You might have heard the phrase “sound track of your life.” One of the earliest songs on my sound track is Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad, which for some reason my mind associates with the first dance I went to in middle school. Not that I danced at all, but that was one of the songs played. The memory comes back today due to learning that Meat Loaf has passed away.
I’ve made some tweeks to the CSS of this site that I think make the text easier to read. I hope that you like the result.
A question that should be answered on the government’s COVID test FAQ, how long is the shelf life of the tests? Or how long do they last? If I get the free tests now, do I have to use them right away? Per the recommendations for when to take the tests, I don’t have a need right now, but I may in the future.
Last year Heather Cox Richardson wrote about what the current troubles in the United States are really all about. It’s worth reading again.
I am using the Arabica theme for my blog design and while I like the font face I think it is too light and thus hard to read, so I need to figure out how to change to change the text font.
Mike Caulfield provides good food for thought about over generalizing misinformation:
Instead of seeing versions of hearsay (non-institutional systems of news and analysis) as damaging institutional systems, we could choose to see the hearsay system itself as the thing under attack. That is, in the age of social media, a valuable system of non-institutional knowledge is increasingly gameable and gamed, rendered useless by a variety of threats and incentives that are polluting not the institutional space, but the hearsay space.
Three tools that Power uses to retain power: assimilation, redirection, and religion.
One of the things that I find really frustrating is following a link from an item in my RSS feed aggregator that is to an article behind a paywall.
A Simple Plan to Solve All of America’s Problems suggests America’s problems are due to manufactured scarcity. I agree, but unfortunately scarcity is what makes some Americans very rich, and America is all about making a scarce group of people very rich.
The first public beta of micro.blog for Android has been released, which is good progress for my blogging platform. Something happened with the link I created in the prior sentence, but I think that was due to a double tap.
Last year Google completed the acquisition of Fitbit and we still have not seen a Fitbit running Wear OS.
My reaction to the news that Jon Lester is retiring is that I wish he could have done so as a Cub. Seeing him in a Cardinal uniform last year was just wrong.
Logitech Signature M650 first impressions: One mouse for all people Nice to see Logitech make a mouse for left handed people, who are usually forced to live in a right handed world.
Were the Founding Fathers Libertarians? is a good article by David Frum. The article makes an important point, that context (history) matters! I suspect many people would respond emphatically yes, but the context says no.
As I said yesterday, so I say it again.
Forming A More Perfect Union
In the United States, democracy is less about the form of government and more about an aspiration. The idea of true equality of all people, regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation was simply not comprehensible to the U.S. founders or their contemporaries. Interestingly, I think James Madison recognized the imperfections of the United States when he wrote these words in the preamble to the U.S. Constitution.
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
To me a “more perfect union” is not a declaration of an end state but rather a recognition that we can continue to become better. In other words, Madison expected the United States in 2022 to be more perfect than the United States in 1780 because the Constitution provides the framework for that improvement. It does this by providing for amendments that improve upon the original work.
In Michigan it’s usually only during winter when it gets this dry.
Finished the first work week of 2022. Fifty one more weeks to go.
The scary reality is that the future of the Republic may very much ride on the Republican Presidential Primaries in 2024. The Republican party enabled Trump to become President thus only it, or better said only it’s corporate and wealthy backers, can prevent him from being their nominee in 2024. In short, most of the anti-Trump, anti-fascist rhetoric is coming from Democrats, but they don’t have the real power to prevent it from happening again, particularly when the country is split 50/50 between the two parties.
Still, unless GOP voters are polarized against the extreme right, and turnout for Republican primary contests increases dramatically, the party could continue to be a vehicle for building this hard-right base at the state level and in congressional races. The poll numbers certainly suggest that these forces have plenty of room to organize and recruit. source
Another lesson of COVID is the reality that while scientists and doctors know a lot about the human body, there is much, particularly when it comes to diseases, that they just don’t know. Anyone who has had cancer can tell you this first hand. You want certainties and the doctors can only talk in terms of probabilities and percentages.