If my link in the sidebar doesn't help you understand blogging, this may.

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(Via David Weinbergers's JOHO blog) JOHO - October 15, 2003:
John Ashcroft had the chutzpah to stage the Boston leg of his pro-PATRIOT Act road show in Faneuil Hall, where Sam Adams proclaimed the liberties he was ready to die for. Apparently, this is the first time Faneuil Hall has been closed to the public for a political event since it was built in 1742.

Here are some of the signs I enjoyed:

The Bill of Rights is the real Patriot Act

Take your empire and shove it

Boston knows patriotism. This is no patriot act.

Hey Mr. Ashcroft, Little Brother is watching you!

Time for another Tea Party

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**Apparently, your news source has a lot to do with the position you hold on controversial issues. Like the Iraq war. Check out this study, via Utne.com

The Power of Propaganda

Study shows mistaken impressions about Iraq war fed by TV news. A majority of Americans held at least one of three false perceptions about the war in Iraq, according to a recent study, and these contributed to popular support for the war.
...
Importantly, the study found that the misperceptions correlated greatly with the respondent's primary news source. Eighty percent of those who relied on Fox News and 71 percent of those who relied on CBS believed at least one of the mistaken perceptions. Comparably, 47 percent of those who said they relied on newspapers and magazines and 23 percent of PBS viewers or National Public Radio listeners held at least one of the three falsities to be true.
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** Synopsis
p. 34
…many scholars are now convinced that the New Testament Gospel of John, probably written at the end of the first cen-tury, emerged from an intense debate over who Jesus was -- or is. To my surprise, having spent many months comparing the Gospel of John and the Gospel of Thomas, which may have been written at about the same time, I have now come to see that John's gospel was written in the heat of controversy, to defend certain views of Jesus and to oppose others.
What John opposed, as we shall see, includes what the Gospel of Thomas teaches -- that God's light shines not only in Jesus but, potentially at least, in everyone. Thomas's gospel encourages the hearer not so much to believe in Jesus, as John requires, as to seek to know God through one's own, divinely given capacity, since all are created in the image of God. For Christians in later generations, the Gospel of John helped provide a foundation for a unified church, which Thomas, with its emphasis on each person's search for God, did not.
35
Nevertheless, I intended that book to raise certain questions: Why had the church decided that these texts were "hereti-cal" that only the canonical gospels were "orthodox"? Who made the decisions, and under what conditions? As my colleagues and I looked for answers, I began to understand the political concerns that shaped the early Christian move-ment.

NOTE:These are simply the passages in this book that appealed to me. Undoubtedly, you would have made other selections. My purpose in presenting these excerpts is not only to give an accounting of what I deemed interesting, but to present ideas you might find interesting through your own read-ing. I encourage you to get the book, make your own notes, and share them with me.
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**If you haven't read David Weinberger's prophetic text on the Web, maybe these excerpts will whet your appetite. What I love about Weinberger is that he thinks about the deeper implications of technology - what the impact is on thought and experience and ultimate meanings.
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TROUSER SEMAPHORE
The acquired skill known as Trouser Semaphore is swiftly gaining currency as the only way for people of quality to communicate in an age of rapidly escalating background noise levels.
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