OneMind

This wonderful quotation from Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong is one with which I can almost completely resonate. (Spong is one of the leading proponents of what some call the New Christianity, a clarion call for Christian faith to move beyond the boundaries of the first century and become relevant and important to today's world.) Emphases are mine.

"Alfred North Whitehead conceived of God as a Process. Paul Tillich experienced God as the Ground of Being. The problem is that we use the language of time and space to give form to an experience and a reality that is not bound by or within time and space. When I use the word "God" I am not talking about a being. I am describing that sense of transcendence that I believe I have encountered within time and space. I believe I experience God as life fully lived, as love wastefully given, as being completely realized. I cannot tell you or anyone else who or what God is. I can only describe my experience. I may be delusional. Lots of religious people are, but I don't think so.

"I join the mystics in saying that I think I am part of what God is. God lives in me, loves through me and empowers me to escape that drive to survive that is in every living thing in order to give my life away. That is the Christ role and I think it is also the role that his disciples are called to model.

"So I am drawn by God beyond my boundaries and I perceive that God becomes real when I enter into the task of living and loving and being. This makes me rather a deeply infused, God-intoxicated human being who no longer has the words to describe the God in who I live and move and have my being, but it does not even occur to me to doubt the reality of that which I experience, but can never define."

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Some friends and I were discussing the apparent absence of passionate protest in American politics the past few years. I suggested that the current generation has taken its protest to the Internet in the form of hundreds of sites, meet-ups, Twitterfabs, etc., and that this makes the revolution less visible to those who are not socially networked.

That led to the idea that it might be useful for the mainstream media to begin to cover these new channels of activism as part of their regular news coverage rather than only when something big like the Iran riots take place. Networks and print media could compete on the basis of who can find the best, most accurate, insightful and interesting reporting of these topics on the Net.

Which led me to the point of this post. What may be needed is for a smallish number of sites to emerge who take on the role of monitoring all these other sites and filtering, selecting and organizing their content for ready access by media and the public. Salon.com used to have a section that summarized the most interesting posts from blogs from the left and right but it went away. I don’t know if they found no interest in it or if the editor left or what, but it was a highly valuable resource for me.

Does anyone know of sites like this that critically aggregate political site contents?

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The San Francisco 49ers, about whom I have blogged incessantly for years until last season and who are my remaining sports passion, are off to a remarkable 2-0 start. They are one of only nine teams in the 32-team NFL to do so. What’s more, both wins have come within their division, which is a huge leg up for them. During Sunday’s game, one of the commentators suggested this lead might already be insurmountable, proving how little he knows about the league. WTF?

It is true that 65% of all the teams who started a season at 2-0 ended up in the playoffs. It is also true that last year, that trend continued a recent-years reversal as a tiny minority of 2-0 teams made it to the championships.

Shaun Hill may be a better QB than I thought, though I think it’s awfully early and I also think his 2-0 record is a lot less due to his slightly-better-than-mediocre performance than it has to do with the improved run-pass mix on offense imposed by Mike Singletary and his coaching staff. Without a star-quality quarterback or a polished defense, it’s not likely any team makes it to the playoffs. Or maybe I’m just trying really hard not to get my hopes up this early in the season again.

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Microsoft is spending $100 million trying to get people t switch to its search service, Bing.com. Yahoo! is unveiling a campaign of the same size to woo Google users. But I’m with Edward Barrera at Adotas.com: I keep using more and more Googley stuff and can’t see any good reason even to consider switching. I wonder how many other people who are techno-freaks are doing the same.

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My pals over at NOLOH have just released a new product called DiffPaste that I suspect quite a few of my programmer friends are going to find useful. Not only is it a nicely featured site for sharing and comparing code snippets (or any textual information for that matter) but it’s also a nifty demonstration of the power of my favorite Web application development tool, NOLOH (Not One Line of HTML).

Following in the long tradition of tools like Pastebin, DiffPaste allows you to paste text into an editor window, save it on the DiffPaste server, call it up for later use, and share it with other members of your development team. Or with the world, for that matter.

What sets DiffPaste apart from other such tools (see a good comparison here), is its side-by-side comparison tool. In a situation where multiple programmers are working on a code base, for example, a programmer could open two recent versions of a method and instantly see differences between them.

DiffPaste also supports syntax highlighting for a whole raft of programming and scripting languages (quite cool) and enables you to label any given snippet as private. In that case, the code won’t show up in the site’s “Recent Pastes” list or be searchable. Instead, users who want to see that code will have to know the complete URL.

You cn create a specific named subdomain of DiffPaste by requesting one from the development team (there are plans to automate that process in the future) so that, e.g., you can store your group’s snippets at shaferwalters.diffpaste.com.

Lead DiffPaste developer Edward Siegel points out,”DiffPaste provides lots of functionality in an easy-to-use interface to enhance the programmer’s workflow rather than hamper it.. Version tracking, for example, “comes for free without the user having to do any extra work.”

My team will be making extensive use of DiffPaste on the Web app projects on which we work and I expect lots of others are going to beat a path to its door as well.

President Obama has proposed a widely popular change to existing insurance law that would prohibit an insurance company from denying coverage to anyone because they had a pre-existing condition. My first reaction — knee-jerk though it admittedly was — was to agree wholeheartedly. Those nasty, ugly, profit-gouging insurance companies shouldn’t be able to pick and choose who can get their insurance. But then I stopped for a moment and thought. And I concluded that maybe this isn’t such a sound idea after all.

Much as I hate to say it, insurance as a social policy wasn’t designed to cover known pre-existing conditions. And I’m not sure it should or can be modified so that makes sense.

Bear with me for a moment here. I know this is not a classic Liberal position to take. But I think it has at least some elements of rationality.

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Liberals — including myself — have been reacting pretty harshly to some of President Obama’s actions and policies since he took office in January. Most notably and most recently, we have taken him to task for seeming to waver on the so-called “public option” provision in health insurance reform legislation pending in Congress. The House Liberal Caucus has gone so far as to threaten to vote as a bloc against any proposal that does not include a public option provision, thus effectively killing the likelihood of any insurance reform this year.

I have cheered these efforts to give the Left a long-lost voice in American politics and have been as vocal as anyone I know about what feels like a retreat from principle on the part of a President for whom I voted in large part because he was — or seemed — so principled.

Now I am doubting the accuracy of my reading of the situation and beginning to wonder whether Obama is not in fact calling all of us to a higher level of political consciousness that I, at least, am only starting to glimpse around the edges.
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No sooner did I post my last entry about how my zealous opinions about politics were getting in the way of my passion for peace than my buddy Tony Seton released one of his most insightful SetonNotes ever. Titled “Righteous Anger,” it contained some of the pithiest observations I’ve heard  on the subject. It further moved my thinking toward finding ways to prevent or avoid the conflict that now occupies center stage in my daytime thinking.

Here are some of my favorite quotations from Tony’s insightful and thought-provoking piece.

Thanks, my friend. I am blessed to have you in my life…and your thoughts nagging at my mind.

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"If peace mattered more to you than anything else and if you truly knew yourself to be spirit rather than a little me, you would remain nonreactive and absolutely alert when confronted with challenging people or situations." — Eckhart Tolle, "A New Earth," p. 188

This is easily my biggest earthly challenge these days. I believe peace does matter more to me than anything else but when issues of war, peace, politics and the such come up, I tend to move into "I have a need to be right" mode. If I'm asked, "Would you rather be happy or right?" I hesitate. "Can't I be both?" I wonder. Yes, you can, but not always. And when being right fails to bring happiness or peace — or worse yet sows the seeds of conflict and anger and violence — then do I still have a right to choose being right? What about my oblgation to the world as a self-avowed peacemaker?

Heavy questions to ponder.

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Users of the iPhone have no choice of phone vendors. Consumers have no real choice in health insurance. Both create bad situations.

If you’re an Apple iPhone user like I am, you’re stuck using AT&T for your cellular service. That means that you get less adequate service than any other iPhone user in the world and less than almost all other American cell phone service providers, including AT&T’s non-iPhone customers! How’s that make you feel?

AT&T’s U.S. iPhone customers cannot use two important features of the phone simply because the telecom behemoth has chosen not to make them available We can’t send and receive photos, sound files or movies directly on the phone using messaging. And we can’t use the phone as a link between our computers and the Internet, a technique referred to as tethering.

That is pure unadulterated crap. They only get away with it because they know that we love our iPhones enough that we’re not going to toss them because the service provider sucks and treats us arbitrarily. I’ve written the FCC and the FTC asking for an investigation of these discriminatory practices. (These aren’t the only such decisions AT&T has made; I’m just focusing on two for the moment because they are ticking me off.)

Similarly, in most parts of the United States at least, you as a consumer/employee have little or no choice when it comes to health insurance. You get the plan your employer decides to offer. Period. You may get a few “menu” options to make you feel like you’re in control, but you’re not. Pricing among plans is like gas price differences: for all practical purposes, non-existent. But you cannot affordably purchase coverage that is better or more closely suited to your own needs even if such a plan is available because your employer selects one plan for everyone. Some larger companies offer employees a choice of multiple plans but that practice appears to have fallen into disuse in a difficult economy.

This is the ultimate reason a public option is absolutely essential to real health insurance reform: it is the only meaningful way to provide true choice to consumers. And only when faced with true choice that consumers themseles can exercise directly, without employer intervention, will health insurance companies have to become reasonable and competitive in their business practices. Otherwise, they are effectively able to operate as monopolies within given market segments or geographic territories.

How do I get this iPhone removed from my rectum where AT&T has shoved it?

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