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In a society that is growing radically more secular every day, I’d say we have more to fear from political dogmatism than religious dogmatism. We have more to fear from those who let their politics determine their faith practices and who turn their religious communities into political armies. We have more to fear from people who look to politics as a substitute for faith.
Religion is that to which we bind ourselves to and I think it more human nature than we realize to bind ourselves to our tribes, whether they be churches, political parties, ideologies, football teams, and NASCAR racers. The problem is that we confuse faith with religion, they are related but different.
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Here is a question that all Americans, particularly Republicans, should ask themselves. When Al Gore conceded the 2000 election, was he being a patriot by putting country over his personal ambitions or was he being weak?
And if you are Republican, honestly ask yourself if your answer would be different if Gore were a Republican.
As we head in to this Presidential election your answer to this question might be the most consequential one of your lifetime. A test of patriotism happens only when you put something bigger like your country above your own self interests like your tribe.
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Joe Cieplinski has a plausible theory about the Apple Solo loops watch bands.
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The Chicago Cubs appear to be rounding in to their 2019 form.
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I am not surprised that Republican Senators who otherwise seem to oppose Trump, like Romney, are all in on getting their Supreme Court Justice approved. The whole reason why they have been tolerating Trump is to get those Justices and there is no way they are not going to claim that prize. Further, I think they see it it likely Trump will lose and it is possible they could lose the Senate, so that have to do it now or never. Republicans are long past the point where fairness matters, and their constituency is only their tribe and not Americans in general. From their point of view, given Supremes are for life, SCOTUS is their last chance to secure their way of life for the next decade.
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Looks like McConnell is going to use a government shutdown as leverage to get a conservative Supreme Court Justice.
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Today is the first day of autumn and I find myself in a bit of disbelief because it feels like the summer flew by. I can only imagine a primary reason I feel this way is because I have not done any traveling this year due to COVID19. Normally by now I would have taken a few trips.
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“Certainty and confidence are actually feelings. As your spouse can attest, just because you feel certain doesn’t mean you’re right. So then, essentially, even in those times when we feel the most right, we can be dead wrong.”
— Love Matters More: How Fighting to Be Right Keeps Us from Loving Like Jesus by Jared Byas
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Is your freedom dependent in the incarceration of others?
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Dark mode has been all the rage for the last couple of years and occasionally I’ve run in to web sites that have white on black text that I find difficult to read. Now I know why, it’s because of my astigmatism. I use dark mode on my phone but don’t use it on my PC.
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Among the things Trump has ruined are red hats.
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I am interested to see how Microsoft sticks with Surface Duo. They must have a long term plan because I can’t imagine there are high sales expectations given the price and COVID. So, there must be planned iterations that improve performance and get the price down to a point where it is more affordable to more people. The other thing to watch is, whether the Surface Neo sees the light of day. You might recall it as the larger “booklet” Surface that Panay showed last year, but it would run Windows 10x. My understanding is that the Surface Pro X, which is the ARM Surface, is not exactly flying out of stores. Microsoft should have an event in October where we might learrn more.
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I still have not found a simple way to track when I go to bed and when I get up in the morning. It’s frustrating because this is something I should be able to do with Google Assistant. Right now I use a routine at night to shut out the lights and set the alarm, so because it would know when I got to bed, when the routine is run, and when I get up, which is when the alarm goes off.
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I am trying Scribble in Drafts and this is really cool! The iPad Mini has just become more like the Newton MessagePad! I wrote this blog post using the Apple Pencil.
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I just updated my iPad Mini to iPadOS 14 and I am still surprised that Apple doesn’t provide any type of “here is what is new” experience the first time you start a new version of the OS. I guess I am just left to stumble upon the new features.
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Kevin Tofel’s review of the Microsoft Duo is worth reading because it might be the most optimistic, if not down to earth, of the reviews I’ve read. A reason might be that not once did he refer to the price and thus didn’t get in to the “for this price one should not have these problems” trope. IMHO any gadget priced north of $1K is too expensive even if it works perfectly!
So, if price is an issue, save the time and the pixels and just write, “it’s too expensive” and move on. Because Kevin is not on a mission to drive home the point that the device is too expensive, he focuses more on the actual problems and frankly, what he writes about seem to be something that Microsoft could address in software updates.
The most important point that Kevin makes, though, is about the biases toward what the Duo is, even though Microsoft has emphasized it is not a phone or a tablet.
I think people are calling the Duo a phone because that’s the closest device comparison they can make. And I get that. But the Duo truly is something different and, along with other folding or swivel screen devices, early in the trend of a new device class.
And I like this thought…
And although Microsoft dubbed it the Duo over a year ago, I think the company should have said that “Duo” is just an internal product code name. A better, more descriptive name would have been Surface Booklet because that’s really what it is: A connected book-like tablet.
To be fair, I noted before that Brad Sams also took effort to emphasize the Duo being a class on its own, although he used device classification of Personal Digital Assistant (PDA).
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Can an Apple Watch function as a standalone device or does it require an iPhone?
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Trebek says he has the “will to survive,” although there are days when the pain and depression is so debilitating that his optimism disappears. He also doesn’t like using the terms “battling” and “fighting” when it comes to cancer, because it implies there are winners and losers.
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We have reached peak smartphone, thus the different manufacturers are working hard to create the next big thing. So far what has been produced functions janky and is expensive.
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Our founding fathers rejected in word if not deed the notions of title and birthright. But they have substituted in its place race and gender maintained by wealth and property. All hierarchy, and especially military hierarchy, exists so that the privileged can maintain and exploit their servants.
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Privilege is seeing yourself as independently good and not seeing that your goodness is built on the goodness of others.
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“If we truly understand that the Church went off the rails by aligning herself with Constantine, then it shouldn’t be too hard to see that anyone who maintains political entanglements is still emulating that same Constantinian form of Church.”
Keith Giles , Greg Boyd (Foreword), Jesus Untangled Resurfaced with readwise.io
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Religion is the most powerful force, as in “powers and principalities,” in the world. It’s why so much is written in the Old Testament about idolatry. Yahweh doesn’t “feel” the human emotion of jealousy that we humans think is why idolatry is offensive, but love naturally knows it needs to be free and that idolatry is true enslavement.
The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution may be one of the most enlightened of the writings that were a result of The Enlightenment because James Madison and the Founders understood how Power uses religion to enslave and thus increase power. This recognition might be the heart of the freedom our country was founded upon, but it is no longer taught as such because Power has appropriated it into the modern understanding as only freedom of religion and not also preventing government from using religion.
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It is easy to say the Duo is a smartphone but when you look at how Microsoft is promoting the hardware, to me, this is device reminds me more of the PDAs of the early 2000s than of the smartphones of the 2020 era.
Brad Sams’ review of the Microsoft Duo is the first I’ve seen that calls it a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), which I suspect is a better categorization than smartphone or tablet. The problem again comes back to price, it’s just way too expensive and doesn’t not provide enough for that expensive beyond being a niche product. My hope is that Microsoft and Google don’t give up on it too soon and find a way to get the price down.
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Based on my read of a few of the Microsoft Duo reviews, which are negative, I see that they are written in the context of the device’s $1400 price. Compare reviews of the Google Pixel 4a and the Microsoft Duo, in some ways they are the same, but because the 4a only costs $350 the issues are understandable or overlooked. Devices priced at $1k or higher need to be perfect; the Duo appears to be a beta, akin to Google Glass.
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