The November 14, 2021 issue of the New York Times Magazine contains an article by Jake Silverstein entitled A Nation of Argument. (If you follow the hyperlink, you’ll find at least one different title; NY Times’s articles seem to change their names fairly frequently.)
The article discusses Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 project, which claims that “… the moment in August 1619 when the first enslaved Africans arrived in the English colonies that would become the United States could, in a sense, be considered the country’s origin.”
I might quibble that the indentured Africans who arrived in August 1619 were not actually slaves, and I would argue that it doesn’t make sense to designate a single day as the first day of a new country.
But those are just my usual quibbles against rhetoric. Hannah-Jones is making the much more substantive claim that from its earliest days, our country has been founded on a contradiction.
This contradiction is between our founding statement that “All men are created equal” and our founding history, where some men (and women) clearly were not equal.
I’ve thought for years that the cognitive dissonance between American ideals and American reality helped propel people to bravely go South in the early 60s to risk their lives to register voters.
It had never occurred to me that this cognitive dissonance can be resolved another way:
… our founding concept of universal equality, in a country where one-fifth of the population was enslaved, led to an increase in racial prejudice by creating a cognitive dissonance — one that could be resolved only by the white citizenry’s assumption of Black inferiority and inhumanity. It’s an unsettling idea, that the most revered ideal of the Declaration of Independence might be considered our original divisive concept.
In the midst of the discussion of the ethics of genetic testing, I found this:
Even in the best of circumstances, the nature of DNA made the question of consent particularly thorny. As one commenter on a genealogy blog pointed out, “When YOU give consent, you are also giving consent for fifty percent of your mother’s and fifty percent of your father’s DNA, too.”
Doesn’t this help break down our especially American belief that we are each autonomous, separate individuals? Part of our genetic “identity” also belongs to other people.
I’m not even sure what questions this raises, but I’m sure there are many.
In the summer between my junior and senior years in high school (I think), the father of my best friend, Mark (“Gruesome”) Grandy, found us jobs picking peaches at a farm belonging to a friend of his in California’s central valley.
The workers lived in buildings with screen all around, letting outside air in. We slept on cots. Because we were special, Mark and I had one bunkhouse to ourselves while a couple of dozen Mexican braceiros lived in another one. A third building held a smaller group of Americans, men who “Boss Tweed” found by driving his Edsel station wagon to Yuba City/Marysville and looking on street corners. Some of the men he brought back were still drunk (they fell of their ladders sometimes, breaking valuable peach tree branches).
That summer, the Mexicans constantly sang Pancho López, a song strongly based on the super popular theme song of Disney’s Davy Crockett tv show. (All the kids - boys anyway - wore Davy Crockett hats that year.)
Nació en Chihuahua en novecientos seis en un petate bajo un ciprés, a los dos años hablaba inglés, mató a dos hombres a la edad de tres.
Pancho, Pancho López, chiquito, pero matón.
A los cuatro años sabía cantar, tocar guitarra y hasta bailar, a treinta yardas podía atinar un ojo a un piojo y sin apuntar .
Pancho, Pancho López. se fue a la revolución.
A los cinco años sabía montar, la carabina sabía pulsar, y su papá lo dejaba fumar y se emborrachaba con puro mezcla.
Pancho, Pancho López chiquito pero matón . A los seis años se enamoró, luego a los siete, pues se casó, y lo que tenia que pasar pasó, a los ocho años papá resultó.
Pancho, Pancho López. valiente como un león
Y aqui la historia se terminó porque a los nueve Pancho murió, la moraleja de la historia es: no vivas la vida con tanta rapidez.
This is the tool used to punch holes in the earth for the orange conduit that will hold our Google Fiber. It’s kind of like an autonomous jackhammer that pounds its way through dirt and even rock. It’s powered by the air compressor behind it.
Workers dig long holes every 20 feet or so (it varies and I’m guessing anyway).
The punching tool is placed in the hole.
The worker uses his shovel, leg, etc. to point the tool towards its goal, the next hole up the street, marked by the yellow shovel handle.
The tool goes to work, shaking everything. It’s fun to put your foot on the ground along its path to feel how far it’s gotten.
Here you can see a finished hole heading up towards the Baers’ Zoysia grass patch. (Tom, they did a good job of putting the grass back.)
The European Union unveiled plans on Thursday to make USB-C connectors the standard charging port for all smartphones, tablets and other electronic devices sold across the bloc, an initiative that it says will reduce environmental waste but that is likely to hit Apple the hardest.
The move would represent a long-awaited yet aggressive step into product-making decisions by the European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm. Apple, whose iPhones are equipped with a different port, has long opposed the plan, arguing that it would stifle innovation and lead to more electronic waste as all current chargers that are not USB-C would become obsolete.
So Apple is worried about waste?
Anyone who has a drawer full of wires for old iPods, iPads, Macintoshes, etc. knows how ludicrous and hypocritical this is.
Macintosh owners know far too well the waste of a perfectly good charger when the built-in cable frays:
One more thing
IMNSHO, Apple’s iMac is responsible for far more waste than just cables.
Go to your local Craig’s list and search for iMac computers. You’ll find lots of them, many with beautiful, still functional screens and the old, underpowered processors that are no longer have enough memory or storage for today’s needs. (Many never did have enough power).
The idea of tossing out such beautiful displays drives me crazy. You can’t even use them as a display for another computer.
I have a beautiful BenQ monitor which reproduces 99% of the Adobe RGB color space. No need to replace this for a long time. But as you can see, I have replaced the old Mac Mini that used to power it:
I was pretty sure that USB-C cables could be upgraded to do whatever Apple wanted to do, so I asked Reddit:
It’s interesting that the poster calls this a “random thought” when this is all over social media and even MSM (definition #2). This is yet another example of how we humans like to believe that we think independently.
