David Baer @david@arktos.social

Draining the swamp by pardoning a guy who tried to auction off a US Senate seat.

Trump Commutes Corruption Sentence of Governor Rod Blagojevich of Illinois - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/18/us/politics/trump-pardon-blagojevich-debartolo.html#click=https://t.co/2yH9jDsElC

Fascinating piece about wild rice--lots of stuff I did not know. Apparently it's not actually rice, for one. But also its importance in indigenous North American cultures.

The Cross-Border Indigenous Battle for Wild Rice https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-wild-rice

Paul Krugman puts his finger on the reason for Republicans' refusal to hear evidence in the impeachment trial: it's become a habit of mind.

"Think about what is now required for a Republican politician to be considered a party member in good standing. He or she must pledge allegiance to policy doctrines that are demonstrably false; he or she must, in effect, reject the very idea of paying attention to evidence."

How Zombies Ate the G.O.P.’s Soul https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/opinion/republican-party-trump.html

Wow. Didn’t get this until I saw the picture.
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2020/02/02/sunday-favorites-279/

Duck, North Carolina, 2015

“The money necessary to implement a Green New Deal or provide health care and jobs is there — it’s simply being given away to the Wall Street casino.”

—Nicole M. Aschoff, “No Rational System Would Value Tesla at $100 Billion”

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/01/tesla-stock-price-elon-musk-financialization-capital/

Sunday favorites https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2020/01/26/sunday-favorites-278/

“Give counsel, grant justice; make your shade like night at the height of noon; hide the outcasts, do not betray the fugitive; let the outcasts of Moab settle among you; be a refuge to them from the destroyer. ...

"Then a throne shall be established in steadfast love in the tent of David, and on it shall sit in faithfulness a ruler who seeks justice and is swift to do what is right."

"The love of God does not find, but creates, that which is pleasing to it. ... Rather than seeking its own good, the love of God flows forth and bestows good." - Martin Luther, 1518 Heidelberg Disputation

Last month I repeatedly worked through my day off. That turned out to be a mistake, with negative consequences for my physical and emotional well being. I'm resolved not to do this again in the new year.

Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, 2016

This is cool: generate a random 63-character password for your wireless access point, and encode it in a QR code.

https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/encoding-wifi-access-point-passwords-qr-code/

I somehow missed this Peter Wehner column, which is very good.

"Those of us of the Christian faith believe that Christmas Day represents the moment of God’s incarnation, when this broken world became his home. But it was not an entrance characterized by privilege, comfort, public celebration or self-glorification; it was marked instead by lowliness, obscurity, humility, fragility."

NYTimes: Christmas Turns the World Upside Down
Christmas Turns the World Upside Down https://nyti.ms/2Qhy1vL

All I want for Christmas is a week of hibernation.

Thanks, Amazon, for shipping a child's toy by slapping a label on the retail box. Surprises are overrated anyway.

Kaaterskill Falls, New York State

I left my #openbsd laptop in my office, not realizing I had kicked out the cord from the AC adapter. I came back hours later to find it powered down, but was pleasantly surprised to start it up and see it un-hibernating: apmd automagically did the right thing when the battery level was critically low and suspended to disk. w00t!

I love that the bluff/intimidation factor of this is way higher than its actual degree of difficulty.

You don’t need fancy symbolic integration techniques here. You just need to know that "integral" means roughly "area under curve" and that it’s distributive over addition.

“Folly can be overcome, not by instruction, but only by an act of liberation.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer (h/t Fred Clark)