Broken Washington
A day in the life of Barack Obama.
Politics  obama 
1 hour ago
Floating World — The Essential Critic (and why we need them)
Argument is not about right or wrong, winning or losing – it’s about ideas, presentation, and prose. It is never absolute, and it never will be; instead, it is bound to be continuously repeated and revised, bounced back and forth until the end of human consciousness.
6 weeks ago
Robot Heart: Sex, Religion, and Politics: “My thoughts on God…”
“The simplest answer to the question of god’s existence is that humans produced god as a way to find comfort in a universe and a life that is otherwise meaningless. As a way to satisfy needs that we all have that might otherwise go unmet.”
Religion  philosophy 
7 weeks ago
Achtemeier’s journey to accept homosexual marriage, ordination
"But he also contends that “if the Bible’s teaching does not help us make powerful sense of life and experience, if Biblical faithfulness is not life-giving, that is a sure sign we have not understood our Scripture properly.""
religion  sexuality 
9 weeks ago
Mohammed Image Archive
Depictions of Mohammed throughout history
religion  art  politics 
may 2010
Cate - Fag
"This is what I heard someone call my little boy today. "
sexuality  parenting  gender 
may 2010
Classically Liberal: The Enforcement of Morality backfires on Christians
"The great irony of the Devlin/Wolfenden debate is that Devlin's ideas won but it is his religous heirs who suffer because of it, not homosexuals. Every legal structure should be built as if one's worst enemies would control it. If that is done, the rights of all will be protected."
sexuality  rights  religion  morality  politics 
may 2010
The Bookbat - College is such a weird weird place
"College: 5% learning, 95% proving your comfortably-middle-class credentials."
college  motivation  life  culture  education 
april 2010
On Being A Mainstream Pop Star In A Lady Gaga World - Kesha - Jezebel
"[T]here's nothing sadder than a party girl who clearly hates the scene, but feels like she has to keep acting like she loves it anyway. There aren't enough special effects in the world to cover that up."
culture  music  lady_gaga  performance  motivation  passion 
april 2010
Poolga
iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch wallpapers for the rest of us.
iPhone  wallpaper  art 
april 2010
Mac & the iPad
"It’s easy to talk about Steve’s paranoia and how that forces him to keep the project small, but, in truth, the secrecy is more of a useful by-product of the way he manages new projects, rather than the central goal. Steve assembles and motivates a small team of young geniuses, then sets them to work for “90 hours a week and loving it.” The results are highly-integrated designs that far outpace the competition."
apple  history  mac  steve_jobs  ui  iPhone  iPad 
april 2010
Fun Size Bytes (from @Tj) - Free Tech Support is just one of the many services I provide…
"“Contempt for the user” is showing a meaningless error message with tech jargon in it, written by engineers who are so familiar with the program that they’d be happy if the error messages were just a 4 digit code that you looked up in a book (or, better, memorized)."
computers  ui 
april 2010
Classically Liberal: Tea Party, neither tea nor a party.
"What they wanted was Big Brother government using all its power to root out and find illegal immigrants looking for jobs. These were people who would applaud government monitoring work places, setting up ID check points, having the police randomly stop people in the streets to check their "papers" to make sure they are "legal" residents. These are the type of people who as children, thought the hall monitors were good guys making sure everyone had a "pass" from teacher. I would call them closet authoritarians except I don't think they're in the closet."
tea_party  politics 
april 2010
Declaration of Causes of Secession
The South were the ones who made the Civil War about slavery within their secession statements.
slavery  US  civil_war  history 
april 2010
Not A Potted Plant: Lest We Forget Why They Fought
"Treason in defense of slavery is not a subject matter appropriate for any freedom loving people to celebrate. The Civil War had good guys and it had bad guys. The good guys were the ones who won."
history  slavery  civil_war  US 
april 2010
Robot Heart: Civil War was about slavery
"To argue otherwise demonstrates a shocking lack of understanding over exactly how morally deficient any society is that treats human beings like livestock. Slavery is wrong, whether slavery is justified through racism or not. The end of slavery in America is not to be qualified by how long racism continued (continues) after slavery ended, because slavery in and of itself is an evil."
slavery  history  civil_war  US 
april 2010
Cocoa with Love: Network data requirements on iPhone OS devices
"A quick warning about this: the WiFi connection can take 10 seconds or more to wake up after the device is woken up from sleep. If WiFi is not available, you may want to set a timer and try again for the next 5-10 seconds before presenting an error."
cocoa  network  development  software  programming  iPhone 
april 2010
Ill Fares the Land | The New York Review of Books
"What matters is not how affluent a country is but how unequal it is."
money  economics  society 
april 2010
Squashed: Individual Responsibility is an Individual Virtue
"By preaching personal responsibility as a solution, we’re saying “some person—who is not me—should worry about this.” Demanding personal responsibility from somebody else justifies our own irresponsibility. It allows us to ignore the problem."
society  culture 
april 2010
Bill Totten's Weblog: America: The Grim Truth
Filed for future reference, though. Can't say I particularly agree, though.
politics  america  culture 
april 2010
Shyness - James Parker
Charles Darwin, who was very interested in shyness, correctly diagnosed it as a form of “self-attention” — a preoccupation with self. How do I fit in here? What do they think of me?
shyness  personality  self 
april 2010
And this is the problem
"I then log on to the Internet (which was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration) and post on freerepublic.com and Fox News forums about how government involvement in healthcare is SOCIALISM which is BAD because the government can’t do anything right."
health  hcr  socialism  politics 
march 2010
kung fu grippe -- Bad Romance
Merlin Mann on Lady Gaga's Bad Romance
lady  gaga  bad  romance  music  video 
march 2010
Senators' Letter To FDA - Health News Story - WCVB Boston
Did not know that it was illegal for gay men to donate blood.
politics  blood 
march 2010
Apple's 10 biggest problems - Apple 2.0 - Fortune Brainstorm Tech
"The pessimistic dig on Apple, says Gruber, is that it's a supremely well-organized company organized around one irreplaceable guy. The optimistic view is that Jobs has structured it to run like his other company, Pixar, which manages to turn out hit after hit, year after year, without a charismatic celebrity leader."
apple  gruber  steve_jobs  business 
february 2010
slacktivist: All are responsible
The great philosopher and activist Abraham Joshua Heschel said, "Few are guilty; all are responsible."
global-warming  science  religion 
february 2010
Seth's Blog: When I want your opinion, I'll ask for it
"Too many people, when asked for their opinion, dissemble"
opinion  critique 
february 2010
Arab society's crunch points, by Brian Whitaker
"There was also one statement on the list that people wanted to talk about more than any other. So much so that towards the end I was saying to people: “Please, let’s not talk about that one, I’ve heard enough already.”

The statement in question was the title from from one of al-Jazeera's Doha Debates and it said: "The family is a major obstacle to reform in the Arab world.""
arab  middle-east  anthropology  society  family 
february 2010
Schneier on Security: My Reaction to Eric Schmidt
"Too many wrongly characterize the debate as "security versus privacy." The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very definition of a police state. And that's why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide."
privacy  politics 
january 2010
PROJECT 880: THE AVATAR THAT ALMOST WAS
"Obviously this scriptment would have made a five hour movie. Things needed to be cut. I just wish Cameron had been able to keep the decent story and rounded characters along with his deeply designed world. But when you're spending that much money, it's the story and characters that get canned before the FX."
avatar  movies 
january 2010
A world of hits | The Economist
A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better.
Media  critique  the_long_tail 
january 2010
There's a war going on
A handwritten PDF about education and programming.
Programming  pdf 
january 2010
Letter From London - My American Friends
The first thing I ever heard about Americans was that they all carried guns. Then, when I came across people who’d had direct contact with this ferocious-sounding tribe, I learned that they were actually rather friendly.
america  travel  optimism 
january 2010
The Gay Animal Kingdom § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM
"But Roughgarden believes that biologists have it backwards. Given the pervasive presence of homosexuality throughout the animal kingdom, same-sex partnering must be an adaptive trait that’s been carefully preserved by natural selection. As Roughgarden points out, “a ‘common genetic disease’ is a contradiction in terms, and homosexuality is three to four orders of magnitude more common than true genetic diseases such as Huntington’s disease.”"
sexuality  biology 
november 2009
Major Hasan and The Legacy of George W Bush | CommonDreams.org
"When bin Laden attacked us in the 1990s - several times - in an attempt to raise his own stature in the Islamic world, Bill Clinton dealt with Osama like the criminal he was. He enlisted Interpol and the police and investigative agencies of various nations, brought in our best intelligence agents, and missed bin Laden in a missile-launched assassination attempt by a scant twenty minutes (bringing derisive howls from Republicans that he was trying to "wag the dog" and deflect attention from the Monica investigations)."
politics  bin  laden 
november 2009
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