fm2279:participate in the frantic

Table of Contents

  1. Computing
  2. Contact
  3. Education
  4. Marking Time
  5. Observations

§ Marking Time in the 21st Century

Conversation with Death, A
Cracking the case.
Faith, Matters of
Take it as a given.
Hear Ye, Hear Ye.
Sounds.
Lists
Useless compilations.
This is the ocean.
For five seconds.

§ Computing

Denetwork
The Graph API doesn't care about your nephew or anybody else.
Information Science
Notes on tinkerings.

§ Education

Museum Kiosk
Notes on development of an interactive kiosk for our county museum.

§ Contact

WebFinger (vCard)
My iDigital eBizConnectCard.
Where
I once was lost...
Resumé
Working for the weekend.

§ Observations

Larry McMurtry on Postmistresses, from Paradise.
“Perhaps postmistresses in small places are jolly because they know the dirt on everyone and don't have to countenance any pomposity.”
Honoré de Balzac on Misers, from Eugénie Grandet.
“‘Be very careful!’ the last words came from him; 'one day you will render an account to me of everything here below.' Which utterance clearly shows that a miser should adopt Christianity as his religion.”
Wendell Berry on the Commercial Revolution, from The Unsettling of America.
“Air remains the only necessity that the average user can still get for himself, and the revolution had imposed a heavy tax on that by way of pollution. Commercial conquest is far more thorough and final than military defeat.”
Chris Hedges on American Fundamentalist Christians, from American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.
“Faith presupposes that we cannot know. We can never know. Those who claim to know what life means play God. These false prophets - the Pat Robertsons, the Jerry Falwells and the James Dobsons - clutching the cross and the Bible, offer, like Mephistopheles, to lead us back to a mythical paradise and an impossible, unachievable happiness and security, at once seductive and empowering. They ask us to hand over moral choice and responsibility to them. They will tell us they know what is right and wrong in the eyes of God. They tell us how to act, how to live, and in this process they elevate themselves above us. They remove the anxiety of moral choice, the fundamental anxiety of human existence. This is part of their attraction. They give us the rules by which we live. But once we hand over this anxiety and accept their authority, we become enslaved and they become our idols. And idols, as the Bible never ceases to tell us, destroy us.”
Eugene V. Debs
“When I rise it will be with the ranks, and not from the ranks.”
Mr. Jensen, from Paddy Chayefsky's Network.
“We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr Beale, to see that perfect world in which there’s no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit. In which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquillised, all boredom amused.”
David Harvey in the Independent.
“The problem of global poverty cannot be attacked without attacking the global accumulation of wealth. Environmental issues cannot be solved by a turn to green capitalism without confronting the corporate interests and the lifestyles that perpetuate the status quo.”
James C. Scott, in Seeing Like a State.
“The necessarily simple abstractions of large bureaucratic institutions...can never adequately represent the actual complexity of natural or social processes. The categories that they employ are too coarse, too static, and too stylized to do justice to the world that they purport to describe.”
Jane Mecom, after the passing of her brother, B. Franklin, (in a letter to Sarah Bache) September 6, 1790.
“To make society agreeable there must be a similarity of circumstances and sentiments, as well as age. I have no such near me; my dear brother supplied all.”
Ibn Khaldun, in The Muqadimmah.
“We have been informed that certain criminal tyrants used to kill their prisoners in order to learn their own future from the words the prisoners would utter when they were about to be killed. It was unpleasant information they recieved from them.”
Benjamin Franklin, in a letter to his sister Jane Mecom, September 20, 1787.
“It seems to me, that if Statesmen had a little more Arithmetick, or were more accustomed to Calculation, Wars would be much less frequent.”
T.H. Fehrenbach, in Lonestar.
“Human folly is far easier to explain than human valor.”
T.H. Fehrenbach, in Lonestar.
“Texas was never a refuge for the lowly, or oppressed, or a beacon proclaiming human rights. It was a primordial land with a Pleistocene climate, inhabited by species inherently hostile to the Anglo-Celtic breed. Some North Americans chose to conquer it, and in the process unquestionably came to look upon themselves as a sort of chosen race.”
T.H. Fehrenbach, in Lonestar.
“Texans had to be pragmatic to prosper and warlike to stay alive.”
Bernard Crick, in In Defence of Politics.
“‘The secret of liberty is courage,’ as Pericles declaimed. It is not a very safe world anyhow. Free men stick their necks out.”
Bernard Crick, in In Defence of Politics.
“Coercion (or secession or migration) need arise only when one group or interest feels that it has no common interest in survival with the rest. Put at its most obvious, most men would simply agree that coercion needs justification: conciliation justifies itself if it works. There may not be any absolute justification of politics. Let us be brazen and simply say, ‘We prefer politics.’ But such modesty had better be somewhat truculent. For it is, after all, too hard (indeed perverse) to respect the morality and wisdom of any who, when politics is possible, refuse to act politically.”
Anonymous, cited in State and Local Government in Texas. Macmillan, New York. 1948.
The law locks up the village thief
Who steals the goose from off the common,
And turns the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from the goose.