Some of the Joys and Frustrations of Owning a Mac

I never thought that I would become a Mac owner. Between the snarky Apple adds (back when they had their obnoxious Mac versus PC campaign), the cutesy look of the operating system, and the ubiquity and familiarity of Windows, I always assumed that I would stick with Windows systems forever.

But then I started looking for a new laptop. My 2003 Dell had recently turned six years old (it is now nearly eight) and could hardly run basic software anymore. The battery was shot, the components were hopelessly obsolete, and I really wanted to get into Windows 7. So I started looking at what was on the market. All of this coincided with the height of the glossy palmrest craze in laptop computers. As I browsed the offerings at Best Buy, Wal Mart, and anywhere else I could find computer displays, I grew increasingly frustrated with the glossy lids, glossy bezels, glossy palmrests, and, most of all, glossy trackpads. In terms of design and usability, my old Dell blew away anything new I could get.

Then I found the 2009 MacBook Pro. In place of glossy plastic was beautiful aluminum. In place of creaky seams was Apple's seamless unibody construction. In place of a horrible glossy trackpad was the lovely, giant, glass multitouch trackpad that seemed to be an extension of my being rather than an obstacle that came between me and the operating system. The hardware completely won me over.

There was a problem, though: I couldn't get an aluminum MacBook Pro without also getting Apple's OS X and "switching" from PC to Mac. So I started investigating OS X itself and was surprised to find that it was elegant, simple, and a joy to use. Furthermore, for $30 I could get a full copy of Windows 7 from Microsoft with their student deal and run it on a new Mac using Boot Camp. So with Christmas help from family, I got a MacBook Pro in January 2010 and installed Windows 7 on it. Now I really do have the best of both worlds.

Since then I've come to love OS X, but having easy access to Windows 7 also reminds me of what I'm missing. Nothing in Windows compares to the beauty of Apple Mail, which I use all the time for my email. iTunes is much nicer than Windows Media Player as far as the beauty of the user interface goes, and I've really come to like using Safari. iWork Pages, though it has its problems, is far and away the aesthetic superior to Word. There is very little that I can do in Windows 7 that I can't do just as easily, and more beautifully, in OS X. The addition of the Mac App Store only made that even more true than before—I now have serviceable, and free, solitaire and minesweeper games on my Mac. Here's hoping more PC games will become available for Mac.

The only thing that makes me regret not using Windows 7 as my primary OS is Windows Media Center. The Apple equivalent is Front Row, which is a lovely way to enjoy all the media content on my computer. Unfortunately, I need third party software to run Hulu and Netflix on my Mac's desktop, which I need to be able to do to use the Apple Remote to control playback when watching content on our TV. Windows Media Center, on the other hand, seamlessly integrates Netflix into the Windows OS, and all the TV content I need is presented beautifully within the program. I can watch Blue Bloods using the media playback keys on my Mac keyboard, not to mention being able to use the remote!

If Apple can fully integrate Netflix and internet TV into Front Row, perhaps with the release of OS X Lion this summer, then the last reason for me to use Windows 7 (apart from the occasional need for compatibility, or certain PC games) for daily life will have vanished. Much as I respect Windows, I am happy to be a Mac user for the foreseeable future.

On the Necessity of Self-Sufficient Communities

I posted last time (back in February--before the craziness of the Lenten season really got underway) about two models of community that accord closely with the way in which God intended society to be set up: the household and the village. Now I'd like to address why exactly I find a return to these models to be necessary for the economic and cultural survival of our country. The answer has to do with self-sufficiency.

Consider, for example, the situation with GM. Here in Michigan, the financial plight of that gigantic corporation has a devastating effect upon whole communities, however small. Because a few executives over the years made poor decisions, and because a selfish labor union made stubborn and unreasonable demands (or wherever you want to place the blame for GM's decline), many in a wide geographical area find themselves with no source of income. How different the situation would be if we were not dependent upon large, outside companies for our livelihood. Imagine if we lived more as did our ancestors on the small homestead or the large farming estate. Rather than working for outsiders in a wage-earning situation, we would be cultivating our own resources, namely our richly productive land. We would be producing enough to live on within our own households and villages, with perhaps enough surplus to sell to the outside world in return for luxuries (and a few necessities like salt). Now, however, even those who do still farm are largely dependent upon outside markets for their livelihood. The bulk of their work is directed toward the production of profitable crops that will be used far outside the local community for the production of sugar, dough, ethanol, and other such commodities. Prosperity is determined not by how much you produce for the use of your own household and community, but by how much outsiders are willing to pay for what you produce. Present-day laborers, both farmers and wage-earners, are therefore subject to the vagaries of the national and even global market, which at the present time (and for the foreseeable future) is a decided liability.

The solution? Return, as much as possible, to a system of small communities in the form of households and villages whose chief economic activity is the satisfaction of their own immediate needs, namely food, clothing, and shelter. Other things, what any reasonable person would consider to be dispensable "extras," would be only incidental, supplied by the surplus produce generated by the self-sufficient community. Such a system would mean that when one community experiences crisis, the others may not, and may even be in a position to offer effective (and voluntary!) help. Concentration of economic activity in the local community could therefore actually contribute to much greater economic stability in the nation as a whole. Also, self-sufficiency among households and villages would go a long way in freeing individuals from the influence of "big business," rendering moot the whole question of governmental intervention in the market for the protection of individual or small-scale interests.

Trained economists may see immediately some obvious flaws in my proposed system, but it seems to me an obvious answer to our current problems. And not just an answer, but even desirable in itself as being the mode of community life for which humanity has been designed.

I'm not a utopian, but...

The way we live now falls so far short of the ideal, I think we really need to reexamine our lifestyles. The present economic crisis wouldn't be so much of a problem if more of us lived the way God intended us to live. I don't mean simply not sinning. I mean having a clearer sense of where we fit in the divine economy, i.e. God's process of getting the things we need from "nature" to us. It seems to me that there are two basic community models that do that especially well. One is the "household" model, and the other is the "village" model.

I'll address the household model first, because it's the first one to have come into existence. In the household model, every family is a self-sufficient community. The head of the household (originally Adam) provides leadership. He owns all the property, and he assigns duties or offices. I think that we can assume that Adam assigned Cain to the office of farmer so that the world's first household would have a supply of grain. He then assigned Abel to the office of shepherd to provide a supply of milk and wool (no meat until after the Flood). I'm sure that various daughters were assigned to care for the fowl (for eggs) and to process the grain, milk, and wool (to get bread, butter, cheese, and fabric for clothing and shelter). And of course the producers Cain and Abel were responsible for returning to God the firstfruits of their produce. All in all, we can visualize a smooth-running (until the murder of Abel) household that made efficient use of the land into which Adam and Eve were driven from the Garden of Eden.

Households may legitimately expand pretty dramatically beyond this. A household may include servants (who are not family and are therefore paid for their service to the household) and various employees who contribute such products and skills as specialized cooking, metalworking, mechanical arts, printing, and, of course, preaching and teaching. The point is, each household produces everything it needs to exist comfortably. It may import raw materials and products, but these are always extras.

The village is much like the household except that it is de-centralized. Authority lies not with the head of the household but with some form of government (of course fatherhood or patriarchy is itself the first and most basic form of government), whether elected or hereditary or whatever else.  A village is made up of households, but each household is not self-sufficient. Instead of the household employing servants or assigning children to perform specialized tasks, each household in the village is itself specialized, most engaged in farming but some dedicated to various trades and arts, including the Preaching Office. These specialized households, when banded together to form a village, become a self-sufficient community. Really, the village is just the household on a larger scale and with fewer bonds of blood-relation. By the way, the household as a component of the village is what Dr. Luther assumes when he says that each Chief Part of the Catechism is presented "as the head of the family should teach it in a simple way to his household."

Why is this important? Other than being simply beautiful and the way in which we were created to live, I consider it an economic necessity. We cannot continue as we've been doing, with every laborer integrated not into a small and self-sufficient community but into a huge and global community--which becomes no community at all. I have an inkling that smaller communities are more efficient than larger ones. Yes, the larger the community, the greater the division of labor. But a small community can react so much more quickly and meaningfully to crises among its members, and the leader of a small community can be more effective and personal in his administration than can the leader of a "community" of millions.

There is vastly more to say about this, and I hope to do so eventually.

Following

Anyone who would be interested in reading my posts regularly (to the extent that my posting activity itself can be called "regular") is welcome to become a "follower" of The Persistent Barbarian. I think that at this point that just means Matthew/Slash. One would be enough, though. By the way, Matthew--maybe you should add the "followers" widget. I would sign up.

Problems with Time Travel

I've recently started watching the show Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. I really enjoy it, and it has me thinking again about the things I love, and hate, about the Terminator series of movies. Most of it has to do with time travel.

So the premise of the original Terminator was that John Connor, the future leader of the human resistance against the Machines, has sent a soldier back in time (to the 1980's) to protect his mother Sarah from a Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger), sent back in time to murder Sarah Connor and prevent John from ever being born. The soldier (Kyle Reese is the character's name, if I remember right) does manage to protect Sarah from the Terminator, though he dies in the process. Just as important is the fact that he also fathers John Connor with Sarah during his time protecting her. So the future John Connor guaranteed his own existence not only by protecting his mother and maintaining his own safe arrival into the world, but also by providing himself with a father. (I don't remember if he knew, in the original movie, that Kyle Reese was his father.)

The original Terminator on its own stands alone very well. In fact you could say that the Machines made a big mistake by sending a Terminator back in time. Skynet must not have realized that you cannot change the past. By taking steps to change it, you only end up guaranteeing that it will happen just as you remember it. The same goes for the future, as Oedipus learned so painfully and so well. "Fate" is just the progress of time, and it is set in stone. Even those who don't recognize the providence of God typically have some notion of fate, and the idea that you can change fate is just a cheap fantasy that the original Terminator avoids. By sending the Terminator into the past, Skynet set in motion the chain of events that would lead to the birth of its arch-enemy! If Skynet had never interfered with the past, John Connor would never have arisen to oppose it. But of course Skynet had to do what it did, because the Terminator was a part of the past all along, and the past cannot be changed.

This beautiful arrangement is totally disrupted in the second movie, Terminator 2: Judgment Day. In this sequel, John and Sarah Connor, together with a reprogrammed Terminator, manage to keep Skynet from ever destroying the world in the first place. That's very nice, and I like to think that the nuclear holocaust of 1999 just never happened. Who would want it to happen? But by doing that, doesn't anyone realize that they've kept John Connor from ever being conceived? If Skynet never arises, then it never sends the first Terminator back in time to prevent John's conception, and if the first Terminator never goes back, then the future John Connor never sends his own father back, and so he's never conceived. John's existence depends upon the future playing out just as it always has.

Then there's Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, which I hated at first because Judgment Day turns out never to have been averted, just "put off" for a time. Now the inevitability of Judgment Day no longer bothers me--in fact I see it as a necessity--but what's all this about the future being "put off" temporarily? That's even worse. And yet again we have more Terminators being sent back in time to mess with the past.

Now we have this show, which I enjoy and find deeply interesting, but it brings with it all the same problems. It eschews the simplicity of the first movie and now we have virtually countless time-travelers messing with the past. It seems that in nearly every episode, someone or something has come here from the future to change his/its own present. If it's really possible to change the past, then there will be absolutely no end to this cycle. Skynet can always send more Terminators back, and the resistance can always send people and re-programmed Terminators to foil them.

I'm interested to see what happens with the new Christian Bale movie, Terminator Salvation. It seems that the future that John Connor faces is quite different from what his mother had told him about. How can that be? I guess we'll find out.

So in general, I get very frustrated with movies and stories that have people traveling back through time and changing the past. Frequency does the same thing. If Jim Caviezel's character has changed his family past, why doesn't he remember things differently? How can he remember a time when his parents were dead if he's changed the past such that it never happened? Time travel adventures depend upon the protagonist existing outside the normal progress of time. He alone remains unaffected by the changes he makes, and that only in certain respects.

There are two stories I've read/watched that handle time-travel well, though, as far as I'm concerned. One is the movie Twelve Monkeys (too depressing to be enjoyable for me), in which Bruce Willis's character as a child witnesses his own death as an adult--the grown-up Bruce Willis travels back in time to fail in foiling a terrorist plot that spreads a deadly virus world-wide, and his actions tend inevitably toward the scene that he remembers in his dreams. He manages to change nothing in the past, but the past depends upon his interference to progress in the way that it always has. The other story is the third Harry Potter installment, The Prisoner of Azkaban, in which Harry and Hermione travel back in time thinking that they will "change" things, but end up doing things that their past selves had already witnessed. And strangely (and interestingly), their actions are essential to make the present what it always had been, and the present turns out to have been happier all along than they'd realized. Delightful.

So I'd like to see more stories that recognize the past as totally unchangeable. The present and future depend upon it. I'd like to see a protagonist who influences the past with confidence, because he knows that whatever he does will result in the present that he already knows.

My New Position on the Upcoming Election

A few months ago, I was resigned to voting for Senator McCain out of a moral obligation to oppose, as effectively as possible, the election of Senator Obama. I reasoned that Senator McCain was more likely to appoint justices to the Supreme Court who would, given the opportunity, vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, thus allowing the states once again to outlaw the crime of abortion. Several things have happened since then, though, to change my mind. Here are the ones that stand out:


1. In light of increasingly unfavorable polls, Senator McCain has pulled his campaign out of Michigan. He has given up on the one-time battleground state in which I am now registered to vote. If Senator McCain has decided that my state is a lost cause, why should I waste my vote on a candidate that I dislike to begin with and who is now a guaranteed loser in my state?


2. Senator McCain is not the boon to the anti-abortion cause that I had thought that he was. In last week's debate he claimed that he would not impose a pro-life "litmus test" (an expression that has become one of my pet peeves!) on any potential appointees to the Supreme Court. He weakly, reluctantly, and unconvincingly added that support for the bad law inherent in the Roe v. Wade decision might render a candidate unqualified, but the gist of his statement was that liberals needn't worry that he'd be too much of a stickler on the whole question. I seriously doubt that, given the opportunity, Senator McCain would appoint the kinds of justices we need.


3. We actually don't even need justices appointed to end the federal ban on state bans of abortion! Congressman Ron Paul's Sanctity of Life Act would constitutionally (Article III, Section 2) restrict the Supreme Court's appellate jurisdiction on the question of abortion. We can end abortion in this country through congress, not just the Supreme Court via the Presidency!


4. I was at first enthusiastic about Governor Palin, but in the last few weeks I've become convinced that the liberals are actually right about her being unqualified for the Presidency, and she has heartily embraced all that I dislike about Senator McCain. Both she and Senator McCain support tightening federal regulation of the economy. (By the way, it irritates me so much how government intervention in our economy, especially in the monetary supply, has cause our present financial crisis, and now the media, together with both major candidates and their running mates, claim that the crisis was caused by too little government intervention! Now there will be more and more of a push toward socialism in this country, which will make things worse and worse, and all the while they can claim that it was a failure of the "free market"--which we don't really even have--that made such extreme economic lengths necessary...)

So what does this all mean? I now plan to vote for Chuck Baldwin, the Constitution Party candidate (U.S. Taxpayers' Party candidate on the Michigan ballot) who has been endorsed by Congressman Ron Paul, who supports the Sanctity of Life Act, who respects the Constitution's restrictions on the power and extent of the federal government, and who recognizes the value of sound money (i.e. no fiat currency issued by the Federal Reserve--only gold and silver coinage!). He won't win (barring a miracle, and there is precedent for that), but at least my vote will count. If I vote for Senator McCain, my vote will be lost among the millions who will vote for a candidate who will lose in Michigan anyway. If I vote for Chuck Baldwin, then if I accomplish nothing else, at least I will add to the number of those who have expressed their dissatisfaction with what both major parties have been offering us.

Would anyone like to try to convince me otherwise? Please feel free.

"Lex orandi lex credendi": A Phrase That Can Afford To Be Retired

I was reading Rev. Klemet Preus's fine book The Fire and the Staff today, and I was distressed to see him quote favorably the old axiom, "Lex orandi lex credendi." Actually, the axiom isn't that old. It's a fairly recent innovation that contains a pernicious teaching. Rev. Preus attributes it to Prosper of Aquitaine, but what St. Prosper actually said was, "ut legem credendi lex statuat supplicandi," "that the law of what is to be beseeched in prayer may confirm the law of what is to be believed." That means that because St. Paul commanded prayers on behalf of the secular authorities (a true "lex supplicandi"), and these prayers would naturally include the supplication that pagan rulers would be converted to Christ, the grace of Christ precedes any act of human free will in the miracle of conversion. This fact lends support to the "lex credendi," i.e. the binding article on sola gratia. It does not mean that practice in general reflects doctrine in general (Rev. Preus's point), and it especially doesn't mean that the liturgy independently determines doctrine (what most who say "Lex orandi lex credendi" usually teach).

I'm tired of hearing Lutherans use this axiom. It's a fantasy of those behind the modern liberal liturgical movement, those who find the "beauty of the liturgy" far more compelling than the beauty of pure doctrine as actually taught by our Lord Christ. It's fine to say that doctrine must inform, yea, must determine practice. It's fine to say that good practice can teach pure doctrine. It's fine to say that corrupt practice leads to corrupt doctrine. But when you say, "Lex orandi lex credendi," you're using a "made-up" phrase (it can't be attributed in that form to Prosper of Aquitaine), you're associating yourself with a disgusting trend, and you're tossing around a slogan that's either meaningless or actively pernicious. Pope Pius XII had the sense to invert the axiom (how refreshing!). Why can't Lutherans do the same, as did Hermann Sasse? or, better yet, just not use the phrase at all? Please let's have done with "Lex orandi lex credendi."