I've been publicly addressing white mediocrity since my 2011 blog post "The American Way: Mediocrity, When White, Looks Like Merit," but I learned A LOT from @IjeomaOluo's MEDIOCRE. As Brittney Cooper's @nytimes review said, it really is an invitation for society to do better.

Of necessity, that invitation requires unvarnished truths. A few of my favorite lines:

“When I talk about mediocrity, I am not talking about something bland and harmless. [...] I’m talking about a dedication to ignorance and hatred that leaves people dead, for no other reason

than the fact that white men have been conditioned to believe that ignorance and hatred are their birthright and that the effort of enlightenment and connection is an injustice they shouldn’t have to face” (6).

“Perhaps one of the most brutal of white male privileges is the opportunity to live long enough to regret the carnage you have brought upon others” (30).

“Nothing says ‘American’ like a boy making a woman struggle so that he can seem independent” (35).

“Mediocre, highly forgettable white men regularly enter feminist spaces and expect to be centered and rewarded, and they have been. They get to be highly flawed, they get to regularly betray the values of their movement, yet they will be praised

As 2020 is ending, I want to share a true story with you all. A story that has saved, changed and touched a soul. Little long but a MUST read for everyone.

Charles Plumb was a US Navy jet pilot in Vietnam. After 75 combat missions, his plane was destroyed by a surface-to-air missile. Plumb ejected and parachuted into enemy hands. He was captured and spent 6 years in a communist Vietnamese prison.

He survived the ordeal and now lectures on lessons learned from that experience!

One day, when Plumb and his wife were sitting in restaurant, a man at another table came up and said: "You're Plumb! You flew jet fighters in Vietnam from the aircraft carrier. You were shot down!"

"How in the world did you know that?" asked Plumb. "I packed your parachute," the man replied. Plumb gasped in surprise and gratitude. The man pumped his hand and said:"I guess it worked!" "It sure did," Plumb assured him. "If your chute hadn't worked, I wouldn't be here today."

That night, Plumb couldn't sleep, as he kept thinking about that man. Plumb says: "I kept wondering what he had looked like in a Navy uniform: a white hat; a bib in the back; and bell-bottom trousers. I wonder how many times I might have seen him and not even said

🎩🎉🥳⏳ 2020 New Year's Time Capsule in oil paintings -

Thread 🖌️20 highlights of (approx 50) projects from 2020.
No particular order, but some have greater impact than others.

Tweets are numbered,
last one will say /end thread/

1) "Turning Angel"
A tribute to...

1b) "Turning Angel monument, built over the graves of five children killed in a factory explosion in the early 1900’s:

(2020)She was recently vandalized, toppled, had a broken wing. She is made whole here.
This was my first time painting in only black & white, no color at all."

1c) "When I first heard about this statue being toppled and damaged, something about it tugged at my heart. When I found out that it was a memorial over the graves of five children, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I looked up the statue to see what it looked like…decided to

1d) "paint it. I understand how it feels to create something to honor the deaths of people, & to have someone destroy it in a hateful action. That beautiful angel statue, installed as a memorial for children who died so tragically young- toppled to the ground with a broken wing"

2) 🖌️ Even in 2020, we are welcome at His table, multitudes.
Come as you are.

My wife and I led a very successful Zoom party for New Year's Eve. I thought I'd share details and tips in case it helps others. We had about 15 squares worth of people on the screen. The two main activities were charades and singing songs related to time. 1/14

An issue we were worried about was tech support during the event, since not everybody was familiar with all Zoom features. We were planning to use a breakout room or two in case people got bored with an activity and wanted to talk, but never needed it. 2/

To aid in tech support, we used BOTH a laptop (with external monitor) & a separate iPad. That way, I could ensure that my instructions on what to tap worked, see what the others were seeing, etc. The iPad had audio off & we shared a good external mike connected to the laptop. 3/

Since I needed to work closely with the laptop, I had to sit right in front. The second device let my wife also sit right in front of a camera. The external mike cut down on room echoes since she was closer to it than the laptop's mike and made our voices equal. 4/

We asked everybody to rename themselves to be the names of who we were seeing (e.g., "Joe and Jane Smith" instead of "JSmith iPad"). That required tech support for most people. (It's different on iPad and laptop.) We introduced everybody, telling how we met them. 5/

The faces of the insurrectionist, anti-American mob that attacked the country have inspired me to re-read George Orwell's "The Road to Wigan Pier".

One of his lesser known, but IMHO best books. Thread.

First, so many right wing extremists tweeting Orwell quotes right now, as if he would have supported an attack on democracy. Read his work. Here's what HE believed, in his own words:

Orwell was a socialist. In fact, he was fighting against fascism in the Spanish Civil War when the book was published in 1937. He took a bullet in the

I'm re-reading the book because of what Orwell writes about class.

Buying plane tickets, purchasing weapons of war and body armor, taking time off from work, that takes time and money.

This is why Orwell is so interesting. Who are the people most prone to fascism?

Since today is my birthday, I thought I'd share a little something I wrote about life lessons learned to commemorate the day:
View from age 55…
1. Make intentional space for things that bring you joy.
2. It’s okay to take a nap when you get tired. This year has been exhausting.

3. Take care of yourself. No one can do this for you.
4. Notice small things. There is sacredness in the mundane.
5. Pay attention to your emotions. They give us needful information.
6. Listen to your heart’s desires -they give you guidance about how to spend your one life.

7. Never regret turning a year older. Not everyone had that privilege. Birthdays are a gift to be celebrated.
8. Don’t be afraid of silver hair. I feel like mine represents the experiences in my life and the (hopefully) wisdom I have gained.

9. Grief is a part of life. It is not weakness or lack of faith. Allowing yourself to grieve is the only way through.
10. What other people think of me isn't as important as I once thought.
11. I don’t have to live up to the expectations of others. I have to be true to my self.

12. I have learned to accept myself more. Not perfectly every day, but much more than I did in the past. I am who I am and I’m shaped how I’m shaped. I can only be who I am.
13. I’ve learned to be kind to myself.
14. The beach is always a good idea. It helps me reset.

Today’s the 8 year anniversary of the release of A Memory of Light, the 14th and concluding volume in The Wheel of Time.

8 years since it ended. Wow. Although we all know there are no endings to the turning of the WoT!

(Thread)

Info:
https://t.co/QEdSOyTapw

#twitteroftime

The title to this book was one RobertJordan thought of when he was finishing up edits on Knife of Dreams. He never explained the exact meaning although @BrandSanderson would later offer his version of it.

The closing epigraph of the book is one of my favorites:

“He came like the wind, like the wind touched everything, and like the wind was gone.”

There’s a story behind that quote.

Robert Jordan came up with that wind quote. He and Harriet were traveling to New York to meet with their publisher @torbooks. He shared the quote with Harriet, who was struck by it & really loved it.

The quote referred to Rand, of course, but after RJ died, it spoke more to Harriet about her husband than it did about the character. The quote was included in RJ’s prayer card from his funeral. I still have one.

How about a New Year's Eve thread about Gordon Parks & the photo world's deeply entrenched culture of white supremacy? Ok? Let's go.

We celebrate Gordon Parks as one of the most significant photographers of the 20th century. Rightfully so. His photos were more than exquisite aesthetic objects. They also profoundly shaped the way that white people saw & understood poverty & race. BUT...

But we rarely talk about *why* Parks was able to achieve so much in the photo world.

The answer is simple & clear: He -- alone among Black photographers of his & earlier generations -- received the same kind of mentoring & opportunities that as promising white photographers.

During most of photography's history, the single most important predictor of mainstream professional success was the possession of a white skin.

“This work”, says the publisher, “was not named ‘The Qur’an and its Translation’, because its author, M. Quraish Shihab, was acutely aware that the Qur’an is a holy book that cannot possibly be translated into any other language.” #qurantranslationoftheweek 🌏🇮🇩

Nevertheless, Muhammad Quraish Shihab’s (MQS)“Al-Qur’an dan Maknanya” (“The Qur’an and its Meanings”, first published in 2010) comes across as a Qur’an translation, rather than a qur’anic commentary.

Published in a single 650-page volume, which includes both the Arabic text of the Qur’an and an appendix that summarizes the content of all surahs, the work renders the meaning of the Qur’an into Indonesian verse by verse.

Some footnotes contain additional explanations, and the occasion of revelation of a segment of the Qur’an is infrequently provided, but the proportion of such additional material is small.

MQS (b. 1944) is a prolific Indonesian exegete, and a highly visible one as well, as he was the country’s first TV exegete. In 2004, he began hosting TV programmes that focused exclusively on the interpretation of the Qur’an.

1/18 Looking back at some of the most notable books I've read in 2020. It's a pretty eclectic mix!
I don't keep track so I am sure I forgetting something, especially if it was in deadtree form. Also, omitting the ones I started and abandoned.

2/18 The Supernova Era

I am a big, big fan of Cixin Liu- love his fiercely imaginative prose in the 3-body series and short stories... but I was bummed by this book.
The plot unfolds so preposterously that the large scale backdrops are grotesque. Pity.

3/18 How the Internet Happened

Beautifully written chronicle describing key actors & events that led to the internet as we know it today (almost).
I was a freshman in computer science in '92, saw a lot of that 1sthand, yet there was so much I didn't know!

4/18 Agency

A @GreatDismal in great shape. Getting back to that universe was fascinating, tho remembering all the characters frm th 1st book was hard.
His view of the Jackpot is disturbingly plausible, I am sure every reader wondered whether we are in

5/18 The Case Against Reality

Fantastic book. Evolution optimizes for fitness, not truth (whatever that is), and this book does a much better job explaining it than I ever could, to myself and others.
Skip the last chapter,

I've been reflecting some on Anatolios' book and wanted to put some thoughts down about doctrinal development, specifically re the Trinity.

The first thing that we have to say is that all Christians, irrespective of which tradition we are from, have to reckon with doctrinal development. Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, we need to understand that doctrines do historically develop as the church reflects on Scripture.

Crucially, as Protestants, what distinguishes our mode of development from others is that our development absolutely must be regulated by Scripture. We are captives to the word of God. Therefore, as we develop doctrine it is crucial that it is developed biblically.

Both of these things being the case, we need a model of explaining doctrinal development that can account for the fact of development and the fact that it must be truly biblical development. Though Anatolios is a Malkite, I think the model he presents is workable.

By which, I mean that his model, which is original to the French Catholic Gabriel Marcel, explains doctrinal development in ways that 1) account for how development actually occurs historically, and 2) leaves the conclusion of development open to analysis on Scriptural terms.

Does anyone remember when @DavidCornDC and I wrote about the #Groundswell group led by Ginni Thomas and organized by Cleta Mitchell?

The organizer of yesterday’s insurrection is one of the top influencers in that group — JennyBeth Martin, formerly of Tea Party Patriots.

Because no one calls them out, and because the IRS granted this group of orgs their coveted nonprofit status and further loosened restrictions and disclosures for them, they’ve been allowed to grow a seditious, criminal enterprise, led by the spouse of a sitting SCOTUS justice.

On our new podcast, we interviewed @angie_rasmussen, one of the leading virologists, who has been a guiding light during the pandemic. Thread here to summarize, transcript and audio https://t.co/Q6CabBsKCM @cuttingforstone /1

Current status
"We're essentially experiencing the equivalent of a 9/11 every day in terms of number of deaths; our hospital systems are overburdened. ...We're going to be dealing w/ this for some time to come, even after people get the vaccine, certainly #LongCovid is real." /2

On her strong efforts for dispelling misinformation
"My philosophy about public health is that you can't have it without the engagement of the public. And my philosophy about communication is that information empowers people to decide for themselves" /3

The diagnosis of #SARSCoV2 reinfection is very challenging and Dr. Rasmussen provides the best and complete explanation for why that's the case. One dimension of that is being able to culture the virus in a BSL (biosafety level)-3 lab /4

Many are not familiar with what BSL-3 and 4 labs are all about. Great summary here from her extensive experience. More in podcast/transcript on her response in BSL-4./5

1/

2021 is a year when I need to work much smarter.

I need to build #collaborations with folk to make better progress on the projects I want to work with.

These are in the following areas:

1) Education - the current system is both skewed by nation state imperatives ...

2/

... and by the huge and still growing burden of knowledge it attempts to package and deliver both at school and beyond school in working environments ...

Folk need to switch to alternate education, finding leaders to first follow in the footsteps and then ...

3/

... assume the mantle of the late, great @SirKenRobinson

We need to find current leaders, build practice on the ground, connect internet guides to folk wanting to learn, and lift accreditation and connectivity systems into the cloud to make learning far more accessible ...

4/

2) As far as global ecology is concerned, #BigAgri is still ruling the airwaves, and #RegenAgri still needs all the support it can get.

Leaders like #JohnDLiu and #GabeBrown have made a mark this year in the film @kissthegroundCA , but we all need to do more ...

5/

... to support the grassroots projects out there and get #RegenAgri practice much more widely known and adopted.

Again we need practitioners on the ground, but we also sorely need top communicators to be able to help the #grassroots movement tell its story.

Joyce's great story, "The Dead" takes place today 6 January, feast of the Epiphany. I look forward to discussing it this evening @IrlEmbRome. An endlessly rich story for our times, it turns the comforting Christmas tale of new life into a meditation on death, memory, loss. Thread

It corrects or seems to correct some of the bleakness of the earlier stories. Joyce wrote that he had "been unnecessarily harsh" in not reproducing any Dublin's "ingenuous insularity and its hospitality. The latter 'virtue' so far as I can see does not exist elsewhere in Europe".

It offers a wonderful evocation of hospitality and a luscious description of the laden Christmas table "A fat brown goose lay at one end of the table and at the other end, on a bed of creased paper strewn with sprigs of parsley, lay a great ham, stripped of its outer skin ...

Joyce wrote this extraordinarily mature story when he was just 25 years of age. Part of its inspiration came from a tough Christmas he and Nora spent in Rome in 1906. Christmas dinner, he complained, was just an uninspiring plate of pasta.

The Dead is also a fitting story for #NollaignamBan as Gabriel is made aware of his failure to see and properly hear the three women who challenge him: Lily, the caretaker's daughter, Miss Ivors, and of course his wife, Gretta.

🧵THREAD🧵

So, I'm on a another platform with some very smart people that apparently got Jack's goat over the years, and late last night, I got a crazy idea.

The idiot shitlibs have been, with varying degrees of effectiveness, using a basic rulebook since the early 1970s.

That book is "Rules For Radicals" by Saul Alinsky.

Until @realDonaldTrump came into politics, every time a Republican was confronted by one of these rules, they rolled over and showed their soft bellies as they waved the white flag.

The Boss is different though.

Here in the next tweets, I'm going to go over the "rules" and how Trump has broken, subverted, or appropriated their rules to beat them at their own game.

1. "Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have."

Trump's answer: This is straight out of the "Art of War": Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.

Interesting dichotomy, isn't it?

This is why so often, the MSM backs the Democrats and demeans Trump, to create the illusion that the Left is more powerful than they are, and that Trump is working from a position of weakness/illegitimacy/stupidity.

A lot of folks are grappling with, "What comes next? How do we atone for our part in what happened?"

We Jews have a ~700 page book you can turn to, The Gateway to Repentance. It painstakingly catalogues what true atonement requires.

But I want to tell you WHY we have this book.

Have you heard of Maimonides, aka The Rambam, aka Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon?

He was a Torah scholar, Saladin's doctor, wrote widely on mysticism and rationalism, and was super controversial.

He lived in Spain. Here's a common rendering:

He was born in 1138. He wrote The Guide for the Perplexed. In the late 1100s, controversy erupted over the fact that he had the gall to suggest that Torah scholars should work rather than live off of benefactors, and that his Mishneh Torah was more helpful than many rabbis.

The Guide for the Perplexed attempts to reconcile science and philosophy with rabbinic Judaism. This is no small thing! Assimilation in Spain and France was rampant among Jews, and many were not happy about this work, to put it lightly.

So the author of the book I posted, Shaarei Teshuvah, is Rabbi Yonah of Gerona. He is born in 1180. Unlike Maimonides, he spent all day learning Torah. He is related (by blood and marriage) to the Ramban, aka, Nachmanides, aka Rabbi Moses ben Nahman.

(Maimonides dies in 1204.)

💞𝐊𝐞𝐧𝐲𝐚'𝐬 𝐅𝐚𝐯𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐞 𝐁𝐨𝐨𝐤𝐬 𝐨𝐟 2020💞

I didn’t read as much as I normally do because I was writing my own books in The Mogul Series which you can find here: https://t.co/0sODsY2S21
🥰

There are a ton of books I just did not get a chance to read that are on

my TBR which is why this is a FAVORITE list and not a BEST of list; bc I mainly read for pleasure. I was introduced to some new authors who blew my fcking mind.

Many of these books challenged or comforted me in some way; so I want to thank these incredible authors for putting their heart on the line and sharing their words with us and making this tumultuous year a little bit brighter. 💖

🌟𝐓𝐇𝐄 2020 𝐋𝐈𝐒𝐓🌟
1. Queen Move — Kennedy Ryan
2. Our Reckless Hope — Love Belvin
3. Villian — LJ Shen
4. Shu — Alexandria House
5. The Duke the Lady and a Baby — Vanessa Riley
6. Daring and the Duke -- Sarah MacLean
7. Charming the Scottish Bastard— Melissa Blue

8. Andre - Jayce Ellis
9. Rock the Curves— Twyla Turner-Author
10. Truly— Carmel Rhodes
11. Jaded by Love — AJ Alexander
12. Cry of Metal and Bone— Leslye Penelope
13. The Jezebel— Dylan Allen
14. Black Out— Lynn Raye Harris
15. In Fury Lies Mischief — Amo Jones

A few notes on @TheProspect article on "The China Hack"

In general, it presents a critique of American political economy as overly dominated by corporations (including non-profits, that is, universities) that sell out US national interests (principally considered in the national security sense) for profit.

Much of the argument is based on US military contractors seeking profits in China and pushing the US government to allow transfers of what should have been obvious dual-use (commercial but also military) technologies.

The tone of the piece is harshly critical of prior engagement, but the policy recommendations are mostly limited interventions pushing for more engagement on better terms.

What the piece did not have as much on but made me think about were counterfactuals, especially in geopolitics.