What we need more of in popular music today: powerful and appealing ballads with ukulele accompaniment.
If Moses really signed this I think they should be asking more than $75.
Finding it remarkably hard to decline an automatic upgrade on American Airlines. I just wanna keep my economy seat next to my wife!
Eric Collins has play-by-play for the Iowa-Troy game on FS1 today and sounds like Gus Johnson on coke. Yelling to the point his voice breaks for a fumble in the 4th quarter of a 10-point game. Bro, take it down a notch. Maybe two.
Pretty sure this is the first time I’ve preordered a new iPhone on release day. 16 Pro 256 GB in natural titanium. 👍
Made it to YOW plenty early for my flight home… turns out US Border Patrol doesn’t open until 0500. At least I’ll be within the first dozen in line once they do…
I knew that the WNBA audience has grown substantially this year. I was still surprised to turn on TSN here at my Canadian hotel and see the Aces-Fever game on. (I’ll forgive them for the crap video quality, which might be the hotel’s fault and not TSN’s.)
Summer has been for family trips and fun; fall is apparently now for work travel. 5 of the next 9 weeks I will be out for at least part of the week for meetings or conferences. Today: CID -> ORD -> YOW. 🇨🇦
2024 Reads: An Autobiography by Mohandas K. Gandhi 📚
If one of the Desert Fathers had training as a lawyer and wrote a Substack, you would get something like this book. Gandhi: super-weird.
Look I know we’re only 6 quarters into the season, but this Nebraska football team looks WAY better than they did last year. This is fun to watch.
Sitting out on the drive with a fire going and the football game on. The kid is there in person. #GBR #football
PRd my 5k this morning! (27:55 still has lots of room for improvement!) Beautiful chilly morning for a race.
There are days where work drives me bonkers; there are other days when I come away deeply appreciative that I work with some fantastic engineers doing really good stuff. Today is one of the latter. Thankful.
Nice cool morning to get out and run. 5k nice and steady. Running my first real race in several years on Saturday.
Caitlin Clark with a garbage rebound at the end of the game to make it a triple-double. What a performance!
As a first year WNBA follower, one of my big takeaways is that the league needs to upgrade their refs. So many poor and uncommunicated calls every game. Women’s college basketball has better officiating.
The blessing of the dedicated civil servant
There’s a wonderful long-form profile on the Washington Post right now about Chris Mark, a man who eschewed an opportunity for a upper-class education to (literally) go work in the coal mines, and ended up revolutionizing coal mine safety. (That’s a gift link, so you can read it whether you’re a WaPo subscriber or not.) It’s a compelling story of a man, driven by some complex family dynamics, who found his niche and ended up in a government job where he could follow that interest in a direction that has resulted in countless miners' lives saved over his career.
The value of experts in government driving regulation gets stated explicitly late in the piece:
Every now and then, however, Chris’s work slipped into public view. His coal mine roof rating was used all over the world and, in his own narrow circles, he was well known. In 2016 — the first year in recorded history that zero underground coal miners were killed by falling roofs — Chris landed in a public spat. He’d seen an article by an economic historian about the history of roof bolts in the Journal of Technology and Culture. The historian wanted to argue that roof bolts had taken 20 years to reduce fatality rates because it had taken 20 years for the coal mining industry to learn to use them. All by itself, the market had solved this worker safety problem! The government’s role, in his telling, was as a kind of gentle helpmate of industry. “It was kind of amazing,” said Chris. “What actually happened was the regulators were finally empowered to regulate. Regulators needed to be able to enforce. He elevated the role of technology. He minimized the role of regulators.”
Government functionaries can be an easy target for criticism, but this profile highlights the key and dedicated role that so many play in today’s society. In my own work I have encountered many Federal Aviation Administration employees who fit a similar profile. They found some particular niche interest related to flying, and they made it their life’s work to make it better and safer. It’s often a thankless job, and on a government pay scale that pales next to what they could likely make in industry.
(As a side note, this is part of what makes Trump’s Project 2025 intentions to politicize the civil service so terrifying: it would eliminate protections on just these dedicated experts to replace them with people who don’t know the topic but who donated to the right political cause. You wanna see the country (literally) crumble? Ditch all the regulatory experts like Chris Mark and replace them with Heritage Foundation interns.)
Youngest daughter has her school permit and is driving herself to school for the first time this morning. End of an era of doing drop-offs and pick-ups. Phew.
Brisket turned out great! I’d give myself maybe a 8.5/10. Think I could’ve pulled it a little sooner. Still, great flavor, texture is fine, lots of leftovers… yum.
David Bentley Hart’s “The Experience of God”
With some of my recent reading getting my mental wheels turning about the nature of who God is, I figured it was a reasonable time to pull The Experience of God off my shelf. Right off the bat in the introduction, Hart promises what I was hoping for: “My intention is simply to offer a definition of the word ‘God’…” Unfortunately, 332 pages later, what David Bentley Hart has written isn’t at all simple, and approaches a definition of “God” only from an oblique angle.
Hart structures the book in three major parts. In the first, he clarifies that the “God” he is describing is the ultimate deity, the prime mover, from which all other creation and being have their source. It is here even in the beginning section that he starts taking aim at what appears to be his actual target with this book: the arguments of the popular atheists of the late 20th and early 21st century. (Richard Dawkins is a regular whipping boy.)
The second section (comprising the bulk of the book) is structured around three characteristics which Hart points to as the core aspects of God: being, consciousness, and bliss. Each of these (long) chapters seems less interested in enlightening the reader on who God is than in disputing with the atheists and materialists. God is the root of being, declares Hart, and anyone who says differently is just stupid. There is no materialist explanation for consciousness, says Hart, and the materialists who argue for an evolutionary reason and dismiss God are illogical and foolish. There is no evolutionary reason for a search for beauty, truth, and goodness, says Hart, and those who would try to argue thus are intellectually dishonest. So it goes.
Hart’s arguments are at his strongest when he’s arguing for something instead of railing against something. The first part of his chapter on bliss was particularly good in that regard. Sadly, most of the book goes the other direction.
It’s very hard to review Hart without taking his blustery style into consideration. He’s never met a big word he didn’t like. He makes huge sweeping assertions without any hint of supporting justification. He seems to think that just by declaring something “obviously” wrong that it’s obvious to everyone and doesn’t need explained. In doing so he dismissively waves away not just the weak sauce of people like Dawkins but also more substantive scientists and thinkers who deserve better. Hart falls almost into self-parody at the beginning of chapter six: “[W]e should not mistake every pronouncement made in an authoritative tone of voice for an established truth.” While aiming this at popular atheists, it’s an argument that is equally valid against Hart himself.
There’s an old joke about a preacher, who at one point in his sermon notes has written: “weak point, pound pulpit”. As a lay theologian and not much of a philosopher at all, my trouble with Hart’s book is that he does so much pulpit pounding it makes me suspect the strength of his points. Even in places where I find myself in agreement with his conclusions I have a hard time feeling like the book was beneficial.