To declare God’s goodness, that hath enabled us to speak, we are bound to speak: speech is the Glue, the Cement, the Soul of Conversation, and of Religion too.
Unfortunately for the US State Department, they clearly shouldn’t have been messing with computers, either. In setting up their SIPRnet, they were trying to grab the advantages of rapid, silo-free, networked communication while preserving the hierarchical proprieties of official confidentiality. That’s the real issue, that’s the big modern problem; national governments and global computer networks don’t mix any more. It’s like trying to eat a very private birthday cake while also distributing it. That scheme is just not working. And that failure has a face now, and that’s Julian Assange.
Writing a book is like doing a huge jigsaw puzzle, unendurably slow at first, almost self-propelled at the end. Actually, it’s more like doing a puzzle from a box in which several puzzles have been mixed. Starting out, you can’t tell whether a piece belongs to the puzzle at hand, or one you’ve already done, or will do in ten years, or will never do.
The Man With The Electronic BrainKevin Huizenga remixes, edits, and erases from a crazy old comic.
Cumbria, England
Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before.You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.
It is from this ‘unending conversation’ that the materials of your drama arise.
While it’s stated like a given, the idea that the number of evangelicals buying into the extreme ‘Green Dragon’ line is 'far larger’ than the number who support climate action is unsupported in Mims’ post. I’d love to see the numbers. Mims also linked to a piece I recently wrote for Slate in which I reported on the current state of the evangelical 'creation care’ movement. One stat in my piece may have leapt out: According to a Pew Research Center survey in October, only 16 percent of regular churchgoing white evangelicals said that global warming is a 'very serious’ problem (compared to 31 percent of Americans overall). What I didn’t include (but now wish I had) is this: If you combine that 16 percent with those who call it a 'somewhat serious’ problem, the total rises to nearly 47 percent. On the other hand, in the same survey, the combined number of evangelicals who call it either 'not a problem’ (31 percent) or 'not too serious’ (19 percent) is about 50 percent. Hmm.What’s more, political scientist John Green, an advisor to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, noted that 42 percent of evangelicals in that survey said global warming is a problem requiring 'immediate government action.’ That’s certainly not a majority, but it’s a large number (especially when you consider that evangelicals are something like 25 percent of the population). And when you compare that 42 percent to the 46 percent of Americans overall who gave Pew the same answer – I don’t know, is it possible that evangelical Americans are actually, well, not that different from other Americans?
Cow Clicker is a Facebook game about Facebook games. It’s partly a satire, and partly a playable theory of today’s social games, and partly an earnest example of that genre.You get a cow. You can click on it. In six hours, you can click it again. Clicking earns you clicks. You can buy custom “premium” cows through micropayments (the Cow Clicker currency is called “mooney”), and you can buy your way out of the time delay by spending it. You can publish feed stories about clicking your cow, and you can click friends’ cow clicks in their feed stories. Cow Clicker is Facebook games distilled to their essence.