The weather was fantastic today, with sunshine and above average temperatures. Here is a picture of what’s left of the sunshine reflecting off trees along my walk.
A couple of weeks ago I took advantage of Best Buy’s Black Friday sale to buy the Space Black M4 Macbook Pro, and I have been very happy with the purchase. The sale plus trade-in of a M1 Macbook Air brought the price down to below the cost of the 15-inch Macbook Air. I am finding the 14-inch screen of the Pro to be much better than the 13-inch one of the Air, and of course the M4 processor and 16 GB of RAM provide much better performance.
Today I received the sleeve case I bought for it from Mission Leather Company, shown below. I have been using these style cases from Mission Leather with my Macbook and iPad for several years now and recommend them. I picked the darker leather, “Whiskey”, version of the sleeve to match the near black color of the Macbook.
Debate That Leads Toward Progress
This blog post by Alan Jacobs on the conservative disposition is similar to a book by George Will titled The Conservative Sensibility. I think both do a good job of describing the conservative world view. What I don’t understand from reading these pieces is how conservatives imagine progress is made.
Will has a pretty strong disdain for progressives. Most conservatives I encounter seem to wear their knee-jerk reaction against progress as a badge of honor.
Now, I imagine an answer that Will might provide is it should be incumbent upon one to convince him that whatever one might claim is progress is that in fact. For that to work, it must also be incumbent on conservatives to listen and be open to being convinced. What I see in practice more often than not is an unwillingness to listen to an opponent, often tainted with contempt, coupled with an inability to make a persuasive argument. In short, a lack in what I would say are the skills of debate.
What might even be worse than the lack of true debate in politics today is a seeming disagreement that progress is in fact a goal. We can’t even seem to agree that shootings in schools in the United States is a problem worthy enough to actually strive to prevent. If we can agree that a child’s life might actually be more important than a constitutional amendment, then how can any progress be made?
A Lack Of Meaning And Dualism
Just read a great blog post by Dave Rogers on the importance of meaning, which includes a referral to a TED talk on the topic. He writes:
But as children, we were exposed, constantly and relentlessly to messages about achievement, about desire and acquisition, about competition and rank. We were saturated in these messages, and children today still are. We relentlessly observe each other, in part I suppose, in the traditional sense of getting to know other people. To make friends, or to learn who our enemies are. But mostly, I think, to compare ourselves with others.
I particularly agree with this description of how dualism is implanted in children by emphasizing achievement and merit that can only be determined through comparison.
In my opinion, one way to read Genesis 3 is as description for how all of us grow up. Our parents teach us right from wrong and in that we all eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Dualism becomes our default, evolutionary, mode of operation, which requires us to see everything and everyone apart from ourselves. Dualism prevents us from seeing ourselves as a part of something else, connected to everything and everyone around us.
What I find even worse, is that almost everyone’s experience with what is known as Christianity, reinforces this dualism. Whether it’s described as bible believing or not bible believing, protestant or catholic, saved or not, sinner or not a sinner, and we believe these things because we believe this is how God intends us to view things. All of this defines a hierarchical world with supremacy as the natural order, and that leads to all the “isms” that ills us.
It’s as if we convinced ourselves that the story of Genesis 3 is exactly how God intended, but is that true? Go back and read it. What if the whole purpose of what Jesus taught was to for us to change our minds about how we think of God?
Review requests are skyrocketing; everybody is inundated with them,” said Colleen P. Kirk, professor of management and marketing at the New York Institute of Technology. “Over time, consumers will get more skeptical of them. source
I am sick of all the surveys and I pretty much refuse all of them unless I really have a bad experience.
What I find even more annoying, particularly when this happens at work, is that companies measure the number of responses to their surveys as engagement and treat that engagement as good, and in the case of my employer, pat themselves on the back. Consider that people most often only take the time to provide reviews/complete surveys when they are not happy, so I wouldn’t view that engagement as a good thing.
In my opinion, most corporations are lazy and poorly led; they simply follow whatever others do, and do those things simply for the sake of doing them. Little thought or effort is put in to the small things that matter.
I’ve been reading about how the telco networks of AT&T and Verizon have been hacked in what is being claimed as an attack from China, and authorities believe the hackers still have access to these networks. Here, is what I found interesting:
The move is in reaction to law enforcement backdoors in the public telephone network - including AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile - being hijacked by Salt Typhoon; a cyberattack group believed to be operated by the Chinese government. source
Emphasis added. Officials are advising that we all use communications that is end-to-end encrypted, which ironically is the last thing law enforcement officials want as they have been demanding backdoors to encrypted networks for years.
Today I was reading an article about the Cubs signing Matthew Boyd and found it to be the first to include a link to a post on Bluesky. It’s the first time I’ve seen a link to a post on Bluesky from something that looks like mainstream media.
If Joe Biden does what Donald McNeil suggests I will bet money a case wil go before the Supreme Court claiming a pardon cannot be issued before a conviction of a crime. I know that Ford “pardoned” Nixon, but Nixon was never actually charged with, let alone convicted of, a federal crime, and nobody presented a case before SCOTUS challenging Ford’s ability to do the pardon.
Heck, given how SCOTUS now ignores precedent, even if a prior court affired Ford’s ability to pardon Nixon, this court would simply say the prior decision was an error. My bet is that being the fundamentalists they are, SCOTUS will say that pardons only apply to convictions, despite prior practice that was been reviewed by the Court.
Why is it that all Chicago professional sports franchises are dysfunctional? Is it all of the family ownership?
I’ve created a new wiki page for the Macbook Pro M4. I need to make updates in the wiki and move it to a new server.
Finished reading: The Mary We Forgot by Jennifer Powell McNutt 📚
What is so scandalous about Jesus’ life and teaching is its inclusivity. The powers and principalities that make up what most of us think of as normal preach exclusion, which is exactly how we know they are not of Jesus.
Collapsing Recliner
Every now and then I have an experience that reminds me of just how much technology, in this case smartphones and their cameras, have changed our lives.
I have a La-Z-Boy recliner that is the center of my “man cave.” The man cave is the basement of our condo, which also happens to be my home office during work days. Sunday night I sat down on the recliner and started falling backward, if I hadn’t reacted I probably would have flipped myself and the chair over. Obviously, something broke, and my diagnosis found a part that looks like a clamp that attaches to a rod that runs across both sides of the chair had “ripped” and thus disconnecting what I assume looks like an arm that holds up the right back of the recliner when it’s not reclined. When reclined the chair is perfectly stable.
Detroit Skyline To Change
General Motors and Bedrock have announced the conceptual changes they propose of the Renaissance Center in Detroit. The changes involve removing two of the four office towers along with the current ground floors at the base of the complex. The ground floors will be replaced with a similar design that has glass walls rather than concrete.
Earlier this year General Motors announced they were moving their world headquarters from the Renaissance Center, which they bought in 1996, to the New Hudsons site built by Bedrock. GM’s move brought speculation about the future of the Renaissance Center, whether it be completely torn down or repurposed in some way. The conceptual design is a middle solution between the two.
As stated , GM bought the Renaissance Center in 1996, and my speculation is one of the reasons why it could is that it gained extra money in that year when EDS was spun out of GM and was provided a multi-million dollar payment.
I worked at the Renaissance Center from 2004 to 2015. In 2004 EDS, which was the company I worked for, consolidated their Detroit office space into one of the two smaller towers on the east side of the complex. Through work force reductions and acquisition of EDS by Hewett Packard, the company slowly vacated floors and eventually entire tower it was in and by 2015 only occupied one floor in the north east tower (Tower 100).
While I disliked the morning and evening commutes, I very much enjoyed working at the Renaissance Center. It was the center of all of the major events in Detroit, including Super Bowl XL in 2006, Detroit Red Wings and Pistons championship parades, the Final Four, and Red Bull aerial races, not to mention the yearly Fireworks. I am happy that GM and Bedrock have found a way to keep a good portion of the original complex.
I am reading “How the Ivy League Broke America” by David Brooks, published in The Atlantic (gifted link), and agreeing almost entirely with the points that Brooks is making.
Looking back, I know that my grandmother’s (who raised me) strongest desire for me was a college degree that lead to achieving “the American Dream.” Her desire was influenced by the meritocracy Brooks describes, even if the arc of her life started before the meritocracy view of the world was instituted.
So, I fit in the college educated category, except that my grandmother was not wealthy and my education was paid for mostly by Pell Grants and student loans. The grants sufficiently covered my credits, so I only needed a relatively small amount of loans for things like books.
I feel as though if I were born just ten years later I probably would not have the life I have today, because I probably would not have afforded that college degree or I would have been hugely in debt.
Like most of her generation, my grandmother wanted me to partake in the American Dream and she believed that would only happen if I had a college degree. She wasn’t wrong, but the problem is that if you can boil down the achievement of a better life to one thing it becomes very easy to put a dollar value on that thing and when that happens a barrier is created.
What Brooks describes in this article is a cultural problem that government itself cannot fix. Yet, government made up of people who see the problem can make government an enabler of a fix rather than a barrier. Does eliminating the Department of Education help or hinder? Honestly, I am not entirely sure.
I use Lilihub.com to read my micro.blog timeline, but up until today I hadn’t used it to write a post. I am pleasantly surprised to see that it’s post editor is more than the input box that micro.blog provides, and so I will be using this more in the future.
Looking through photos that I took last month, and I like this one.
After reading the simple explanation about cross posting from micro.blog, I checked out Pixelfed and decided to create an account and enabled cross posting. I don’t k now too much about Pixelfed, but the accounts are formatted Mastodon and mine is @frankm@pixelfed.social. The public view of my Pixelfed profile is at https://pixelfed.social/frankm.
Of the authors that I read regularly, Richard Rohr has the most influence upon me. I am happy to learn that he was written a new book, The Tears of Things, coming in March, 2025. At this point in his life, each new book that Richard writes he thinks it is his last.
I do a lot of my writing in Drummer and some of that is published on the Drummer associated blog and other parts is published to my regular blog hosted by micro.blog. (Some times I publish posts to both blogs by copy/paste between outlines.) What I write and publish to my blog get’s cross posted to Bluesky and Mastodon, and in that way I am using the editor of my choice.