It has been a fantastic weather day for January in Michigan. Plenty of sunshine for all creatures to enjoy!
What Is The Purpose Law?
Police in the United States have a blank check to kill because people in power have convinced citizens that if an officer feels threatened there is no consequences for their actions. Feelings cannot be proven or disproven so the result is immunity. The combination of fast, mass hiring of officers to fill law enforcement positions with a likely low threshold of evaluation on the hiring, is a threat to all citizens in the United States.
A government for the people must treat the use of lethal force against citizens with the utmost care. Any person given a gun, bullets, a badge, and the blank check to kill citizens must be throughly vetted.
Why should it be acceptable that disobedience of an officer’s orders be grounds for killing?
Further, why if you are telling a person in a car to move, does one stand in front of that car to “block it?”
Is shoot first ask questions later by officers justice? Or is this really a show of force to create a state of fear? And if the answers are yes, then how is the United States different from any of the “socialist” or “communist” or “dictatorships” of any other country in our past or current times? Isn’t shoot first ask questions later how the military works? While ICE may be organizationally apart from the military, I think their actions are of the military and should be treated accordingly.
You may think you are creating order through enforcement of law, but that is not justice and it is certainly not freedom. What we have right now in the United States is a standing army on U.S. soil killing citizens.
I agree with Cory Doctorow’s idea regarding teaching writing, but I also think he missed an important part of writing. I remember a time I had with a middle school history teacher, who having graded a test in which I had to write responses he asked me how much I read. Of course I told him a lot, to which he responded “I can tell by your writing.”
A part of becoming a good writer is reading good writing and that is not for what passes for writing on most of the Internet. You certainly don’t find good writing on social networks. Reading is implied in Doctorow’s examples of writers workshops, but it should be obvious that reading is fundamental to writing. Much of how we learn is by mimicking others, so we cannot write well if we never see or read good writing.
Article on Talking Points Memo claims January 6, 2021 is when we lost the plot in the United States. I think the train went off the tracks much earlier, probably on 9/11. I personally consider our lack of response to the murder in Sandhook Elementary as the moment because I want to believe that in a prior time the country would have been shocked in to a consensus. The reinterpretation and idolization of the Second Amendment completely blocks any form of agreement in the U.S. and I do think that is exactly what the Powers want.
Who Can Be Accountable?
I think most people trying to interpret Trumps actions in Venezuela are making a mistake of doing so through a lens of what is thought to be normal, or how or why things were done in the past.
The same formula seems to be repeated: “Trump claims the reason why he did this is because X but here is an instance of Y that is completely opposite of X.” The implication is, Trump’s claim cannot be true because it’s inconsistent. I think the real problem is paying any attention to any claim made by Trump.
Everything that Trump does appears to be in the moment, his actions are mostly emotional and whoever has access to him last greatly influences what he does. In my opinion the real root problem is that Trump believes he can do whatever he wants and doesn’t need to convince anyone, neither Congress, the Supreme Court, nor citizens, that what he is doing is good or right or just. Sure, he very much wants us all to like him, but in the end nothing matters, the only thing that matters to Trump is what is in his head at any given moment.
I think we need to spend much less time on Trump and much more time on his enablers. Why is all this happening? It’s happening because the Supreme Court ruled Trump is above the law and made him king and the majority in Congress is only there for the LOLs and not there do their job, and a wealthy class of people willing to pay and participate in tearing it all down for the sake of keeping what they imagine to be their wonderful life.
The response to every action Trump takes should be a push to remove any enabler and make them accountable. All this has to start with us not reacting to anything Trump does from what we think to be normal. Making claims that what he did is illegal does not matter because there is no accountability of him. Pointing out Trump’s hypocrisy does not matter. Nothing you can do or say about Trump matters. What does matter is how we view and consider those people who enable him now and work to replace them.
Today Sarah Bessey announced a new book, a compilation of Rachel Held Evan’s blog posts, titled “Braving The Truth Essential Essays For Reckoning With And Reimagining Faith.” Held Evans, who wrote of her faith deconstruction and reconstruction, died much too soon in 2019.
As bad as the insurrection on January 6, 2021 was, what is worse to me is general apathetic reaction to it from more than half the country. Having grown up in the 70s I can’t help but compare these our current times to back then and the reaction to Watergate, when it was clear to me that there was a line by which citizens believed a President cannot cross and that citizens did not think the President is above the law.
Even more important, back then more members of Congress and the Supreme Court had a backbone no matter party affliation. I imagine today’s Supreme Court would have ruled that Nixon did not have to give up the tape as they view the Supreme Executive as not accountable to any branch of government.
This not a rehearsal and it’s not a drill, it’s real!
Every article I read about the Chicago Cubs' off season has the same pattern. It basically says, the Cubs have checked in with so and so player to find out their interest. I imagine after every one of those phone calls Jed Hoyer says, “Oh, so and so won’t play for nothing? Oh well” and moves on to the next player on his list. He only makes the calls and tells the press he made the call for the appearance he actually is doing something.
The pattern is the same every single off season to the point to which I think Ricketts and company are insane because they keep expecting a different result. First, there is complete turnover in the bullpen with hope it will pan out in the upcoming season. Never mind that hope is not a strategy.
Next, they find every single player available at the start of the off season to be too expensive. Then with about a month left, which we are now approaching, the Cubs seem to panic, trade away some prospects and sign someone they either don’t need (Dansby Swanson) or have no chance re-signing (Kyle Tucker).
In short, Hoyer manages the Chicago Cubs like he is managing a Fantasy Baseball team. And the real irony in all this is Ricketts thinks he is saving money when in reality he is wasting money.
For Most, Christianity Is A Religion
The problem of Christianity is that like an onion, there are many layers of understanding about it. What started as an adjective associating the way people lived to who they followed became an institution, a religion, a church, and a set of beliefs some equate to being faith.
The Christianity known to perhaps 90% of the world is a religion and the institution founded by the Roman emperor Constantine. A hallmark of religions and institutions is that one can be kicked out of them.
If you have spent any time studying what Jesus taught, does it make sense to you that he would create something from which you could be kicked out from?
Religion is a necessity for and a product of man’s ego, in fact it may be one of the most dangerous things ever created by man. It is often used by Powers and Principalities to control people and to gain wealth.
I think the most enlightened part of the founding of the United States was the recognition through experience by the founders of just how religion is used by people in power, and attempted to wall off the threat of religion in the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The first amendment does not just exist to protect religions from the government but also, and I think most importantly, to protect us from the government using religion to take away liberty.
The Clicks Communicator
I noticed some entries in my RSS feeds this morning making reference to the Blackberry, and I suspect they were in reference to the Clicks Communicator, a new Android-based phone to launch later this year. This is from the company that has been selling a physical keyboard case for the iPhone. The Clicks Communicator has a built-in physical keyboard, hence the reference to Blackberry.
The device software is built on Android 16 with a customized launcher that is optimized for communications. What it looks to me like is the Android notification shade made front and center to the device. It has hardware buttons to initiate voice to text input, if one prefers and has an LED around the primary button that will flash different colors one configures for different notifications. The color LED reminds me of the roller ball of the first Android phone, the T-Mobile G1.
The negatives start with the price, while one can reserve one now for a $399 total price by paying $199 to reserve it, the Communicator will retail for $499, which I think is too much for a device being promoted as a second phone. The intro video compares the Communicator to a Kindle as it compares to the iPad, but Kindles cost much less than $499.
Another big miss in my opinion is not providing a removable battery nor Magsafe support, although I imagine this might be something that could be provided via special “cover.” The device includes the things smartphones lost over the years like the physical buttons, storage card slots, and 3.5mm audio adapter, so why not go all the way and provide removable batteries?
The Clicks Communicator is going to be a niche device, it’s not going to take over the smartphone leaders. I got to think that $499 starting price will have to come down to the $300 to $400 range to justify the purchase as an “accessory” to an every day carry smartphone. The question then is, will enough sell for the device to last long enough for the price to come down? The answer depends on whether there is truly a demand for this type of device.
Woke up this morning to the news that the U.S. has illegally invaded in to another country, captured its leader and his wife, and kidnapped them out of their country. I see this as an act of war, no matter the claims of crimes that the leader may have committed. Unfortunately, these events will continue to happen so long as the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) of 2001 is in place. Congress must repeal this blank check it gave to the President for military force. Stop feeding the Military Industrial Complex.
Lots of sunshine today but the temperatures stayed in the twenties.
At The Start Of 2026
Mother Nature set the scene today by providing freshly fallen snow, sunshine, and frigid temperatures, which I take as a sign for a fresh start. Today is not only the start of a new year, but for me it is the start of the fifth chapter of my life, now as a retiree. My most specific plan for now is to savor more of life, to take it in fully and continue to learn and grow.
I have long followed people who seem to be able to spend most of their time on whatever they find to be most fulfilling in the moment and dreamed of that for myself. My intentions for this year are to read more, to write more, to listen to more music, to spend more time with people I love, and to be grateful for every minute.
Year in books for 2025
Here are the books I finished reading in 2025. I fell short of my goal to read 20 books this year, and I am committed to meeting and exceeding that goal in 2026.
Freshly fallen snow, sunshine, and blue skies on New Year’s day 2026. A clear sign of a fresh start to a new year and new start. Happy New Year!
I am taking more pictures than normal the last several days as a way to capture the memories. The following summarizes what it is like outside on this New Year’s Eve.
Today I have a mixture of emotions. Disbelief and gratitude are highest among them. At midnight on New Year’s Eve 2026 I will become an unemployed bum.
Currently reading: The Gales of November by John U. Bacon 📚
The sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald is a memorable event for one who grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan during the 1970s and I am enjoying this book that provides all of the background about the Fitzgerald and shipping on the Great Lakes. Taconite, which is lower grade iron ore that is pulverized into little marbles for shipment, was the Fitz’s cargo at the time it sank. I remember trains that ran through my childhood home in the Upper Peninsula that carried the taconite to the ore docks to be loaded on these ships. The marbles often fell off the ore cars of the train on to the tracks and we used to gather them up for slingshot ammo.
I am going to fall short of my goal of reading 18 books this year, I have three that I am currently reading but this one is the furthest along at 26% complete and I don’t expect to finish it by the end of tomorrow.
We are in Grand Rapids for the annual Great Lakes Invitational hockey tournament while the big winter storm hits. Fortunately all I need to do is walk a block from the hotel to the arena later today, no need to drive.
