst president ever. Bar none.

My buddy Laurence Rozier is blogging about AIR and a group of related technologies at his Funkencode blog. Interesting stuff. He’s been on the bleeding edge so long I’m susprised he still has the energy and enthusiasm to keep digging on the frontier.

Glad he does, though.

Well, for the second time in less than a week, some idiot decided it would be fun to screw up someone else’s life (presumably because their own is pathetic) and hack into Dreamhost servers. Several index files on my site were modified, including the one that brings up this blog.

Unfortunately — and uncharacteristically — Dreamhost support was non-responsive. I finally went in a bit ago and edited the index file for this site so I could resurrect my blog. This hacker, unlike the last one, didn’t replace my page, just added a bunch of crap to the end of it.

Looks like I may have to find a better solution for my hosting needs. This is taking too much of my time.

Huh?

Adobe’s newly renamed AIR (formerly code-named Apollo) is putting its dev team on an 18-city tour this summer and September. They’re hitting most major metro areas but, bizarrely, skipping Silicon Valley!?

Their West Coast meetings will be in LA, Portland and Seattle. So if you live in or near the hotbed (and, just for grins, home base of the company) Silicon Valley, you have to travel hundreds of miles to get in on the action?

Just weird. I’ll wait for the DVD.

Adobe Systems tonight released not one, not two, but three beta products, including most notably (for me) the newly renamed AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime). This technology, formerly code-named Apollo, allows Web developers steeped in HTML, JavaScript/ActionScript and Flash to build stand-alone applications that can connect to the Internet. Very exciting stuff.

I know there are a lot of skeptics out there. Some of them are good friends and colleagues. I don’t know that AIR ultimately becomes the platform of choice for Inventive Users (a group for which I’ve long advocated), but something very like it will.

The stuff these IUs are going to start building with this powerful new technology platform is going to blow your socks off. Or at least untie your shoelaces.