What follows is utterly precious, needing no further comment. Here's the opening sentence of some extraordinary information provided by the U.K. Guardian:
The US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.
I’ll admit up front that I’m shooting from the hip here. There are many aspects to what is happening in Wisconsin right now with parallels to several past instances in the country in the fight over workers’ rights, unions, and moneyed interests, but I frankly don’t have the time to research them all right now and get something up before it all comes to a head. Isn’t it interesting, though, that we are collectively cheering what is happening in the Middle East right now and something similar is happening right here and people don’t seem to be paying attention to what’s at stake? I grant you, it’s a stretch. But on principles, not so much. We’re talking about who has the right to speak to power and over what. The protesters in Madison aren’t having their internet access and phone service pulled and it’s doubtful the military will be called in, but on the other hand the Wisconsin state police are being asked to go get the now-labeled Wisconsin 14 and bring them back to the state capitol to vote on something that is clearly a stripping of the right of petition and assembly. So this can become very quickly a constitutional issue and that’s scary, because right now the Supreme Court has been decidedly against workers’ rights. Governor Scott is at least being clear. I’ll give him credit, he’s not ducking questions about what he’s trying to do. Wisconsin, like many states, has a budget crisis. He’s already gotten concessions from the unions, a lot of money. The unions have not balked at doing their civic duty in terms of agreeing to pay cuts, freezes on raises, and some concessions on benefits to help the state meet its budgetary responsibilities. But he’s going further and asking that all these unions be stripped of their collective bargaining abilities in order to make sure they never again demand something from the state that the legislature or the governor believes they don’t deserve. In other words, Governor Scott doesn’t ever want to have to sit down and ask them for concessions ever again—he wants to be able to just take what he wants. [More . . . ]
This cute song is about a serious issue.
As a story is passed along, it evolves. With the advent of writing, the rate of change slowed, but still continues. I was reminded of this by a delightful retelling in modern form of a story traditionally told in staid structure. Here is a chuckle-worthy modern take on the arrival of Jesus. As always, this vernal event is traditionally pasted over the older pagan winter solstice Yule festival. This retelling in modern paradigm also embraces the evolution of the Bedouin shepherds to Zoroastrian wise men to Kings, and somehow skipping l33tspeak but keeping the Renaissance garb. This tale is usually full of anachronisms and inconsistencies. But it still makes a good yarn.
For years, I’m been a big fan of WordPress. How could you not be? WordPress is amazing versatile open source software; 25 million people rely on it to publish their blogs. If there is one thing that could be a bit easier, though, it is the WordPress post editor. It works well enough, but it’s a bit clunky and the window can be confining. 
Rather than composing on the WordPress editor, then, I often write my posts on MSWord, or I dictate them in Dragon, then paste them into the WordPress post editor. One needs to be careful, though, to first strip out all of the word processing formatting tags. If you don’t, those tags can wreak havoc with the site design—they crawl outside of the post and change the formatting of other posts too, and they can even modify the homepage design. To strip out those formatting tags, I copy the finished text from my original workspace and paste it into Notepad (on Windows) and immediately copy it out and paste it into the WordPress post editor. But that requires two extras steps. And then I find myself tweaking the post once it has gone live.
Where, then, can one get the best of both worlds: A) a spacious writing area with WYSIWYG and B) no worries about formatting tags? This post is my first attempt to use Windows Live Writer, a free utility from Microsoft. I learned about it from the company that provided my magazine theme, Solostream. The screen looks very much like a well-equipped word processor. When you are finished with your post, you choose your blog (you can set up many blogs at once) from a pick list, and you are finished. You can easily format photos and videos too.
It all seems quite painless. This is an excellent product by Microsoft, which allows me to appreciate WordPress all the more. Now I’m going to hit “publish” and we’ll see how it looks.