Zack Exley

Bible sentiment analysis 23 November, 2011

Sentiment analysis on the bible — by OpenBible.info

Bible sentiment analysis from OpenBible.info CLick to enlarge

my public key 24 May, 2011

ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAABIwAAAQEAnxY39MUzzNTIfKkR20U/qTl3+ayt5RM3CwoQQKdFMLw6waL3GC7F7XjbY8EOFnm52eDyGWsfdoHfZSOYJADc+Qs/e8T2aqXHcKTYSo2Y8JZRw6qmzthvGJUIGfG/A7BrK3oj1nSwyp75EkU+qSCtnIUfYyg2hwiqNc+IHdRPxp/hJyl2oqrXTLk2+XpOrdWjPMhTPwjzj1i1ZV3HGM4xBTye1W1ZFTH/2SETlSTLRhoczahCKt9g0TdCxMBqNHVSRTmzZ8IcF//LEdQRYxfjyPQpjmcEotXvmB2dXoimq375IM4D/Ml50dCiH2a79vPee/BG2NV9FTlRfCvqOmQuDQ==

U.S. Churches: Homogenous since the revolution? 26 March, 2010

I thought the class and ethnic homogeneity of the American church was a recent development — mid 20th century or something. But according to Gordon Wood in Empire of Liberty, American churches became homogenous when they became democratic in the wake of the revolution.

Before the revolution, the class hierarchies of the community were reproduced inside the church. After the revolution, the ‘middling sort’ of people (the lower/middle class) asserted their equality in a radical cultural revolution that changed everything from the way people dressed (the origin of the dull gray suit) to the way people addressed each other (everyone became a ‘mister’). That happen in all social settings. For example: students went wild on college campuses, burning buildings, mocking their professors, even beating their college presidents when necessary! (Parallels to the Chinese Cultural Revolution.)

But it also happened in church. The lower and middle ‘sorts’ (they didn’t say ‘classes’ yet) pointed to the New Testament’s egalitarianism (Don’t give those good seats to the rich guys!) and demanded equality in spiritual fellowship.

Guess what the rich folk did? They left and formed their own congregations, or became Universalists, or stayed in their old congregations when all the middling sorts left for the new evangelical Methodist, Baptist and other 2nd Great Awakening churches.

The NT paints a picture of congregations that were both egalitarian AND mixed class…doesn’t it? The Catholic Church has always included mixed classes as long as the geography of the parish has. In the reformation, congregations were mixed, but probably not so egalitarian. Is it worth hoping that the American church in the 21st century is a place where people can, to use Shane’s phrase, “fall in love across class lines?”

Who’s scarier: Heath Ledger’s Joker or Glenn Beck 18 March, 2010

Glenn Beck *is* Heath Ledger’s Joker. I’m serious: same intonation, same delivery. It’s terrifying because the guy actually exists in real life, and has millions of followers. Listen to the clips below and make your own comparison.

Americans are freaking out, as they should be, as their society and economy crumbles down around them. If you don’t know that’s what’s happening, then you’re not paying attention. Glenn Beck is one of the few prominent voices who’s connecting full-on with that very appropriate anxiety.

But he’s using a classic, uncreative stunt to do it: demonizing a false enemy — in this case “communists,” a category that includes for Beck everyone from Woodrow Wilson to Obama to Wallis and even to little old me.

But over the past few months he’s gone beyond political attack to almost sexualized sadism (“pounding” the Reverend Jim Wallis “all night long”???). He has been taunting and threatening his targets in breathless whispers and hysterical screams, separated with dramatic pauses and prolonged evil villain cackles. Listen for yourself.

Joker:

Should I post this?: One Reason I Will Have Trouble Voting for the Dems in 2010 17 March, 2010

Should I post this on HuffPo? I got a little worked up…so I thought I’d ask your opinion first.

One Reason I Will Have Trouble Voting for the Dems in 2010

Tonight, when I read Representative John Larson’s “Top Ten Immediate Benefits You’ll Get When Health Care Reform Passes“, the first thing that came into my mind was the memory of a Pennsylvania worker named James who once told me how he traded his $30/hour job at Bethlehem Steel for a nearly minimum wage job in a nursing home.

In the 1980′s, a company called USX bought up most of the American steel industry with the intention of milking it for cash while gradually dismantling it. Step One was busting the union. The company proposed a deep pay cut in contract negotiations. It cited low wages in the rising Korean Steel industry. At the time, the Korean government was investing billions of dollars to develop steel as a national champion. Today Korean steelworkers make up a big chunk of the high-income Korean middle class. But I digress.

Humiliated, James and his fellow workers voted to accept the pay cut. USX then made it clear that their intention was to provoke the workers to strike, no matter what it took. It immediately came back with a new demand for an even deeper pay cut.

James told me, “Some of the union leaders told us we should accept what they offered — that a $15/hour job was a hell of a lot better than a $5/hour job.” This time, though, he and most of his co-workers voted against the second cut.

“You have to be able to look yourself in the mirror,” he said, “I wasn’t going to be able to do that if I had said, ‘yeah, go ahead, take away everything, I don’t mind.’ Sometimes it gets to a point when you have to say go f–k yourself. Because they’re going to take what they want with or without your consent. They’re only asking your consent because they don’t want to think of you as a human being any more. Only animals walk themselves willingly to the slaughterhouse.”

John Larson’s top “immediate benefit” is: “Prohibit pre-existing condition exclusions for children in all new plans.”

Do I have to spell out what that means? As it stands in the apparent bill they’re going to vote on, the Democrats are not willing to protect all Americans from the “pre-existing condition” scam — but are attempting to win our consent by dangling a promise to cover our children. My best friend in high school lived below the poverty line — something we never talked about until recently. He told me about the terror he felt when his mother could not go to the doctor, and the shame that he felt when she was able to take him thanks to a program that covered children only.

The Dems say we should trust that adults too will be protected, according the current bill, starting in 2014. Why the wait? It is simply a concession to insurance companies who will reap at least an additional few years of super profits and at most get the new rules repealed. Meanwhile, I have several friends with “pre-existing conditions” who are in trouble right now. Larson’s second “immediate benefit” is that they will be put in a “temporary high risk pool”. Will that pool be subsidized? How much will my friends have to pay? What if they can’t afford it?

What can possibly explain why the Democrats would write the bill to protect only children from the pre-existing condition scam and not everyone? Don’t be distracted by talk of campaign contributions or “pressure” from lobbyists. Donations from one industry are not going to make the difference to any candidates. Moreover, any candidate who stood up to insurance lobbyists would find the lost contributions more than replaced by rewards from the grassroots. And finally, you dumbasses, the health care donors are simply going to give you MORE money if you vote against them in hopes of winning you over the next time.

The hard truth is that the Democrats, as a body, don’t care if you have health care. They are just as much on the side of the insurance companies as James’ sold-out union was on the side of USX.

Over decades, insurance companies have worked together with corrupt and careless politicians to make super profits while bleeding America of nearly one fifth of our total economic product. It would be wrong to blame the insurance companies for this — because, after all, their purpose is to maximize profit. Politicians — both Democratic and Republican — wrote the regulations that give a handful of companies an oligopoly and prevents a normal competitive market from developing. Single payer or Medicare For All would be great — but baring that, I’d settle for a normal insurance market over this Soviet-style oligopolistic bureaucracy that stands between us and our doctors today. Instead, what we have is a cancer that’s devouring the whole American economy.

Just ask yourself why the price of computers falls by half every few years and the price of health insurance doubles every few years? In the information age, you’re telling me that there’s no way to arrange for the sharing of health care costs that more efficient than how our health insurance dinosaurs do it now?

That’s not it. We’re simply being taken advantage of. And our elected representatives are the ones handing us over for the slaughter. And now, the 2010 elections are coming up. And the Democrats are going to be asking us to vote for them again. I’m not voting for the bastards. I’m going to do what James did. I’m going to tell them to go to hell. And don’t say to me it’s because I’m covered. I’m right in the middle of worrying about health insurance coverage for my family. Last year we had to pay Cobra because we had the “pre-existing condition” of a pregnancy. And now I’ve got a baby girl to worry about who may go un-covered for a couple months now that our Cobra is running out.

What the Democrats are doing is wrong. It’s not a “compromise” with anyone but the American people. It’s a defense of the Insurance industry — an industry in which a number of the execs are actually embarrassed about how lavishly they’ve been protected at the expense of the American people. Of course they have an army of lobbyists. It is their job to lobby for rules that benefit them. And it is the peoples’ representatives to say, “Sorry, no.”

And it is the American people’s job to say, “Sorry, No” to any political party who asks us to casts votes in favor of our own demise.

Understand the financial crisis in 5 minutes 17 March, 2010

Jon Stewart explains the whole thing!

His explanation starts at 5:00 in this clip.

Widows and orphans 14 March, 2010

Early Christian communities used to feed widows and orphans in their cities — and not just other Christians, but anyone. They fed so many that Roman officials complained the Christians were making the government look bad.

As it happens, I’ve come to know a widow here in Kansas city. She is raising three happy, brilliant children. She is a refugee who’s been resettled to Kansas City by the U.S. government. She doesn’t speak English. It’s very difficult for her to find work. She has the disadvantage of appearing as though she just walked out of the pages of National Geographic. I’m just saying…that’s how she looks to potential employers: Teeth stained black from chewing beetle nut, wearing a sarong and handwoven blouse, and one missing eye (probably from the war that took her husband). After spending many hours looking for jobs for refugees who are much closer to what employers are looking for than she is, I’m confident there is no job for her here. And anyways: her kids have a hard enough time in this society as it is. I’d hate to see them left alone in their public housing project all day, and/or all evening, as their mom worked in some far off factory or warehouse.

She’s collecting welfare, which will last another few years. Then she will have no support (thanks to the limits on welfare passed by that tax and spend liberal Bill Clinton).

Would any Christians out there like to help take care of this widow and her children? My family can pitch in $100 a month. But that’s only enough to make our relationship with her extremely complicated — not enough to actually give her any stability. If anyone wants to join in helping, let me know and I can share more information about the family and their needs.

9 million American workers in the street 19 March, 2009

French unions claim three million in the streets today — the second huge mobilization in just a few months. Police estimates were 1.2 million.

Hey Hey Ho Ho Le Capitalisme has got to go! A few weeks ago I met some people involved in building the “New Anti-Capitalist Party” over there, one force involved in these mobilizations. It’s an almost mainstream thing. A guy named Olivier Besancenot is the most visible spokesperson — and in opinion polls he’s scoring above the French president for credibility. It’s an old radical party that disbanded itself and reformed along more open, non-sectarian lines. Some of the leaders I met reminded me in a way of the kind of new political activists you find in movements like MoveOn or the Dean or Obama campaigns: people who have wanted change for a long time but who were deterred by tired old organizations with their boring meetings and confused messages and jumbled agendas.

If we split the difference on those crowd numbers, and call it 1.8 million, and then adjust it to be in proportion to the American population, that’d be 9 million American workers in the street!

Can you imagine that? It’s happened here, actually — in the great organizing movements during and after the Great Depression and before that in the struggle for the 10 hour day.

Secret worlds 24 January, 2009

OK — here’s something. But then look below to see how Neil Gaiman said the same thing (at least of the first half), but in three sentences and way better! I just saw the Gaiman quote yesterday before I was about to post this.

The most important thing to remember is the infinity of the person sitting next to you on the bus, or the person bagging your groceries, or your mother.

It’s a good way to remind yourself of the truth of the principal of equal worth of all people. If you’re anything like me, you need a reminder too every now and then.

Every human brain is a universe of trillions of neurons. Even each one of those neurons is a whole world in itself, with millions of mysterious systems that still have scientists shrugging their shoulders.

These days any desktop computer with the right software can simulate a whole galaxy of stars. Astronomers plug in the positions of all the stars and the computer says exactly where they’ll be in a thousand years or a million. A galaxy is simple. The brain of the kid who sewed the tag into my t-shirt, on the other hand, is bigger and more complex than a whole universe of galaxies.

What does that mean? It means that, just like me, he has dreams in full color that he will only vaguely remember when he wakes up—dreams that would be Oscar-winning films if only they could somehow be extracted. It means that his internal musings on the meaning of life—which in his case were particularly fruitful from ages nine to eleven when the sweatshop had him mostly working on the quieter machines facing the windows—are rich enough to fuel an entire religion. If you’re not buying it, then put the book down for a minute and think back hard to some of the stuff you used to think about when you were nine. Remember it? Remember how big it was? It’s possible you’ve forgotten, because don’t we all know that nine year olds are not deep philosophers or dreamers of beautiful stories?

It’s a cruel thing that words are the only medium that most of us have to share the universes of our minds with other people. A feeling is worth a thousand billion words. There’s simply no way to really convey what goes on in our minds, even with the people we spend our lives with. Though there is no way out of this isolation, many religions have a beautiful way of dealing with it. They have an abbreviation for the infinity of the mind: God.

That’s why I fell in love with the Christians, once I got to know them. Because even those ridiculous ones, the ones with the giant planks coming out of their eyes who are always trying to pick specs out of yours — even they will admit to the infinity of your soul while they are damning it to hell.

In one version of heaven that I have heard preached in the churches I’ve been visiting, everyone who has ever lived will be resurrected into healthy, strong bodies with newly sharpened minds. Our job will be to worship God and enjoy each other. It will go on forever and we will all get to know each other infinitely.

I like that version of heaven. That kid from the sweat shop and I will talk for several lifetimes until we have pulled up every forgotten dream. And we’ll do that with everyone who’s ever lived. You and I will hang out for hundreds of years, joking around, composing poems, making movies and laying around in the grass looking at star filled skies (if there are grass and stars — I hope there will be).

Christians believe that God has a plan for humanity on Earth. We’re building toward Heaven, but it’s more than that. I’m still trying to understand. But the Bible doesn’t say anything about what God’s plan will be once everyone is resurrected and the New Heaven and New Earth are in full swing. Surely he’s got something up his sleeve, and another Bible will have to be written then.

And the image I had when I was writing that thing was of universe-sized minds connected only by thin lines of words. This picture is by a guy with a geek comic called xkcd.

Starving in America 18 November, 2008

One in eight Americans “struggling to feed themselves” this year…from the AP:

Some 691,000 children went hungry in America sometime in 2007, while close to one in eight Americans struggled to feed themselves adequately even before this year’s sharp economic downturn, the Agriculture Department reported Monday.

The department’s annual report on food security showed that during 2007 the number of children who suffered a substantial disruption in the amount of food they typically eat was more than 50 percent above the 430,000 in 2006 and the largest figure since 716,000 in 1998.

Overall, the 36.2 million adults and children who struggled with hunger during the year was up slightly from 35.5 million in 2006. That was 12.2 percent of Americans who didn’t have the money or assistance to get enough food.

Almost a third of those, 11.9 million adults and children, went hungry at some point. That figure has grown by more than 40 percent since 2000. The government says these people suffered a substantial disruption in their food supply at some point and classifies them as having “very low food security.” Until the government rewrote its definitions two years ago, this group was described as having “food insecurity with hunger.”

Read the whole story.