Trickster, Teacher, Chaos, Clay

God is Power—

Infinite,

Irresistible,

Inexorable,

Indifferent.

And yet God is Pliable —

Trickster,

Teacher,

Chaos,

Clay.

God exists to be shaped.

God is Change.

Earthseed: the Books of the Living 

Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler

By the Numbers

The winner take all electoral process in the United States is increasingly out of balance.

Let's say that all of the population of people over 18 are eligible to vote and do so an election over what color to paint the sky, pink or puple.

Let's say that 51% of voters in Wyoming vote to paint the sky purple, and 51% of adults in Texas do, too. 

Electoral rules mean that all of Wyoming's 3 electoral votes are dropped into the purple bucket, along with all 40 of Texas' votes. This seems to be simple majority rule, right?

But wait.

49% of Texans voted for pink.

This means that the 221,638 purple votes of Wyoming effectively canceled the 8,586,712 pink votes in Texas.

Sure, we could divvy it up by proportion: 21 purple votes and 19 pink votes for Texas, plus 2 purple votes and 1 pink vote for Wyoming. But the representational math still doesn't work, because Wyoming's 221,638 purple votes are 2.5% of Texas' 8,937,191 purple votes, but the 2 votes that would be allocated are 10%, so their votes count 4 times as much as Texans.

This is wrong.

This is not representational government.

It's time to rethink the electoral college.

In the meantime, move to Wyoming, and vote!

The magic of libraries

"The world is very stressful. The library makes me feel at peace and curious and in control of my time. I love that it’s a public space where I can also have a private moment. We can be alone together. To me, that is sacred.” —Andy Crocker

Adapt and Endure

We do not worship God 

We perceive and attend God.

We learn from God.

With forethought and work,

We shape God.

In the end, we yield to God.

We adapt and Endure,

For we are Earthseed 

And God is Change.

Earthseed: the Books of the Living 

Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler 

Unready Fingers

A gift of God

May sear unready fingers.

—Earthseed: the Books of the Living 

Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler

I got thrown back off the TBI cliff again. Grief has won the day, and most of last night, and looks to be the prime contender for the foreseeable however long. I do not love this, and at the same time I do not trust myself to make big decisions right now. Grief makes a whole meal out of helplessness, and to dine at that table is to party with Despair, something I have no interest in. 

I miss Georgia. 

I miss talking with her, and I miss seeing her, and I miss reading with her nearby.

I can’t get the words on a Philosophy page to weave into concepts. They just sit there, being words, silently wondering if I’ve figured out how to pick the lock yet. I haven’t, of course. I can digest the news headlines after a few minutes of thinking about them, and then wish I hadn’t; it seems like a waste of effort.

I feel useless.

And so I make tea and walk the dog.

I chop up the cooled chicken and add avocado and red onion and tarragon, then take a nap because I’m too tired to eat, and I didn’t have any appetite really anyway.

The air is muggy with a not-yet storm and I wish it would either rain or move on.

Even the climate feels helpless.

Only baths and tea make sense.

Some an Hundredfold, Some Sixty, Some Thirty

All that you touch

You change.

All that you Change

Changes you.

The only lasting truth

Is Change.

God

Is Change.

—Earthseed: The Books of the Living

The Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler

There’s a break in the rain this morning, and the day is warm with a cool breeze. The furnace blast of the heat wave seems to have been washed away by the storms.

My Disability Days seem to be nearing an endpoint; it’s been a long time since I lost nearly a week to neurological issues and suffering. The suffering ended yesterday, and today I seem more able to think and read and write, even though only for short periods at a time with naps and meditation in between. I’ll take it.

The CrowdStrike outage on Friday didn’t impact me personally as much as the neurological chaos; I was already scheduled to leave after scrum in the morning, and so the Blue Screen of Death on my laptop didn’t impact much of my work. The outage seems to have been a wake-up call to the industry, though I’m not sure they have enough of the necessary perspective to be able to implement any new-found sanity. We’ve been living by the motto of “moving fast and breaking things” for so long that the treadmill’s whiplash pace seems to have run away with us. 

I’m dogsitting again for the coming week, and I have all my tools — food and books and electronics, oh my. I don’t know that I will be able to do much Philosophical reading before the meeting on Tuesday morning; I’m still having trouble getting the phrases to match up into a concept and engage with the meaning of the text. For some reason it’s still easier to work with data, which feels like building a lego as opposed to oil painting. 

Politics feels like a chapter in a near-future science fiction novel, and when I sleep I wake up wondering if I dreamed the latest headline. 

Subjugation through erosion of believability

“This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. 

A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. 

With such a people, you can do whatever you want.”

—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)