yesterday is a wrinkle on your forehead
yesterday is a promise that you’ve broken
don’t close your eyes, don’t close your eyes
this is your life and today is all you’ve got now
yeah, and today is all you’ll ever have
don’t close your eyes
don’t close your eyes
this is your life, are you who you want to be
this is your life, are you who you want to be
this is your life, is it everything you dreamed that it would be
when the world was younger and you had everything to lose

Someday will have to be today at one point or another. Today is all we have. #

This is one of my favorite quotes (often attributed to Plato, but it was probably said by Ian Maclaren):

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.

There are things, many things you don’t know about a person. Of course people vary. But it’s true overall. The heart hides things you might not think can be hidden. But we’re pretty good at this.

There’s not really much else to say until you’ve understood this, seen and known somebody hiding such pain. There was a Mefite who recently comitted suicide. He left a sad, sad note. He never told anyone about his demons and his experiences with professional help were pretty poor.

And he hid it. He was a nice guy. You might not have any idea he was so often in pain, he was so pleasant and kind.

And so he left his story in a note before he killed himself. You didn’t know, I didn’t know, his parents didn’t care. He was ashamed; he didn’t think anybody could care.

It’s so easy to hurt people, to tear them down because you’re annoyed, scared, stupid, not thinking, offended by the front they put up to hide what’s inside, and so on and so on.

Of course you should always be kind, love everybody. But maybe it would be a little easier if you remember that everyone is fighting a hard battle, even the people you don’t think are. Everybody holds inside things you can’t see, perhaps things that are utterly crushing. Everybody’s got a fight somewhere.

Sad to say, here I am apologizing for not posting. The thing is, our esteemed ranter Caleb is taking a break. And everybody else has been keeping busy, even including me.

Yep.

I’ll write some stuff. But it could be slow. Stick the blog in your RSS reader or grab an email subscription and then wait for it to cook.

There’s a cool (or red-hot, depending on your view) anti-establishment attitude afoot. A well-deserved one, I should say, yet it has a problem. It’s wrong to hate people, even in groups. We should reserve our hate for sin and forgive people instead.

Groups are, of course, made up of human beings. People are the same inside of a group as outside. In a group, though, individual people are not always to blame for a corporate wrong. For instance, I am a citizen of the United States, ruled by the people, yet I am not directly to blame for our many problems. Yet I am a, albiet small, member of the party to be blamed.

Furthermore, it’s wrong to hate people. In Matthew 5, Jesus described hate, a murder in the heart. In addition, he commanded love for our enemies and prayer for our persecuters. We should not have an attitude of hate, but one of love. And the two cannot coexist.

However, greed, selfishness, unethical business practices, and all other sins are just as wrong in groups, too. We should condemn these things. There are wrong things here. Groups should change.

Indeed, if I sell you three pounds of peanuts, but bag 2 and a half for you, I’ve sinned. You shouldn’t hate me, but you should hate what I’ve done. And I’m not off the hook. I still owe you half a pound of peanutes (and probably some extra) and a confession. While there is still an issue, those wronged should be forgiving, but not dismissing of the wrong. Reconciliation is important, personally and in business.

Groups have problems. Some have massive problems. Neither fact absolves the duty to hate sin and not the sinners, the problem and not the foolish. Be ever forgiving, even of AT&T.

The Google Chrome Team wrote a small book about browsers and the web. It’s a basic introduction to browsers and the modern web, well written and easily readable.

It’s also designed and published using HTML5, no Flash needed. Thus, you should grab a modern browser like Chrome or Firefox and then enjoy the book in fullscreen. Really quite delightful.

Kind of distracting way to start reading

Take this screencap of an article on The Weekly Standard. All those flashy colors on the sidebar make it hard to concentrate, especially since your eyes hit them every time they get to the end of a line. And that’s just one thing in a pile of stuff that can make it hard to read. Ugly fonts, small fonts, crazy colors, flashing banners, and on it goes.

Fortunately, there’s a little tool that makes web reading a billion times² easier. It’s called Readability.

The same page viewed with Readability in a smaller browser window

Readability is a bookmarklet that strips away the extraneous elements of a page leaving you with nicely formatted content. Often, it will kill off the comments section, too (not a great loss on most public sites).

It’s also amazingly robust, extracting the content from almost any page I’ve wanted to throw at it (home pages and the like excepted, because it’s not designed for that).

Fret not, customization is easy. If, for some reason, you don’t enjoy reading medium size Athelas typeface with wide margins, change it: margins, typeface, size. Whatever you prefer. There’s even an option to convert links to footnotes, which is excellent for pages that look like a Wikipedia entry.

That’s it. No extra bells and whistles. In fact, it’s more like no bells and whistles. Which is awesome.

© Lisa Kimberly

OpenCongress published a blog post yesterday reporting that the two most viewed bills right now are “outlandish, non-viable proposals that have no support and no chance of being taken seriously by congressional leaders, ever.” A lot of traffic is arriving at these bills via searches.

These bills top the list because of chain emails. The sort that posit, in eye bleeding colors and typefaces, conservative conspiracy theories about clandestine government operations or ridiculous proposals. What is the problem with these viral messages? Citation needed. The people passing on the emails might feel they’ve fulfilled their duty to expose these heinous schemes, but the truth is nothing of the sort.

In reality, they merely muck up the issue and possess a lack of trustworthiness and verifiability. Some person or group of persons crafts a scare message, passes it on, and the recipients pass it on, and on, and on, and who knows who sent it in the first place or if it’s even the same message anymore.

Contrast this to the model of open information, say a blog post on OpenCongress. The writers present the subject clearly and cite sources. The post has a URL. Anybody can link to it. It doesn’t change. It’s open, trustworthy and verifiable information.

Peer-to-peer messages do not work for getting accurate and helpful information out. Citation needed.

Since yesterday happened to be National Coming Out Day, I took the opportunity (albeit a day late) to express my thoughts on the topic.

My number one point is: we should love lesbians, gays, bi- and transexuals the same as everybody else. They don’t deserve to be despised or hated. In most ways, they are exactly like everybody else. In fact, they are everybody else. In one sense, it is as irrational to hate them as to hate left-handed people. Their differences from what one might call traditional views of sexuality do not justify hatred; neither does being a lefty.

Now, about this coming out bit. In a way that truly isn’t contrary to what I just said, I believe that in absolute truth, these sexual deviances are sinful. This fact directly makes the celebration of LGBT lifestyles sinful. While again that does not entitle you or me or anyone to hate these people. It does mean that they will suffer the consequences of their sin, whatever form that may take. That is not man’s responsibility but God’s right¹.

In the lives of our friends, family, larger culture, and selves, these lifestyles do create problems: STDs, breakdown of the family, loss of sexual profundity. We can take issue with that. Depending on who we are, we should take issue with that. People, especially Christians living in sin, can be confronted. We can engage. We can write, like I do now. We can rest in the satisfaction of godly sexuality and permeate the world with generational fruit. In fact, we’re supposed to.

But all that—never, never destroys our duty to love these people.

One person saying something is a minnow in the sea.

10,000 people saying the same thing is a leviathan.

Don’t be discouraged, you can make a difference. The USA is still a free country. The millions who defy apathy—they are the ones that make the difference. You can be one of them.

Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote.

-George Jean Nathan

The two important things: Make sure you are registered to vote (in many states, there is still time to sign up before the November elections) and then vote with your conviction!

Pass the message on.