And yet, “be careful what you pray for, you might get it!” portrays a Heavenly Father who waits up in heaven for a Gotchya! moment. Every prayer request put before Him is a “teachable moment,” every prayer for strength an opportunity to test your mettle, every prayer for patience an opportunity to run His children through the grinder of difficulty and frustration in the name of “growing” patience in His followers.

These do not seem like the actions of a heavenly Father to me, but those of a Heavenly Drill Sergeant. Who would dare ask a drill sergeant for a favor, lest he require fifty extra push-ups? //

Scripture instead describes a God who wants us to pray without fear. For everything and anything. To pray even when the prayers are ridiculous. Thomas wouldn’t believe eyewitness accounts of men he’d spent the previous three years with, men he surely trusted, and yet, Jesus granted Thomas’s desire, //

Do note that Jesus did not make Peter swim himself to shore in order to teach him perseverance or to teach him that walking on the water isn’t so important, really, and he should desire more holy and less ridiculous things. He just rescued him. Immediately. //

The Bible also abounds with accounts of those whom God made comfortable, with more than they needed. There was food left over after Jesus fed the multitude. (Mark 6:30-43) The widow who fed Elijah had food for many days after she fed the prophet. (1 Kings 17:7-16) Jesus made Thomas emotionally comfortable, (if you’ll forgive the modern idiom) even in his doubt. When Jesus called the disciples, he didn’t just give them enough fish, he gave them so many their nets started to break. (Luke 5:1-11) And when the wine ran out at the wedding at Cana? Jesus didn’t just turn the water into wine, he turned it into good wine. (John 2:10). Even Job, who is surely our best example of suffering and want save Christ himself, was restored two-fold at the end of his trial. (Job 42:7-16) //

If anything, this car is teaching me to hope again, to receive God’s good material gifts without fear that they will be snatched away in order to teach me a lesson. To ask my dear Father in Heaven just as I asked my dear earthly father when I was small. To understand that God sometimes grants abundance, and when he does, it’s because He is good, not because I am.

An election integrity watchdog said the current Electoral College deadlines not only have “zero constitutional basis” but are preventing states from fulfilling their legal and ethical obligations to ensure free and fair elections.

The Amistad Project of the non-partisan Thomas More Society released the study (pdf) on Friday, making the case that the only constitutionally-set date in the election process is Jan. 20, when the next president of the United States will be sworn in. All other dates, including the “safe harbor” deadline, the Electoral College vote on Dec. 14, and even the congressional vote count on Jan. 6, are dates set by federal law, which the paper argues are “arbitrary” and founded on obsolete concerns.

Today in Aviation, 29 years ago, Pan American World Airways ceased all operations, putting to an end 64 years of existence, and leaving behind a legacy of many industry firsts that shaped commercial aviation as we know it today.

On this occasion, Airways features the story of the last Pan Am flight, served by a Boeing 727-200 under the radio callsign Clipper 436 from Barbados to Miami.

The bigger problem we have as a nation is that we are acquiescing to voting processes that are not capable of being verified and tested in a meaningful fashion during the time period available under the statutes and Constitutional provisions that determine how Presidents are selected. The voting process is captive to partisan political interests with a motivation to bend it to their needs. Then, when their actions are questioned, those raising the concerns learn that all the “evidence” that might establish what took place is within the control of the same partisan actors, and everything becomes subject to efforts to “run out the clock” on any bona fide challenges.

The country needs uniform voting standards and procedures across all 50 states. The security and integrity protocols need to be the same across all 50 states. The audit and electoral contest procedures need to be the same across all 50 states.

“Convenience” to the voter needs to be way down the list of considerations about how the voting process takes place, and can never be a justification for sacrificing security. Make Presidential Election day a national holiday once every four years so the vast majority of citizens do not need to try to “work it in” to their schedule.

And the overriding consideration for voting integrity needs to be that each invalidly cast vote is the embodiment of the violation of the right to vote of a legitimate voter who chose another candidate, regardless of party.

THAT is the ultimate disenfranchisement, and it corrupts democracy when partisan interests encourage such acts in order to secure power.

2020 saw record turnout—though calling it a “turnout” is a bit misleading since the involvement was largely a function of states’ haphazardly mailing out paper ballots to everyone.

All mandatory-voting advocates are doing is further degrading the importance of elections and incentivizing more demagoguery.

If they truly believed democracy was sacred—rather than a way to accumulate power—they’d want Americans to put more effort into voting for the president than they do in ordering Chinese takeout. And they certainly wouldn’t want to force anyone to do it.

The world this week lost a great defender of economic freedom with the passing of the great American economist Walter E. Williams. He was 84.

Williams’ legacy will be one of fighting for lasting liberty at every turn against those who would be dictators over their fellow man.

As an economics professor at George Mason University, Williams gave numerous speeches at The Heritage Foundation over the years, and he always had fascinating things to say. His mind was sharp and clear as he saw things for the way they are, putting him at odds with those seeking Big Government policies for shortsighted solutions.

There have been only a small number of economists in modern times who have challenged and overturned more wrongheaded economic thinking than Williams. //

In his December 2019 column “Why Capitalism Is Morally Superior to Other Systems,” Williams made a succinct case for free-market capitalism for young people by pointing out:

Free markets are morally superior to other economic systems … . In a word or so, our protest should not be against capitalism. People should protest crony capitalism, where people use the political arena to buy government favors.

If millennials and others want to wage war against government favors and crony capitalism, I’m with them 100%. But I’m all too afraid that anti-capitalists just want their share of the government loot.

We'd heard of SwissDisk here at rsync.net, but they rarely showed up on our radar screen. We were reminded of their existence a few days ago when their entire infrastructure failed. It's unclear how much data, if any, was eventually lost ... but my reading of their announcement makes me think "a lot".

I'm commenting on this because I believe their failure was due to an unnecessarily complex infrastructure. Of course, this requires a lot of conjecture on my part about an organization I know little about ... but I'm pretty comfortable making some guesses.

It's en vogue these days to build filesystems across a SAN and build an application layer on top of that SAN platform that deals with data as "objects" in a database, or something resembling a database. All kinds of advantages are then presented by this infrastructure, from survivability and fault tolerance to speed and latency. And cost. That is, when you look out to the great green future and the billions of transactions you handle every day from your millions of customers are all realized, the per unit cost is strikingly low.

It is my contention that, in the context of offsite storage, these models are too complex, and present risks that the end user is incapable of evaluating. I can say this with some certainty, since we have seen that the model presented risks that even the people running it were incapable of evaluating.

This is indeed an indictment of "cloud storage", which may seem odd coming from the proprietor of what seems to be "cloud storage". It makes sense, however, when you consider the very broad range of infrastructure that can be used to deliver "online backup". When you don't have stars in your eyes, and aren't preparing for your IPO filing and the "hockey sticking" of your business model, you can do sensible things like keep regular files on UFS2 filesystems on standalone FreeBSD systems.

This is, of course, laughable in the "real world". You couldn't possibly support thousands and thousands of customers around the globe, for nearly a decade, using such an infrastructure. Certainly not without regular interruption and failure.

Except when you can, I guess:

uptime

12:48PM up 350 days, 21:34, 2 users, load averages: 0.14, 0.14, 0.16

(a live storage system, with about a thousand users, that I picked at random)

uptime

2:02PM up 922 days, 18:38, 1 user, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

(another system on the same network)

Further, the consensus might be that rsync.net is not providing "cloud storage". Good. We're not. I would be very happy if the colloquial definition of "cloud storage" did indeed imply very "sophisticated" and "modern" infrastructures, like Amazon S3 and Rackspace Cloud Files and so on. Complex, sprawling webs of fault tolerance and survivability that no team of ten people could possibly understand - and certainly not their customers.