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.'"