Finished reading: Do I Stay Christian? by Brian D. McLaren 📚
Watching the U.S. Open on TV with the volume turned down and the Detroit Jazz Festival playing on the computer. Tennis and jazz. Hard to believe that the last U.S. men’s champion was Andy Roddick in 2003.
Finished reading: Allow Me to Retort by Elie Mystal 📚
“Remember, Madison and the other authors of The Federalist Papers didn’t think amendments to their new Constitution were necessary. More than that, they thought a bill of enumerated rights could be dangerous. They worried that if they specified a few rights, some fools in the future would conclude that their list of rights were the only rights people had or should have. They worried that the federal government would grow to take power over everything but the few special carve-outs they bothered to enumerate.”
Like privacy and personal autonomy.
— Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution by Elie Mystal
Currently reading: Allow Me to Retort by Elie Mystal 📚I have the last chapter left.
Yesterday I had a Raspberry Pi crash after a system update and fail to boot. I figured out what went wrong and learned some things along the way. Breaking things is how one tends to learn.
Just discovered Steve ‘n’ Seagulls. Who says Twitter isn’t useful?
I’ve been seeing this little one and it’s mother eating together at a spot along my evening walk, but it’s venturing further away from mom each day. Last night I came upon it alone at a spot where we could look at each other and I took this picture.
Education Is More Important Now Than Ever
Part of the backlash against Biden’s plan to forgive federal student loans is really a backlash against education. College education has become stereotyped into identities that some dislike. The fact that American society has pushed the necessity of a college degree for one to get a good job and have a good life is also problematic and wrong.
Scary thing is, true education in which one practices critical thinking and decision making is more critical now than ever. The United States is not and was not ever intended to be a pure democracy. Our government is a representative democracy, which by definition means there are gatekeepers, some voted in to positions (Congress, the President), some appointed by those we voted for (Supreme Court, Attorney General, Secretary of State), and some defacto (political parties, the Press).
Technology is eroding away the whole idea of gatekeepers upon whom our country was built, which slides us towards pure democracy. At first this might seem like a good thing, but what it really means is that more responsibility is with citizens. From within democracy tyranny can easily emerge, all it takes is to convince enough people that the tyrant’s cause is virtuous.
The guardrails against tyranny is education and free speech, and liberty to practice both. Critical thinking and systemic decision making. If we are left to not trust politicians, journalists, or anybody else for that matter, then we need to be able to trust ourselves. Education does not necessarily mean a college degree, but it does mean an openness to idea that one might be wrong, the desire to understand why, and the willingness to change one’s mind.
I’ve been using the Google Pixelbuds Pro for a few weeks now with my Pixel 4a phone and my iPad Mini 6, and I have to say that I am surprised by how well the Pixelbuds work with the iPad. The multipoint audio works between the Pixel 4a and iPad work as expected and the playback controls work with the iPad too.
On Friday I came across an article by Jess Martin that summarizes a conference about tools for thought that occurred on August 16, 2022. I have not yet finished watching the videos embedded, but I did update Writings On Organizing Information with what I gleamed so far.
“If we take the future as our starting point for thinking about God, creation, and humanity—then everything we know must … be realigned to an evolving universe, including our theologies, philosophies, economic and political systems, cultural matrices—in short, our planetary life.”
— Sr. Ilia Delio, as quoted in Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned by Brian D. McLaren
Dave Winer has released his app that creates an RSS feed of one’s Twitter feed. I mostly use micro.blog to contribute to my Twitter feed, so if you follow me on micro.blog or follow my blog’s RSS feed you get almost all the same thing. However, I do some time use Twitter directly and so if you want, you can subscribe to my Tweets via http://tweetfeed.org/frankm/rss.xml. Read more about this in my daynotes for today.
CW has pretty much been the only broadcast network with shows I watched consistently, but I think that is likely to change.
I don’t know what to make of this, Amazon appears to be selling very old HP iPaq Pocket PCs. Must be a mistake or a hoax or something. I wouldn’t be surprised to see these on eBay but being sold on Amazon as new is wrong.
In my reading this past weekend I came across a few essays written by Linus Lee that relate to the topic of organizing information that I reference in Writings On Organizing Information, which I am calling a living document.
“Two thousand years after Jesus launched a subversive spiritual movement of equality, emancipation, and peace, two thousand years after women were among his inner circle and the first messengers of resurrection, two thousand years after Jesus defended Mary of Bethany’s place in the all-male circle of disciples, the Christian religion still remains subservient to patriarchy and the authoritarian control it engenders.”
— Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned by Brian D. McLaren
A second morning of comfortable temperature, low humidity, and cloudy sky. What a nice break before returning to the normal August heat tomorrow.
Cloudy skies, a slight breeze and cool temperature calls for being outside.