The Religious Society of Friends group on Facebook is very quiet on the subject of impending war with Iran. That's a kind of silence I don't want to be around.  I left the group.  Not enough authentic Quakerism for my taste.

As a clerk of IT (information technology) for our Yearly Meeting, I studied the work of our indigenous members, who were busy building our multi-meeting database. That baton has since been passed, and the work continues.  We haven't outsourced (yet) to a non-Quaker commercial firm.  We use PHP with MySQL.

In my day, we kept track of meeting…

I'm reaching out to Friends in higher education with my recent Youtubes, which I'm free to distribute outside of Alphabet (Google) just as well.  A lot of my viewers don't ever watch Youtubes.

Scouting developed as a result of some folks wanting to abstract the fun part of military campaigning. Lets not…

Quaker Journaling 2.0 was ordinary blogging.

[ originally posted on Medium ]

Do you know the etymology of “grok”? To the best of my knowledge, it comes from Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein.

You’d think I’d have talked a lot more about…

[ EXHIBIT 1: Recent posting to npym-it-discuss, a listserv for those in NPYM interesting in yakking about matters IT ]

The Unitarians are more at the forefront than Friends on this initiative, however we had a number of Quakers at the Iran Forum where this proposal was floated, receiving much interest and applause. I'll give a link in the comments to my journal entry on our meeting.  Portland is already sister cities with a lot of others, like Chicago is, including Sapporo (Japan) and Ashkelon (Israel).

Given my connections to higher education, I'm especially keen to share Silicon Forest curriculum…

[SNEC = Synergeticists of the Northeast Corridor ]

Because I went to a fancy school (Princeton) and studied philosophy, I'm used to such as Dr. Walter Kaufman suggesting that "university philosophy" was a subject with zero backbone, a spineless trajectory for dweebs.  That was a challenge to us of course, to make it be otherwise. We were the new generation. He told me directly in his office he thought I was best of breed, in terms of my writing.



Wittgenstein too begged his…

[memo to a listserv for faculty and Peace Corps vets, a couple typos fixed, I think I'll add this to Medium]



I was pleased to see the militaries colluding to put on a fun show for the vicious masses, eager for fireworks. TV voyeurs love a great spectacle. Many are whining they want more. They want to "rubbleize" Damascus. "Please please please give us more violence".



Choosing to attack supposed…

One might think "mumbling" describes it better, as more incoherent than not, however "murmuring" sounds better.  Today is Easter, and April Fools.

I'm meditating on the foolishness of Man, quite appropriately. I'm going back to Genesis 2-3 when they apparently had the choice of a second tree's fruit, the fruit of Eternal Life.

Given a choice between Eternal Life and this other thing God said no about, and that had a snake on it, a talking one, Man chose this other thing. How…

I've long been aware of this branch in Jewish Orthodoxy and have wondered if the free-from-nations movement (FFNM) would be regarded as offensive to them. Paradox: FFNM encourages each self-respecting nation to fulfill plans for world domination virtually meaning: assume you've won, the world is your…

As one respectful and grateful to science, and yet a believer in continuing revelation, to me it's clear what a Chosen People we are, as hominid inhabitants of this "Global U" or "universe city" called Earth.  Likewise I see our Promised Land is a spherical body, with a relatively large moon, situated amongst other such spherical bodies, none so much an Eden nor genesis zone.

The theatrics of nation-states, on the other hand, seem increasingly phony to me, nothing serious enough on…

Friends gathered at the Stark Street meetinghouse for this public-invited showing of 13th, a widely distributed, award-winning documentary about the ongoing cultural and civil war in North America.

Although Lincoln declared the slaves free, an opening shot in his war to preserve the Union, the South was not on board with providing them with full human rights overnight.  Women couldn't vote yet either.  A system of apartheid…