Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. From Paris to Hangzhou: The $9m Quest to Return China’s Lost Encyclopedia (September 21) "The final version approved in 1407 consisted of 22,877 manuscript rolls across 11,095 volumes, with between 370 million and 450 million Chinese characters, according to estimates by various academics. The book was first stored at the Ming Palace in Nanjing, which served as the nation’s capital from 1368 to 1421. It was later moved to the Forbidden City in Beijing, now the Palace Museum."

Also from Sixth Tone: Beijing Court Lets Widow Use Embryos Created With Late Husband (September 25) In China, only married women are allowed to freeze eggs/ use IVF. China has ideas about what the "correct" family structure is, and it's very much embedded in the laws.

2. Tyrannosaurus (September 18) From xkcd.

3. I Desperately Want a Baby. What I Need to Do to Get One Can Take Me to a Dark Place. (August 10) "Through a survey of fertility patients with a history of sexual assault, Feferkorn and his colleagues found that, for many patients, fertility treatments completed in an office—and that barely resemble sex of any kind—can be retraumatizing. But they also found practical accommodations that could make clinical care feel safer and more empowered."

4. Macklemore Proves Zionists Don’t Care About Antisemitism (September 25) "The story here is that people with a great amount of money and power, like Robert Kraft, are using that money and power to silence criticism of a genocidal state, and they are able to do that because of the complicity of “apolitical,” “well-meaning,” “both sides,” “complicated issue” spineless money-hungry losers like Ed Sheeran."

5. What’s Missing From Coverage of the Massive DoorDash Worker Settlement (September 28) "But even when workers are treated as employees with rights, those rights are violated with stunning frequency. A 2014 estimate from the Economic Policy Institute places wage theft at $50 billion per year, more than other forms of theft. The Cleveland Federal Reserve last month reported workers who experience wage theft lose around $95 per week, almost $5,000 per year."

The bible warns rich people, "The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty." When I use the term "living in sin," I mean the employers who don't pay their workers what they owe them. Part of me wants to start a campaign for "the biblical definition of hiring people," get Christians all riled up and mad at employers who are stealing their workers' wages, because it's "unbiblical." Surely the Christians who make such a big deal about following the bible will totally get on board, right? Right?

No, they won't. All that stuff conservative Christians taught me about how it's so important to follow the bible, it was all fake. They never actually believed in following the bible. They just use it for a few specific culture-war issues where they want to control other people's personal lives.

6. “Good” School, or Failing One: Black Parents’ Impossible Choice (September 25) "If a mother sits across from a first-grade teacher who says her son or daughter can’t read and must repeat a grade, what is that mother supposed to do? How long should she wait — and how hard should she push — for the school to get it right? How much of her child’s education must she sacrifice on the hope that the system might eventually improve?"

7. Texas Dem. Senate Candidate Talarico Clarifies He Still Opposes Statewide Ban On Trans Athletes (September 26) "Talarico still pledges to support a national ban on surgical interventions that help transgender youth, which may include top surgery or hormone implants." Some of the statements he has made about trans people are good, but he's not fully standing up for them the way we would want.

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. At the End of an Age (September 21) "It is quite ironic that this end of American greatness happens under a regime that promised to 'Make America Great Again'."

2. ICE is looking into 'mobile detention facilities' (September 23) "'What they describe is a network of vans that would follow officers into the field as they make these arrests,' says Michael Wriston, a co-founder of Project Salt Box. 'Very conspicuously missing from this description was: What are the standards? You know, how long a person can be kept in a van. How are people using the bathroom? How are they feeding them?'"

3. The Trump Proposal to Pay Moms for Childcare May Sound Like a Good Thing (September 14, via) "This initiative is transparently not about helping all children to have a parent at home if that is what their parents desire. If it were, then it would apply to all lower-income families equally, regardless of whether a breadwinner spouse is in the picture. This is the government paying only for married moms to stay home."

4. CNN, MS NOW and Politico allowed back at the White House after judge blocked Trump’s ban (September 24)

5. Defending Ned Flanders from his cultured despisers (September 22) "Who are white evangelicals in the eyes of the vast majority of “everybody else”? They are the people who gave us President Trump. They are the people who handed guns to the lawless white-supremacist goons of ICE and who held their cloaks as they murdered Renee Good and Alex Pretti and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo."

6. Mahmoud Khalil on his detention by ICE: 'It is a stain on the U.S. consciousness' (September 29) "What is happening behind ICE detention gates is horrendous. And I believe that it is a stain on the U.S. consciousness. ... It was crowded with hundreds of people who were told that their existence is illegal and no one of them could go free or could be set free."

7. The Kakistocracy Report (08.19.2026) (August 19, via) "Once inside the building, a man in face paint and a fur headdress climbed onto the Senate platform, in the very chair the Vice President had occupied a short time before, and led a prayer thanking God for filling the Capitol with patriots and for the opportunity to “send a message to all the tyrants, the communists, and the globalists” that this is God’s house and God’s land. I want you to notice he didn’t stop to ask whether prayer belonged in the middle of a building he and his companions had just broken into by force. In his theology, it belonged there more than anywhere. The building was already his. The prayer was just claiming it out loud."