Cox Crow

The Company We Love to Hate

Rick Ochoa pointed out Stick a Quark in It, which mentions a minor tussle at a Fred Ebrahimi spiel delivered in New York recently. Tony mentioned this in passing the other day. Apparently the audience wasn't just sitting there, taking their beating like good little consumers.

Indeed, these witnesses attest, audience questions about Mac OS X provoked an Ebrahimi tirade of Old Testament proportions: Quark’s Dear Leader told his squirming guests that "the Macintosh platform is shrinking," and that "publishing is dying." He suggested that anyone dissatisfied with Quark’s Mac commitment should "switch to something else," although he insisted that making the move to Adobe’s long-Carbonized InDesign package is "committing suicide."

4:33:51 PM # Google It!
categories: Low-Hanging Fruit

Linkages

Jon Udell -> AllConsuming -> Mullahs on the Mainframe -> unmedia -> subscribed

I'm just too much of a dilettante to concentrate on system administration for longer than it takes to type reboot. :-)

4:21:13 PM # Google It!
categories: Writing Online

The End of the World as we know it

Googling my titles, I found an excellent piece from PBS's Frontline on apocalypticism.

4:06:07 PM # Google It!

The Apocalypse

And now for some hypertextual literary exposition. In the title and the second paragraph of his essay, Mr. Floyd refers to William Butler Yeats's "The Second Coming."

Now it may be that it is still a tyranny in utero, a rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem—or in this case, Washington—to be born, and not yet the full-blown monster, fangs bared and back plated with bristling armored scales.

And thence, through "The Second Coming," referring back to the Revelation of John, specifically to Revelation 13, the coming of the Beast.

There's an interesting confluence of streams here, as the Revelation is frequently interpreted as being predictive of the present day, that we are now living in the End Times before the return of Christ. In this Messianic tradition, the Mark of the Beast

And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads

is seen in the Social Security Number, efforts to establish national identity cards and invasive means of tracking the populace, or even in bar codes.

While one interpretation sees the Revelation as predictive, a slight variant sees it as prescriptive: these things must come to pass before Christ can return. Thus, if we wish the Messiah to come, we must needs help things along. It is this interpretation that prescribes the destruction of the Dome of the Rock to rebuild the Temple, and the necessity of a war in Israel.

11:17:18 AM # Google It!

Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely

A country whose leader has the power to imprison any citizen whatsoever, on his order alone, and hold them indefinitely, in military custody, without access to the courts, without a lawyer, without any charges, their fate determined solely by the leader's arbitrary whim—that country is a tyranny, not a democracy, not a republic, not a union of free citizens.
"Rough Beast Slouching: The Birth of an American Tyranny," Chris Floyd, CounterPunch, November 23, 2002 [via Wealth Bondage]

10:50:29 AM # Google It!
categories: Law, Politics

Power Corrupts

John Ashcroft on snooping:

The administration's interest in all e-mail is a wholly unhealthy precedent, especially given this administration's track record on FBI files and IRS snooping. Every medium by which people communicate can be subject to exploitation by those with illegal intentions. Nevertheless, this is no reason to hand Big Brother the keys to unlock our e-mail diaries, open our ATM records, read our medical records, or translate our international communications.

10:45:39 AM # Google It!
categories: Law, Politics