Essays
Laws Only Apply To Those Under Authority
I keep reading articles about how the things Musk and Trump are doing are illegal, which applies under a democracy with rule of law. Democracy is no more in the United States once the Supreme Court ruled the President is above the law. Trump can’t be touched and neither can Musk (or anyone working for Musk) because Trump will simply pardon them.
In their decision SCOTUS reserved the right to decide what is a Presidential act, implying that it could still decide whether the President broke “the law.” If they do such rule who will enforce it? If Congress impeached and convicted Trump, who will enforce it?
So my advice is to stop thinking about whether or not something Trump does is illegal. of course it’s all illegal, but that does not matter. I think he welcomes any confrontation with Congress or the Supreme Court.
The Senate could have convicted Trump twice, but Republican Senators were too scared to do it. The Supreme Court could have concurred with Colorado in that the 14th Amendment prevented Trump from holding office, but was too scared to do so. Both branches failed in their role as a check against tyranny as the founders intended.
Laws now only apply to those with whom Trump and Musk have a grudge against.
Post Obsidian Notes To Microblog
The essay that I wrote earlier today was written in Obsidian. I copied and pasted the content to lillihub.com and then published it to this blog. I looked for and found a community plugin that suggests I can post notes directly from Obsidian and if I have it configured correctly this note should appear on my blog.
That worked as expected, not this sentence is an edit, can I publish this edit back to the same post? Yes I can! Now, I need to check whether I can do this across other devices.
Alright, I installed the plugin on my Macbook Pro and so let us see whether I can post this update. Final test to see how this works from the iPad Mini.
Do We Get Him?
Most American White Christians do not have an appreciation for the society, rules, and cultural norms during Jesus’ life. Consequently, I don’t think we really understand most of what he teaches. Jesus lived under imperial occupation. The religious leaders of Israel collaborated with the Romans to rule society mostly for their own safety, and that collaboration lead to the crucifixion of Jesus.
I believe many, if not most, American White Christians don’t really read or understand scripture because they are not the heroes of that story. Most of us align to the ruling classes at the time of Jesus, which has been our privilege within American society, but this appears to be coming to an end.
In today’s daily meditation from the Center for Action and Contemplation, there is this:
Over two millennia ago, these biblical prophets envisioned a different world, a world pressing to be born. In place of imperial culture, the prophets articulated another way of living in God’s Creation. Countering extraction, force, and separation, the prophets lifted up trust, right relationship, and becoming. In prophetic understanding, these three qualities embodied the way of faithfulness to Living Presence, the way of aliveness.
Trust in life itself is essential to aliveness. The prophets repeatedly admonished the people for trusting in wealth and influence, for seeking security in power and possessions—trusting in extraction. Instead, they called people to trust Living Presence by trusting the gift of life, the God-given gift of unfolding, unexpected, ever-creating life. Rather than seeking more things, the prophets called for seeking the more in life. Rather than seeking to be in maximal control of life, the prophets called people to participate in the fullness of life. This is the response to the desire to extract: receive and appreciate the more within life itself.
May American Christians now know what it means to say and have the courage to say, Jesus Is Lord!
Good Teams Have Painful Loses
There is no consolation today for lifelong Detroit Lions fans. A loss in the first playoff game after having the best regular season record is particularly painful. Detroit fans can look back to the Detroit Red Wings, who had similar heartbreaking losses to the Devils in the 94-95 Stanley Cup finals and to the Oilers in 2005-06. The loss to the Devils was particularly hard because the Wings had not been in the finals for so long, had the best regular season record, and got swept. The next year the Wings again had the best regular season record and then lost to the Avalanche in the conference finals. Finally, the Wings won the Stanley Cup in 96-97.
Being a lifelong Cubs fan, I know the feeling of rooting for a team that were perennial losers to finally become a good team. I learned I would much rather feel the pain of a playoff loss than the feel the frustration of the Cubs being out of contention after the first month of the regular season. Painful loses are part of the consequences of being a good team, otherwise you are never in position to have such loses.
The Lions have built a firm foundation and there is no reason to not believe that Holmes and Campbell will learn from this and continue building upon that foundation. There are no guarantees next year will be just as good as this year, but there is every reason to look forward to next.
NFL On Christmas Day
Yesterday (Christmas day) is the first time that Netflix streamed live NFL games and I was happy to have a sports alternative to the NBA, which historically has been the only professional league playing on Christmas. Netflix’s production did not go without a hitch for me using an Apple TV. I went in to the app and selected “Watch Live” which I expected would take me to whatever was the current place of the stream, but instead it started at the beginning of the stream an hour earlier. Worse, for some reason it got to a point where it just kept showing non-stop commercials, like it was stuck in a loop. I was screaming in frustration/anger because I knew the game had started and I was not able to watch it. It then dawned on me to look at the progress indicator at the bottom of the display and I noticed it mostly at the beginning on the left rather than the right, so I tried fast forwarding and that enabled me to catch up. I don’t know what happened, I searched to see whether anyone else had the same experience and I did not find any reports.
Major League Hypocrisy
New Photo Collections
A new feature has been added to micro.blog that automatically generates pages of photos that one groups together in to a collection. I found the instructions for creating my first collection did not work, as I had to create a new page and embed the shortcode. Looks like after creating that first page I can then create new collections as per the instructions, but you still have to create a page with the collections shortcode in order to make them available.
I have created a Photo Collections page that will be the index to my collections. I wish that the Photos page automatically listed the collections rather than making me create and maintain a page.
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?
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.