| Rayne Today Searching for dharma, in spite of the weather...
How can we possibly expect to be able to assist the Palestinians and Israelis as anything more than impartial bystanders? We certainly can’t speak from expertise. We haven’t been able to resolve our own land dispute problems here inside the PBS’ program this evening, “Matters of Race”, explores the challenges facing the Native American peoples. They have been denied their cultural heritage and had their land taken from them. Ameliorating programs meant to repair damages by the It makes my blood boil to listen to the argument that programs which benefit Hawaiians – who are overwhelming poorer than whites and in most cases without title to their own lands – are racist and should be abolished or opened to all. What most whites do not understand is that treaties and reparations with the Native American peoples who were once entirely sovereign were extra-Constitutional. They are not agreements with Americans by Americans for Americans; they were agreements with other peoples who were forced to become American and yet retain their heritage. In essence, these are people of dual-citizenship. They are at once members of their own nation, a nation subsumed. They are forced to be Americans – they did not relinquish their previous nationality. They are an occupied people. They do not see benefits from the riches harvested from their lands. They see their ancestors burial places desecrated and unrestored. Somehow the benefits of an all-Hawaiian school funded by a trust for Hawaiians is too much of a good thing for Hawaiians, though. It’s racist. Should the Hawaiians have just rolled over and played dead, let the whites take everything that was theirs? Or should they regret not killing every single missionary and sailor who set foot on their land? Should they take up suicide bombing of tourist resorts to make their point? Or could they reasonably expect the government of the I have to leave this as it is. I’m too upset to write further.  comment []
Now What??? Is there nothing left? Is there not one happy thing left in this hell hole of a country? I live under a government that I cannot trust, with a leader I despise. I cannot find a decent job to save my soul, let alone justify the time and money spent going to college. And now this: I probably poisoned my children while breastfeeding them. In spite of watching the foods I ate, restricting my freshwater lake fish intake to one serving a month, my kids were consuming flame retardants while nursing at their mother’s breast. Can you believe it? Some nursing mothers in the What next? Is there another shoe to drop? Agh, not a giant snakehead fish in Wisconsin, too…
Should I be watching for plagues and pestilence next?
comment []
Cutting out the bloody blog software niche – part 2 Blather by techies about enlisting A-listers and connectors promoting sales of new blogging software really got under my skin this week. Most of us in the blogosphere – a clear and convincing majority the likes of which political candidates can only fantasize – are neither A-listers or connectors. We won’t be quoted in the New York Times or featured on TechTV any time soon. And yet… WE ARE THE MARKET FOR BLOG SOFTWARE. Not somebody who teaches information technology or someone who’s been a coder by profession and is concerned that they have to do something soon about the demand on their bandwidth. Not people who do something else professionally but have a team of crack uber-geek bloggers to whip up their “personal” blog. These people are actually the minority of the blog world. A clear and convincing majority of bloggers – even these A-listers and connectors – do have one thing in common. WE WRITE. A Short-stories, blurbs, novels issue from us. We crunch away, tappity-tappity, pumping our souls into text. The tools we have for writing don’t always serve us to this end; we make do with the limitations of the software, whether we are using the editor provided in blogging software or cut and paste from a word processing package. Which brings us back to a fundamental problem the techies hashing over the blog software market have forgotten. Writers aren’t necessarily happy with the software heavily promoted for document creation. Add blogging software to this mix, whether it is used as an editor or only for publishing and you may have a rather frustrated writer on your hands. Sure, maybe writers aren’t technically gifted. Perhaps they are challenged by the so-called intuitive interface featured in some word processing or blogging softwares. But they may be living in a different mindset, a different state of consciousness which doesn’t see things as techie application creators do. What might be incredibly cool to a software developer may be incredibly cumbersome to a wordsmith. A couple of folks I know who are intrigued by writing, are interested in pursuing it further. They deserve a place where they can get ready feedback on their work to encourage their development; blogging would fit that bill quite neatly. Yet the software available now will discourage these people, keep their works hidden in the recesses of their desk or their harddrives. They don’t want to mess with anything more complicated than typing out their thoughts and pushing a button to save and publish; they simply may not be able to deal with anything more than that, especially if they’ve typed their brains out in a creative rush. Imagine something like War and Peace, squirreled away in a home office, unseen and unshared. That’s a large segment of the real blog market that needs to be served. Not just one that requires low barriers into blogging. It’s one that requires low barriers into writing and publication comment []
|
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
