Tread lightly on the things of earth

In this critical time, Eyes Wide Open speaks directly to our hearts and minds, shattering the claim that the war has made America safer and challenging us to confront our fears and let our dreams, not our nightmares, shape our collective future.

I survived Black Thursday.

“Ubuntu” is an ancient African word, meaning “humanity to others”.

Did you know that almost 97% of Americans look the other way when [the Disabled American Veterans] ask for help?

MAMP provides Mac OS X (Panther) an utterly self-contained and easy-to-manage install of Apache2, PHP4, PHP5, and MySQL (also phpMyAdmin and MMCache) for up-to-date Web developing.

Whew — here’s all my content presented using Textpattern.

Intense cleaning, organizing, and navigational interlinking going on over next several days. Looking in, I don’t know if you’ll see a busy technician in an open-to-the-public laboratory — my preferred self-imagery — or a bonobo in a primate house flinging smelly bits.

Probably both.

Poke around as I work, or else visit the content as originally published 2002-2004:

[2005-03-29 update: Taking Movable Type archives completely offline in response to insane level of incoming comment spamming attempts. All archived content is available in current Textpattern presentation via search field.]

• Tread lightly on the things of earth (MT weblog, 2003–2004)
• Tread lightly (Radio Userland weblog, 2002)
• Tread lightly: Interesting links (MT sideblog, 2003–2004)
• Mike’s Photolog (MT photolog, 2002–2004)
  
  

I’ve finally migrated all content to Textpattern (Txp)!

I’ve been planning this since last June when I became VC125 at startup webhost TextDrive. TextDrive’s gotten nothing but better since; it’s the best hosting decision I’ve ever made. Txp has been maturing similarly.

There’s much I love about Movable Type (MT), and I have nothing against it, but I really, really prefer using Free Software, which MT isn’t and Txp is. (Txp is GPL’d.)

Please join me at Tread lightly, Textpattern edition (RSS, Atom).

Wow, Dale notes a powerful Hauerwas quote to start off the new year:

A “truth” that must use violence to secure its existence cannot be truth.
(The Peaceable Kingdom, p.15)

If this statement is accurate, and I believe it is, then all this “freedom is on the march” talk cannot be truthful. I think such talk is instead, generally speaking, nonsense. Deadly, deadly nonsense.

I’m enjoying the unlikely benefit of a houseguest who lived in and through the rise of Nazi Germany. His stories are changing me, and giving me fresh first-hand confirmation of the perils we face given current U.S. leadership, practices, and attitudes.

Eeriest similarity between here-and-now and there-and-then:
Government manipulation of public opinion through the media.

If I understand him correctly, that’s the factor that most enabled the consolidation of power in the Third Reich. And in our time, it’s what chills me most about our current U.S. governmental predicament.

In this new year, I seek to grow beyond simply railing against the problem — as God knows I did a lot last year, and which can’t possibly be interesting — to participating somehow in the solution. What we’ve lost in embracing the worldview we’ve embraced is monumental and, too often it has seemed to me, unrecoverable. Yet presumably, with God all things are possible. Heartchange can happen in the blink of an eye, and over sweeping numbers of people. I tend to forget this over and over, but the reality securing this hope is as constant as ever.

[Promised Textpattern blog rollout almost ready; family holiday activities took precedence over its preparation, as they should.]