The advent of “word processing” — what an odd phrase — electronic writing, writing on a computer, whatever you call it, meant a sudden and complete end to these endless deliberations and tests of your fine motor skills. You could change anything! anywhere! right up to the point of printing the thing out — and if you had the financial wherewithal or institutional permissions that allowed you to ignore the cost of paper and ink, you could even print out a document, edit it, and then print it out again. A brave new world indeed. Thus, as the novelist Anne Rice once commented, when you’re using a word processor “There’s really no excuse for not writing the perfect book.”
But there’s the rub, isn’t there? For some few writers the advent of word processing was a pure blessing: Stanley Elkin, for instance, whose multiple sclerosis made it impossible for him to hold a pen properly or press a typewriter’s keys with sufficient force, said that the arrival of his first word-processing machine was “the most important day of my literary life.” But for most professional writers — and let’s remember that Track Changes is a literary history of word processing, not meant to cover the full range of its cultural significance — the blessing was mixed. As Rice says, now that endless revision is available to you, as a writer you have no excuse for failing to produce “the perfect book” — or rather, no excuse save the limitations of your own talent.
Author explains why Democrats have zero chance of winning the House until 2030
LinkThe Republican Party, on the heels of a sweeping loss to Barack Obama in 2008, hatched a scheme it called REDMAP, short for Redistricting Majority Project. It was “the most audacious political heist of modern times,” writes David Daley, author of Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy, a new book about REDMAP.
John Lennon – Imagine
Video‘This is disgraceful. It is intolerable.’
QuoteThe fact is that in this election, we have a candidate for President of the United States who, over the course of his lifetime and the course of this campaign, has said things about women that are so shocking, so demeaning that I simply will not repeat anything here today. And last week, we saw this candidate actually bragging about sexually assaulting women. And I can’t believe that I’m saying that a candidate for President of the United States has bragged about sexually assaulting women.
“Electric Brains” and Other Menaces
QuoteWe should recognize that advances in science, and in material benefits are not necessarily good for humanity in the long run. They are incomplete, imperfect benefits, Wisdom, on the other hand, is the most thorough-going benefit for all the world. Thinking and attitudes born of morality and virtue are thoroughly good for us all. The Buddha’s Four Measureless Attitudes of kindness, compassion, joy, and even-mindedness are totally advantageous to all creatures. When we base ourselves in thoughts such as these, then we can go ahead and put technology to work for us. There’s no fear that we will forget the fundamental aspects of humanity: our own bodies for example. In the future people will forget entirely what people look like. We will all become like animals. I’m not scolding you, this prediction is a cold, hard fact. The superior person, Even in poverty, Maintains his integrity; The petty person stops at Nothing to strike it rich.
Have You Played… SimCity?
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Consequently, SimCity is a brilliant antfarm. I always like watching my little people drive and walk around, and SimCity lets me do that in a beautiful, 3D, tilt-shifted world, where you can also watch the water and poop flow and visualise the data of your city with umpteen other overlays. It’s a terrible shame the little people don’t walk to their own house every day, choosing instead the closest vacant property to sleep in, but it still looks amazing when you zoom out and watch everything buzzing away beneath you.
It Ain’t Over
LinkTrump came to political prominence by promoting the Birther movement, the idea Obama was not born in the US, and hence his presidency was not legitimate.
What is coming is worse. It is not accepting legitimacy of our nation and its core institutions.
Trumps campaign has already transgressed so many social norms and unwritten rules — the very things that hold a country together.
James Alison on Mark 13 and September 11, 2001
QuoteThere is something apparently callous about this. We react to bad news as to a form of emotional blackmail, obliging us to “feel” for the victims, and be outraged by someone who doesn’t appear to feel. But not Jesus. His attention is entirely concentrated on his interlocutors. It is not the events themselves which concern him, but their reaction to the events, and what that reaction says about whose power they are in. We can imagine the excitement of those telling him, wanting a pronouncement of appropriately apocalyptic tenor: the Galileans were not sacrificing at Jerusalem, probably at Gerizim. Maybe this was their punishment from God. But they are disappointed. Jesus completely de-sacralizes the event, removing any link between God and what has happened. Any link between morality and what has happened. If we are caught up in thinking like that, then we too are likely to act in ways moved by the apocalyptic other, the god of blood and sacrifice and murder, of morality linked to worldly outcome, and we will perish like them. To ram home his point, he chooses an example where there was no obvious moral agency, no wicked Pilate, no sacrifices of dubious validity: the collapse of a tower — maybe an architectural flaw, maybe a small earth tremor, the shifting of an underground stream, who knows. Once again, Jesus completely de-sacralizes the incident. It has nothing to do with God. But if we are caught up in the world of giving sacred meanings, then we will be caught up in the world of reciprocal violence, of good and bad measured over against other people, and we will likewise perish. Once again I stress: Jesus will not be drawn into adding to meaning. He merely asks those who come to him themselves to move out of the world of sacred-seeming meaning. What does it mean for us to learn to look at the world through those eyes?
Dangerous idiots: how the liberal media elite failed working-class Americans
LinkI’m hard-pressed to think of a worse slight than the media figures who have disregarded the embattled white working class for decades now beseeching the country to have sympathy for them. We don’t need their analysis, and we sure don’t need their tears. What we need is to have our stories told, preferably by someone who can walk into a factory without his own guilt fogging his glasses.
Can elections be hacked? And the Russian gambit.
QuoteSure, Fox News and right wing radio guys have been spreading a cult of adoration of Vladimir Putin for a decade, culminating in Donald Trump’s huge, bromantic crush on the (I’ll admit) very clever Russian President. But is it truly possible that the conversion of U.S. conservatism into confederate-ism is so thorough that no one in Red America can smell a rat? Nothing else makes the conversion more clear. Russia used to be red. Now the color doesn’t even apply in Trump Country.
Physicists just created the world’s first time crystal
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Just last month , physicists made the best case yet for why time crystals – hypothetical structures that have movement without energy – could technically exist as physical objects.
How Half Of America Lost Its F**king Mind
LinkSee, rural jobs used to be based around one big local business — a factory, a coal mine, etc. When it dies, the town dies. Where I grew up, it was an oil refinery closing that did us in. I was raised in the hollowed-out shell of what the town had once been. The roof of our high school leaked when it rained. Cities can make up for the loss of manufacturing jobs with service jobs — small towns cannot. That model doesn’t work below a certain population density.
If you don’t live in one of these small towns, you can’t understand the hopelessness. The vast majority of possible careers involve moving to the city, and around every city is now a hundred-foot wall called “Cost of Living.” Let’s say you’re a smart kid making $8 an hour at Walgreen’s and aspire to greater things. Fine, get ready to move yourself and your new baby into a 700-square-foot apartment for $1,200 a month, and to then pay double what you’re paying now for utilities, groceries, and babysitters. Unless, of course, you’re planning to move to one of “those” neighborhoods (hope you like being set on fire!).