I am profoundly less political this presidential election than I was during the last election in 2020 and I was profoundly less political in that election than the one previous to that. Lorena and I are watching the debate tonight, but for me, it is with a great deal of ambivalence. I am currently reading through the Old Testament of the Bible and it seems like we are in an era where the leadership of the USA is not dissimilar from the weak and evil kings of Judah and Israel. The political choice is a choice for the lesser of two evils. This is a time to focus on Christ. The culture at large is immersed in sin. Jeremiah and Elijah understood this. Part way into the debate, I am saddened by both sides. I am glad Jesus is King and God is the only true God. That is my politics today.
Category: Politics Page 1 of 5
Dark, dark clouds are on the horizon. I hope they are actual and not metaphorical, too. Things just seem to be getting crazier and crazier. Politics, culture, and just life. It is a very interesting time to be alive. I need to keep reminding myself we were all put in this time and place by a higher power and to just go where I am taken and do what I can to be a help. God is in control and it all comes out OK in the end.
There was an assassination attempt yesterday on Donald Trump. I am writing this post, not so much to comment about it, but to provide a marker in the blog for when it happened. The first time something like this happened in my lifetime was in 1963 when I was eight years old at recess in the third grade at Harrison Elementary School in Cottage Grove, Oregon. Cottage Grove High School was up the hill from Harrison and we saw some high school kids running down the hill to talk to the teacher on recess duty. They told her that John F. Kennedy had been killed. The second was, of course, when the Twin Trade Towers in New York City were hit in 2001. We lived in Sherwood, Oregon at the time and I had just dropped my in-laws off at the airport to return to Monterrey, Mexico and was on my way to work. When I got to work, everyone was glued to a television watching the it all. I got there just in time to see the second tower get hit, live. This attempt might fit into a second category in terms of my awareness–not the gravity of the event, the assassin killed an innocent bystander in the audience. I remember where I was and what I was doing when Ronald Reagan got shot in 1981 (riding on a train from Boise to Denver with Curt Nichols) and when the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up in 1986 (sitting in a dentist chair). Yesterday, Christian sent a note to Lorena that the President Trump had been shot. I was sitting at my desk working (on a Saturday) so I immediately pulled up X (Twitter) and spent the rest of the day following the events.
We found out today that the grandfather of Omar, one of our most dear friends in Mexico fought in the Mexican revolution as a Carrancista. If you do not know what that is, it is okay. You can read a little about it here. He enlisted in the forces of Pancho Villa (not a nice man) when he was very young–maybe just a boy. That war was brutal. My thesis adviser for my Masters degree at University of Texas at El Paso told me that one out of every five people in Mexico lost their life during the war. I am not sure that is true and there is not a consensus on how many actually did, but there is a consensus on the fact that a LOT of people died. The sad part is that is that the influenza epidemic of 1918 took even more people. We are looking forward to the next time we can get together with Omar to ask him about all this.
Lorena and I have been living according to an ad hoc schedule since when I finished my degree back in December. We have been at loose ends trying to figure out what to do next. We have finished almost all we set out to accomplish since we arrived in Texas almost three years ago. The only thing left is the thing that is, mostly, keeping us in Texas–that is the finishing of the house on the hill to the point where we can live in it well. We are still six or so months away from that. By that time, we will be close to the end of the year and time to receive family for the holidays, so we are thinking it does not make sense to do something else until early 2025. The election will have occurred by then and either Trump will be president or it will have been stolen again. Either way, that will be at least a little bit of an indicator about what we might want to do and where we might want to live.
I said all that to say that we have decided to try to start living a more ordered life again. To that end, we went out today after our worship meeting and bought fixing for a fine Sunday dinner of pork loin and vegetables. That is one of the little things we hope to continue to do through this period of uncertainty. We want to add other regularities like that to our lives.
Christian and Lorena got tickets for the Trump rally today in Manchester, NH, drove up there from Cambridge (only about an hour drive), saw the massive lines to get in, checked the temperature (14° F), and decided to try again tomorrow at the Concord, NH rally. Lorena has been a huge Trump fan since the very beginning. They were pretty sad, but there was a good chance that the would have stood in line for several hours and still not been able to get in. I have gotten a lot less political with age. More and more, I am buying into the “not my circus, not my monkeys” motif and I think it seems to serve me well. It is very much in the spirit of “render unto Caesar” and the whole concept behind Mere Christianity. Still, I do like the Donald and would love to see him poke the establishment in the eye.
Maybe it is because we are approaching Halloween that I am thinking about these things, but it is magnified by a spiritual decline in the west and around the world that provokes a strong sense of foreboding. The spirit of the current age is very different from anything I have experienced in my lifetime. Paganism is on the rise in the west, even to the displacement of the Enlightenment informed atheism that was in ascendancy for so many years. Cultural Christianity is in steep decline. The war in Ukraine is/was disconcerting, but the new war in Israel has distinct apocalyptic overtones–especially with the saber rattling of Turkey and Russia in conjunction with the already heavy Iranian involvement that evokes remembrances of Biblical prophecy. The response around the world to all this seems demonic. Right now I am reading through the Old Testament, just finishing Joshua and starting into Judges this morning. The Old Testament narrative arc culminates in a cataclysmic end and new beginning with fierce spiritual warfare. Now is not the time to be complacent.
I deleted my twitter account today. The next step is to start moving from gmail and outlook email to ProtonMail.com. They are untrustworthy. After that, I will be leaving instagram. I have been using duckduckgo for search but have recently switch to swisscows. Same for WhatsApp and Hangouts–I have mostly made the stitch to Signal. The funny deal is that all the new ones actually work better for me than the ones they replaced.
Today, everything that is going on just seems crazy. We do not have a new U.S. President yet and whichever one ends up in office will make half of the country go crazy. The morality of the culture at large is abjectly bad. We are in the middle of a pandemic for over which there are additional levels of crazy on all sides of the issue. The funny deal is that at this one snapshot in time, our lives are going well, at least in a temporal sense. Lorena just earned her Associate of Arts degree in December. Kelly and Christian both have good jobs that would preclude them from being taken into the military if there is war. They both got good little, end-of-year raises at a time when that is quite uncommon. I have a job I love that, if we can solve a few more problems, we will speed up and provided a more controlled environment for virology and other types of research that require the growing of cells under specific conditions. What happens over the next few weeks with respect to the President will not have a huge effect on any of these things, but life could get a lot more insecure with respect to financial, moral, and physical security. In the meantime, we have a great view out our living room window.
I know the postings have been sparse and I am turning this site into a single trick blog, but in this time of the China Virus pandemic, there is not really much more to do. Honestly, though I have hope that I will be able to write about other stuff. There certainly is some other stuff on my radar. The political correctness of my current university is pretty much off the charts even though it is in the middle of fly-over country. I would be enjoying the ridiculousness of it if it were not so evil. So, rather than dwell on the negative, I am pressing on toward more important things.
For instance, the graph above was done in Python with a library called matplotlib. I am not great at it yet, but making a lot of progress. I feel really handicapped moving from C++ to Python, but this and some other libraries like ggplot are the gold standard for this kind of graph creation, so I am biting the bullet and working through it. I only have a few more graphs to complete for my first article.
I was a little discouraged watching the election returns last night, but then I read these verses and got some perspective.
Luke 17:20-21 Being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, he answered them, “The kingdom of God is not coming in ways that can be observed, nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There!’ for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you.”
It reminded me of when I first heard the saying, “Not my circus, not my monkeys.” My sister, Aunt Julia, told us that when some kids were acting up. Precisely right. In the end, the election was not all bad from my perspective, but this is definitively not my kingdom and not my king. Still, render to Caesar…
Kelly voted today and had some nice and interesting things to be about it. Here is what she had to say:
Dad texted me today to inform me that Susan B. Anthony was the first woman in the US to cast a vote (this is a lie, it was someone else) which I thought was VERY inspirational and anyway I looked it up and even if she wasn’t the very first, she definitely got arrested for voting illegally in 1872 and if *that* story (on top of modern events if you’re a well adjusted & morally sensitive person unlike myself!) doesn’t stir up the flames of righteous feminine patriotism within your heart I don’t know what will! What a country we live in that even my contemptible, procrastinating tush is allowed to fill out a ballot online, print it, and drop it off in the ballot box up until 8pm on election day! Apathy is for spineless chumps and I know my Rosie the Riveter kitchen plaque would say the same!! Get out there & vote your conscience!.
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(this is a picture i took of myself when i felt cute but also had to hide from employees in an anthropologie downtown bc i was using a hidden outlet to charge my phone at 2%, which is as good of a depiction of my political life as any I think).
Enough said. Vote pro-life.
We live in interesting times. The most notable non-presidential election of my lifetime is scheduled to take place this coming Tuesday. I am not wildly involved in any of this, but like to know what is going on. I do not trust any of the traditional news sources–we have not subscribed to a paper and ink newspaper for a couple of decades now and we do not have a television. That leaves the internet and, to a much lesser extent, the radio. Fortunately, I think it is possible figure out what is going on better than any time in my lifetime. I will continue to depend on non-traditional news sources and continue to vet my current sources at the same time I look for new ones.
My cousin, Trisha, attended the Donald Trump rally in Elko, Nevada yesterday. She lives only a mile from the venue. She said it was amazing about every school bus and piece of heavy equipment in the county was used as crowd control and security barriers. The crowd was huge and 6000-7000 people were turned away because they ran out of room. It sounds like it was very high energy and consisted of the standard stump speech kind of stuff. What was the best was the Trump did not use a teleprompter. Everything he said was from him. He might not be the most polished orator, but much better than the previous occupant of his office who read in monotone from a script in front of him.
I have been reading a lot of memories of 9/11/2001 on the internet today. I dug up some old video (kind of bad, but if you download it, you can hear the sound) of the Kelly when she was 7 years old and Christian when he was 5 years old, just three months before the attack on the twin trade towers. Grandpa Lauro and Grandma Conchita were visiting us when we lived in Sherwood, Oregon. It all happened right after I dropped them off at the airport in Portland and headed off to work in West Portland. Their flight got canceled and they had to take a taxi home. I listened on the radio after the first tower was hit, then made it to work at ESI in time to watch the second airplane fly into the second tower and the two towers both fall to the ground on live television. My sister Jean was in New York heading toward the towers when this all happened. They got stuck there for quite a few days before they could make their way home, but that is another story for another time.
The whole valley behind the house is obscured by smoke from forest fires. It is kind of crazy how often this happens and it is because logging does not occur as it did when I was growing up in Oregon. Because of that the snags and underbrush do not get cleaned up and thinning does not occur so there is just massive amounts of fuel ripe for these big fires. This is our second summer in this house and it happened last year, too. We hope someone comes to their senses and the forests get opened up again so this does not happen so much in the future. It would be good for the economy, too.
It was great to be in Puerto Vallarta with half of Lorena’s family, but it is great to be home now, too. This was my first real vacation in the last several years. It turned into a time for reflection that I hope Lorena and I can repeat more frequently now. We talked a lot about the fact with the kids grown, on their own and paying there own way for over four years now, we have the freedom and responsibility to set some new goals. The difficulty of giving up control of one’s kids is not diminished by the fact that, if you did your job right as a parent, it is going to happen whether you want it or not.
There is a lot that happened over the week, but one of things that cast a pall over some of the vacation is the looming election of a new president in Mexico who appears to have plans to push the country along a similar path as is currently being followed by Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. That happened the day after we returned to Washington. Everyone is pretty worried, but there is nothing to be done about it other than wait to see what happens and hope for the best.
Lorena and I spent the night with Kelly in Seattle on Tuesday night so we could drive to the Birch Bay Enrollment Center of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection of the Department of Homeland Security to be interviewed. We did not get much sleep because we talked with Kelly until very late in the evening, then got up at 4:00 to get to our appointment on time at 8:00 AM. It was really pretty uneventful. The arrogance of the first guy we met to turn in our papers was offset by interviews with very nice agents with both the U.S. and Canadian border services. We still have a couple more steps to get through the process, but when we are done we will get to go through the TSA Precheck at airports in the U.S. and global entry lines which are almost always a lot faster. There is another certification I can get to get through customs in participating Asian-Pacific countries. I think it will be worth it if I continue with the expected travel to China.
The new header I put up (you can still see it here when I change it again). It seems appropriate that this was the view of the mountain out our window this 16th anniversary of the cowardly murder that took place at the Twin Trade Towers in New York in 2001. The header picture was taken at 6:00 AM and the picture to the left was taken an hour later. It all reminded me of that power of God. I read a factoid yesterday about the power of hurricanes, that an average hurricane expends way more power than the sum of all the man made power in the entire world for an entire year. Looking out the window and reflecting on the understanding that Mt. Ranier thousands of years overdue for an eruption it makes me realize how small and inconsequential is the raging of men. I understand the Mount St. Helens explosion was 1600 times as big as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in World Wart II. This coming eruptions of Mt. Ranier is prognosticated to be much bigger than that. It is never too early to get one’s house in order.
All that being said, I think some seemingly inconsequential events are much bigger deals in light of eternity and judgment. I was thinking of what a great thing it was for Kelly to receive the benefit of an amazing and spiritually edifying trip to visit family in Mexico. But, on some levels, even more than that was an after church dinner to which we got invited at Bob and Gena’s house yesterday. We were very grateful to be included in that. I went from there straight home to the computer to work on contract work–good, helpful work that will save lives. I missed the afternoon Gospel meeting because of that and could not get past the thought that seemingly small spiritual things are so much more important and powerful than whatever else is going on in our lives have a greater eternal impact than world events and work. Even these world shaking events like terrorism, hurricanes, volcanoes or the solving of sickle cell disease pale in comparison.
Google, in the minds of many, is pretty much the devil. I have started to come around to that opinion myself. There are lots of people who believe this. The problem is there has never really been any other option. After the most recent spate of ignorance and draconian overreach when Google fired a guy for expressing an idea that is objectively true, I decided to see if I could bail out of use of the Google search engine because, in my opinion, they censors what is good and true to promulgate evil. I found out that is kind of a hard thing to do. There are some searches for my work at which Google is better than anything else available. That led me to the idea that I need to minimize my Google searches to those for which there is no other alternative.
The good news is that I found a solution. I wrote earlier (here) about what I believe to be malfeasance on the part of Mozilla in their treatment of a very good man. That man, Brendan Eich, got fired from Mozilla for unconscionable pretexts. Because he believes in and supports “traditional marriage” (just marriage for non-double-speak people), he got fired from Mozilla. He immediately started a competing browser company named Brave. I tried that browser when it first came out, but it really was not ready for prime time. I tried it again today because I was so feed up with Google and Mozilla and I have to say that if it is not yet ready for prime time, it is very, very close. In addition, they have a way to set my browser (I use DuckDuckGo to avoid Google for the vast bulk of my searches) and Google only for those where it works best–stuff where they cannot impose their extreme hard left-wing bias. Brave facilitates all of this and I am grateful. Check it out. Don’t get swallowed by the Borg.