the tindog coffeehouse

I was working at Microsoft at the time. Usually I’d listen to the radio on the way to work, but for some reason on the morning of September 11, 2001, I didn’t.

I showed up for work a little before 8:00 AM, and the office was still pretty quiet. I walked down the row of cubicles to say hi to my friend Larry, and I found him staring at his monitor. “Did you hear about this?” he asked. Of course I hadn’t. “A plane crashed into the World Trade Center.” Oh my God! How awful!

I got back to my desk and pulled up any news website I could get, trying to find out what happened. Normally, there were TVs at the end of the rows permanently tuned to MSNBC, but none of them had been working for a week or so. And now I couldn’t reach any of the major news sites (msnbc.com, cnn.com, etc.) as they were all flooded with traffic. I was able to get some information on the Dallas Morning News site, though, and kept reloading it over and over to try and get the latest updates. This was a terrible accident!

Then came the news that another plane had hit the other tower, and we understood that it was no accident.

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Over the weekend, I closed my Facebook account. Technically, it’s “deactivated”, meaning I can log back in and reactivate it later if I choose. I’m not sure I want to, though.

It wasn’t a rash decision; it was something I had considered numerous times before. And honestly, even as I clicked the button to deactivate it, I had mixed feelings about doing so. But I did it anyway.

Why? I think I finally just ran out of patience with it. Every single thing I did on the site, whether I changed my profile picture, posted a photo, or updated my status, resulted in some kind of response from someone, and the responses weren’t always welcome. Just this weekend my “friends” told me I looked like a serial killer, offered me unwanted (and not very accurate) medical advice, and tried to coax me into a political fight. Between that and the never-ending barrage of Facebook quizzes and other nonsense, I had simply had enough. (And I’m not the only one.)

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From Searching for God Knows What by Donald Miller:

When the church began to doubt its own integrity after the Darwinian attack on Genesis 1 and 2, we began to answer science, not by appealing to something greater, the realm of beauty and art and spirituality, but by attempting to translate spiritual realities through scientific equations, thus justifying ourselves to culture, as if culture had some kind of authority to redeem us in the first place. …

In fact, much of biblical truth must go out the window when you approach it through the scientific method.  God does not live within the philosophical science He made, any more than He is bound by the natural realities of gravity. There is moral law, to be sure, but moral law is not our path to heaven; our duty involves knowing and being known by Christ. …

In a culture that worships science, relational propositions will always be left out of arguments attempting to surface truth. We believe, quite simply, that unless you can chart something, it doesn’t exist. And you can’t chart relationships. Furthermore, in our attempts to make relational propositions look like chartable realities, all beauty and mystery is lost. And so when times get hard, when reality knocks us on our butts, mathematical propositions are unable to comfort our failing hearts. How many people have walked away from faith because their systematic theology proved unable to answer the deep longings and questions of the soul? What we need here, truly, is faith in a Being, not a list of ideas.

Previously:
When we worship God

First, a quick rant. Thanks to the Louisiana-Monroe game being on pay-per-view and the Wyoming game being on the Versus network (which was just dropped by DirecTV over a financial dispute), it looks like I’m going to miss the first two Texas football games of the season, which really blows. I mean, I’ve been jonesing since January for some college football, and now that it’s finally here, I’ve gotta wait two more weeks? Argh! It’s killing me!

OK, rant over. Deep breath. Serenity now! Ah, much better.

So last year I tried a season-long experiment in which I played NCAA College Football on the Wii every week, pitting the Longhorns against that week’s opponent to see if the video game score was any indication of the real score. The answer was that, well, no, it wasn’t too accurate. So while I had fun playing video games every week, I won’t be repeating the experiment this year. Sorry to disappoint you.

However, I did want to weigh in with my thoughts about the upcoming season. Basically, it comes down to this: The Horns have to win. Period.

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Back in April, Senators Jay Rockefeller and Olympia Snowe introduced two bills, 773 and 778, which would’ve essentially given the President the unilateral ability to shut down any services on the Internet — even those from the private sector — in the case of a “cybersecurity emergency”. But the bills didn’t stop there. They would’ve also given the Commerce Department “access to all relevant data concerning [critical] networks without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule, or policy restricting such access.”

As Wired points out, S-773 has been revised significantly since then, removing much of the controversial language and replacing it with more sensible (albeit general) guidelines for dealing with with cyber attacks on the U.S.:

(2) [I]n the event of an immediate threat to strategic national interests involving compromised Federal Government or United States critical infrastructure information system or network—
(A) [the President] may declare a cybersecurity emergency; and
(B) may, if the President finds it necessary for the national defense and security, and in coordination with relevant industry sectors, direct the national response to the cyber threat and the timely restoration of the affected critical infrastructure information system or network;
(3) shall, in coordination with various critical infrastructure industry sectors, develop detailed cyber emergency response and restoration plans for each critical infrastructure industry sector;

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