Many Americans think of Pat Robertson as buffoon, a foil, a fading TVangelist who asked God to kill a Supreme Court justice he doesn’t like. But to the rest of the world, he’s an important American religious leader who meets with our president and who once ran for the office himself. So, when Robertson suggests that we murder the president of Venezuela, the democratically elected leader of another country — which happens to be the world’s fifth largest oil producer — because the alternative is to start a war, the rest of the world is not going to laugh in anticipation of the Saturday Night Live sketch that will result.

It’s not enough for Rumsfeld to say “Certainly it’s against the law. Our department doesn’t do that type of thing” and “Private citizens say all kinds of things all the time.” He and President Bush need to say more than that they’re not taking the suggestion, but it’s fine with them for a religious leader to make such suggestions. They should — IMO — say that while private citizens can say what they like, they find the suggestion despicable and anti-democratic. Reacting as they have so far makes America less safe.

They could even blurt out the truth that Robertson is getting crazier with age and has been making a fool of himself for years now.
[Tags: venezuela PatRobertson HugoChavez]

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I learned in Guy Hart-Davis’ excellent Word Annoyances (O’Reilly) that Word has a “work menu” that lists the files you designate so you can easily load ones that you use frequently. To install it, go to Tools > Customize > Built-in Menus and drag “Work Menu” onto your tool bar. Nice!

But I couldn’t figure out how to remove an entry from the list. PCPlus has an answer, and, although it’s ridiculously complex, it’s the best one I could find. If you know of an easier way to delete an entry from the Work Menu, let me know. Anyway, PCPlus says to go to Tools > Customize > All Commands and drag ‘”ToolsCustomizeRemoveMenuShortcut” to your toolbar. (Right-click on it and rename it before you close the Customize dialogue box.) Now when you click on it and then click on the Work menu, it lets you click on an entry you want to remove.

Omigod, didn’t anyone at Microsoft use the Work menu before it shipped?

By the way, if the PCPlus technique doesn’t work, this page has a macro that supposedly will do the trick. I haven’t tried it, so take it as is:

Public Sub DeleteWorkMenuItems()
Dim i As Long
Dim nDelete As Long
With WorkMenuItems
For i = .Count To 1 Step -1
nDelete = MsgBox( _
Prompt:=”Delete “”” & .Item(i).Name & “””?”, _
Buttons:=vbYesNoCancel, _
Title:=”Delete Item from menu”)
If nDelete = vbCancel Then Exit For
If nDelete = vbYes Then .Item(i).Delete
Next i
End With
End Sub

It also has a macro you can attach as an item on your work menu. (If you’re not comfortable with Word macros, skip it! I am not responsible, etc.) [Tags: annoyances WordAnnoyances word Microsoft tips]

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We used to believe that the world was divided into those who believe the truth and those who don’t. Our job was to convert them, kill them, or let them live their lives peacefully unaware they were about to plummet into an eternity of fire for believing the wrong things.

Then we were able to communicate at the speed of light rather than at the speed of wind, so we learned more about other cultures. At least some of us grudgingly concluded that those other people were entitled to their contrary beliefs. The world, we admitted, was unsatisfyingly relativistic and we attempted the impossible task of believing that beliefs for which we were willing to die were no better than their contradictions. Different strokes for different belief systems.

Then the Internet happened and the world fell into conversation. It’s no longer a matter of getting reports back on the strange beliefs of distant lands — “Why, in China crickets are considered to be smart and monkeys to be dumb…Believe it or not!” — but an immediate awareness that we’re all living within a single conversation space. We may not actually be IM’ing Chinese Communists or Jihadists, but we at least know that what’s being said in one corner of the Web is being refracted elsewhere. And we know that we can pick up the Skype phone and actually talk with a Communist. Where there aren’t actual conversations, there is now the constant awareness of the potential for conversation.

There is a big difference between a relativistic world in which contrary beliefs assert themselves and a conversational world in which contrary beliefs talk with one another. In the relativistic world, we resign ourselves to the differences. In the conversational world, the differences talk. Even though neither side is going to “win” — conversation is the eternal fate of humankind — knowledge becomes the negotiation of beliefs in a shared world. What do we need to talk through? What can’t we give up? What do we believe in common that seems so different? What should we just not talk about? These are the questions that now shape knowledge.

Knowledge is not the body of beliefs that needs no further discussion. Knowledge is the neverending conversation. And much of that conversation is precisely about what we can disagree about and still share a world.

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