August 3, 2026 · 10:17 PM

Easy Mango/Pineapple Soft-Serve Ice Cream Recipe

Like with the previous Triple-Berry ice cream recipe, I got this one from Google AI, and tried it out with good success with my 1.5L iCreamLab compressor ice cream maker1. It’s simple, and fast, taking less than 45min from having the idea of doing it to eating the ice cream. The flavor and texture reminded me a lot of the Dole Whip that we tried in Hawaii.

Ingredients:

  • 1 cup2 diced pineapple (fresh or frozen)3
  • 1 cup diced mango (also fresh or frozen)
  • 1 Tbsp lemon juice
  • 3/4 cup white sugar
  • 1/4 tsp kosher salt
  • 1 cup whole milk
  • 2 cups heavy cream4

Instructions:

  1. Add the fruit, lemon juice, sugar, and salt into a blender, and blend until smooth. If you’re using frozen fruit, and your blender is weak enough (like mine), you may need to add the dairy to the fruit to get it to blend. If you’re using fresh or thawed fruit, you can probably just blend it without adding the dairy.
  2. If you haven’t added the dairy yet, pour the fruit into a bowl, and fold in the milk and cream, and stir until evenly mixed.
  3. If you didn’t use frozen fruit (or partially thawed fruit), you may want to chill it in the fridge for 30min-1hr.
  4. Once chilled, or if you were using frozen fruit as the base, pour it into the ice cream maker, and run it for ~30min for soft serve, or 60min for hard serve. If you want it harder, you can then put it in the freezer for another hour or two before consuming.

If you’ve made it soft-serve, you can serve it immediately, and feel free to add toppings (fresh pineapple pieces, berries, maraschino cherries, dried coconut flakes, fruit syrups, berry compote, etc.).

  1. It was actually almost certainly a kickstarter scam — the group just white labeled an ice cream maker you could find on Alibaba, but it has worked reasonably well, even if they never delivered the three extra mixing bowls I had ordered as add-ons. Note: this recipe would almost certainly also work with a traditional ice-bucket style ice cream maker, or with a compressor ice cream maker from a reputable brand, like the dozens of different models you can find on Amazon. ↩︎
  2. You can vary the fruit amounts from 1-1.5cups and still have it fit in the ice cream maker, and it still tastes pretty good — feel free to vary it up or down based on preference. More fruit obviously makes it fruitier. More cream makes it creamier. Pretty simple. The Triple Berry Recipe did 3cups of frozen fruit and 1.5cups of cream, for reference. ↩︎
  3. I had good results with frozen pineapple and mango — on the plus side, you didn’t have to chill the mixture before putting it in the ice cream maker, though blending frozen fruit chunks is harder, so I had to mix in the dairy in order to get it to blend properly. The AI didn’t recommend doing it that way, but instead recommended putting the fruit out in a bowl to partially thaw, or defrosting it in the microwave, though you ideally want the fruit to still be cold to avoid having to chill the mix before putting it in the ice cream mixer. ↩︎
  4. You can vary the cream a little — dropping it down to 1.5cups like with the triple-berry recipe still worked fine, though I’m sure it melts faster. ↩︎

Leave a Comment

Filed under Recipes

Tagged as , , , ,

July 16, 2026 · 10:32 PM

Easy Sheet Pan Chicken Shawarma

I can’t remember where I got this recipe from, but this is a yummy and simple recipe for making chicken shawarma in a regular oven that can take as little as 15min of prep time, depending on how pedantic you want to be about ingredients1.

Ingredients:

  • 2lb Boneless skinless chicken thighs
  • 1 large yellow onion
  • 1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil
  • 2 Tbsp lemon juice2
  • 1-1/2 Tbsp minced garlic3
  • 2 tsp kosher salt
  • 1 tsp ground cumin
  • 1 tsp ground coriander
  • 1/2 tsp black pepper4
  • 1/2 tsp turmeric
  • 1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
  • 1/4 tsp cayenne pepper

Instructions:

  1. In a large bowl or measuring cup, using a whisk, mix together the oil, lemon juice, garlic, and spices.
  2. Peel the onion, and slice it into long narrow pieces.
  3. Add the onion and chicken to the marinade mix, and stir them to evenly coat all pieces5. After mixing them, I’ll usually then put it in a large 1 or 2 gallon ziploc bag, and shake it around to make sure things are evenly coated.
  4. Set the coated chicken and onion slices aside to marinate in the fridge for at least two hours, though if you have time, overnight is better.
  5. Once sufficiently marinated, preheat the oven to 425F, and then place the marinated chicken and onion mixture onto a baking sheet. You can spray the baking sheet first, but the marinade has enough oil in it that I usually don’t bother6.
  6. You then bake it in the oven until it is golden and cooked through. This typically takes less than 30min.

I’ll typically serve the cooked chicken shawarma and onions while they’re hot, on pita bread or pita pockets, with diced cucumber, Roma tomatoes, and sliced romaine lettuce. Theoretically, it’s probably most authentic if you top it with a yogurt7 or tahini-based sauce, or tzatziki sauce, but I usually prefer hummus.

  1. Ask yourself the question — if someone calls for lemon in a recipe — do you go for the bottle of lemon juice, or would you consider that bordering on sacrilege. If you’re fine with using pre-minced garlic and bottled lemon, this recipe can take as little as 10-15min of prep time. If you’re the kind of person who only use fresh-minced garlic, and fresh-squeezed lemon juice, it will probably taste at least 5% better, though it’ll likely double or triple your prep time. Your call, I won’t judge. ↩︎
  2. Or the juice of one medium-sized lemon if you prefer fresh-squeezed. ↩︎
  3. Three large cloves of garlic if you want to peel/mince them fresh. ↩︎
  4. Freshly ground black pepper is slightly better — you can make some by smashing peppercorns inside a fold of paper towel with a mallet. ↩︎
  5. If you want to, you can trim excess fat, and slice the chicken into narrow, ~1/2in strips before coating it in the marinate, or you can marinate the full pieces, cook them, then slice them when they’re cooked. It’s easier and faster to cut them when they’re cooked, but you get better coating of the chicken with the marinade if you slice it beforehand. Either approach works. ↩︎
  6. The chicken is fatty enough, even if you trim it, that between the rendered fat and the olive oil, you typically end up with a lot of juice, and very juicy chicken. If you wanted more of a grilled texture, you could potentially cook the chicken on a wire rack on the baking sheet, or you could cook the chicken for say 20min, then finish it on the grill. But frankly, just doing it on the sheet pan gets you something that’s delicious and easy. ↩︎
  7. The recipe I had did come with a simple yogurt sauce recipe. You basically whisk together 1/2 cup of unflavored Greek yogurt, 1 Tbsp of lemon, 1 Tbsp of extra-virgin olive oil, 1 Tbsp of minced garlic, and a pinch of kosher salt and a pinch of red pepper flakes. If you like yogurt sauce, it’s a pretty quick and simple recipe. ↩︎

2 Comments

Filed under Recipes

June 6, 2026 · 4:19 PM

Unimpeachable

In a recent post, I suggested several potential amendments to the U.S Constitution, including an amendment to change the method used for handling the impeachment removal trials in the Senate to a secret ballot approach. While I won’t rehash those arguments here, I did want to expand on that with a quick thought exercise to illustrate why reform to the impeachment process is so important.

Basically, the question is: what would a President have to do in order to actually be both impeached and removed under the current process?

The Math

Under the current Constitutional process for impeaching judges or executive officers, the Impeachment is handled in the House by a simple majority vote on the Articles of Impeachment, but at the Senate trial, conviction and removal requires a vote of 2/3 of the Senate. In both cases, under the current process, the votes are almost always held on the record, where you know exactly how each member of Congress voted.

Which means that in order to convict and remove a President, they currently would need 67 Senators to vote against them. In my lifetime1, the largest majority a party has held in the Senate was 59-412 in the 111th Congress (2009-2011), but on average the majority party over that same time frame has only held a 53-47 lead.

So, if you imagine the easiest Senate Trial vote during that post 1980s timeframe, where the defending President was in the most extreme minority (i.e., with 41 senators of the President’s party against 59 senators in opposing parties), the majority party would still need to convince 20% of the President’s party’s Senators to vote against the President in an on-the-record recorded vote…

In the most extremely challenging case, trying to impeach the President of the most extreme majority party (i.e. 59 Senators aligned with the President’s party against 41 senators of the opposing parties), the minority party would need to convince almost 45% of the President’s Party’s senators to publicly vote to convict and remove the President.

So, basically, to actually remove a President, you need to convince somewhere between 20-45% of the senators from the President’s own party to publicly vote to sentence and remove the President…

What Would a President Need to Do to be Convictable?

Given those numbers, let’s go back to the thought experiment. With a public vote, how extreme of behavior do you currently think it would take for a President’s party to publicly vote to convict and remove them?

Imagine first the other party. Those unprincipled cretins. What would it take for 20-45% of their Senators to vote to convict and remove a president of their own party, on a recorded vote?

Then imagine your preferred party. Obviously much more principled than those other guys. But be honest with yourself, what do you think it would take for your party to turn on your own president bad enough for 20-45% of them to vote to convict and remove your own president from power?

Cold-blooded murder in public might actually be enough, so long as the victim was sympathetic, the murder was done in public, and there were no plausibly mitigating circumstances. Maybe3.

That’s about the only thing I think would have a solid chance. I doubt an affair or an accusation of sexual assault would be enough to be reliably convictable, other than in extreme cases. I doubt abusing power for personal gain by accepting or soliciting bribes, or insider trading of stocks or prediction markets would either4. Flagrantly violating the Constitution by say starting a war without Congressional approval, creating taxes without Congressional approval, etc. don’t seem to be anywhere near enough.

This is why I say that impeachment, as it currently stands under the Constitution is functionally useless as a check on executive power.

  1. I’m almost 46 years old, which is older than the current median age in the US of 39.4yrs old. ↩︎
  2. Technically the Democrats only held 57 seats, but they had two independents who regularly caucused with them. ↩︎
  3. I wish I had more confidence that this was a better than 50/50 probability. ↩︎
  4. I heard a joke recently that the best way Iran could tell if the US was about to restart hostilities is if there were any suspiciously large anonymous Polymarket bets on something related. The number of bets that look like insiders making millions on front-running administration announcements is truly impressive. And unlikely to result in any consequences. ↩︎

Leave a Comment

Filed under Government, Politics, Uncategorized

Tagged as , , ,

· 3:53 PM

Easy Triple-Berry Soft-Serve Ice Cream Recipe

This was a quick, easy, and delicious ice cream recipe that I found via Google’s AI when searching for recipes for use with my compressor-style ice cream maker1. I’ve gone from deciding to make a batch, to eating the last of the batch in under an hour, and most of the ingredients are ones we already have at home, so it’s an easy and quick go-to for desserts.

Ingredients (makes ~1.5qt/1.5L):

  • 3 cups Frozen or fresh mixed berries2
  • 1-1/2 cups Heavy Cream
  • 3/4 cup Whole Milk
  • 3/4 cup White Sugar
  • 1-1/2 tsp Vanilla Extract
  • 3/8 tsp Kosher Salt

Instructions:

  1. Prep the berry base in a blender by combining the berries, sugar, whole milk, and kosher salt. Blend on high until completely smooth3.
  2. Whisk in the heavy cream and vanilla extract. This can be performed in the blender during the previous step if the blending needs more fluid.
  3. If you used fresh berries, you’ll want to refrigerate the mixture for at least 1hr. If you used frozen berries, the mixture is already chilled and ready to put in the ice cream maker.
  4. Turn on the compressor ice cream maker and pour the chilled mixture into the ice cream tub. Churn until the mixture reaches a thick soft-serve consistency (about 20-30min depending on the machine), or if you want it firmer you can let it mix for longer.
  5. Serve immediately or transfer to a container and freeze for another hour or two for a firmer texture.
  1. I’m sure you could use the same recipe in a traditional ice-bucket style ice cream maker, I just haven’t tried it. ↩︎
  2. You can use whichever berries you prefer, though I usually go for strawberry, raspberry, blueberry, and sometimes blackberry. I usually use frozen berries, as you can skip the chilling step. ↩︎
  3. In theory, you can strain the mixture to remove seeds, but if you’ve blended it well, the seed have been blended in by this point. ↩︎

Leave a Comment

Filed under Recipes

Tagged as , , ,

April 25, 2026 · 9:08 AM

Simultaneously True #1: Iran Thoughts

I’ve been wanting to start a blog series for a while with short posts about things that are able to be simultaneously true. For a ton of different reasons, people tend to lump several ideas together, either in their own thinking, or their assumptions about your thinking, that don’t actually have to go together. This series is about trying to point out the false dilemmas and false corollaries, and some of the reasons people seem to get stuck with them. I’ll start with something nice and incendiary: the current US/Israel war with Iran. As with the Iraq War, proponents of the war often felt the need to bundle certain beliefs with that support, and opponents of the war often felt the need to bundle other beliefs with their opposition.

So here’s a list of a few things that are able to be simultaneously true:

  1. The Iranian regime is a brutal and oppressive regime that has gleefully murdered its own people, and the Iranian people would be better off if the current regime took its appropriate place on the ash-heap of history.
  2. War is always a dice-roll, that while sometimes successful in achieving its primary objectives, almost always comes with huge unintended consequences.
  3. There’s a reason why the Constitution vests the power of declaring war in the Congress and not the President. If a President feels war is needed, he/she should make the case to Congress, and Congress should decide on it.
    • Congress should also get in the habit of impeaching and removing Presidents who drag the country into Congressionally unauthorized wars of choice.
    • And yes, I would have been fine with Congress applying that to past Democratic Presidents who have launched Congressionally wars.
  4. While I’m generally opposed to starting wars for non-defensive purposes, it is something that is explicitly within Congress’s purview to do, if they decide war is in the best interests of the nation. That decision however, was never intended to be put in the hands of one person.
    • I think that had he wanted to, the Trump administration might have been able to successfully make the case to Congress for the war. There are very real strategic reasons why a war might have been the least worst option at some point.
  5. The Iranian regime has been engaged in periodic hostilities with the US and many of its neighbors throughout most of my lifetime.
  6. That doesn’t mean that the US President was authorized to start a new war without needing to seek Congressional support.
  7. There is still a real chance that the Iranian regime could still fall, but there’s also a very real chance that they can inflict enough pain on the US to force us to back down. Neither side is winning so far, at least by any real definition of the term.
  8. The US/Israeli operations at the start of the war were tactically brilliant. Using the Iranian regime’s security state apparatus to help track and target regime leaders was impressive.
  9. Tactics and Strategy aren’t the same thing, and while the US/Israeli side has had some tactical brilliance, the war so far has been a strategic embarrassment.
    • Like the complete and utter lack of planning for securing the Strait of Hormuz, even going so far as decommissioning some of our last remaining minesweeper vessels only a few months before the war began.
  10. Even if the US wins the war, and the Iranian regime crumbles, there will likely be long-lasting economic damage caused by this war and the disruption to global trade.
  11. The downside risks of this war spiraling further out of control aren’t fully appreciated or priced-in by the market yet. If the Iranian regime falls, but decides to pull the Samson option, it could yet kill a lot of people and do a lot of hard-to-quickly-repair damage to the global economy.

I could go on, but I think this sort of illustrates the point. You can oppose the war, without becoming a “Tanky” and acting like the Iranian regime is good, and that it would be good for the world if they won. You can oppose the war, but still hope that if it continues being fought, that the Iranian regime falls and gets replaced with something less brutal to its own people and neighbors. You can support the war, but still realize it’s being incompetently executed by a President that is clearly out of its depth. You can hope that the Iranian regime gets replaced as a result of this war, and still think that Congress should impeach the President for dragging us into it without Congressional authorization. Etc.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Foreign Policy, Government, Politics, Simultaneously True

April 11, 2026 · 5:15 PM

What I’ve Been Reading in 2026

I’ve been working more on reading books rather than doomscrolling social media in the evenings, and as a result I’ve already finished almost a dozen books, barely three months into the year. I’m not sure if anyone is going to read this or care, but here is what I’ve been reading so far in 2026:

  1. Prelude to Glory 8: A More Perfect Union – Ron Carter – 535pgs: This is the eighth book in a historical fiction series about the Founding Era of the United States, as experienced first-hand through the adventures of a fictional extended family (the Dunsons). This book primarily focused around the time of the Constitutional Convention, including the lead-up, some of the debates, and the ratification process afterward. Mixed in, they also had a fictional story of the Dunson rescuing a crew of theirs that had been seized by the British in the Caribbean. The author included tons of chapter end notes and sources, and explained where the story took liberties with the historical source material, and why. This really brought the Constitutional Convention, and the challenges of drafting and ratifying the Constitution to life in a way that history and civics classes alone often struggle to do.
  2. Prelude to Glory 9: By the Dawn’s Early Light – Ron Carter – 612pgs: This final book in the series skips forward around 30yrs to address the War of 1812. Many of the characters are now middle-aged, with the rising generation starting to have more of a role. It was a fascinating stitching together of the stories of the war and the politics behind it. While trying to cram the story of that war into only ~600pgs meant leaving out and in some cases simplifying some of the complex story, it definitely was a fun and interesting read, and it was sad getting to the end and realizing that with the author now deceased, that was truly the end of the series.
  3. Project Hail Mary – Andy Weir – 478pgs: I really loved this book the first two times I read it through1, so knowing the movie would be coming out in March, I decided to reread it this January. I really love the story – geeking out on the science and troubleshooting, the friendship between Rocky and Grace, watching Grace’s character arc, the riveting action, the humor. I’ve actually met people who didn’t like the book, but it’s one of my favorites. Definitely worth a third time through.
  4. The Three Body Problem – Cixin Liu (translated by Ken Liu) – 399pgs: This one had been sitting on my shelf for a while, the first book in a trilogy about an alien invasion of the earth (to oversimplify things). I’ll be honest, I struggled a bit with this series. It was written well enough to make me want to know what happens, but it’s picture of humanity is pretty bleak. This book is in many ways a mystery story – something has been leading a bunch of scientists to commit suicide, and they’re trying to figure out what or who is causing that. Which leads them to find out that humanity is now at risk of destruction due to the revenge of a survivor of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
  5. The Dark Forest – Cixin Liu (translated by Joel Martinsen) – 518pgs: How do you defend humanity against an enemy that is vastly more technologically advanced, and that can prevent you from making physics breakthroughs, and who can spy on anything you say or do anywhere in the solar system? That’s one of the key premises of this second book. Also, the source of one of the scarier explanations for Fermi’s Hypothesis. I’ll be honest, I almost put this down near the end, because it seemed pretty hopeless. But I stuck through to the ending, and it made me decide I wanted to read the final book.
  6. Death’s End – Cixin Liu (translated by Ken Liu) – 604pgs: The thrilling and depressing finale to the series, chronicling how the detente at the end of the previous book breaks down, and what that leads to. I won’t spoil the story, but its outlook on humanity and sentient species in general was a bleak and not particularly hope filled one. It was well written, but makes me really hope the author’s hypotheses about how interstellar species-to-species interactions are wildly wrong2. Worth reading, even if it’s depressing. Kind of like some classics from Russian writers like Dostoevsky.
  7. The Martian: Classroom Edition – Andy Weir – 380pgs: After that previous series, I badly needed something more hopeful and life-affirming. Having re-read Project Hail Mary already this year, I decided to reread The Martian. I’ve read this one at least three times previously, but had given away my hard copy to someone, so I bought a copy of the “Classroom Edition”. Basically this was the edition with PG-ified language that Weir made3. It doesn’t really change anything from the plot, but I’d strongly recommend it if you’re the kind that doesn’t like excessive swearing. It’s a great book, a story of survival, and rescue, and sciencing the crap out of things. And of course, once I was done, I had to rewatch the movie, which was yet another enjoyable entry in the Matt Damon Rescueverse4.
  8. Delta-V – Daniel Suarez – 426pgs: I can’t remember if one of my asteroid mining friends gave me this as a gift, or if they just recommended it and I bought it. Either way, it had been sitting on my shelf for a while. As a story, I really enjoyed it. The characters and plot were interesting, and definitely sucked you in, with real stakes. If you either don’t have a deep background in space, or have drunk deeply from the “asteroid mining and free-flying space settlements” koolaid dispenser, you probably will love this book. If you aren’t from the asteroid mining/free-flying space settlements tribe, or have a strong background in manufacturing or aerospace engineering, you’ll likely still enjoy the book in-spite of being triggered by it occasionally5. It was interesting, having worked on some robotics for NASA’s abandoned Asteroid Redirect Mission6, hearing technical concepts I had been pushing a decade ago being put into a story. If you know the industry, you could guess who Suarez used as consultants.
  9. Mormon’s Codex – John L. Sorensen – 714pgs: This one was my first non-fiction of the year. It was the magnum opus and last major publication of a latter-day saint anthropologist who had been studying Mesoamerican cultures and archeology for over half a century. The book makes the argument that the Book of Mormon makes most sense when viewed as a translation of an authentic Mesoamerican codex7. It was a fascinating read, with some parts fairly convincing, and other parts less so – and that’s coming from someone who believes in the historicity of the Book of Mormon. Key interesting insights I liked were: that it’s quite likely that a small colonizing party would not have transmitted much archeologically detectable material culture into a larger indigenous population8, an interesting explanation for the meaning of the “narrow pass” into the land northward from the Book of Mormon that fits really well geographically but is totally non-obvious for someone not from the area9, a strong correlation between major demographic and cultural changes in the Chiapas Central Depression area that line up very well timeline-wise with the narrative from 4 Nephi and Mormon. I could probably list a few more. But there were also a lot of places that felt forced, and where the author ignored some of his better points to try and overfit things. Long-story short, if you’re a latter-day saint with an interest in Mesoamerican archeology, it’s probably a worthwhile read, but I’m not sure how much anyone else would get out of it.
  10. Critical Mass – Daniel Suarez – 444pgs: This one was a bit slower of a start than the other book, and was a similar mix of a reasonably well written story that was engaging and fun, with interesting characters, in a hard sci-fi setting. Once again, if you’re coming from one of the space tribes that strongly believes in some of the technology choices he selected, or if you don’t have a strong space background, you can probably enjoy the book and not get too triggered by it. While all of the technical pieces are ones that researchers have looked at, and all of them look technically feasible, it really felt like this was “what can happen if everyone’s research idea works nearly flawlessly the first time”, which ends up being a big suspension of disbelief requirement on my part.
  11. Artemis – Andy Weir – 305pgs: After rereading Weir’s other two books, and watching or rewatching both of the movies, I figured I’d reread Artemis. I had only read it once before, so had forgotten enough of the plot to make it enjoyable again. That said, this one is just impossible to censor down to a PG-level on the fly, so I didn’t even try reading it to my family. It has some similarities with The Martian and Project Hail Mary, in that the protagonist had to solve challenging technical problems to save the day, but wrapped into a caper/heist-gone-wrong genre of story. I’m kind of looking forward to seeing the guys who directed the Project Hail Mary movie adapt this book into movie form. My guess is they’ll try to keep it PG-13, so they’ll have to tone down some of the crude humor and language to a point where I can watch it with my family. It’s definitely not one I can recommend as-is to my kids or other family members. But if you don’t have a problem with crude language and and a lot of adult humor, the story itself is fun and interesting. Not as good as his other two books, but other than the more mature content, I don’t regret rereading it.

Ok, that’s what I’ve completed so far for the year. I’m in the process of reading two other books — Jesus the Christ, which I described in my goals post yesterday, and On the Edge by Nate Silver. Both non-fictions. My guess is I’ll be done with Nate’s book this month, though Jesus the Christ may take a few more months to complete.

  1. I read it once to myself, and then immediately turned around and read it to my family – reading books out-loud to my family is a bit of a tradition. I’m just glad I didn’t have to censor the language on the fly like I did for the Martian. But everyone loved the story. ↩︎
  2. I’ll put spoilers here in the footnotes — I just really find the whole Dark Forest Hypothesis, that sufficiently advanced alien species will just go around trivially wiping out entire star systems and deliberately killing all of the sentient beings in them, just as a logical, amoral, and bureaucratic survival tactic really, really dark. ↩︎
  3. So that high-school science teachers could use the book to teach their kids scientific thinking without having parents burn them at the stake for assigning a book with the F-bomb two times in the first three sentences ↩︎
  4. I haven’t seen Saving Private Ryan, but understand it’s another Matt Damon Rescue movie, this time set in WWII. ↩︎
  5. I liked some of the ideas, but felt like the ISRU and in-space manufacturing aspects were way easier than they would be in reality. Learning how to use new processes, new materials sources, and new approaches to manufacturing almost never is something that a tiny team figures out by themselves in a few months. Getting to a promising proof of concept demo? Maybe. Having a four-person team be able to carbonyl print a whole complex space plane without having to do any structural testing to make sure the material was consistent and that the print worked right without flaws? ↩︎
  6. I literally have the simulated asteroid boulder we built for the prototype sitting about five feet away, outside my office window at home (it was about 1in too big to fit through the door into my basement), and I have a trio of partially disassembled asteroid boulder grabber robot arm prototypes sitting on shelves in my basement. ↩︎
  7. The Spanish called the books indigenous Aztecan and Mayan bark-skin or deer-skin books that they found codices. Most of them were burned by the conquistadors, but a few, like the Popul Vuh survive to this day. ↩︎
  8. Like for instance, in a two family colonizing group like what is described in 1st and 2nd Nephi, is there any reason to believe that any of the people there were master potters? Ceramics is one of the few things that survives well over millennia, but if there wasn’t a pottery expert in the group, would you really see any evidence of Near Eastern pottery influences where they landed? ↩︎
  9. When I think of the term “narrow pass”, as someone growing up in the US, my brain goes to a mountain pass, or a narrow isthmus or something like that. I hadn’t thought of a major river surrounded by swamps and wetlands on both sides that only had one good location for over one hundred miles where the ground was elevated, dry, and rocky enough to safely pass from the river into the lands to the north. ↩︎

Leave a Comment

Filed under Book of Mormon, Goal: Book Reading, Science Fiction

April 10, 2026 · 11:58 AM

2026 Personal Goals: Better Late than Never

I normally try to set personal goals for the year in January, but the start oft his year has been the perfect storm of minor health issues in the family and family/work travel, so I wasn’t able to set goals formally at my usual time. Things were starting to quiet down by the end of March, so I decided that there’s no reason you can’t formalize your yearly goals at the start of Q2, so here we are. As with previous years, I’ve structured my goals in the four categories my church uses for encouraging youth to set personal goals: spiritual, social, physical, and intellectual.

This year I’m trying a new thing with several of my goals: I’m going to set explicit Good/Meh/Ugly thresholds for many of these goals. This allows me to have a broader top level goal, combined with an explicit up-front scoring criteria. I have more goals this year than I can realistically simultaneously achieve, but I’m ok with several goals that would’ve been ugly at least getting up into the Meh range.

Without further ado,

Spiritual Goals:

  1. Get into the habit of regular journal writing: I’ve written in journals off-and-on for the past 30 years, but had lately gotten into the habit where other than church conference notes, I was only writing a few times per year. I tried to get up to weekly writing last year, but only did so-so, hence I wanted to try again this year. Scoring Criteria: Good if >100 entries, Meh if 50-100 entries, and Ugly if <50 entries.
  2. Help Jamie get prepared and out the door on his mission: Jamie received his mission call earlier this year, and has been assigned to serve for two years in the Baton Rouge Louisiana Mission, starting on May 6th. Before he goes, we need to help him prepare a ton of things, including buying sufficient clothes, luggage, and equipment, but also helping him get ready for two years without computer games and most social media, hopefully getting to bed and getting up in sync with his future missionary schedule, and helping him get used to exercise routines he can do without having regular access to a gym.
  3. Read the book Jesus the Christ from cover to cover: This is a good one on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, written by latter-day saint apostle James Talmage about a century ago. I read it on my mission, but thought it would be a good one to reread.
  4. Attend the temple regularly: This one is almost always on my goals list, both because it is important to me, but also because with the temple almost an hour away, it’s something that’s easy to let slip if it’s not a focus. Scoring Criteria: Good if >10x this year, Meh if 6-10x, and Ugly if <6x.
  5. Work on at least one goal from General Conference each week: I really enjoy my church’s semi-annual General Conferences. The talks are often inspiring, the spirit is wonderful, and most of the time six months later, I have little tangible progress to show for it. There are often too many areas of improvement for me to juggle all of them at once1, but picking one item to work on for each given week is something where I can make some tangible incremental progress. Scoring Criteria: starting after the April General Conference in Q2, measured by if I set and successfully kept at least one goal stemming from General Conference (or Stake Conference) in a given week. Good if successful >30x, Meh if 15-30x, Ugly if <15x.

Social Goals:

  1. Renew Passports and take the family on at least one international trip: With Jamie heading out on the mission, we’ll be down to four of us, so international travel is a little more feasibly financially. Most likely this will be a trip up to Banff National Park up in Canada, since our last attempt to make it up there was during COVID, and the border was still closed by the time we made it up to Montana.
  2. Go on regular dates with Tiff: We haven’t been very consistent on this, especially as the boys have grown up and gotten busier, so I wanted to set a goal to try and do this more often. Scoring Criteria: Start counting in Q2, group dates count, going shopping together at Walmart doesn’t. Good if >27x, Meh if 15-27x, Ugly if <15x.
  3. [Update 7/1: New Goal Added] Spanish speaking practice at least 10 min/day and secondary language learning at least 5min/day: I was realizing that I’m in a rut on my Spanish, having gotten most of what I can from Duolingo and Pimsleur. I’m going to try using a AI-based language conversation app (likely Langua) to try and get to a point where I’m more comfortable communicating in Spanish. Additionally, I have a work conference in Turkey that I’ll be speaking at in October, and I decided I want to spend a little time every day between now and the conference on Duolingo and/or Pimsleur learning basic Turkish. My guess is this may be my only visit to Turkey, so I’ll probably switch to another language after the trip. Scoring Criteria: Start counting in Q3. Good if >120x, Meh if 60-150x, Ugly if <60x.

Physical Goals:

  1. Get back into a cadence of daily exercise: I had actually been doing pretty well with this last year, but things fell apart in Q1 with how many times we were sick or traveling. I want to get back into the swing of things. This year, I’m trying to mix things up with some distance running, some strength training, and some Tai-chi2. Scoring Criteria: Starting in Q2, it counts if it’s at least 10min of intense exercise. So regular walking wouldn’t count, but most other things would. Good if >150x, Meh if 75-150x, Ugly if <75x.
  2. Get pull-up bar setup, and get to the point where I can do multiple proper pull-ups sequentially: My family got me a wall-anchored pull-up bar station for Christmas that I want to setup and use. Back in 2020 I got to the point where I could do 1-2 chin-ups, but I want to get to the point where I can do a proper pull-up, starting from a hanging position, without cheating. Scoring Criteria: by the end of the year, how many proper pull-ups can I do in a row. Good if >5x, Meh if 1-5x, Ugly if none3.

Intellectual Goals:

  1. Get back into a cadence of regular substantive blog posts: Between this blog (focused on personal stuff, politics, religion, and recipes), Selenian Boondocks (my blog where I post along with a few friends about general space, technology, policy, family updates, etc.), and my Starbright Engineering blog (where I post professional think-pieces about satellite servicing technology, policy, and business), I have a lot of blogs, but have been very inconsistent about writing. Running a bootstrapped space startup for a decade, where so much of my time was tied up in creative technical writing, it didn’t leave much time or juice for blogging. Now that my boys are starting to grow up and head out on their own, and now that I’m currently not running a startup, I have a bit more time to think. So I wanted to see if I could get back into creating long-form, thoughtful content, rather than just shooting my mouth off on Twitter4, which is more content consumption than content creation. Scoring Criteria: What counts as a substantive blog post is somewhat subjective, but examples of things would count include: explaining new concepts, writing persuasive arguments, posting recipes, etc. If it’s just a blog post with links to stuff I’ve written recently on my other blogs, or something more administrative, or two quick of a quick take, I probably won’t count it. Good if >18x posts this year, Meh if 9-18x, Ugly if < 9 blog posts5.
  2. Read books on a regular basis: I did reasonably well with this last year, and wanted to double down on this, especially as I try to be better with preparing for sleep most nights. This includes both fiction and non-fiction. Scoring Criteria: number of books completed this year. Good if >36x, Meh if 18-36x, Ugly if < 18 books6.
  3. Finish setting-up and learning how to use my maker and cooking tools: I like to buy gizmos, especially 3d printers and cooking tools. But a lot of the time I buy them then never learn how to use them. Or at least take a long, long time. So I’m setting a goal to setup and use the ones I haven’t figured out yet (currently including my belt-fed 3d printer, my resin printer, my Snapmaker’s CNC router fourth axis, the reinforcement kit for my Snapmaker, the bamboo bun/dumpling steamer, and the ice cream maker that was my first time getting scammed on Kickstarter7). Scoring Criteria: how many I setup and learn how to use well enough to make something with. Good if >3 tools, Meh if 1-2 tools, and Ugly if none.
  4. Learn how to use AI Tools (Claud, ChatGPT, etc.) to do useful work-related tasks: I’ve been fairly slow at adapting AI to help with work and creative tasks. I still prefer doing the creative writing, but there are plenty of things that I could use AI for such as: skimming an RFP to create a draft compliance matrix, reviewing a proposal against requirements and selection criteria, creating orbital dynamics simulation and visualization tools (vs doing stuff in Excel), creating useful illustrations, filling in drafts of boilerplate sections in proposals, etc. Scoring Criteria: number of useful work-related tasks that I successfully learn how to do using AI. Good if >3 tasks, Meh if 1-3 tasks, Ugly if no tasks.

Anyhow, that’s a long list. It’s almost certain that I won’t be able to accomplish all of my goals at the “Good” level, but I decided that this year, I’d rather have a few Goods, many Mehs, and hopefully not too many Uglies, than having a smaller list of goals. We’ll see in January how that turned out for me.

  1. And when it comes to areas for self-improvement, I’m what military folks might like to call a “target rich environment”… ↩︎
  2. I hear that Tai-Chi can be good for flexibility, and strengthening your joints, while also having some benefits similar to strength training. I’m not hippy enough to truly enjoy all of the eastern philosophy that comes along with the Tai-Chi youtube videos I’ve been using, but the exercises do seem to help, especially in the evening for wind-down before bed. ↩︎
  3. In this case, getting to even one proper pull-up is enough for me to count it as a Meh-level win. ↩︎
  4. Yes, I still refuse to call it X. You knew exactly what I meant. ↩︎
  5. It’s worth noting that at this point (10 Apr 2026), I think I’ve written at least four posts this year that count — A SB post about canceling Starliner and recompeting it for commercial crew, two SE posts about Fleet Maintenance satellite servicing, and my post here about ideas for new constitutional amendments. So I’m already halfway to Meh status, and have a fighting shot at getting to Good. ↩︎
  6. At the time of this writing (10 Apr 2026), I’m already at 11 books completed. Some of which were thick non-fiction books. I’ll probably do a writeup soon. But I’m well on the way to Meh, and Good is feasible. ↩︎
  7. Long story short, right after closing a large kickstarter for a compressor-style ice cream maker, they changed the design and some of the specs. Then they charged a suspiciously high shipping cost, that I initially thought was due to tariffs, but basically drove the cost of the machine up higher than what it would’ve cost to get an equivalent one on Amazon. Yes, I was dumb enough not to search to see if stuff like this already existed with others — I had never seen a home version compressor ice cream maker, so was dumb enough to think this was novel. When the hardware arrived, if you google searched for the part number on the user’s manual, it pulls up a design you could buy already from someone else on Alibaba. All of their pictures of their “factory” showed stuff like a bunch of the machines fully assembled on rows of workbenches with no tools, no parts, no sign of any real assembly. Just 100% fake. The machine does seem to work, just about half the speed that they advertised, and they didn’t send me the four additional mixing containers I ordered. I’ve backed a lot of things on Kickstarter, and this is the first time I’ve been scammed, and I at least got something out of it, so I count myself somewhat lucky. ↩︎

Leave a Comment

Filed under Goals

April 3, 2026 · 6:00 AM

Some Proposed U.S. Constitutional Amendments for America’s 250th Birthday

America is coming up on its 250th birthday celebration this summer, and as part of thinking about where our country has been and where it is going over the next fifty years, I wanted to suggest a few constitutional amendments that I think could help get us on a better track for the future.

Why Even Make the Constitution Amendable?

The founders created the amendment process to the Constitution because they knew it would be needed. I was reading a good historical fiction series on the American Revolution and early founding days of the republic1, and it really drove home how much compromise and creativity went into the Constitution. It’s kind of mind-blowing how many unique features of the US government ultimately came down to a single vote, or someone coming or going from the convention at the right time. They knew that while the Constitution was inspired, it was also the work of imperfect men, and also a product of their time, and that a process for updating the constitution would be necessary for several reasons:

  • To fix mechanisms that ended up working in practice differently than intended, and address unseen flaws in how things were setup.
  • To reflect and address the changing realities and needs of the country as it grew and as technology and society progress.
  • To allow the people to deliberately change the relationship of the people and the government over time as needed.

They also made the amendment process a non-trivial one, so that major changes in the government and the relationship between the people and the government required broad consensus, not just the whim of a temporary slim majority.

I don’t want to get into a history lesson, but some examples of things the amendment process has been used for in each category include:

  1. Fixing Flaws: Early on, they realized that the way they elected President and Vice President could and did put two political rivals together in presidency, which didn’t work very well in practice, so they changed how the Vice President was elected. Also, the Bill of Rights amendments were added as additional protections to the people.
  2. Addressing Changing Realities: One of the big compromises in the original constitution was basically punting on the thorny issue of slavery. After the Civil War, several amendments finally addressed correcting those earlier compromises now that the country was ready to move on. Also, over time the right to vote was expanded to women and all citizens, to better reflect changing societal norms.
  3. Deliberate Changes to the Relationship with the Government: I’m less a fan of some of these changes, but for instance changing the Senate to being elected directly, or allowing the federal government to collect income tax were major changes that were done via the amendment process. While not everyone likes those changes, at least they weren’t done just as a legislative change by a slim majority, but actually required buy-in from the public at large. I guess you could also count Prohibition and the Repeal of Prohibition under this category.

Anyhow, that’s a lot of background. Let me jump into my thoughts on a few new Constitutional amendments for our nations 6th 50 year cycle.

An Age Limit for Federal Office

The first amendment I’d like to suggest is setting an upper age limit for federal offices (President, Vice President, Congress, and the Supreme Court), somewhere in the 75-80 years old range. This amendment would likely need to include some provisions for how to transition to this new age cap, especially for sticky areas like the Supreme Court, and possibly some mechanism with a high threshold requirement allowing rare, specific exceptions if they’re broadly supported.

I think there are several reasons why this is both reasonable and valuable:

  • Our Constitution already includes lower age limit qualifications for most major roles (President, VP, House, and Senate). These were based upon the founders opinions on roughly when people might be mature/experienced enough to do the job well, but realistically there are almost certainly plenty of people under the age threshold who are more mature and experienced than some of the people we’ve elected from above that threshold. It’s an imperfect system, but also a reasonable one based on our founders understanding of human nature.
  • As we’ve witnessed with the Biden administration and are likely actively witnessing with the Trump administration2, there’s a high risk of mortality and severe cognitive decline in this timeframe. While there are absolutely some people who are healthy and mentally sharp well beyond this age, it’s also a time where decline can happen rapidly. And as was clear from the Biden administration, our constitutional tools for “taking the keys away from a stubborn grandparent when they think they’re still safe to drive” are limited and fraught.
  • When people in power go downhill mentally, it creates a real “Weekend at Bernie’s3” sort of incentive for their team, where staffers and aides realize they can exert an outsized influence on a president or congressperson, while hiding behind that person’s popularity with their voters.

In a country with approximately 125 million citizens in the 35-75 year old age group, I really don’t see a strong need to include people in an age group with high risks for mortality and mental health decline in the candidate pool. The risks are high, and the payoff is unclear. Almost every congressperson or executive we’ve had over those age limits kind of makes my point. Of the original founders, only Benjamin Franklin would’ve been excluded by this suggested rule, and frankly, I think he was self-aware enough to admit that serving as an executive at his age and health would have been a horrible idea. It might be worth including some sort of “exception” mechanism, like a Senate vote with a high threshold (say 65%) to allow someone a waiver if they have broad enough bipartisan support, in case we’re ever lucky enough to get someone of Franklin’s caliber again.

Also, while I’ve seen some argue that the health/mental acuity issues should be handled via some sort of test, rather than a blanket age cap, my worry is that is way too subjective and gameable. And once someone is in a position of power, it’s almost always harder to remove them if it starts becoming obvious that there’s something wrong. It’s just seems a lot wiser to set a reasonable age limit, and not have to deal with the messiness of having to decide things each time, on a case-by-case basis.

If technology allows human health outcomes to shift noticeably over the coming decades, where we no longer have the huge risk of health or cognitive decline issues around this age group, the number can be revisited in future amendments.

Putting Teeth Back Into Impeachment

The impeachment process, as it is currently implemented, isn’t very effective. At least for the most powerful positions in the US government. Which is kind of broken. The executive branch regularly usurps powers explicitly granted under the constitution to Congress, especially on things liked dragging the country into undeclared wars, but Presidents and executive officers know there is almost no chance of successful impeachment and removal of executive officers under the current process4.

I think one change could restore impeachment to something that has a real threat of removing an executive officer who crosses the line: making the impeachment removal vote in the Senate be handled via secret ballot5, and either getting rid of the mechanism for forcing the vote to be public, or significantly raising the threshold from 20% to say 40-50%.

The rationale for this suggested change should be fairly obvious. There’s a reason why the votes of individual jurors are almost never public record information, whether for criminal trials, military courts martial, etc. In fact, in some high-profile cases, such as for organized crime, the attorneys don’t even know the names or personal information of the jurors. All of this is to preserve the independence of the jurors. Because it’s pretty obvious that if the jurors individual votes were public record, it would be extremely easy to influence them to vote in specific ways, using threats or bribery.

Keeping the votes for at least the Senate impeachment removal process by secret ballot, and forbidding Senators from disclosing their votes after the fact would go a long way towards preserving independence by making both bribery and threats significantly harder to carry out. It is worth noting that impeachment removal would still require a 2/3 vote in the Senate, which given the nearly balanced power of the two major parties would still require convincing roughly 1/4-1/3 of the Senators of the accused executive officer’s party that they should be removed from office. And that’s assuming that all of the Senators of the opposite party honestly agree that the charges are legitimate, when free of outside pressure from their party.

I know that generally speaking, most legislative action should be public-record, so legislators can be held accountable by the people they represent. But there’s a reason why almost no other jury system has jury votes public record, and when functioning in a jury role for impeachment removal hearings, I think it would be wise to follow what has worked so well in literally almost everywhere else in the judicial world, by keeping Senators in their juror role independent via secret ballots.

A Speaker Truly of the House

I’m not sure if Congress has ever been highly functional6, but the last twenty years have seen Congressional dysfunction reach new lows. Our country has real problems like spiraling debt, an imperial presidency usurping congressional authority7, the rise of authoritarian peer adversaries, rapidly changing technology, etc., and we really need to have a Congress that functions at least a little. My suggestion for a constitutional reform to help Congress function better is to change how the Speaker of the House is elected.

The Constitution doesn’t currently say very much at all about how the Speaker of the House is elected, just that they should be chosen by the members of the House. My next amendment recommendation would be to require the Speaker of the House to be elected by at least 60% of the representatives in the House, not just a bare majority.

Why on earth would I suggest changing the threshold like that?

  • With how evenly balanced the two major parties have been, control of the House often comes down to only a handful of votes, meaning that the extreme wings of both parties often hold outsized power over their caucus. But neither party has held 60% of the House in over 60 years, meaning that under this rule, a Speaker could only be selected by including at least some members of the minority party. Since you already have to court at least a few moderate members of the other party, it becomes easier to get a stable support point by ignoring your party’s extreme fringe, and focusing on the majority of your party and the most moderate members of the opposing party.
  • Under a Senate that continues to operate with the filibuster8, it’s really hard for legislation to pass both chambers of Congress without some bipartisan support anyway, so having a Speaker that represents 60% of the House increases the odds of not having party-line House bills that have almost zero chance of passing in the Senate9.
  • A Speaker that represents 60% of the House also likely wouldn’t be just representing a single party, negotiating directly with the President/Senate Majority Leader and sidelining most of the rest of the Congress. That could help convert congressional roles back to being legislators, rather than mostly being a performative position. That might attract people better talented at finding acceptable compromises and workable solutions.
  • The Speaker of the House sets the agenda for which bills are considered for vote. For the past few decades, both parties have run things under something called the Hastert Rule, where only legislation supported by a majority of the majority party is even considered. Under a Speaker that represented 60% of the House. Meaning that something that has significant but not majority support in the majority party, and strong support in the minority party can only really be considered if they force the Speaker’s hand using a discharge petition. In a House overseen by a 60% Speaker, I think you’re likely going to see more bipartisan bills put up for consideration.
  • A 60% Speaker is also less likely to support and enable politically-driven investigations and impeachments as a Speaker who is in thrall to their party’s extremists. Similarly, a 60% Speaker is less likely to obstruct investigations and impeachment inquiries to protect an administration that happens to be aligned with the House’s current majority party.
  • The Speaker of the House is the second in line for the Presidency, after the Vice President. A 60% Speaker is a far less scary proposition than one who only got elected by appeasing the extremist wing of his or her own party.
  • The Speaker of the House plays a major role in assigning committees. A 60% Speaker is less likely to give away committee roles to unqualified extremists from their own party, and is more likely to pull people from committees if they’re being incompetent.

Having a majority still confers real benefits in voting on legislation and amendments, but by shifting the agenda from a strongly partisan to a more bipartisan Speaker, I think a lot of the dysfunction of the last 30 years might start to go away, and we might start attracting real legislative talent again. The challenges our government faces at this point requires a more competent and functional Congress, and having a Speaker that has to represent more than the bare majority in the House could go a long way towards making that happen10.

Shutting Down the Endless Government Shutdowns

Under the current legislative rules, if the appropriations bill for an agency, or a continuing resolution11, isn’t passed by the end of the fiscal year, that agency is shutdown until either an appropriations bill or a continuing resolution is passed. But a shutdown doesn’t have to be the default situation if an appropriations bill isn’t passed on time.

My fourth suggestion for a new constitutional amendment would be to change how appropriations are handled, so that a continuing resolution is the automatic default if a new appropriation isn’t passed. To make it mildly painful to not pass an appropriations bill, it could be a continuing resolution with an across-the-board 2-5% decrease from the previous year’s funding.

Most governments throughout the world are setup under a similar approach, where a failure to pass a new budget doesn’t result in a shutdown, it just results in the equivalence of a continuing resolution. US government shutdowns have become an increasingly frequent example of US government dysfunction. They almost never result in truly positive change for either party, rarely result in increased fiscal discipline, often result in passing huge poorly-scrutinized omnibus appropriations or year-long CRs, and frankly make life miserable for the entire population for little lasting gain. Admittedly shutdowns would be far less likely if the previous reform was enacted, but I think it’s a tool that should be removed from the Congressional toolbox, and burned.

One other potential check on appropriators who can’t come up with a passable budget would be a “three-strikes rule” for appropriators. Each time your appropriations committee fails to pass a budget on time, all members of the committee get a strike on their record. After three strikes, you’re no longer eligible to serve on the appropriations committee. Seats on appropriations committees are some of the most coveted powers in Congress. If members of the committee are incapable of doing their job, they shouldn’t be able to keep the perk of a cushy appropriations committee seat.

No Self-Suing

It’s always interesting looking at rules. You almost always find ones that make you really wonder “what idiot did something that dumb enough to require adding that rule?” This is probably one of those rules.

The President runs the executive branch, which includes overseeing the Department of Justice. If someone sues the Federal Government, the Department of Justice provides the attorneys who defend the government against the suit. President Trump and several of his former employees have recently sued the Federal Government for massive amounts of money in damages. If you can’t see the massive conflict of interest in being able to sue an organization that you also run, and whose defense attorneys you can order to settle the suit in your favor, I’m not sure what to tell you.

My fifth suggested Constitutional amendment would be a strict ban on the ability of an executive branch officer (and especially the President and Vice President) to sue the government while the administration that he or she is/was part of is still in power.

The President and Vice President are currently protected from civil and criminal suits while in office, it’s a fair trade that they shouldn’t be allowed to sue their own government while in office.

Nobody Above the Law

My final recommended constitutional amendment deals with the sticky issue of how to balance the importance of preventing purely political prosecution of former executive branch officers, while at the same time allowing them to be held accountable for their actions. Right now, we have the ironic situation, where some of the most powerful people in the world are held to much lower legal standards than almost anyone else in the country. Knowing you can be held accountable for lawbreaking is one of the keys to deterring law-breaking. But right now, a former President can hide behind the claim that they’re just being prosecuted for political reasons.

My suggestion for how to balance those two competing objectives is to provide a mechanism for allowing criminal and civil prosecution of former executive branch officers upon secret ballot vote in the Senate of at least say 60 or 65% of the Senate.

Here are some thoughts on this idea:

  • Going back to previous points — given the partisan makeup of the Senate, this would almost always require getting at least a few votes from members of the accused officer’s own party. This both should help prevent obviously political prosecutions, while also giving bipartisan legitimacy to prosecutions that Senators acting without external pressure agree are legitimate.
  • If the Senate votes to allow the prosecution, this should automatically eliminates the ability of the executive officer to request that the judge dismiss the charges based on executive privilege.
  • The vote to allow the prosecution does not decide the result of the legal action. The former officer would still be entitled to all of the legal protections and due process of any other citizen. It would be up to the judge and jury to decide to convict and how to sentence. The Senate vote just clears the way for the trial to occur.
  • In the case where a criminal case is brought against a former executive while that person’s party is in power, it might be worth giving the Senate the option, also requiring a similar 60-65% secret ballot vote to assign an independent prosecutor who does not answer to the current administration to prosecute the case. Because this person would require approval of a similar 60-65% of the Senate, that should force them to be someone with bipartisan support.

I think a mechanism like this might provide a way to allow legitimate prosecutions to happen, to hold previous executives accountable for criminal behavior, while still preventing blatantly political prosecutions from happening.

Conclusions

I’d love to hear what people think of these amendments, but I think they could go a long way towards making our government more functional, more just, and more likely to last as a functioning country to see its 300th birthday. Feel free to leave comments if you see flaws in my suggestions, have improvements you could suggest, or if you think any of these ideas have any chance of getting proposed and enacted.

  1. The Prelude to Glory series by latter-day saint author Ron Carter. It was an enjoyable nine-book series that starts shortly before the battles of Lexington and Concord, and wraps up at the end of the War of 1812. ↩︎
  2. It is interesting to see people who were so adamant that the left was covering up Biden’s cognitive decline are now basically doing the same thing for Trump. ↩︎
  3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weekend_at_Bernie%27s ↩︎
  4. It’s kind of telling that Mitt Romney was literally the first senator in US history to vote for removal of a president of his own party. I’m not positive if Senators crossed the aisle in either of the two cases of executive officers impeached, but I somewhat doubt it. ↩︎
  5. I might also suggest having the House impeachment vote be by secret ballot for similar reasons. ↩︎
  6. Reading that historical fiction series about the Revolutionary War really drove home how dysfunctional Congress has historically been. On the plus side, it gives you some hope — we’ve survived Congressional incompetence in the past, so maybe there’s hope we can survive the current messes. ↩︎
  7. Presidents from both parties have used Congressional dysfunction to justify rule by executive order. Each side complains about the other side’s overreaches, and both sides tend to prefer concentrating executive power to accomplish different ends. But partisans on both sides often go for executive overreach to accomplish things that they know they don’t have sufficient popular support for to achieve via the constitutionally authorized legislative channel. ↩︎
  8. Which as annoying as it is, probably prevents way more mischief and stupidity than people realize. Most norms and customs are only truly appreciated when we’re dumb enough to toss them aside for short term advantage. ↩︎
  9. This should also at least somewhat moderate the risk of a party with a trifecta being able to ram through major changes to the government that only have a slim majority of support. ↩︎
  10. If that works, it might be worth a follow-on amendment doing a similar thing for the Senate — Have the Senate agenda controlled by the Senate President Pro Tempore, and have them elected by 60% of the Senators. If you had both chambers overseen by leaders who had to represent more than just the majority party, I think you’d be pleasantly surprised at how much more effective our Legislative branch became. It’s not a panacea of course, but I think it would help a lot to put legislating back into the hands of the legislature. ↩︎
  11. A continuing resolution is a stopgap measure that basically funds an agency at the same budget as the previous year, often with the same funding levels for programs within the agency as the previous year. Ironically, the term CR in Tagalog is the term they use for a bathroom. It seems ironically appropriate, because CRs are a crappy way of funding a government agency. ↩︎

6 Comments

Filed under Government, Politics

Tagged as , , , , , ,

January 8, 2026 · 7:44 PM

2025 Goals Accountability: The Return of the Good, the Meh, and the Ugly

As I did last year, I wanted to give an update on how I did on my various goals for the year. I’ve found that knowing I’m going to be giving a public accounting of my progress provides a little extra incentive to “lock in”.

As with last year, my thirteen goals were focused on four areas: spiritual, social, physical, and intellectual. This is based on my church’s Children and Youth goal-setting program, modeled after the New Testament scripture Luke 2:52:

And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man.

As with last year, I’m dividing the results of my thirteen goals into three categories:

  • The Good: Goals that I either completely achieved or came very close.
  • The Meh: Goals that I made some useful progress on but did not achieve.
  • The Ugly: Goals that I made little or not progress on.

The Good…

First off, starting with the goals I did well on:

  • Help Jonny head out on his mission successfully (2/13): At the time I was setting my goals for 2025, Jonny had already received his calling to serve as a full-time missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, assigned to the California Los Angeles Mission. Jonny is our first one to head out on a mission, and some things have changed in the quarter century since Tiff and I served, so there was a little bit of a learning curve involved. Probably the biggest misadventure was that we didn’t realize Jonny needed his wisdom teeth removed until about a month before his February mission start date. The earliest we were able to schedule him for the wisdom tooth removal was a few days into his one week of “Home MTC” (some initial missionary training and orientation they now do from home via Zoom before they fly out to one of the actual Missionary Training Centers). By the time he was supposed to fly out, he was still recovering, so they gave us an extra few days to get there, but in the end I ended up renting a car and driving him out to Provo, UT. We got to drive through a blizzard between Park City and Provo, and Jonny misunderstood the eating instructions so ended up getting very green about the gills, but we were able to get him there by the deadline. He’s now been out in L.A. for almost a year, and has served in the San Fernando Valley, as well as down near LAX. Going into 2026, Jamie has submitted his mission papers, and we’re expecting him to receive his call sometime later this month, so I’ll likely have a similar goal for Jamie this year.
Jonny with his missionary name tags
Wisdom tooth removal complete — good riddance to “Sebastian the Sideways1“
My last time seeing Elder Goff in person until Feb 2027
I just had to also include this picture from a few months into Elder Goff’s mission
  • Help Jamie get his mission papers submitted (12/21): Speaking of which, Tiff and I were able to help Jamie complete submitting his mission papers. Because they went in the Sunday before Christmas, we’re not expecting a call until sometime this month. But this time around, Jamie got his wisdom teeth removed before submitting his papers.2
  • Have a meal with church members, neighbors, or other friends at least 2x per month: I set this goal to force myself to be more consciously social, since I’m a bit of an introvert, and did really well. Overall I recorded at least 41 different meals with church members, neighbors, relatives, or other friends, and I’m sure there were plenty I didn’t count. Some highlights included an Altius Alumni BBQ I held in October for former colleagues, dinners with at least half a dozen families in our new ward that we didn’t previously know very well, cooking Filipino food with the Stokes, and making Colada Morada3 for the Christmas Music Night the Greys held.
Eli Kopp-Devol’s band gave us a live performance at the Altius Alumni BBQ in October. We don’t usually have live music at our meals, but these guys were pretty amazing.
  • Finish Pimsleur’s Latin American Spanish Levels 4 and 5 (2/8 and 12/344): I’ve already been to a Spanish speaking country in 2024, but I hadn’t yet finished the last two levels of Pimsleur Spanish. I got the first level done early in the year, but the later one took until right at the end of the year. I technically finished it a few days into the new year, but it was close enough I’m going to count it as a success. I found out that my company is going to have me represent them at a conference in Spain in February, so hopefully I’m a little more confident in my Spanish than I was when I went to Panama and Ecuador last year. That said, the version of Spanish they speak in Spain is slightly different from the Latin American version, so I may try to do some of the Castilian Spanish lessons that Pimsleur also has before that.
  • Read at least 2 books per quarter: I finished reading 10 books last year: A City on Mars5, Saints Volume 4, and Books 1-8 of Prelude to Glory (an excellent American Revolutionary War historical fiction series)6. I read a few of those (Saints Vol 4, and Books 1-3 of Prelude to Glory) out loud to my family. We started the Prelude to Glory series right after someone mentioned that we were at the 250th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord. I remembered we had this historical fiction series about the Revolutionary War, so decided to try it out. We were hooked, and about 4000pgs later, I’m just about to start the final book. It was particularly fun finishing reading the story of the Battle of Princeton to my family literally on the 249th anniversary of that battle.
  • Do at least 15min of medium intensity exercise (jogging, body-weight exercises, dumbells, or weights) at leas 2/3 of the days in the year: By my records I had at least 206 days of exercise I had notes for, though some weeks when we had campouts or trips, so my notes kind of fell apart, so I probably missed recording a few days. When I set the goal, I should’ve specified 2/3 of the non-Sunday days in the year, because as a rule I almost never exercise on Sundays. If you take 206 days as a percentage of the whole year including Sundays, it’s only 56%, but if you take it as a percentage of the year excluding Sundays it’s 66%. I’m going to count this one as Good though because I’m at the line by one count, and while I’m short of the goal by another count, I made a solid effort throughout the year, and came reasonably close to the goal.
  • Attend the temple at least one time per month: I actually came fairly close to completing this one, with eleven temple trips over the year, though we ended up not going in December due to schedule challenges, and at least some months I missed and then did a visit early the next month. Still a work in progress, and something I want to improve on, but I think I did a lot better than most years.

…The Meh…

Ok, some goals I made serious progress on, but didn’t get very close to completing:

  • Get into the habit of nightly prayers with Tiff: I did start doing better at this later in the year, but being a night owl, there were many nights where I didn’t even make it up to bed until after Tiff was asleep. I also wasn’t very reliable at doing this while traveling, etc. In December I think we started getting to over 75% of the time though, but overall I’d guess we were probably less than 25%. So some progress, but not close enough to count under “the Good”.
  • Write in my journal at least 1x per week: I only managed 19 entries this year, and eight of those were either Stake Conference or General Conference notes, and one was notes from a work meeting. If you subtract that out, it was only about one entry per month on average. Not great, and definitely well short of 1x per week. That said, by having the goal, it definitely drove me to write more often. Most of my entries ended up being on plane trips for work or family. Since I can’t have my laptop out during takeoffs and landings, but I can have my journal out, it’s a convenient time to write, and many of those times, I’d write 2-3 pages. I think one thing that may help this year is the shift in when our ward meets for church. Last year, we met at noon, which encourage sleeping in in the mornings, and then our afternoons and evenings were usually pretty full with church meetings, family time, calling home, so that I almost never had time to write in my journal. This year our ward meets at 10:30am, so I think it may be easier to bake in a consistent time that usually works for a journal update.
  • Setup and learn how to use the resin printer, belt fed printer, Snapmaker rotary 4th axis, and Snapmaker Dual Print head (12/8): I count this one as partially successful. I did get the dual print head working this year, in time to design and print two sets of ornaments — a temple ornament for a friend from my old ward, and a faux-stained-glass nativity ornament for Christmas. If I want to do such faux stained-glass ornaments next year, I think I can get it setup and running fairly quickly. There’s still some work if I want to print things with water soluble supports, etc. But I have the general modeling, slicing, printing, and calibration steps all sorted out. As for the Anycubic Photon Mono 4K resin printer, I did manage to get it and the cleaning station setup, including building out a printer box area with fume hood setup, and ventilation ducting routed to the outside so I wouldn’t be breathing in too many toxic fumes, but was never able to successfully make it through calibration steps. I’ve done some slicing work, and did print one predesigned/presliced model, but I definitely don’t have it ready for general use yet. For the IdeaFormer IR3V2 belt fed printer, I was able to get it partially assembled, but never finished putting it inside its tent, or setting up the roller conveyor supports, and never even tried running it. And I didn’t even bother touching the Snapmaker rotary 4th axis this year… So I definitely still have some work to go before Tiff will allow me to buy another 3d printer. Even if a Snapmaker U1’s four print heads would allow me to do a faux-stained-glass ornament using all three primary colors and the frame material… A guy can dream, can’t he?
My resin printer setup with the Anycubic Photon Mono 4K printer on the left, the Wash and Cure station in the middle, and an ultrasonic cleaner on the right. Mounted inside a hydroponic grow tent as an enclosure, with a laser cut acrylic two piece top and front fume hood closeout. The vent fan in the top center ducts out the back, ties in with the outlet of the vent duct from the Snapmaker, and then routes out the side of the house. All told a pretty decent setup, but as I said, I’m still struggling with the calibration steps — both getting the build plate sufficiently level, and dialing in the base and transition layers to adequately support the prints and provide the right balance of precision and strength.
The temple ornament I made for a friend from my old ward. Printed with a transparent blue PLA filament and a marble-like PLA filament
I’m really happy with how my faux-stained-glass nativity ornaments turned out. I based it on a laser-cut ornament design I bought off of Etsy, and controlled the blue hue by varying the number of blue layers printed. My mom is a real stained-glass artist, and really loved it.

…and the Ugly

There are a few goals that I think I did particularly poorly with this year. I figure if you don’t miss on at least some goals, you’re likely either not pushing yourself hard enough, or not picking enough goals… but that’s probably at least a little bit of “cope” on my part. Without further ado, here were the goals I didn’t make much if any progress on:

  • Get back and stay below 180lb through the end of 2025: I at least tried somewhat on this. I think at my best, in late September I was getting down to just over 180lb. Then I got really sick for several weeks, then holidays, and in the end, I ended up almost exactly where I started at the end of the year last year — 187lb. Not gaining weight is a good thing, but I never locked-in consistently enough to actually make it happen. I’m still ~30lb down from where I was before I started trying to lose weight in 2020, but have regained about 15lb from my low point of 172lb… I guess middling efforts produce middling results.
  • Start Pimsleur German and finish at least Level 1 and Level 2 including exercises: I didn’t even start this one. Partially because I hadn’t finished Spanish till right at the end of the year, partially because I was having second thoughts on what I should do next language-wise. At this point, I’m not sure whether I want to do Castilian Spanish first, go on to German, or join my youngest two boys in studying Japanese.
  • Develop a family budget that closes and stick to it: This one is probably the most embarrassing, because it’s literally been on my weekly todo-list all year long, and we got nowhere with it. Selling Altius allowed me to pay off my debts (mostly from subsidizing Altius), and allowed us to put a downpayment on a house, and provide some savings, but we’ve slowly been burning through those savings. With us being a single-income family with four kids, this is definitely something we’ll need to work on more seriously this year.

That completes my 2025 goals accountability. Overall I’m pretty happy with how things turned out. Some of the items were ones that likely would’ve happened anyway without setting the goal (like getting Jonny out on the mission, or helping Jamie get his mission papers in), but in many cases the goals helped encourage me to try harder in several areas I cared about. I still need to think through my goals for 2026, but overall I’m pretty happy with a lot of things I achieved this past year.

  1. In true Goff fashion, he and his brothers came up with silly names for all four of his wisdom teeth that needed to be removed. Sebastian the Sideways was the one that was coming in rotated 90 degrees into the tooth in front of it… ↩︎
  2. His bishop ended up being the dentist he used for the missionary dental exam, so he insisted that we take care of that before submitting. It’s almost like he knows us or something… ↩︎
  3. I super yummy Ecuadorian hot spiced berry drink. Think like a mix of spiced apple cider but with a berry/pineapple base. I’m still iterating on the recipe a bit, but will definitely write it up on here once I have it dialed in further. The drink is usually used for El Día de los Muertos, but warm spiced fruit drinks kind of say “Christmas” to me. ↩︎
  4. 12/34/2025 = 1/3/2026. There’s an old story about a pair of companies that were trying to close a sale in a certain calendar reason for various purposes. The paperwork took a little longer than hoped for, and the sale slipped into New Year’s. So the dated the transaction as signed December 32nd. If it works for them, it works for me. ↩︎
  5. I don’t think I did a review of the book — the short version is that I like the Weinersmiths, am glad they put in the effort to write an interesting and entertaining book on space settlement, and agree with some of their points (like the importance of getting data on human health in hypogravity), but respectfully disagree with some of their worldview and conclusions. ↩︎
  6. Technically I finished book 8 on “12/37” or 1/6/2026, but I finished most of it before the end of the year. ↩︎

Leave a Comment

Filed under Goals

Tagged as

June 16, 2025 · 9:07 PM

King-men

The recent “No Kings” protests over the weekend, and some of the comments and snark about them on social media reminded me of something I noticed from a story from the Book of Mormon a while back.

In Alma 51, Mormon is recounting some civil unrest that eventually led to a major war that dominates the rest of that book. Here are the relevant verses (Alma 51: 2-8), with my emphasis added:

2 Nevertheless, they did not long maintain an entire peace in the land, for there began to be a contention among the people concerning the chief judge Pahoran; for behold, there were a part of the people who desired that a few particular points of the law should be altered.

3 But behold, Pahoran would not alter nor suffer the law to be altered; therefore, he did not hearken to those who had sent in their voices with their petitions concerning the altering of the law.

4 Therefore, those who were desirous that the law should be altered were angry with him, and desired that he should no longer be chief judge over the land; therefore there arose a warm dispute concerning the matter, but not unto bloodshed.

5 And it came to pass that those who were desirous that Pahoran should be dethroned from the judgment-seat were called king-men, for they were desirous that the law should be altered in a manner to overthrow the free government and to establish a king over the land.

6 And those who were desirous that Pahoran should remain chief judge over the land took upon them the name of freemen; and thus was the division among them, for the freemen had sworn or covenanted to maintain their rights and the privileges of their religion by a free government.

7 And it came to pass that this matter of their contention was settled by the voice of the people. And it came to pass that the voice of the people came in favor of the freemen, and Pahoran retained the judgment-seat, which caused much rejoicing among the brethren of Pahoran and also many of the people of liberty, who also put the king-men to silence, that they durst not oppose but were obliged to maintain the cause of freedom.

8 Now those who were in favor of kings were those of high birth, and they sought to be kings; and they were supported by those who sought power and authority over the people.

So here are my thoughts:

  • Notice first that the “king-men” didn’t choose that name themselves, but were called that name by their political opponents.
  • Also, given that this is an abridgement of the story, we’re never given details on exactly what the particular alterations were to the points of law that they wanted changed. The effect of those changes is described as changing the law “in a manner to” overthrow the government and establish a king. Which kind of suggests it may have been a little more complicated than literally saying “we’re going to replace the Chief Judge with a King”.
  • Notice that we also don’t really get to hear side of the story of the people who were labeled king-men, just that they lost, and that their opponents believed that they were just trying to make those changes because they wanted power over other people. But most people, even bad people, or people pushing bad policies, have internal rationalizations for what they’re doing that don’t paint themselves as the villain of their own story.

I’m not saying that if we had more of the details that we’d find that the king-men were actually in the right. I generally trust Mormon’s opinion in this case, that the requested changes would’ve led to dangerous concentrations of power that would’ve threatened the liberty of the people.

But it is interesting to think what it would’ve been like to hear this political debate had it occurred in a day of social media. Would the king-men have felt demonized, and that accusation of them wanting power and authority and kings was unfair? Did they have any reasonable sounding arguments, even if they were wrong? Were there otherwise good people convinced by some of those arguments, not because they actually wanted a king per se, but because the government was seen as too ineffective, and they wanted leaders to have the power to get things done? Did some people see the freemen labeling their opponents as “king-men” and align themselves with the king-men because they thought the freemen were unfairly slandering the group?

Anyhow, it’s one of those things that I’d love to hear more of the backstory, because for a historical item from over two millennia ago, it feels very timely.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Book of Mormon, Politics