Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Journal Club: An Ace Reading of Frodo (June 29) "Hobbit culture emphasizes the importance of family and lineage, but Bilbo and Frodo are both highlighted as strange for being perpetual bachelors. This puts a lot of distance between them and their home culture."

2. The Lexicon of Revolution: Tracing the Origins and Global Journey of China’s ‘Long March’ (June 30) "In 1976, 'Long March' was first added to the dictionary, merely as a subentry under 'long.' However, in June 2016 — coinciding with the 80th anniversary — the OED upgraded it to a standalone main entry with a comprehensive historical definition: 'The retreat of Chinese Communist forces ... in 1934–35 ... over a distance of 6,000 miles.'"

Also from Sixth Tone: Investigation Uncovers China’s Underground Height Surgery Market (July 1) Wow this looks horrifying.

3. Jurassic Park but with a Cat (2021, 1-minute video, via) and Jurassic Park with a Cat — Behind the Scenes (7-minute video)

4. Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are married. What to know about the wedding (July 5)

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. The Supreme Court upholds grace periods for mail-in ballots, siding against the GOP (June 29) I don't really *get* this case- so, the question is about how the deadline for mail-in ballots is defined: is it that your ballot has to be received by election day, or postmarked by election day? Both of those seem like reasonable policies to me; either one should be fine, as long as everyone is clear on which one it is. I'm confused about why this is always framed as "Democrats are in favor of counting the ones that arrive after election day, Republicans are not" and also why Democrats are talking about this like it's about the big questions of democracy and fairness to voters- it *doesn't* seem intuitively obvious to me that being on the side of fairness and democracy means that even the ballots received after election day should be counted.

(Okay, but from the Supreme Court's perspective, the question is about whether states are in charge of their own election policies.)

My initial thought was, maybe it's about "people who have enough money and resources that they're able to live their lives in an organized way and don't have trouble with meeting deadlines" skewing Republican, and "people who are poor and therefore never have enough time or money for all the things they need to deal with, so they often miss deadlines" skewing Democrat- so that's why Democrats want to count them and Republicans don't? Or maybe "people who aren't paying attention and didn't realize there was an election until the last minute" correlates more with voting for Democrats. Something like that?

*I* vote by mail- I wonder if any of my ballots have ever been received after election day. I try to get it done as early as possible, because I know there's uncertainty in how long it takes to mail stuff from China to the US (unless you pay like 50 bucks for a good shipping service like DHL or Shunfeng). But yeah, sometimes the time between when the ballot becomes available to download and print, and the election day, is not that long- maybe it makes sense that a lot of mail-in voters send in their ballots and they *don't* arrive by election day, even if these voters are being responsible and aware of what's going on. 

Maybe the partisan angle is about how Democrats are more likely to vote by mail than Republicans. So I should think of it not as "this is about counting the ballots of people who are bad at meeting deadlines, apparently a key demographic for Democrats???" but more like "it *is* reasonable that some proportion of mail-in ballots arrive after election day- this is about protecting the right to vote, for people who vote by mail." (I would be interested in seeing the statistical distribution showing when mail-in ballots arrive, relative to election day.)

And then another way to think about it is, those ballots are already in the mail. People *want* to vote, they have the right to vote, and they did the work of filling in the ballot and mailing it. You *should* count them.

2. Immigration is about Race (June 29) "Both of Alito’s opinions are mockeries of legal reasoning. He had a conclusion to get to, and he got there. He can’t say it in so many words, but he wants to Make America White Again. And the other five conservative justices agreed with him."

3. Megyn Kelly faces backlash over ‘profoundly racist’ rant against Haitian immigrants after Supreme Court ruling (June 26) "'We don’t care if you’re offended. Get out! Go home! Go back to f***ing Haiti!' Kelly said on her podcast."

And also about Haitians: The U.S. healthcare system is in crisis. A Supreme Court ruling could make things worse (July 2) "Experts say deporting Haitian TPS recipients will have a catastrophic impact on the nationwide healthcare workforce crisis — a workforce that is hugely dependent on immigrant labor."

4. Israel Bombed a Turtle Sanctuary & Killed Mona Khalil (June 29) "In my opinion, Israel destroyed the Orange House, and Khalil, because they want to destroy what it and what she stood for: hope. A better life. A life where even poor refugees can care about helpless little turtles."

5. Supreme Court upholds birthright citizenship on constitutional grounds (June 30) So the court ruled 6-3 that the 14th amendment says what it says. Uh. Jonathan Last writes, "The first time the Trump administration was able to find any judge, anywhere in America, to state that it had the ability to do away with birthright citizenship was when it got to the Supreme Court. And then it found three of them." (And Kavanaugh, even though he sided with the majority, it was for other reasons, not because he believes the 14th amendment says what it says.)

The six opinions in the birthright citizenship ruling have a lot to teach us about the U.S. today (July 2)

And apparently a bunch of MAGAs are really unhappy about this, and have a lot of racist things to say about it. My "favorite" is Steven Crowder, who is mad that "little Josue born to illegal Haitians in Springfield, Ohio is just as American as you and me." Um, yes? That's what America is about? So I guess they're not even going to pretend America is about equality for everyone. And for the MAGAs who make a big deal about being Christian, I guess they aren't even going to pretend that Christianity is about a God who loves everyone.

6. He sent a harsh email to ICE's top official. 5 months later, federal agents tracked him down (July 1) "'It's starting to look like a pattern of knocking on people's doors to ask them questions about clearly constitutionally protected speech. And that is very troubling,' said Nathan Freed Wessler, the deputy director of ACLU's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project."

7. House Democrats accuse Trump of 'hijacking' America's 250th birthday for his own gain (July 2) "'They had a chance to do this in a bipartisan way or a way that wouldn't enrich cronies, but they pretty clearly didn't do that,' said Zibel. 'I think that this is a follow-the-money situation that needs to be explored.'"

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. How a Buddha Got Its Sight Back (April 13) "The small circular cavities visible on their faces once held inlaid ceramic or glass pupils. These were fixed in place using a technique known as qianmu, in which the eyes were inserted into carved sockets. Over the centuries, as Yungang’s soft sandstone yielded to wind and rain, and later to war and theft, these fragile elements loosened, slipped free, and vanished."

2. Countdown Standard (April 13) From xkcd.

3. ‘Everything is gone’: Israel destroys entire villages in Lebanon (April 12, via) "The tactic of mass destruction of homes in Gaza, where Israel has been accused of committing genocide, was described as domicide by academics, a strategy that is used to systematically destroy and damage civilian housing to render entire areas uninhabitable."

4. “They Hopped” — Ken Ham’s Answer to Kangaroo Ark Migration Based on False Information (April 11) "The only placental mammals that appear to have reached Australia before human arrival are rats. And rats, as anyone who has studied dispersal biology knows, are perhaps the single most capable overwater dispersers among all mammals. The fact that only rats made it is actually powerful evidence for how difficult the crossing was, not evidence that a land bridge made it easy." (Similar to the video I wrote about here: Kangaroos and Creationist Fan Theories.)

5. 【可一儿歌】050 小燕子丨KeYi Children's Song丨【三淼儿童官方频道】 For those of you who are interested in what kind of Chinese songs my toddler is listening to.

6. Newcomb’s Paradox occurs in real life (April 17) "I’ve never heard anyone say, 'I’m a one-boxer if the second box contains $1M, but a two-boxer if the second box contains $1,001.'"

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. ‘One of the good ones’ obscures a dangerous lie (April 9) "So this man who had fled a country where he had been beaten and imprisoned by military police for no reason encountered America’s militarized police who beat and imprisoned him for no reason."

2. And this take from the Onion (parody site, not actually true): Melania Trump Slams Baseless Reports Linking Her To Wrong Wealthy Pedophile (April 10, via) 

3. The American Gulag (April 6, via) "Damas and Lunas Campos were among the roughly 73,000 people whom ICE currently holds in a tangle of detention camps sprawled across the country. And more centers are under construction. Many of them are former warehouses designed to function, as ICE acting director Todd Lyons put it last year, 'like Amazon Prime for human beings.'"

4. Trump's 'Praise Be to Allah' Easter Taunt Should Be Immediately Recognizable to U.S. Christians (April 7, via) "When the Roman state executed Jesus, according to John 19:19, it placed above his head a sign that read Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum: Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews."

5. Conversion therapy is soul-crushing — and it doesn't work (April 2, via) "I know this because I lived it for eight years. The guidance I was given ranged from the practical — “Don’t watch gay porn” — to the outlandish — “By developing platonic relationships with other men, my sexual desires for them would disappear.” But what it truly does is try to disintegrate a person’s body, mind and spirit."

6. Hegseth leads Pentagon prayer service with faux Bible verse made famous by ‘Pulp Fiction’ (April 16)

7. ICE detains 86-year-old in US to marry long-lost love, family says (April 15)

Update on that: 85-year-old French widow detained by ICE returns to France (April 17)

8. Amid quarrel with pope, Trump strips Miami charity of funding to house migrant kids (April 15) "'It’s incredibly psychologically harmful to be moved,' sometimes as stressful as serious illness or a death in the family, Latham said. 'For little kids, moving repeatedly creates bonding issues and destroys the sense of both self and community. They don’t know who they are and where they will be' from day to day."

9. Minnesota has charged an ICE officer with assault for alleged actions during immigration surge (April 16) "One victim told state law enforcement the encounter led them to believe there was a "crazy person driving down the road aiming guns at people," the complaint says."

10. She Helped the Authorities Deport Her Abuser. Then They Deported Her Back to Him. (April 6) "Carmen’s lawsuit, ICWC v. Noem, accuses the Trump administration of ignoring deferred action status and removing survivors from the country anyway; the administration is also deporting people like Carmen who don’t yet have the status but may be eligible once USCIS reviews her application. The case was filed against ICE and USCIS and seeks to represent a wide class of survivors who applied for U visas, T visas, and other protections under the Violence Against Women Act."

Really rich that these MAGAs are claiming they're "protecting women" by being mean to trans people. Here's something that would actually protect women: Don't deport immigrants who are survivors of domestic abuse.

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Hand-Waving at the Fall: YEC Explanations of the Origins of Defense Structures (March 23) "If God “pre-programmed” organisms with hidden venom systems, parasitic capabilities, and predatory anatomies—knowing they would be activated by the Fall—then the distinction between a “very good” creation and a creation designed for predation and suffering becomes vanishingly thin. This is not a creation that was corrupted by sin; it is a creation that was engineered from the beginning to produce suffering upon activation of a divine trigger."

Also, I was struck by the part about "different use" (ie, young-earth creationists claiming that maybe predatory and/or defensive features of organisms' biology were adapted from some other purpose), because seriously, most creationist arguments are along the lines of "look at this complex system that this creature uses! So many different parts, and they all have to interact just right, and it if only worked partly, that would be totally useless and natural selection would not favor it- there's no natural explanation for this, it must have been God designing it! Wow!" but now that they've noticed the awkward theological implications of claiming that animals' abilities to kill other animals are specifically designed that way by God, it's "oh, well this was probably *not* originally designed that way by God, probably just adapted from a system that had some other purpose NOTHING TO SEE HERE!" 

So KIND OF THE EXACT OPPOSITE.

2. "I am Jesus Christ" and Other Games About Jews (February 21, via) I laughed so hard at "But as a popup tutorial informs us, you can turn water into wine by first pressing right click and then holding left click." Also, I hadn't heard of the "Bible Adventures" video game before, but I am 0% surprised that Christians made a not-very-good video game with extremely shallow representations of bible stories and then marketed it as a godly alternative to mainstream video games.

This video is about what it means for a video game to be Jewish, what it means to play a video game in a Jewish way, and the search for video games which reflect what it's like to be Jewish.

3. A series of posts from the Slacktivist:

Texts of terror? Terrific! (March 25) "This is such a non-liturgical white evangelical idea. The rest of American Christianity gets to watch them awkwardly attempt to rediscover and reinvent the lectionary without realizing that’s what they’re doing."

You have heard it said, but I say this instead (March 26) "But the real obstacle for Olson here is not any notion of inerrancy or infallibility. It’s the dogma of univocalism — the idea that all of the Bible is a single text that speaks with a single voice without internal debate or contradiction or contention."

Team Everybody sliding into our DMs (March 28) "This is what we find, too, when we turn to “the Bible.” It affords and accommodates different and opposite meanings, depending on how we choose to read it. We can choose to view it as a text assuring us that we are the special ones who will get to “possess” every last remnant of the lands and legacies of “Edom” and of all the excluded whose birthright we have taken for our own. Or we can choose to read it as a text that calls us to call in “the rest of humanity,” so that Everybody may seek the Lord."

And from Paul Davidson: Why Scholars Date the Book of Daniel to the Second Century BCE (March 5) "You know how in movies based on true events, multiple historical individuals are often combined into a single movie character for simplicity’s sake? That seems to be the case here, with the historical Nabonidus subsumed into the literary character of Nebuchadnezzar."

4. Satellite Pollution (March 27) 

Also from xkcd: Creation

5. Under New Olympic Sex Testing Policy, A Cis Woman Who Gives Birth Could Be Considered Male (March 31) "And it is not the first time the Olympics has subjected women to mass sex testing—the last time it did, from 1992 to 1999, the results were disastrous, with cisgender women discovering they had intersex conditions they never knew about, leading to public humiliation, career destruction, and at least one suicide before such testing was abolished."

And more on that from Skepchick: Olympics Committee Punishes Trans & Cis Women (March 31) "Because as a reminder, girls as young as 11 compete in the Olympics, and now those children, too, will be put under the microscope to determine if they’re truly “woman” enough. It’s disgusting, and the Olympics staff should be ashamed."

Also from Erin in the Morning: Supreme Court Rules Against Conversion Therapy Bans On Transgender Day Of Visibility (April 1) This quote from Justice Jackson: "A state license used to mean something to the patients who entrust their care to licensed professionals—i.e., that the person is certified to be one who provides treatments that are consistent with the standard of care. That stops today."

6. The Final Word (Michael Card) - I've probably posted this before. I like this song about Jesus.

7. Liftoff! NASA astronauts have launched on a historic journey to the moon (April 1) "The crew members will first orbit Earth so that they can check out key systems on their spacecraft, including life support, communication, and navigation. Then they'll fire their vehicle's propulsion system to send themselves on a looping figure-eight path around the moon and back, ending with a splashdown into the Pacific Ocean."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Lebanon faces ‘humanitarian catastrophe’ under Israeli assault: UN (March 27, via) "The families are … living in constant fear, and the psychological toll, particularly on children, will last far beyond this current escalation."

2. Photos: 'No Kings' protests across the country (March 28)

Millions turn out for "No Kings" rallies held worldwide to protest against Trump (March 28)

No Kings Protests Failed To End Fascism on Saturday. Curious. (March 30) "They watched 200,000 people gather in Minneapolis, a city that was terrorized by the president's secret police for a solid month, and they were not impressed, not in the least."

3. Trump Must Resign (March 24) "It’s true that Trump is very unlikely to willingly step down. But calls for resignation can be powerful in themselves if repeated consistently and forcefully."

4. Franklin Graham told Trump he can still get into Heaven. That’s the problem. (March 30) "On a side note, it’s wild that Graham is explaining Christianity 101 to Trump more than a decade after conservative Christians tried to convince people Trump was already one of them. (James Dobson said of Trump in 2016, 'He did accept a relationship with Christ.')"

5. The Largest Physician Organization In The US Reaffirms Gender-Affirming Care Is Medically Necessary (March 27) "The American Medical Association (AMA) has reaffirmed that gender-affirming care for trans minors, including surgeries, is medically sound—and that access to this life-saving care should not be impeded."

6. Federal judge rules DHS illegally stripped immigration status from thousands who entered through CBP One App (April 1) "'Our clients followed the law: they waited, registered, were inspected, and were granted parole under the law,' Perryman said in a statement. 'The Trump-Vance administration's effort to tear this status away overnight was unlawful and cruel.'"

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. If AI’s Native Language Is English, Where Does That Leave China? (March 12) "Many non-English languages are often what researchers call low-resource (e.g., Swahili) or medium-resource (e.g., Vietnamese) languages. This means there might not be enough diverse and high-quality digital texts — such as scientific papers, business case studies, or legal documents — available in those languages to train AI models on."

2. Conquest Narrative // Good Relation (March 16) A Jewish take on the biblical story of Joshua. "We could stop here, read the Conquest Narrative as both warning and foreshadowing, and move on. But there’s something that sits wrong with me about this solution."

3. Apples, Oranges, and Genomes: A Critique of Dr. Carter’s Claims about Human-Chimpanzee Genetic Similarity (March 12) "Christians deserve better than to be told that the latest Nature paper confirms their faith when in reality that paper’s authors see nothing in their data that challenges the standard evolutionary framework, and when the data actually strengthen the evidence for common ancestry by providing a more complete picture of genomic evolution across the ape lineage."

4. Why Complementarianism Isn’t Actually About Men Really Leading (March 18) "Male leadership in complementarianism is not about men leading, but instead about men being free from accountability and responsibility." Yeah this is what happens when you have an ideology that says the husband is the leader because he's a *man*, so he just *is*, regardless of whether he actually has any qualities that fit any normal definitions of "leadership."

5. The structure of ideological abuse (March 9) "You must never require someone to share their inner life with you without their free, full, informed consent."

6. Cesar Chavez abused and raped women and girls, NYT investigation says (March 18) [content note: rape] "In a statement posted to Medium on Wednesday, Huerta wrote: 'I am nearly 96 years old, and for the last 60 years have kept a secret because I believed that exposing the truth would hurt the farmworker movement I have spent my entire life fighting for.'"

7. Chuck Norris, martial arts master and actor whose toughness became internet lore, dies at 86 (March 21)

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. ICE agents reveal daily arrest quotas and surveillance app in rare court testimony (March 13, via) "In the hearing, an ICE agent identified as JB testified that his team was given a verbal order to target eight arrests a day."

2. Hypothetical Legal Advice to SecDef Hegseth on “No Quarter” Statement (from Office of General Counsel) (March 14, via) Hegseth keeps talking about how enthusiastically he wants to commit war crimes. WTF? Can we impeach him or something?

3. FCC chair threatens TV networks amid Iran war coverage — but his warning rings hollow (March 16) 

4. Top US counterterrorism official resigns over Iran war, urging Trump to 'reverse course' (March 18, via) "'This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States,' the letter continued. 'This was a lie.'"

5. One Year Later: The Effect of US ‘Chainsaw’ on Global Health (January 20, via) "To date, 757,314 people – the majority children – have died from the funding cuts, according to ImpactCounter, which tracks the effect of USAID cuts via sophisticated modelling tools."

6. Zionist Institutions Spread Antisemitic Propaganda (March 15) "Israel and Zionist orgs in the US have effectively been releasing huge amounts of antisemitic propaganda, linking Jews to the action of a violent nation state and its policies of sweeping censorship, apartheid, genocide, and war."

Also from Everything is Horrible: Dems’ No Tax Proposals Are Reactionary Garbage (March 17) "When people say that US society is not affordable, they are saying they’d like to pay less for groceries. But they are also very much saying that US society is constructed in a way that is inhuman, cruel, and un-navigable for everyone but the ultra-rich."

7. Judge ends asylum claims for Liam Conejo Ramos and his family, orders family's removal (March 18) "Attorney Danielle Molliver, with Nwokocha & Operana Law Offices, told MPR News on Wednesday that the firm is appealing the decision handed down by U.S. Immigration Judge John Burns. Molliver said an appeal could take months or years."

8. Trump is dismantling democracy at 'unprecedented' speed, global report finds (March 20)

9. ICE officers are taking DNA samples from protesters they've arrested (March 19) "'What you worry about is an officer making a decision in the field that a person committed a crime when they might not have. Maybe they were doing something protected under the First Amendment,' Kerr says. 'The officer says, 'I think you crossed the line, I'm going to arrest you.' It turns out the officer was wrong, but the DNA test has been conducted, and the information has been entered into the database. What then?'"

Blogaround

The last blog post of the year~ Happy new year everyone!

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. My favorite Christmas song: Casting Crowns - I Heard The Bells on Christmas Day Live 

2. The NIMBY Christmas cinematic universe (December 23) "Particularly frustrating is the argument that economic growth, development, and newcomers — the very things that ailing small towns desperately need — are actually the root of their problems."

3. Firewood Banks Aren’t Inspiring. They’re a Sign of Collapse. (December 9, via) "You don’t start a wood bank in a country with functioning institutions. You start one when heating assistance programs can’t keep up, when the grid flickers every time the wind shifts, when propane and heating oil costs swing so hard that families can’t budget more than a week out. You start a wood bank when seniors stop turning on their heat because they’re scared of the bill. You also start one when the country pretends energy insecurity doesn’t exist because acknowledging it would mean admitting that entire regions were left behind on purpose."

4. Collections: Coinage and the Tyranny of Fantasy ‘Gold’ (January 3, 2025, via) "So a denarius or a drachma isn’t a unit so big that no normal person would ever use it, but it is a big enough unit that one is hardly going to use it casually"

5. Israel says it will bar aid groups, including Doctors Without Borders, from Gaza (December 30)

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Is It Too Late? (December 9, via) "The full-on hijacking of the 14th Amendment has not been challenged with commensurate concerted outrage and political clarity. That is because far too many white Americans associate the 14th Amendment’s guarantees of birthright citizenship and equality, as provisions that only protect Black people, migrants, Latino people, and other marginalized groups, rather than as core democracy infrastructure of our Constitution."

2. What We Can Learn from the Right’s Attack On “Toxic Empathy” (December 11, via) "But by trying to get inside Chauvin’s head and heart, by insisting that he should be the focal point of identification, Stuckey can move away from what actually happened, and can instead present herself as the truly thoughtful and empathetic voice, feeling along with the right, white, and supposedly Godly person."

3. The return of the r-word (December 23) "But it turns out that banishing the slur from public discourse was, in fact, important. Because now it’s back and it turns out that it does matter when subtext becomes actual text, when terrible people enable open hatred and bigotry, encouraging others to emulate them, degrading us all."

4. Conservatives Want the Antebellum Constitution Back (December 21) "What this means in practice is that if you are not white, you cannot go certain places without the risk of being kidnapped by federal agents. That is not “common sense”; it is the nullification of the Constitution’s guarantee of equal rights under the law."

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Reading Halloween (1978) Through the Lens of Labor (October 30, via) "Parents, historically, have been the most recurring threat to babysitters in their capacity to exploit and prey on them, and yet with Michael on set, the threat of the predatory employer-parent gets completely displaced."

2. Scientists thought this fossil was a teen T. rex. Turns out it's a new tyrannosaur (October 30) 

3. Hundreds killed in Darfur hospital massacre, 'hero' doctors abducted (October 30)

4. Israel still blocking most Gaza aid as military carries out more attacks (November 1, via) "This is an average of 145 aid trucks per day, or just 24 percent of the 600 trucks that are meant to be entering Gaza daily as part of the deal, it added."

5. Too many rats? Birth control is one city's answer (November 1) "For all these reasons, Somerville is trying something else — an anti-fertility chemical that targets the mature eggs in female rats."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. America's immigration crackdown is disrupting the global remittance market (October 28) "What leads Yang to argue this is that immigrants in the United States send a jaw-dropping amount of money back home to their families. These remittances, as they're known, have dwarfed the size of official foreign aid that the U.S. spends on things like economic development, health, and humanitarian assistance."

2. America’s Assault On Real History Comes For The Staff Of The Charles Lindbergh House And Museum (September 3, via) "As of the end of August, it’s all gone."

3. Trump administration sets lowest-ever cap on refugee admissions to U.S. (October 30) "'It is egregious to exclude refugees who completed years of rigorous security checks and are currently stuck in dangerous and precarious situations,' said Sharif Aly, president of the International Refugee Assistance Project. He said that the number of those with confirmed travel plans to the U.S. is greater than the new refugee cap."

4. Trump Admin Attempts To Ban Trans Youth Care Nationwide With New Federal Rules (October 30) "Now the administration is escalating with a blitz of three new rules that could effectively end most transgender youth care nationwide if enacted—pressuring many medical institutions to drop trans patients from receiving the care they need out of fear of federal reprisal, and punishing those who do not comply."

5.  The Myth of the Woke Right: A Response to the New York Times (October 24) 36-minute video from Big Joel about how that felon never actually understood "free speech" to mean "free speech"; how the New York Times wrote an article about "The Woke Right" but that's not really a thing, and the people who use the term use it to mean all sorts of different things; and the difference between cancel culture and government censorship.

6. Food Stamps are Good, Actually (Here Comes the Science) (October 30) "In the meanwhile, I urge you all to reach out to your local community to help out, or to find help if you need it."

And: Trump administration faces Monday deadline on use of contingency funds for SNAP (November 3) "The situation leaves millions with uncertainty about how they will feed themselves. Benefits will be delayed in November regardless of the outcome of the court cases because many beneficiaries have their cards recharged early in the month and the process of loading cards can take a week or more in many states."

7. US carries out new strike in Caribbean, killing 3 alleged drug smugglers (November 2) "The U.S. military has now killed at least 64 people in the strikes."

8. They were promised a lifeline to 'graduate' from poverty. Then it was taken away (November 2) "But just as you are about to receive that support, it gets canceled."

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Michael Tait | CCM's Biggest Star Abused Others For Decades [re-upload] (August 2) 1-hour-46-minute video from Fundie Fridays. I've posted other links about this before. Here is a long video which explains the whole entire thing. It's really horrifying the way he sexually abused people.

2. Israel strikes Gaza as both Israel and Hamas accuse each other of breaching ceasefire (October 19) 

3. Story of The Split: a zine about ace community history (October 19) "This term—this specific string of words—does not come from the ace community. It comes from people framing ace community vocabulary writ large as a threat to gay people."

4. Never Too Late: China’s Takeout Apps Remove Tardy Delivery Fines (October 20) "Under the pilot rules, drivers will no longer face immediate cash deductions for late deliveries."

5. Enchanted Capitalism (2023, via) "In the past, humans generally believed that the metaphysical structure of the world was determined by God. In a capitalist society, money plays that role: without money, you, or at least your needs as a human being, don’t exist."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. No Kings, October 2025 (October 18) "If you google 'how to prepare for a protest', I think the advice is overly cautious, preparing for the worst.  But the median protest is entirely safe."

Also: Photos: Scenes from the No Kings Protests (October 18)

Photos: ‘No Kings’ Anti-Trump Protests See Massive Turnout Across the Country (October 18)

2. As tensions rise in Chicago, volunteers patrol neighborhoods to oppose ICE and help migrants escape (October 17) "Witnessing ICE arresting people in this area has become an almost daily occurrence over the last few weeks, Ivan says. A few days ago, he took a video of an enforcement operation happening at the nearby grocery store." (I posted a different link about this same group a few weeks ago.)

3. The Pro-Massacre, Pro-Segregation, Pro-Eugenics Administration (October 17) "Put another way, we’re no longer in the usual realm of Republicans whitewashing or downplaying the darkness in our history, e.g., the Supreme Court saying we don’t need voting protections because racism isn’t so bad anymore. This administration has upgraded the earlier model, showing through word and action that it believes the shameful sides of America’s past were, in fact, good—even examples to follow today."

4. In Shambles (October 20) "Petro tweeted that 'US government officials have committed murder and violated our sovereignty in our territorial waters. Fisherman Alejandro Carranza had no ties to drug traffickers and his daily activity was fishing.' He added, 'We await explanations from the US government.'"

5. Unfettered and Unaccountable: How Trump is Building a Violent, Shadowy Federal Police Force (October 18, via) "Speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, the official rattled off scenes that once would’ve triggered investigations: 'Accosting people outside of their immigration court hearings where they’re showing up and trying to do the right thing and then hauling them off to an immigration jail in the middle of the country where they can’t access loved ones or speak to counsel. Bands of masked men apprehending people in broad daylight in the streets and hauling them off. Disappearing people to a third country, to a prison where there’s a documented record of serious torture and human rights abuse.'"

6. Adelita Grijalva was elected to Congress. But she's having trouble doing her job. (October 20) "Democrats in both Washington and Arizona have ramped up pressure on Johnson to schedule Grijalva's swearing-in ceremony, with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., on Friday sending a letter to the speaker demanding he swear in Grijalva during a short session, as the speaker has done in the past with Republican members-elect."

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. 17-year-old trans girl’s suicide over NHS wait times was preventable, coroner rules (October 9, via) "Wait times for each clinic vary massively, from just three months in Nottingham, to 41 years in Belfast, and a staggering 224 years in Glasgow."

2. What Would Billy Say? (October 10) and also Slacktivist's comments about it. Franklin Graham has withdrawn two large evangelical organizations (Samaritan’s Purse and Billy Graham Evangelistic Association) from the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability, an organization which keeps an eye on the leaders of evangelical groups to make sure they're not stealing money or abusing people. Uh... why is Franklin Graham withdrawing from this oversight group? Seems very suspicious. As the Slacktivist put it, "Or maybe you’ve got to ask if there could be any possible explanation for this other than the simplest, most obvious one."

3. 男高音艺术歌曲《我会自己上厕所》转自抖音 (2023) This is extremely funny if you understand Chinese.

Okay I'll explain it: So there's a song for Chinese toddlers called “我会自己上厕所” (I can use the bathroom by myself) featuring such profound content as “上厕所时不能吃东西” (you can't eat while using the bathroom), and apparently it became something of a meme on the Chinese internet because everyone found it hilarious, and people were making their own covers of this song. This video is an opera-style cover of it.

See this is what happens if you have kids. You have to listen to songs about potty training, and find humor in them or else you will just lose your mind.

4. Bari Weiss: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) (October 13, 34-minute video) Video about Bari Weiss and her media outlet "The Free Press"- apparently she is one of those people who claims to be too liberal for conservatives and too conservative for liberals. Whenever I've come across writing from people like that, it's confusing to me because they might have some "liberal" opinions on specific issues, but they don't seem to really understand the overall big-picture of why liberals would have those opinions, and how they would connect to other issues too.

5. A ‘Hardcore’ theological crisis (October 15) "She is his child and he is going to try to save her even if Almighty God has already decreed since eternity past that she is predestined for damnation."

6. Greta Thunberg: “They kicked me every time the flag touched my face” (October 15, via) "This is not about me or the others from the flotilla. There are thousands of Palestinians, hundreds of whom are children, who are being held without trial right now, and many of them are most likely being tortured, says Greta Thunberg."

7. Photos: Ceasefire in Gaza brings reunions amid devastation (October 15)

8. Doctors Without Borders permanently closes its emergency center in Haiti's capital (October 16) "'The building has already been hit several times by stray bullets due to its location close to the combat zones, which would make resuming activities too dangerous for both patients and staff,' said Jean-Marc Biquet, MSF head of mission in Haiti."

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Links related to the antichrist:

(I hope someday some historian finds my blog and says "wow, people back then believed Trump was the antichrist.")

1. There will be No Kings protests on Saturday, October 18~

2. Opinion: Why I'm handing in my Pentagon press pass (October 14) "Today, NPR will lose access to the Pentagon because we will not sign an unprecedented Defense Department document, which warns that journalists may lose their press credentials for "soliciting" even unclassified information from federal employees that has not been officially approved for release. That policy prevents us from doing our job. Signing that document would make us stenographers parroting press releases, not watchdogs holding government officials accountable."

Also related: Pentagon reporters have now turned in their badges – but plan to keep reporting (October 15) "Current and former Pentagon correspondents who spoke with the Guardian said that coverage would undoubtedly suffer from a lack of proximity to administration decision-makers – though many are intent on proving that the restrictions won’t stop the work, with some even saying they plan to take a more aggressive tack."

3. Protesters and Members of the Press Challenge First Amendment Violations by Federal Forces at ICE Facility in Broadview, Illinois (October 6) "A new lawsuit filed this morning argues that this wanton violence by the federal government is a blatant attempt to interfere with the most cherished and fundamental rights enshrined in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religious belief, and the right to peaceably assemble and express disagreement with the government."

4. Documents Allege a Federal Agent at Portland ICE Threatened to Shoot an Ambulance Driver (October 12, via) 

5. Gavin Newsom Vetoes Important HRT Stockpiling Bill For Trans Californians, Signs Other Pro-LGBTQ+ Bills (October 14) "Among all of the legislation passed this year, few bills would have offered such tangible protection for transgender people as SB 418—and yet, it’s the one that won’t become law."

Also from Erin in the Morning: Fenway Health Restricts Treatment for Patients Under 19 In Capitulation To Trump (October 15) "This is a fundamental betrayal to the core mission of Fenway and the patients they serve. Trans patients cannot trust this organization has their best interests at heart."

6. ‘We’re saving God’ (October 16) "The creeds would have to be completely rewritten to be compatible with the Trumpian theology of 'We’re saving God.' Think of all the arguments among different branches of Christianity, every doctrinal dispute about the nature of God, the relationship between God and humanity, eschatology, sin, salvation, sacrament, whatever. Every Christian in every era on every side of every one of those disputes would recoil at the blasphemous nonsense of 'We are saving God.'"

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. How to Make a Great Government Website (2024, via) "First is the required interview. Most of the time it’s a phone call. Often they’ll call from a blocked number. They’ll send you a notice of when your interview is scheduled for, but this notice will sometimes arrive after the actual date of the interview."

2. Beauty and the Beast - How bad was A.I.D.S.? (October 10, via) 56-minute video. It's a queer reading of "Beauty and the Beast," as is overlaps with what was going on with the AIDS crisis in the 80s and 90s.

3. AI Slop Is Destroying The Internet (October 7) 12-minute video from Kurzgesagt.

4. This post about Copilot in Excel getting a simple sum wrong. Apparently it's because the prompt didn't actually include any info about what cells the data was in. The AI doesn't give an error message or anything, so there's no way the user would have known that.

I haven't ever used Copilot in Excel so maybe I'm missing some key thing, but, uh... my reaction is, excel formulas update when you change the data, but if I'm using an AI for something that matters, I would need to carefully check the output. Having a human pay attention to the output every time it changes seems incompatible with having things update automatically (which is one of Excel's biggest strengths).

Doesn't seem great if every formula in every cell of your excel sheet has a mind of its own and you can't rely on them being right.

5. U.S. measles cases continue to climb, with outbreaks across the country (October 12) "Before widespread vaccination, pretty much everyone got measles in childhood. And 400-500 people in the U.S. used to die from it each year."

6. Hamas releases 20 remaining living Israeli hostages after two years in Gaza (October 13, via) "Parents were reunited with sons and children with fathers as those held were handed over to the Red Cross before finally rejoining their families with the help of the Israeli army."

7. Taylor Swift - The Fate of Ophelia (Official Music Video) (October 6) I like this song~

8. Michigan Republican pushing pornography ban linked to porn site, records show (October 7, via) So it was discovered that Schriver, a politician who's been trying to ban porn, used to have an account on a site with sex webcams and the like.

I'm posting this because people are calling it out as obvious hypocrisy, but I think it's a little more complicated than that. In conservative Christian culture, porn is seen as this evil bad thing that all men are naturally drawn to. If they don't have good enough self-control and/or restrictions on their computer, all men would go and make an account on a porn site. A lot of talk about how so many men are "struggling" with porn use, "addicted" to porn, how it's such a bad thing but they're all tangled up in it because it's so tempting.

It makes perfect sense to me that a lot of these conservative lawmakers supporting "porn bans" are men who have been part of this "struggling with porn" subculture- partly interested in it and partly repressing themselves and feeling so much shame- they try to make laws to ban it as a way to fight against their own "porn addiction"- as a way to show God that even though they keep failing in their resolution to not use porn, on some level they really are trying to fight it.

9. The Supreme Court’s First Blockbuster Case This Term Looks Pretty Fake (October 6, via) "And I think, in theory, there’s nothing wrong with bringing a test case. If someone’s rights are really at stake and they haven’t faced punishment yet—but they fear that they will—it’s legitimate for that person to sue. But what ADF does is really finesse the facts, often to the point of fiction, to justify creating a test case that the Supreme Court can use to change the law."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. No Kings is on Saturday, October 18. Go out and protest if you can.

2. Chicago and the Horrors of Carte Blanche (October 4) "Authorities seized people first, without probable cause, treating merely living in the same complex as suspected undocumented migrants as a crime."

Also from Jay Kuo: The Hunger Games (October 3) "After all, why should the Democrats agree to keep the government open for another seven weeks to negotiate a “budget” if the White House can later refuse to honor it? What’s to stop the OMB from doing exactly the same thing with New York City transit funds and blue state energy projects even after a budget is passed and signed into law?"

3. Van Nuys car wash owner files $50M claim over injuries sustained during immigration raid (September 26) "Shouhed says he was terrified as he tried to explain to the agents that his employees were authorized to be on the job, yet he says they took at least five of his employees away in handcuffs. He says he screamed that he is a United States citizen and had proof in his wallet, but he says they did not listen."

4. 'I'm done being afraid': How the shutdown has led federal workers to speak out (October 10) "They say the best organizer is a bad boss, and we all have the same bad boss."

5. ‘Bring her back’: Delaware abuse victim rescued from ICE deportation (October 13, via) "Before agents rummaged through her home, Isabela demanded they show her an arrest warrant. They refused and broke down her door anyway, injuring her son with the doorknob as they barged in."

6. “I Don’t Want to Be Here Anymore”: They Tried to Self-Deport, Then Got Stranded in Trump’s America (October 10, via) "ProPublica spoke with more than a dozen Venezuelans who said they wanted to take the U.S. government’s offer of a safe and easy return. They signed up months ago on the CBP Home app and were given departure dates. But after those dates came and went, these immigrants said they feel betrayed by what the president told them."

7. MIT Rejects Trump’s Bid to Institute Trans Bathroom, Athletics Ban (October 11)

8. Multiple airports refuse to play Kristi Noem video that blames Democrats for government shutdown (October 13)

9. This frog protester in Portland, from this link: Everyone Is Pointing Out This 1 Reason Why The Anti-ICE Inflatable Frogs In Portland May Be The Best Protesters (October 14)

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know (October 2) An extremely long post overanalyzing a weird thing- this is the exact content I am interested in.

2. The phantom menace of biblical chronology (October 7) "No Star Wars fan will let you get away with suggesting that Episode IV: A New Hope was written as a sequel to Rogue One. They’ll be upset by the suggestion not just because it is incorrect, but because that error would change how we should understand and interpret both of those stories."

3. 30 Years Ex-evangelical (August 29, via) "In other words, I was under the impression that evangelicalism was a deep personal commitment to love Jesus for the sake of making the world a more just and beautiful place for all of God’s children. Lol."

4. Israel, Hamas reach a ceasefire, with hostages and prisoners to be freed within days (October 9)

Gazans stream towards wrecked homes as Israeli forces pull back under ceasefire (October 10)

And another thought related to this: That felon supposedly has a plan where the whole population of Gaza would "voluntarily" leave and then the land would be turned into a nice resort (?) and then the people of Gaza would come back (??). Uh, but, fact check, relocating a population is ethnic cleansing and can sometimes even count as genocide. I wish I had a good article that explained this. I think a lot of Americans may have this really naive idea that it's not a bad thing to just move people from one place to another. It would be nice to have a link which very clearly lays out what exactly the problem is and why this is a bad thing.

5. A rescue ship saved them from the sea. Now these migrants find a tough road in Europe (2024) "When the rescuers from Doctors Without Borders reach them, they find 162 people, 29 of them children, so tightly packed into the vessel that many can only stand. The overcrowded boat rocks precariously and if the crowd moves too fast toward the rescuers' dinghies, it could capsize."

6. Over 350 Rescued After Blizzard Hits Everest’s Eastern Slope (October 7) I saw some reports about this from other news sites, but since it's in China it's good to have an article about it from Sixth Tone.

7. How Birthday Party Lady Is Showing the World Boundaries in Marriage (October 8) "SIL sent a text at midnight the night before the party asking if it was still on. On the day of the party, no decorations had been bought, and husband got off work AFTER the party was supposed to start. But she held her ground."

8. The “Debate Me Bro” Grift: How Trolls Weaponized The Marketplace Of Ideas (September 17) "He was showing up armed with a string of logical fallacies, nonsense talking points, and gotcha questions specifically designed to enrage inexperienced college students so he could generate viral social media clips of himself 'owning the libs.'"

The difference between debating to "win", vs actually wanting to communicate and listen to people and learn from each other... I think this is really important, and it took me way too long to even realize the difference. (I'm thinking about my own experiences with apologetics.) When someone makes a point and you don't know how to respond to it, or asks you a question you don't know the answer to, do you try to come up with whatever "your side's" official answer would be? Or do you genuinely ask yourself what you believe about it and what your actual reasons are? To say your actual reasons can be embarrassing- and don't do it if you're in a discussion with someone who can't be trusted with that kind of honesty- but is a very necessary step to coming to a belief that makes sense.

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Action item: Submit a comment on this proposed change that would affect overseas voters (and other US citizens who vote by mail). This proposed change would require voters to show documentary proof of US citizenship, such as a passport, in order to register to vote. It sounds like this means people would actually have to go *in person*, which is impossible for US citizens like me who live overseas. (Comment period is open until October 20.)

2. Treasury Department may issue $1 Trump coin for 250th anniversary of U.S. independence (October 6) Eww, what on earth?

3. Eventually You're Going to Have to Stand for Something (October 5) "When Klein scolds that "we have to live here with each other" he is making a statement about who it is he is getting ready to live with and who he is getting ready to live without, and most gallingly he is ignoring the fact that when it comes to supremacists all of us have been living with them already all along. Nobody is suggesting mass deportation of white supremacists, or the dissolution of straight marriages, or stripping away health care for conservatives."

4. Federal workers sue the Education Department over partisan shutdown emails (October 5) "'Without giving notice to their employees, let alone obtaining their consent, the Department of Education has replaced employees' out-of-office email messages with partisan language that blames 'Democrat Senators' for the shutdown,' the complaint said. 'Employees are now forced to involuntarily parrot the Trump Administration's talking points with emails sent out in their names.'"

And also about the shutdown: IRS walks back guidance promising back pay for furloughed workers (October 10) Excuse me, what?

Schumer slams GOP health care policies: ‘No f‑‑‑ing way’ (October 8) 

5. Higher Education Leaders Reject Trump Administration's "Compact for Academic Excellence" (October 5, via) 

6. Standing up to ICE in the suburbs, the People’s Patrol puts its faith in resistance (September 29) "Racing toward the industrial park on an expressway, Cavazos says the People’s Patrol includes 180 people, all volunteers. The center holds trainings for the work every other Friday."

7. Judge William Young's ruling against Rubio and Noem is a lesson for all in the Trump era (October 2) "Throughout his opinion, Young focused in on several actions of this administration — allowing Rubio’s horrifying statements to speak for themselves, confronting America with a matter-of-fact description of what ICE is and how America’s immigration system operates, and damning the administration’s use of masks in its immigration enforcement."

And this quote (via) from lawyers who know what's what:

Plaintiffs of course understand the hardship the government shutdown places on everyone, including the government's attorneys and their clients. For that reason, Plaintiffs offered to agree to the stay Defendants seek if Defendants in turn would agree to refrain from enforcing the TPS terminations challenged in this case. But Defendants refused. They apparently have the resources to detain and deport thousands of immigrants with no criminal history to dangerous countries, but would prefer not to expend the resources needed to defend the legality of such actions in court. 

Also from Law Dork: Supreme Court lets Noem end legal status for many Venezuelans in the U.S. (October 4) "Explaining the stay request before the Supreme Court over Chen’s September ruling, Jackson echoed that concern, 'What should happen to 300,000 human beings while our colleagues on the Ninth Circuit, and then perhaps we, do the job of judging?'"

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Journal Club: Global Asexual Solidarity (September 30) "Chen says this argument goes too far. They criticize it for relying on an Orientalist fantasy of a pre-existing “authentic” sexuality, and ignoring the agency of local activists."

2. The War on Science (September 23, 4-hour-2-minute video from Shaun) "This book is a collection of tired, irrelevant, right-wing, culture-war nitpicks being released at the most ridiculous possible time. These complaints have never been less relevant to reality, which makes the entire book read like one big joke."

Wow, turns out a lot of the essays in this book are some professor writing "I got fired because of some little mundane thing that THE WOKE MOB got angry about" and then Shaun digs up what actually happened and it turns out the professor in question was sexually harassing students/ had a long-term pattern of extremely racist behavior/ etc.

3. Jane Goodall, renowned chimpanzee researcher and animal advocate, dies at 91 (October 2, via) "He said Goodall was among the first researchers to make close observations of chimpanzees as individuals with personalities and quirks, at a time when other scientists were not trained to observe such specific details."

4. People Mountain, People Sea: Golden Week in Pictures (October 3) This week is China's "Golden Week" (the week we have off work for the October 1 National Day 国庆节 holiday). Usually it's 7 days off work, but this year it's 8 days because Mid-Autumn Festival 中秋节 happens to fall during this week too. This article has a bunch of photos showing the crowds of vacationers all around China.

Also, the phrase "people mountain, people sea" is a direct translation of the Chinese idiom 人山人海. It means it's very crowded. Like you look at a crowd and it looks like a mountain of people or a sea of people.

5. Israeli forces board Gaza flotilla, detain Greta Thunberg, other activists (October 1, via) "At least three ships from the Global Sumud Flotilla, made up of 44 vessels and some 500 activists, were intercepted approximately 70 nautical miles (130km) from the coast of Gaza, according to organisers."

And more updates on this:

Greta Thunberg ‘beaten and forced to kiss Israeli flag’, activists say (October 5, via) 

Greta Thunberg is among flotilla activists deported from Israel. Others remain in prison (October 7)

6. Multi-generational vulture nests hold 700 years of human artifacts (October 3, via) Cool!

7. This Is What Happens When Therapists Don’t Understand Asexuality (September/October issue, via) "As I scribbled darkly with a dark pen, my therapist talked with us about how I could move forward toward having penetrative sex a certain amount of times per month."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. There will be No Kings protests on October 18. Join if you can!

2. UN says Fox News host apologized after calling for world body to be bombed (September 27) "'What we need to do is either leave the U.N. or we need to bomb it,' Watters said. 'Maybe gas it ... we need to destroy it.'"

3. Trump revives family separations amid drive to deport millions: ‘A tactic to punish’ (October 2) "Among Mukherjee’s clients are a two-year-old and a seven-year-old. 'An Ice officer has threatened to separate each of these children from each other and from their mother and their father, detain them in separate facilities, and put them on four different deportation flights,' she said. 'This is unnecessarily cruel.'"

4. Massive immigration raid on Chicago apartment building leaves residents reeling: 'I feel defeated' (October 2, via) "Armed federal agents in military fatigues busted down their doors overnight, pulling men, women and children from their apartments, some of them naked, residents and witnesses said. Agents approached or entered nearly every apartment in the five-story building, and U.S. citizens were among those detained for hours."

5. ‘Could have been an email’: Officials balk at Hegseth's generals meeting (September 30) "'It‘s a waste of time for a lot of people who emphatically had better things they could and should be doing,' said a former senior defense official. 'It’s also an inexcusable strategic risk to concentrate so many leaders in the operational chain of command in the same publicly known time and place, to convey an inane message of little merit.'"

6. The federal government is shut down. Here's what that means across the country (October 6)

Democrats united in effort to stop Trump's 'lawless activity,' says Sen. Van Hollen (October 6)

7. Trump Promotes Magical Conspiracy Beds (October 2) "In a serious country with democratic norms still in place, a circumstance like this would lead directly to journalists forcing Donald Trump to explain whether or not he posted the video, and as a follow-up they would force him to elaborate on whether or not he understands reality. Like, does he know he never said this? Does he know that magical beds don’t exist?"

8. A federal judge blocked Trump from sending the National Guard to Oregon — again. Here’s what we know (October 6)

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Why Frozen Food Gets an Icy Reception in China (September 26) "Chinese consumers are wary of, and even resistant toward, pre-made food. Western consumers don’t mind the convenience of a frozen pizza, and Japanese convenience stores sell countless pre-made meals. So why China’s reticence?"

Yeah, this is definitely a thing. Chinese people going to the market every morning to get fresh vegetables. I mean, not everyone- if you have a full-time job, obviously you're not doing that. I didn't know that some people took it to the extremes that this article says... in contrast, it's also normal in China to have a bunch of meat in your freezer... frozen dumplings, etc... but maybe the point is that people expect restaurant food to be higher quality than what you would make at home, and frozen food is NOT seen as good enough for that.

This was a real issue during the 2022 Shanghai lockdown. People didn't have, like, a stash of canned/frozen food. The government was, on the fly, coming up with systems to distribute food to everyone locked down in their homes- and it was fresh food, so there were some cases where delays in the delivery meant all the food went bad.

2. Huntington's disease successfully treated for first time (September 24, via) "An emotional research team became tearful as they described how data shows the disease was slowed by 75% in patients."

3. Voddie Baucham, Jr., Preacher and Educator Who Courted Controversy, Dies at 56 (September 26)

4. Wyoming town erects new monument to violent, anti-immigrant history (September 28) I think the wording of this headline is very strange; it should say something more like "monument for the victims of its violent, anti-immigrant history." Anyway, it's about this: "After burning several blocks once made up of homes and shops, the mob killed 28 Chinese people and injured another 14, in what is one of the deadliest incidents of anti-Chinese violence in U.S. history."

5. “War Criminal”: Thousands Call to Arrest Netanyahu, March at U.N. Against Gaza Genocide (September 29) "Despite the fact that Netanyahu is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes he has presided over in Gaza, he was able to travel to the U.N. without incident, as the United States says it does not recognize the jurisdiction of the ICC. We spoke to protesters demanding Netanyahu’s arrest and an end to Israel’s genocide in Gaza."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Jimmy Kimmel’s reinstatement shows the power of noncooperation (September 23, via) "No business can handle a large-scale consumer withdrawal, and no government agency can handle widespread worker withdrawal. So even though the Trump administration has been moving methodically to consolidate power, the people of this country have the power to make it an exercise in futility."

2. Trump Posts an Absolutely Bonkers AI Video in Which He Promotes a Magic ‘Med Bed’ That Can Cure Any Disease (September 28)

And more on that from CNN: Trump shares apparent AI video promoting ‘medbed’ conspiracy theory (September 29)

3. Hegseth says Wounded Knee massacre soldiers will keep Medals of Honor (September 26) "'Only an administration intent on committing war crimes in the present and future would stoop to calling Wounded Knee a ‘battle’ rather than what it truly was,' Columbia University history professor Karl Jacoby posted on Bluesky."

I saw a comment about this, where someone said they just couldn't understand why on earth Hegseth would do this. Here's why: It's because acknowledging the atrocities that the US committed against Native Americans is "woke." Everything was fine with the history that Hegseth learned in school, and now these Native American activists are saying something is wrong and the US should apologize, ugh how annoying, can they just stop? Hegseth's decision here has nothing to do with "did US soldiers massacre innocent people" and everything to do with "why would we bother talking about things that don't affect us regular [white] people?"

4. Lower Than Cowards (September 25) "Now we know most titans of industry won’t be fighting right-wing authoritarianism as fiercely as they would a tax hike on private equity."

5. 'I want his name to be known': Wife of immigrant injured at ICE facility shooting speaks out (September 27) "He's on life support after being critically injured on Wednesday in the shooting at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Dallas. He was being detained there after being arrested on Aug. 8 for driving under the influence. He is in the U.S. without legal status."

6. Hundreds protest at ICE building after Trump’s announcement of troop deployment to Portland (September 29) 

7. YouTube agrees to pay Trump $24 million to settle lawsuit over Jan. 6 suspension (September 29) "Law professor Goldman said but for 'an attempt to curry favor with the president,' there is 'absolutely no reason to believe Trump would have gotten anywhere with these suits.'"

8. Trump's new $100,000 visa fee sets off panic and confusion (September 21) "Tech companies and banks sent urgent memos advising employees not to leave the country. Bags were packed, tickets bought and families left behind as visa holders scrambled to beat what they believed was a looming deadline."

9. U.S. Revokes Visa for Colombian President Petro After He Joined Palestine Protest at U.N. (September 29, via) "After the U.S. revoked his visa, Petro wrote online, 'Revoking it for denouncing genocide shows the U.S. no longer respects international law.'"