One Term Presidential Mirrors
I think it’s interesting that CNN is airing a documentary about the first modern outsider elected President before Trump, Jimmy Carter. When I think back about Carter’s years as President I think what happened is that he showed us reality that we did not like very much. It’s no wonder then that he lost to a professional actor and that in many ways we have been living in a delusion that has been amplified by Trump.
Why would the rock-and-roll set flock to a man who, as president, is remembered today as being a micro-managing, straight-arrow engineer who failed to inspire or understand leadership? The reason is that in his prime, Jimmy Carter was cool. He championed a kind of political populism that was extremely attractive to Americans disillusioned with Washington in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate. Sick and tired of elected officials who betrayed them, they found a refreshing change in Carter, a former peanut farmer who was seen as an anti-establishment outsider. As Bishop Michael Curry recalls in the documentary, “We were coming out of the Watergate era and looking …to be a country of integrity again.”
The problem with the quote above from Bishop Curry is that I am not sure the United States has ever been a “country of integrity.” I think some of the founders had this aspiration but failed to see the log in their eye of supremacy is the forms of slavery and colonialism.
To me the greatest irony of the Trump presidency has been that part of the campaign slogan, “Make America Great” is a good and right aspiration but demands a degree of introspection on what is greatness and who determines greatness.
P.S. I observe that it seems all one term presidents of my life time became one term because that were a mirror reflecting ourselves that we did not like very much. Our egos much prefer the myths of our false selves than the reality of our true selves.
It’s 2021 and now time to face reality.
The current economy is not about employment and it’s certainly not about the stock market, it’s about wages. Employers do not want to increase wages or provide full time employment.
A year later unfortunately we went in the wrong direction and now the economy is about employment and wages.
I don’t know if it’s a metaphor, but yesterday’s rainy winter day gave way to today’s sunshine.
I like to do little projects during my week long Christmas holiday so this year I did a redo of a project from last year and built a new Raspberry Pi 4 and configured it to attach to my iPad Air via a USB-C cable. I don’t intend this particular Pi to serve a role on our home network, so I will also use it for other projects. I had have created an outline for my tech experiments in which you can view my project notes.
I’ve created a page of Books That I Read In 2020 that lists what I read in reverse chronological order and I wondering whether I should change that to chronological order. What do you think?
The Jed Hoyer regime is not starting well in Chicago when it communicates b.s. like this. I see zero ways in which the trade of Yu Darvish to San Diego for little in return helps the Cubs in 2021. Maybe the Cubs will be competitive in the N.L. Central by default, but they won’t be competitive outside their division.
I dislike rainy winter days like today. I wish we had a fireplace, but the Christmas tree lights are nice.
I moved to the Detroit, Michigan area 31 years ago, and one of the benefits of that is the ability to attend the annual Great Lakes Invitational college hockey tournament that Michigan Tech hosts. Over those years I think I did not attend three but never until this year, due to COVID19, has there not been a tournament.
I am drinking my first Starbucks Latte in I don’t know how long. EOM.
We got a white Christmas.
Now that Apple has enabled one to use a mouse with an iPad they have to enable them to use external monitors in a manner similar to notebook computers. Right now you can mirror the display to a monitor and that display is larger but it does not fill up the entire screen. When I connect my iPad to my 24-inch monitor I want to have all of the screen space available to me.
“The symbol of Christmas—what is it? It is the rainbow arched over the roof of the sky when the clouds are heavy with foreboding. It is the cry of life in the newborn babe when, forced from its mother’s nest, it claims its right to live. It is the brooding Presence of the Eternal Spirit making crooked paths straight, rough places smooth, tired hearts refreshed, dead hopes stir with newness of life. It is the promise of tomorrow at the close of every day, the movement of life in defiance of death, and the assurance that love is sturdier than hate, that right is more confident than wrong, that good is more permanent than evil.” — Howard Thurman source
A micro.blog question… how come I can only add categories to posts with titles?
Vivaldi Day 2
Today is the second day of using Vivaldi on the Raspberry Pi 4 desktop, and it continues to perform better for me than Chromium. I decided to run Octane 2 and Speedometer 2 to see how Vivaldi benchmarks against Chromium and I am surprised to find that it benchmarks slightly slower in both even though my practical use finds it faster. For example, Speedometer 2 scores 7.93 in Chromium and 7.614 in Vivaldi. For comparison, the Speedometer 2 score on the iPad Air is 201, fastest in the house.
One of the most dangerous ideas that emerged in politics starting in the 1970s is that changing one’s mind about a policy or topic is wrong. We heard politicians claim that their opponent “flip-flops.”
Unfortunately, too many people have taken this to mean that they must not change their minds about something, but changing one’s mind over time is what growing up is all about. Is it any wonder then that people are now so entrenched in their ideas they simply do not listen nor accept anything spoken by someone else that they don’t agree with?
The “no flip-flop” mindset can have dangerous consequences. If scientists aren’t willing to consider the possibility that how they thought something happens, like how respiratory illness spreads, could be flawed, lives can be lost. Not to mention scientists who don’t believe they could be wrong aren’t really practicing science.
If you want to really impress me, tell me about something you changed your mind about in the last three years.
Trying Vivaldi
I use a Raspberry Pi 4 as a personal remote computer that I access using VNC during the work day, which enables me to keep my personal web access from going through my employer’s Internet proxy. It’s also an excuse of me to fiddle with the Raspberry Pi.
I have been using Chromium for browing the web but grown frustrated with its performance on the Pi so this morning I decided to give Vivaldi a try. Vivaldi uses the same rendering engine as Chrome and I’ve found it uses the same extensions as Chrome, which is important because I need access to Lastpass.
Installation was a little tricky because I am running a beta 64-bit version of the Raspberry Pi OS and so I needed to find the arm64 version of the installation package.
So far I am finding that Vivaldi does run faster on the Pi4 than Chromium. One thing I did to speed things up is to turn off the drop-down, URL completion of the address bar so that I can quickly enter URLs. However, one function that I use to forage for new updates in the Federated Wiki verse does not work, for some reason, so for now I will need to use Chromium for that part of my daily flow.
In the beginning was the first site of the World Wide Web. source