dannyman.toldme.com

Why I Am Deleting my Facebook Account

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/05/05/so-long-facebook/

You remember how everyone was on Friendster? And then, Friendster was too slow, and everyone lost interest?

Then we were all on Orkut? But it turned out the guy just stole the code from somewhere else and it got boring pretty quickly, too.

Then there was Tribe.net, but I never signed up for that.

Then there was MySpace, and suddenly you could pretty much do anything with your profile, hook in doo-dads and gewgaws and blinky backgrounds? Well, I dipped my toes in that trainwreck but yeah . . . old news.

And then Facebook came along, which only stole the idea from someone else, and not the actual code. It was fast and scaleable like Orkut, and it had applications and stuff so you could have the flexibility of MySpace but within a controlled environment. Boy that thing took off!! But, Facebook was still missing a critical ingredient: you can not trust them.

So, I figured I would get ahead of the curve on this one. They keep revising their rules and re-jiggering things to make it harder and harder for people to keep their information private. Eventually enough people are going to be spooked at that. I tried to re-re-re-re-review my privacy options and look at taking out most of my profile information but they made it enough of a pain in the ass. Eventually I used Google to find the option where you can just delete your account, which, in true Facebook style, takes two weeks. Anyway, in another week and a half, I will have vanished.

If I change my mind someday I can sign up all over again. Despite the hooplah, though, I think there is a very good chance that lots of folks will move on in the near future. Either some kind of open-standard, or maybe a comparable platform run by a company that regards trustworthiness as a central ethic. (Speaking of which, you can stalk me on Google.)

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My Surname

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/03/24/holmgren-howard-2/

On the radio they are talking about the Census and taking calls from people on the topic: “What my name means to me.”

My surname is Howard, but if my grandfathers had followed convention my surname would be Holmgren. Back in the day the man who carried my Y chromosome married a woman whose surname was Howard, and he took her name for his own to avoid discrimination against dumb Swedes.

I have sometimes wondered about changing the name back to Holmgren, but it hardly seems worth the effort. There is no widespread anti-Swedish prejudice to stand up against in solidarity, and I have no special allegiance to patriarchy.

It seems that most Howards I meet are African American. I doubt they took that surname by marrying English. As best I can guess, their ancestors took their surname, as Howard University did, from Major General Oliver Howard, who fought in the Civil War, and later promoted the welfare of former slaves and war refugees as Commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau.

Perhaps there is even a little solidarity to be had in retaining a surname chosen by people who, to this very day, face discrimination.

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Use of “as per” Exploding in Silicon Valley?

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/03/09/use-of-as-per-exploding-in-silicon-valley/

So, I occasionally get anxious when I perceive some trend in word usage, especially when it seems like hyper-correction. I swear that in the past few years everyone replaced “social” with “societal” and in the past few months I swear that everyone (that I correspond with) has started saying “as per” instead of . . . say, “per” . . . for example:

“I did the job per your instructions.”

Or:

“I did the job, as you instructed.”

Has lately become:

“I did the job, as per your instructions.”

I just saw a work e-mail where someone used “as per” in two consecutive sentences and I said “there has to be a way to track this.”

And there is a way. A very crude way: Google Trends.

I wasn’t able to find anything at first: “as per” is dwarfed by “as” and “per” but I confined my search to the past 12 months, then the United States . . . then . . . California:

It is probably just a statistical blip for an incomplete corpus but at least for the moment I feel a little better to see some data demonstrating a measured spike in usage of “as per” in the Silicon Valley . . . I might not be as crazy as I suspect.

Is “as per” bad usage? It certainly annoys me. Some technical writers are grappling with the issue, and it sounds as if English craftspeople prefer to avoid using this weirdly redundant mish-mash of Germanic-Latin.

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Government Subsidized Food Pyramid

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/03/05/government-subsidized-food-pyramid/

I posted a link which has a wonderful graphic illustrating the discrepancy between what the government recommends that we eat, and what the government subsidizes. This opened up the question as to whether government interference in the free market was a good idea, so I offered my understanding and opinion:

Michael Pollan explains the situation well in “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” . . . because agriculture yield and prices are highly volatile, it is desirable to balance out the wilder potentially-devastating-to-farmers price fluctuations. Historically the Department of Agriculture did this by buying crops when prices were low and storing them for sale when prices were high.

During the Nixon administration there was a shortage of affordable meat, so the government moved to a flat subsidy of certain crops to maximize food production. It worked, but today we are dealing with the unintended consequences.

I think it is good for the government to regulate food safety and to provide food stamps for poor people. I suspect that with the contemporary globalized food system that price stabilization is a lost cause, and less of a concern, because the overall market is larger.

I do like the “soda tax” idea.

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Week of 21 February, 2010

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/03/01/week-of-21-february-2010/

Sunday, February 21

Three laps around Prospect Park with a weaker headwind on the uphill, then I stopped for groceries and fit two gallons of milk into the bicycle basket, which made steering sluggish. Afterwards I watched “Letters from Iwo Jima” which was really neat because it tells a story from World War II in which the viewer’s empathy is given to the enemy.

2.75h Letters from Iwo Jima

Monday, February 22

Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule — Insight into why engineers dislike meetings, and the cultural difference between “makers” and managers regarding meetings.

Pushups: 40

Tuesday, February 23

I kept waking up through the night, which is unusual for me. There is a fair amount of tension at work and other open questions in my life, so I am thinking the subconscious is unusually bothered right now. I woke up dreaming that I was at a party gorging on a smorgasbord of delicious, sweet, and colorful home-made baked goods. I have had these sorts of dreams lately: on another occasion we were at some legendary restaurant and after the feast of dinner I was eager for dessert, but I woke up before dessert.

At any rate, flex hours are a blessing for productivity: if someone has a rough night they can sleep in a bit and just get a late start, rather than taking a sick day. But throughout the morning I felt hung over.

In the evening I made it to my fisrt NYC Yelp event: tacos at The Loading Dock. I made two new acquaintances while enjoying some tasty tacos and free beer. Unfortunately, Mei couldn’t make it.

Wednesday, February 24

I “shipped” a nice feature for our systems management software at work, which will make it easier to request server reboots and other services from our data centers. I then set about coordinating how to deploy the feature. In the evening I did laundry, and watched TV while folding.

Pushups: 35 + 40 + 25

1h Daily Show
1h Colbert Report

Friday, February 26

Due to the snow storm, we didn’t go out as we might have, ordering in some food instead.

Saturday, February 27

After brunch, we spent some time at the Library, but then hustled home so Mei could get in touch with her family as we watched the would-be tsunami roll into Hawaii. Later in the evening we went to see “Invictus” which is an uplifting retelling of how Nelson Mandela won the Rugby World Cup, with a little help from Matt Damon. Afterwards, we stumbled upon a French Bistro type place, where Mei had tartar, I had sausages and beers, we both had dessert, and together we enjoyed a badly needed night out.

2.25h Invictus

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Week of 14 February, 2010

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/02/22/week-of-14-february-2010/

Sunday, February 14

I got up before Mei-Lin to, among other things, make her breakfast. She let me nap afterwards as she, among other things, baked me an apple pie. I dropped her off at work in the evening for what was otherwise a really nice romantic holiday together.

1.5h Daily Show
0.5h John Oliver’s New York Stand-Up

Monday, February 15

The orthodontist is keen to finish my oral infrastructure project before two years has elapsed. He mentioned a desire to change my lower band, but that for my comfort he would wait until next time. I said I could go for it. He babbled with glee, “okay, if you insist I torture you . . . but if it hurts you forget you know me,” and then rambled on about what material the band was made of and how that had a memory so it wasn’t so bad, and words like anterior and other stuff that means he’s a huge orthodontics geek. I can’t tell half the stuff he’s saying but he says it with a sort of joy that makes me trust him, because I too, know the joy of impassioned geekery.

After driving Mei to work in the evening I took some Aleve. This is the second time this guy has adjusted my teeth and I feel it afterward where I didn’t feel it with the prior orthodontist. Since he’s a geeky man I just assume he is pushing my comfort zone to yield results, whereas the nice lady in San Francisco wanted to help me avoid discomfort.

0.25h Aqua Teen Hunger Force
1.75h Inch’Allah Dimanche
1h Colbert Report

Tuesday, February 16

Mei gave me a toy train set today. It is a juvenile thrill even if I can’t figure out a good home for it.

Pushups: 35 + 35
Situps: 100

1.75h Reprise
1h Dirty Jobs
1h Star Trek: The Next Generation

Wednesday, February 17

I have a modest pile of unused credit cards stashed away in case I ever develop a coke habit. And since I doubt coke dealers take plastic, when I say “develop a coke habit” I mean “fund my own Internet startup-up.”

0.5h Colbert Report
1.75h Sophie Scholl: The Final Days
0.25h Aqua Teen Hunger Force

Thursday, February 18

So, LIVE Squirrelcam is occasionally entertaining but I may try to make it better. Right now one would have to tune in while I am broadcasting, and while the squirrels are doing their thing. There’s maybe ten minutes a day, really, of footage, and its in low res.

If I am silly enough to run a computer with some decent horsepower . . . not 24/7 but say during daylight hours, I’m thinking I could have the computer take a series of 30 second clips, over and over, and then we analyse those clips for squirrel activity. The analysis is the part I don’t know how to do, but I figure I can extract, say, a series of frames, and I’m pretty sure mogrify can give me the “diff” of two images, and if I can evaluate the quantity of that diff, then I know something is going on.

Splice together contiguous 30-second clips of “squirrel detected” footage and upload in hi def to YouTube.

The sup has also been talking about installing these giant, prison-like bars on the windows, “but you can open them.” Anyway, a more permanent fixture outdoors where the squirrels can look cute for the Internet without worrying about the guy inside typing away menacingly at the keyboard might be where I end up.

If I don’t just lose interest first.

After an unusually rough day at work, I watched “Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress” which was a nice enough film set during the Cultural Revolution, but in the last 40 minutes they skipped to the modern day and revealed the village was to be flooded for the Three Gorges project. Sappy sentimentality over unrequited love backed by plaintive violin music, this soft-skinned bourgeois intellectual found himself teary-eyed. It also reminded me of another movie I recently watched about the Three Gorges, “Up The Yangtze” so the idea of an ambitious young girl making her way in the world, in that case, literally up the Yangtze, was fresh in my mind.

1.75h Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

Pushups: 30

Friday, February 19

Peddling a bike down a city street is much like paddling a canoe down a river: Watch out for the current if you don’t want to flip or crash!

Rode my bicycle over to the Post Office, then stopped by the bike store to put air in the tires. (They have a hose out front.)

Pushups: 32 + 40

Saturday, February 20

Slept in, rode down to the Tea Lounge for breakfast, then two laps around Prospect Park. The weather was nice but there was a vicious head wind on the uphill part. Took Mei-Lin out for dinner but it was late and she was too exhausted to really appreciate it.

1h Mega Movers: Locomotives

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The Death of Books

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/02/01/death-of-books/

I just posted a comment on a friend’s Facebook status:

I think the Death of Paper Books has been predicted with the advent of newspapers, radio, television, microfiche, books-on-tape, CD-ROMs, the Internet, portable computers, e-books readers, and smart phones, but it still hasn’t happened yet.

I like books, I like holding them in my hands, and I like stacking them on shelves along the walls of my apartment. I suspect that this love of books will be transmitted to my children, much as it was inherited from my parents. I doubt we’ll have an “unabridged dictionary” or a set of encyclopedias like when I grew up, but hell yeah, as long as I and my descendants have the money to spend, paper books aren’t going to die out.

I think eBooks will serve a particular role, especially in lightening the load in school backpacks. For my normal routine of reading one book at a time, though, and then palming it off to a friend or family member, I am fine with having the pulp copy to thumb through, though access rights if I later want to search the book digitally would be nice.

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iPad

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/01/28/ipad/

Background: I am not an Apple fan, but I keep an eye out. Yesterday they said they would make a world-changing announcement, and they gave us: the iPad. Here’s a comment I just made about the iPad:

Lack of an OS? The thing is an extra-large iPhone that can’t place phone calls. It is a Kindle killer but for $500 it can not even keep up with cheapo PC netbooks.

A Dell Mini 10 has a better screen, lower price, keyboard, can run all non-Apple software, video chat, and USB ports so you can offload your digital camera without buying an extra dongle, and you can buy it last year.

I am hoping to see more touch screens on netbooks, going forward.

Another thing I have noticed is that if I trash PCs, Windows, or Linux, people will either agree with me, or not take it personally. “Yeah, things aint perfect.” But if I trash Apple stuff, Apple people quickly become offended. I suspect that a part of the loyalty of Apple users is that they have paid a premium to buy in to the club. Any perception that is positive reaffirms the extra investment they have made into buying only the very best, but any negative perception undermines their self-confidence regarding their investment, and provokes a hostile reaction.

Windows users? Hell they’re just glad if they haven’t had a virus in the past six months.

Linux users? They downloaded a CD and managed to get something non-Windows running, with a little advice from web forums. Some of it is really sweet, some of it is pretty enh.

Mac users get offended that Firefox doesn’t match the style of the rest of their purely Mac applications.

For me, the best part about the iPad is that it was already advertised back in 2006. It is just too bad that the 2010 model lacks Vaginal Firewall Protection.

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When Will Google Voice Support Apps Users?

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/01/26/when-will-google-voice-support-apps-users/

Background: Google Apps is a service where Google will host the e-mail and calendar for your domain. So, instead of going to gmail.com I go to mail.toldme.com and log in as dannyman for dannyman@toldme.com. The annoying thing that has been going on for several years now is that only a minority of the growing array of Google software that features personalized content will support my Apps login, so I have two completely separate Google accounts:
Apps Account: dannyman@toldme.com
Gmail Account: picasasucks69@gmail.com

The first contains an archive of e-mail going back 15 years, my combined e-mail, telephone, and address book of all my friends, and Calendar appointments for the past five years. It integrates seamlessly with my Android Phone.

The second is for all the stupid Google applications that do not work with my Google account and require me to have a Gmail account that I never use otherwise: Picasa, Blogger, Google Maps, Google Voice . . . that last one is especially annoying, because now the brokenness leaks onto my Android phone!

The following is adapted from http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Apps/thread?fid=475790531056779f00047e151dc314f4:

As a big Google fan, I have an Android phone and a Google Apps account, and a Google Voice account. Google Voice is really neat, but since it only supports Gmail logins it is really poor that my Gmail / Android contacts aren’t available in Google Voice. That’s right: since I’m a really big Google fan, the Google Voice application will NOT sync with my Google Phone.

I understand that it is possible to install software that pulls the data out of your Apps Gmail account or Android phone, and then re-copies that back in to the Google Voice non-Apps account. But this requires extra effort on my part to maintain a kludge to have duplicate copies of data stored in two different places.

What I want instead is the obvious and sane solution, where I log in to Google Voice the same way I log in to everything else: with my Google Apps account. My Android phone logs in to my Google Apps account and has instant access to my contacts list, and my hosted Gmail logs in to my hosted Apps account, and has instant access to the very same contacts list shared seamlessly with my Android phone. So, when I log in to Google Voice, I want to log in with my Apps account, and then Google Voice has instant access to all of my phone numbers and e-mail addresses associated with my Google Apps login.

Basically, I am asking for sanity, and short of sanity, at least an acknowledgement that sanity is a desired outcome.

This “second class citizen” treatment is really frustrating at times: the biggest fans get the worst support. Any idea when Google Voice is going to stop locking us out? And when that time comes will I be able to keep my phone number, or will it be like when I was forcibly migrated from Google Calendar over to a blank Google Apps Calendar, losing all my appointments and shared calendars, with no option to migrate my data?

I have tried to get an answer from Google Voice to no avail. I would like to think the Google employees behind Apps are working behind the scenes to make Google Voice available seamlessly to paying and loyal customers. Or maybe this simply is not a priority and us common folk Google Evangelists just shouldn’t get too worked up about Google products, and consider switching to competing technologies. Thanks!

These days my Android phone is in a weird way, because I’m starting to use Google Voice for SMS, except Google Voice has no access to my address book, so everywhere I am accustomed to seeing names and pictures for my contacts I see a ten-digit number, because Google Voice has no access to the contacts in my Google account.

Ugh!

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Are Girl Scout Cookies a Scam?

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/01/25/are-girl-scout-cookies-a-scam/

I will always remember that us Boy Scouts gathered at the local council to go to Scout Camp and it was a really ugly building in a bad neighborhood. One day we drove past the Girl Scout council headquarters in a large, shiny, landscaped office in the suburbs. The contrast in my mind is that our troop got the money to fund camping expeditions, and my sister’s troop got the funding equivalent of an ugly building in a bad neighborhood.

I just filed the following question with the Girl Scouts of Northern California:

Hello,

Why does over 50% of the proceeds from girl scout cookie sales go to “Council Services”?

http://www.girlscoutsnorcal.org/pages/product_sales/cookie_sale.html

I would like to think that if I pay $4 for a box of cookies that the girl’s troop is seeing at least 50% of that, as might be expected from other fund raising opportunities. It honestly sounds like a scam to me, and that is part of the reason I stopped buying Girl Scout cookies.

Thanks for explaining.

Sincerely,
-daniel

They did not write back. I guess you have to pay a bit more for “Council Services” before every last crackpot can expect a response.

I ate a lot of Girl Scout cookies when I was growing up, and I think they’re tasty, but they are not a good value for the money. Next time I’ll ask if maybe they can take a direct cash donation to the troop.

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Week of 17 January, 2010

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/01/25/week-of-17-january-2010/

Sunday, January 17

2.0h V for Vendetta

Monday, January 18

A quiet day on-call, cooped up. Mei had to pull a long shift at the hospital, but when she got home we enjoyed the from-scratch Apple Pie she made for my birthday.

1.0h China From the Inside
0.5h Twilight Zone

Tuesday, January 19

Last day on-call.

In the evening Mei took me out for dinner at the restaurant where I had taken her for dinner for our anniversary. The anniversary dinner had been a perfect dining experience, and we later learned that the restaurant had a Michelin star. This time around we had a great meal, but the service wasn’t as perfect. I figured that like many restaurants they may not have their best staff working on Tuesdays.

Pushups: 35 + 35
0.25h Aqua Teen Hunger Force

Wednesday, January 20

In the morning I biked down to the Tea Lounge. I wrote a follow-up review on Yelp explaining that although I love the Tea Lounge, if you serve diuretics your toilets shouldn’t be traumatizing to sit upon.

Later in the day I called the MTA to get my transit card replaced. They have a new program where you can purchase one transit card and they’ll just charge you more money when your balance runs low. Unfortunately, they send you the same little piece of paper that all the ephemeral transit cards use, so after a few months it was completely shot. They cancelled my defective transit card and said a new one would arrive within 15 days.

Later I dropped by the new orthodontist, who scanned my head in various ways and then got to the business of demanding that my teeth bow to his vision of an ideal alignment.

Pushups: 40
0.5h Aqua Teen Hunger Force

Thursday, January 21

I asked Mei if she had any aspirin since my jaw was sore. I never take aspirin, and while I wasn’t quite in pain, my mouth felt sore enough that I’d rather not have it preoccupy my day. The good Doctor hooked me up.

I sent the city another letter explaining how I don’t want to pay them $115 for violating the no stopping zone that wasn’t adequately marked. I also bought some toilet paper which was marketed with the enticing promise “Virtually Lint Free” . . . 1,000 sheets for 59c? I also bought the name brand roll that was 1,000 sheets for 79c, in case Mei found the virtually lint free toilet paper to be exceedingly cheap in quality.

0.5h Community
1.0h Project Runway
Pushups: 35 + 35

Friday, January 22

Work kept me busy, but I can hardly complain given my commute.

Around 11:30 as we were near bed time Mei asked about these popups she was getting to run the virus scanner that we never installed that said her computer was under siege by viruses and she couldn’t run any programs because everything was infected and she was going to have to upgrade to the premium edition. The legitimate virus scanner couldn’t find anything, so I rebooted into Safe Mode and Windows offered to revert itself about two days, and upon the next boot Windows said it had reverted Internet Explorer and a couple shared libraries. Mei was sleeping by now, so I continued to install Google Chrome as an overall nicer alternative to Internet “zero-day exploits” Explorer, and then I went and scraped about two dozen software barnacles off of her hard drive. Her laptop seems happier with the tune-up. If I were more of a man I would disassemble the thing and solder new connections for the fragile speaker wires that have broken in the hinge. Assuming I owned a soldering iron and had balls enough to wave it at the girlfriend’s laptop computer.

1.0h Aqua Teen Hunger Force

Saturday, January 23

After sleeping in a bit, I took Mei to Cheryl’s and then we walked over to the ice skating rink in Prospect Park where her coworkers were having a get-together. I skipped the ice skating since on the one hand its not my thing and on the other hand I’m still Secondary On-Call with the work laptop in my bag. Better to hang out in the sun reading my magazine and synthesizing vitamin D.

1.0h Dirty Jobs
0.5h Daily Show

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Chicago Card Plus Defeats New York EasyPay Xpress

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/01/20/chicago-versus-new-york/

New York’s public transit system is fantastic. But they’re a bit slow on the whole information technology thing.

In Chicago you can sign up for a Chicago Card Plus, which is a plastic “proximity” card you keep in your wallet. To pass a fare gate or board a bus, you just touch your wallet against the sensor, et voila. When your account runs down it automatically charges another $20 from your credit card. I can log on to their web site and recover the forgotten password for my log-in name, access all of my account information, and a list of trips charged to my card in the last 90 days.

New York has a similar system, that will charge $45 to replenish your balance, but instead of a rugged plastic card they send you the same little piece of reinforced paper with a magnetic strip that is used for the 30 day pass. After a few months of pulling the card out of my wallet and swiping it at various fare gates the strip becomes worn and unreadable. Their web site has no way to recover the “PIN” code for the 13-digit account number they e-mailed to me several months ago, so I call their toll-free number, and after waiting on-hold they cancel the damaged card with a 15-day waiting period to issue a new card.

It somehow seems not worth it.

The part that makes me smile is the back of the card says EXPIRES 06/30/11 — someone at MTA has thought this little paper card would swipe for two years! Hooray for wishful thinking.

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Google.cn: “手气不错”

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/01/15/google-china-luck-not-bad/

There’s been a lot of buzz in the tech community over Google’s Tuesday announcement that they are just totally fed up with the Chinese government’s utter contempt for human rights and for playing nice on the Internet, and that as a consequence they are going to remove either the censorship filters from Google.cn, or Google.cn from China.

I don’t entirely grasp Google’s strategy here, but if a plucky technology company that I admire wants to goad an autocratic government, I’m naturally inclined to sympathize with them.

So, while it is still around, I figured I’d translate Google.cn‘s “I’m Feeling Lucky” button: 手气不错

手 shuo3 is a pictograph for “hand”
æ°” qi4 is a pictograph for curling clouds, meaning “air”
不 bu4 is a pictograph of a bird rising to heaven, which once meant “to soar” but today means “not”
é”™ cuo4 etymologically combines “metal” and “dried meat” for the archaic meaning “gilt” which nowadays means “mistake”

But don’t get hung up on hand-air-not-mistake as the characters combine to form two words:

手气 means luck
不错 means “not bad” as in “pretty good”

So, 手气不错 translates for me as “luck not bad” and that is what I hope for both Google (è°·æ­Œ) and the 中国人.

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Rita Buscari, 25

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/01/10/rita-buscari-25/

Excerpt from Studs Terkel’s “Division Street America” (1967)

There were about forty of us went down there to protest James Dukes’ execution. We had a very orderly, and I think, dignified picket line. We marched in two’s up and down, very quiet. We rarely spoke to each other. But across the street there were about two hundred people in their cars with the doors open, the radios blarin’ out rock’n’roll music, with beer cans and with sandwiches. They were there all evening, and very often there would be jeers at us from across the street.

I was marching with a Northwestern student, who goes down to protest every time there’s an execution. He said these people are there at every execution. Every single one. He said no matter how cold it is–this was a warm night, this was August–no matter how cold it is, there are approximately the same number of people. He believes they’re there because the lights dim in the building, which isn’t true, because the chair is rigged up to a different electrical system.

They stay there until the body is brought out in an ambulance. You got the feeling, you know, that this was the instinct that sent people to the Colosseum in Rome. And it’s here, right here and now, present in our society. Warden Johnson said people call up and ask for tickets. Well, if tickets were sold, I’m sure it would be a sellout house every single time.

It was so brutish. I was marching with pacifists and ministers, and the quiet of these people compared to the crowd across the street gave it a nightmarish quality. At the time of the execution we all turned toward the jail and ceased conversation. And this was when the rhythm of the noise on the other side gained momentum. They had all the radios on, first of all because they wanted to hear the announcement. The sounds on the other side increased as our silence increased.

When the announcement came through on the radio, there was a big reaction across the street: Oh, that’s over with. Oh, that’s great. Especially toward us. It was a victory for them, you see? A great victory against the crackpots who were demonstrating across the street. You know: This is how much your demonstration has achieved, you’re no place at all.

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Atheist Position on God

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2010/01/08/oh-god-whatever/

Hemant Mehta asks:

Which statement should atheists be using?

1. There is probably no god.

2. There is no god.

In my book, Atheism is reverence toward God.

If God is almighty and all powerful, and leads an existence in the Universe beyond my ability to perceive it, then the most responsible approach I can take towards this thing beyond my perception is to shut the heck up about it, and focus on our collective worldly life.

So, maybe “God does not exist within my perception of reality.”

Or perhaps, “The question of God’s existence is irrelevant, but if for some reason it needs to reveal itself unto me, I bet it could hook that up.”

Or more modesty? “I have been unable to perceive the existence or intentions of God. I do think that Faith is important, and I put my faith in humanity, which tests my faith as surely as God tests the faith of its believers.”

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