Harry's Ruminations

In sum, here's my problem:  I've joined a Baptist Church, but I'm no Baptist. In detail it goes like this: Baptists come from the Calvinist tradition.   You may have heard of "free will baptists."  These are not those. Calvinism is a very well reasoned Protestant doctrine based on Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion .  It further comes from the sole scrirptura  tradition of the Reformation, in that it solely derives from points in the canonical scriptures, especially the New Testament. There are 5 major points to Calvinism, encapsulated in the acronym TULIP . Total Depravity Unconditional Election Limited Atonement Irresistible Grace Persistence of the Saints When I queried the pastor, he reaffirmed he "believes in God's sovereignty," furthermore the sermon that same day had the theme that "God is the Author of History," leaning on the person of God as an omniscient and omnipotent active force in His creati...

"Kentucky makes great bourbon.  And apparently, good Software Engineers." Good stuff.

Things seem....bad. Offhand, enumerating the things that seem broken in my country right now: Our government isn't really functioning.  The Constitutional Republican Democracy of 1787 seems like a failure at scale. We're more tribal than we've been since segregation, a process that's accelerating. We're in unending, global guerrilla war against people willing to kill themselves for an idea incompatible with our existence as a nation. We have roughly one mass shooting per day.  Yesterday, there was one in Kentucky. We've lost our ability as a society to dream of something bigger: The moon, world peace, whatever.  That seems like a 1960's fever dream at this point. What can I do about any  of the above?   Nothing .   I mean, I guess I can argue with people on the internet about it, for all the good that does.   I could retain crushing anxiety about what might happen, much like when I was a kid having watched The...

So, 2017 is past. As luck would have it, we decided today would be a good day for midwinter cleaning, as I'm halfway through my 2 week stint off work.  I dug through a box I had from our move back in June, and within was my first Employee Evaluation from Amazon.  I got to look at what I thought would be my 2017 and got to compare it to what I actually accomplished. What an interesting idea.  So, let's do that for 2017. Here are some things I wanted to do in 2017.  These are not  New Year's Resolutions, but, meh. Get out of that Rental.   We were paying 2k / month for a rather crappy rental with little insulation.  It leaked air like a sieve, had a back yard full of fire ant mounds, and had a proprty management company with all the integrity of your average Nixon advisor.  Status:  Achieved . We were out by June 30th. Get out of Austin .  I like Austin.  Sort of.  I dislike the concrete and traffic, but it's a place wi...