Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Why was I invited to Beast Studios? (April 18, 1-hour-18-minute video from Folding Ideas) "But I just left haunted by a profound sense of tragedy. This glimpse inside a vast industrial machine that exists to produce nothing."

2. Prediction Markets: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) (April 20, 32-minute video) Wow, I knew prediction markets were bad, but they are even more of a horrifying dystopia than I thought.

3. Midwives saved his mom's life — and inspired him to pursue the profession (May 5) "A study, published in the Lancet Global Health in 2020, forecast that, if the number of midwives increased to universal coverage levels, 67% of maternal deaths could be averted as well as 64% of neonatal deaths and 65% of stillbirths. This equates to more than 4 million lives saved each year."

4. Canadian fiddler sues Google after AI Overview wrongly claimed he was a sex offender (May 4, via) "If a human spokesperson made these false allegations on Google’s behalf, a significant award of punitive damages would be warranted. Google should not have lesser liability because the defamatory statements were published by software that Google created and controls."

5. Anti-poverty program is effective even in one of the world's toughest settings (May 4) "Now, research shows it works even in incredibly difficult circumstances, like in the southwestern city of Baidoa. Half of the city's 1.2 million people are internally displaced, driven from their homes by extreme drought and violence by the militant group al-Shabab."

6. H-Bomb: A Frank Lloyd Wright Typographic Mystery (February 25, via) Wow I am so into this, I really need to know if the H was originally installed upside-down.

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Thank you to the commenters who left comments on the previous blogaround related to the Supreme Court case about drawing districts to dilute minority votes. What I'm kind of concluding is, this is racial gerrymandering, which has a lot of overlap with partisan gerrymandering. For the Republicans who are pushing it, their motivations are "we want our candidate to win" and also "we don't want black people to have equal voting power" and those motivations are kind of intertwined with each other. Gerrymandering is already bad because it results in a set of elected representatives that doesn't statistically match the population, and this is unfair- but on top of that, because of the US's history of racist voter suppression, it makes sense to have the Voting Rights Act to specifically guard against racial gerrymandering. 

Or, put another way, it's about how partisan gerrymandering has a disproportionate negative effect on minority voters. And the Voting Rights Act recognized that reality and put protections in place, which the Supreme Court says we don't need any more. 

(I am also boggled by all the articles saying it's been John Roberts's life goal to get rid of the Voting Rights Act. Why would someone *want* to get rid of the Voting Rights Act?)

Links:

What to do with a lawless Supreme Court? (May 4) "Since intent is what matters, and a pro-Republican gerrymander looks just like a White-racist gerrymander, it’s impossible to prove racist (rather than partisan) intent. So the VRA’s protection against racial gerrymanders — effectively the last piece of the VRA still standing — is effectively dead."

The Supreme Court’s Conservatives Just Issued the Worst Ruling in a Century (April 29, via) "After the Civil War, Congress passed the Reconstruction Amendments—the 13th, abolishing slavery; the 14th, requiring that states, among other things, not deny persons equal protection of the laws; and the 15th, barring racial discrimination in voting. Despite these amendments, racial discrimination was rampant in the early 20th century, and in the American South, Black citizens were consistently denied the opportunity to vote. In 1965, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, which provided enough protection to vastly increase the opportunities for minority voters to be able to register and vote."

Supreme Court guts Voting Rights Act, greenlights GOP gerrymanders (April 29) "'Today… the majority straight-facedly holds that the Voting Rights Act must be brought low to make the world safe for partisan gerrymanders,' Kagan wrote in dissent."

2. He recorded his quest for tariff refunds. It shows why billions may never get repaid (May 4) "When the refund portal opened on April 20, businesses that applied did so in minutes. Brown was not among them. And he's still not ready."

3. SPLC Caved to Fascists. They’re Being Targeted Anyway. (May 1) "It’s so disappointing to see an organization that has the funding and goals and staff to make real change in the world, but the leadership decided to bet it all on cowardly compliance. We have seen this over and over and over again ever since Trump took office for his second time: the institutions that stand up to him, win. Those who give in, lose."

Yeah... I remember right after the 2024 election, I got so many emails from all these non-profit organizations that were like "we're going to fight back! send us money!" I'm sure it was a good opportunity for all of them to make money- but what are they actually *doing*? How do you know which ones are actually going to use your donation to fight in the way that you want? 

I kind of use the strategy of seeing which lawyer groups are mentioned in the news articles about standing up against these bad policies and suing to protect people's rights. Which lawyer groups have their lawyers calling a judge in the middle of the night to stop an illegal deportation flight. Those are the groups that are worth donating to.

4. Pope Bob Chooses Formerly Undocumented Dude To Be Archbishop Of Pissing Off Trump (May 3) "Throughout his career, he has worked with immigrant communities from all over the world, and insisted that all people deserve to be treated with dignity. In his last sermon at his church after becoming a bishop, he said, 'We cannot say that we love God if we do not love those who are closer to us. […] Empathy, my brothers and sisters. Empathy — putting ourselves in the shoes of others — is to realize our common humanity.'"

As 1 John 4:20 says, "For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen."

5. They Want You to Think Abortion Pills Are Illegal (May 4) "Something else to remind your communities of: informal networks of accessing medication abortion also remain in place regardless of court rulings."

6. Powell to stay on at Fed until 2028 (April 30) "This is an obvious own goal by Trump. If he had just shut his mouth, Powell would likely have also left the board in May allowing Trump to appoint another lackey to that spot."

7. Protester Banned From U.S. Rep. Chuck Edwards’ McDonald’s Properties (April 17, via) "She ended up learning which six McDonald’s restaurants her congressman owns when she got banned from them."

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. That "Pending PayPal Charge" Email Is a Scam — Even Though It Really Came From PayPal (April 28, via) "Don't call the number. Don't reply."

2. The hard problem of AI therapy (February 26, via) "Suppose you’re a high-functioning person with anxiety who discovers that the chatbot can always soothe you on the spot. You ask one question—Do you think I handled that email wrong?—and feel relief. Ten minutes later: But what if she’s actually mad? Then: Can you rewrite my follow-up? Then: List ten reasons I’m not a bad person for sending it."

3. How China’s Deaf Delivery Riders Find a New Life in Gig Work (April 20) "By contrast, most deaf interviewees described becoming delivery riders as turning a new page, one of less discrimination and greater autonomy. Delivery platforms offer features that make interacting with restaurants and customers easier, such as voice-to-text conversion, pre-written messages, and digital badges that will alert users that the rider is deaf."

Also from Sixth Tone: Nine Months After Cloning Its First Yak, China Has 10 More (April 30) "To date, the team has generated over 200 cloned Tibetan yak embryos. By the end of 2028, they aim to build a core herd of over 100 cloned yaks, develop a new high-altitude yak breed, and establish standard breeding protocols."

4. 1 Corinthians 13 in the news (April 27) "Read the Beatitudes from Luke’s Gospel you cowards!"

Also from the Slacktivist: The literary puzzle of Isaiah 1 (April 29) "The current form of our Bibles tricks us into reading Isaiah 1 and Amos 5 as critiques of the religious observance prescribed in the Books of Moses, but actually what we have is the Books of Moses configuring their religious commandments, in part, as a response to and a defense against those critiques in Isaiah and Amos."

5. Soniferous Aether (April 27) From xkcd.

6. Women Have Agency: You Don’t Have to Obey Churches or Husbands Who Want to Control You (April 29) Posting this here because it's important to get the word out about this: If you are a woman who has decided to divorce your abusive husband, and now your church leaders are requiring you to come to a meeting so they can decide if you're allowed to do that, you can just not go. !!! Yes, really! You can just not go! Say no! They can't do anything to you! Even if you signed a "church covenant"- those things are not legally binding. It will not hold up in court. You can say no!

A lot of us spend our whole lives with the mindset "I need to be a good girl" which means when some authority figure says "you have to" do something, then you have to do it. We might not even realize there's another option: NOT doing it.

I'm so glad I learned about boundaries- I really had no idea about any of this before I learned about boundaries.

7. This week in "what Chinese songs is my toddler listening to": 蹦蹦跳跳 沒煩惱 李昕融 舞蹈完整版 簡單舞蹈 律動 廣場舞 洗腦歌 幼兒律動 幼兒舞蹈 兒童舞蹈 兒童律動 抖音舞蹈 動態歌詞 TIKTOK KidsDance【#波波星球泡泡哥哥bobopopo】

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Trump’s cruel plan for Afghan refugees, briefly explained (April 23, via) "Many of the 1,100 Afghans now stuck in limbo in Qatar aided the US over nearly two decades of war as interpreters working with US troops or served as members of the Afghan special forces. Some, the Times reports, are family members of American soldiers, and more than 400 are children."

2. Texas Tech Issues Ban On Students Writing On LGBTQ+ Topics (April 24) "The implications are profound—and at times border on absurd. In core and lower-level courses, there are no exceptions at all. A history professor course could not allocate instructional time to the Stonewall riots or the gay rights movement. If a U.S. history textbook includes a chapter on the AIDS crisis, the professor must skip it."

3. White House posted photo of Trump, King Charles III with 'TWO KINGS' caption (April 29)

4. James Comey posted a picture of seashells by the seashore. Trump's DOJ indicted him for it. (April 29) "The most embarrassing 24 hours (yet) of the Justice Department in President Donald Trump’s second administration continued apace on Tuesday, when Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced another indictment of James Comey, the former FBI director. This time, Comey — targeted by President Donald Trump as a political enemy — was indicted in North Carolina in connection with his since-deleted Instagram post showing a photo of seashells laid out in the shape of the numbers '8647.'"

Also from Law Dork: SCOTUS guts what remained of the Voting Rights Act before taking on TPS termination case (April 30) "The decision in Louisiana v. Callais upended the pivotal civil rights era voting law that Congress initially passed in 1965 and reauthorized several times since, leaving the section at issue “all but a dead letter,” as Justice Elena Kagan said with a somber voice, nearly stone faced, as she announced the dissent from the bench."

I don't really understand this Voting Rights Act case- all the articles I've read say it's so terrible that the Supreme Court has ruled this way, because it allows states to draw districts in a way that racial minority voters are always grouped together with a population of white voters which outnumbers them, and therefore the racial minority voters don't have any meaningful representation. This is confusing to me- it seems to rely on the assumptions that all people of color vote the same way, all white people vote the same way, and white people wouldn't vote for a candidate who would take minorities' needs seriously. Probably this is me being naive about how racism works, and missing some key facts about the history of racist voter suppression. If anyone has an article that explains this, post it in the comment section~

5. U.S. to issue commemorative passports with Trump's picture for America's 250th birthday (April 29) Fortunately it's only the Washington DC office that's doing this, and if you apply for a passport at any other location, you will just get a regular one without the mark of the beast.

6. The Trump team is quietly eliminating U.S. support for birth control abroad (April 29) This makes me so mad. Having penis-in-vagina sex is really common, and for women who are doing that, they *need* to have some kind of birth control, otherwise their lives will be completely dominated by the huge burdens of pregnancy and caring for babies. Those MAGAs claim they are "helping women" by being mean to trans people, while ending the programs that *actually* help women.

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. The Pagoda Puzzle: What Can Save China’s Oldest Wooden Tower? (April 21) "First, the pagoda’s unique structure and scale make the risk of disassembling and replacing original components extremely high. It is a spatial high-rise framework, not a conventional single-beam structure. It would be extremely difficult to reset tens of thousands of rotted, cracked, and deformed components, restore the structural logic of the hidden layers, and avoid secondary damage during disassembly and reassembly."

2. Falling Leaves and Failing Arguments: Why Autumn Adaptation Doesn’t Prove Irreducible Complexity (April 21) "This is the kind of question that sounds simple but turns out to be remarkably difficult for young-earth creationists to answer consistently. Either the pre-Fall world had deadly winters and needed deciduous trees, or it didn’t and the whole system was purposeless until after the Fall."

3. Gene therapy for a rare type of deafness shows lasting results (April 22) "The results indicate that this could be a one-and-done treatment that lasts a lifetime, profoundly transforming patients' lives, Chen says."

4. Journal Club: Sexual pain in Christian Women (April 22) "In the lit review, the paper says that sexual pain may affect up to 46% of women, and that 6.2% of White Christian women report lifetime sexual pain with obstructed penetration."

5. Penn & Teller & the Supreme Court & BS (April 23) "Despite the fact that he had an alibi and bore no resemblance to the witness’s sketch, the police were sure Flores was the second man and they arrested him. So they brought Barganier back in and an officer “hypnotized” her in order to improve her recollection, telling her that hypnosis allows her to tap into the “tape recorder” in her brain."

6. The Onion has agreed to a new deal to take over Infowars (April 20) "Families of those killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, who sued Jones for defamation, want the sale to happen. They're still waiting to collect on the nearly $1.3 billion judgment they won against Jones for spreading lies that they faked the deaths of their children to boost support for gun control. That prompted Jones' followers to harass and threaten the families for years."

7. We’re Training Students To Write Worse To Prove They’re Not Robots, And It’s Pushing Them To Use More AI (March 6, via) "A student praised for years for being an exceptional writer now feels like a cheater because she had to learn how AI detection works in order to protect herself from being falsely accused. The surveillance apparatus has turned writing talent into a liability."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. The tariff refund process has begun for businesses. What about customers? (April 22) "That's because a product, like a TV, often has parts from multiple countries, and each was hit with different tariff rates. Those rates changed over time by presidential decree, which makes calculating a customer's actual cost even more difficult. Plus, the retailer likely absorbed some of that tariff expense. The tariff burden was also shared up and down the supply chain, between vendors, distributors and finally customers."

2. More immigrants are being held in detention for over a year. NPR followed one family's ordeal. (April 22) "This isn't legal. According to a decades-old federal settlement, children can't be detained for more than 20 days. But data from the non-profit newsroom The Marshall Project shows, since the start of Trump's second term, more than 1,600 children have been detained for longer than that."

And update on that: Alleged Colorado attacker's family released after nearly a year in detention (April 27) "Back home in Colorado on Saturday, two days after their release, El Gamal and her children reported to an ICE office for a required check-in. There, ICE detained them again, told them they were being deported to Egypt, and rushed them onto a plane, their lawyers said."

3. They got to the part with the cattle and the creeping things (April 22) "They were taught 2 Timothy 3:16 as a promise and a contract. They were told what they could and should expect to gain from reading every word of every scripture and they were told what others would expect them to gain from it, and so what they learn — not just from this single passage, but from the entire experience of cover-to-cover reading — is to cultivate those expectations while ignoring the often-boring or confusing or unexpected aspects of the actual text itself."

This! This is exactly what it's like, being evangelical and really taking seriously the "read the entire bible" task that evangelicals are always saying we should do. You have an idea of what the bible is, and what the experience of reading it is supposed to be, and then when the actual bible itself doesn't match those expectations at all, you learn to subconsciously ignore what the actual bible is saying.

Also from the Slacktivist: Text and contexts: More Bible in the news (April 23) "That gets very antisemitic and very blasphemous very quickly, and it’s particularly dumb and dim as a reading of this passage, which involves God making a promise. See, the whole basis of supercessionism is that God’s promises are not worth diddly squat and can be revoked at any time because God is a capricious liar."

4. A chaotic White House Correspondents' Dinner, as told by NPR reporters in the room (April 26) "Just minutes into the dinner, guests heard muffled popping sounds as a gunman attempted to charge past a security checkpoint."

5. Justice Department makes it easier to deport those with DACA status (April 25) "DACA, created in 2012 to protect children who arrived in the country illegally prior to 2007 from deportation, now covers around half a million people. Starting last year, DHS officials began urging DACA recipients to self- deport, arguing that the program itself does not equate to automatically providing legal status."

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

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Happily Never After: The Curious Case of Love and Respect (Deep Dive) (February 5, 1-hour-15-minute video) This is a deep dive into the book "Love and Respect," which is the best selling Christian marriage book. The overall thesis of the book is that women need love and men need respect. If your husband is not treating you right, you can solve all your marriage problems by respecting him more. By never disagreeing with him. By never bringing up any problems. As it turns out, this is extremely bad advice. (This is part 1 in a 3-part series.)

2. No ID, No Support, No Plan: Michigan's wrongfully convicted launch app to fill reentry gaps (March 5) "Unlike parolees, who often have months of notice before being released and access to reentry services, exonerees may be released with as little as a few hours' warning and no support at all."

3. New NHS England Review Excluded 97% Of All Trans Studies To Say Care Doesn't Work (March 11) "These 10 reviews are not science. They are the machinery of a government that has decided to eliminate transgender healthcare and is working backward from that conclusion."

4. Technical Debt Collectors: China’s Coders Count Cost of AI Errors (March 12) "When programmers point out an error, the AI will apologize and acknowledge the problem, Wei says. But the new code it produces often introduces new bugs somewhere else, and the process repeats."

5. What Do We Owe the Insufferable? (January 30, via) "Liberals and leftists, committed to deinstitutionalization and autonomy, respond by 'pretending that mental illness never results in antisocial behavior, much less violent crime.'"

6. Home Remedies (March 9) From xkcd.

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Photos from Iran and across the Middle East as the war enters Week 2 (March 10)

2. Thousands in New York City must work to keep SNAP food benefits. ‘The pressure is on.’ (March 3, via) "But a measure pushed by Congressional Republicans and the Trump administration will require about 123,000 New Yorkers to prove that they are working, volunteering or in school beginning in March. This now includes veterans, homeless people, youth aging out of foster care, and parents with children older than 14. It also means that some seniors who had retired under the old rules will now have to go back to work to continue getting food benefits."

3. NYU Langone faces Wednesday deadline to resume gender-affirming care for minors (March 11) "But state officials said NYU Langone’s move violated New York’s sweeping human rights law, which bans discrimination based on an individual’s gender identity. Attorney General Letitia James’ office gave NYU Langone until March 11 to resume the procedures."

4. Statue depicting Trump, Epstein as Jack, Rose from 'Titanic' appears on National Mall (March 11)

5. The U.S. Built a Blueprint to Avoid Civilian War Casualties. Trump Officials Scrapped It. (March 10)

6. Is the US Military Trying to Bring Back Jesus? (March 14) "I absolutely 100% believe that some military leaders are using Evangelical Christian end times prophesy to generate excitement for troops to go into battle. That’s been happening for years, and they need it now more than ever considering that the past few wars in the Middle East were actually popular, while this one is not."

7. House GOP leadership silent as more members post anti-Muslim statements (March 14)

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. On 310 Yuan a Day, She Builds China’s Towers — and Streams the Struggle (February 25) "This is her sixth year bouncing between construction sites across China. As one of the few young women in a workforce dominated by middle-aged men, she stands out immediately — not just for her age or gender, but for her determination to survive."

2. Remembering the Mothers of Gynecology (February 28) "But like a lot of early heroes of medicine, Sims was an absolute monster."

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Image source.

Links related to the antichrist:

1. A Chance To Establish The Run Against Authoritarianism (February 12) This is something we can do to help the families who have been hiding for weeks in Minnesota. Donate to funds to help with rent.

2. The U.S. Men's Hockey Team Failed the Locker Room Test (February 25) "I can’t help but wonder how many of these players have daughters—and whether they’ve told them that they can be hockey players one day, too. How many have told them that the women’s game matters just as much? Do they think their girls will still believe them after they hear their dads laugh?"

3. Deadline looms as Anthropic rejects Pentagon demands it remove AI safeguards (February 26) "For months, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has insisted that Anthropic's AI model, Claude, must not be used for mass surveillance in the U.S. or to power entirely autonomous weapons, such as a drone that uses AI to kill targets without human approval. He has described those uses as 'entirely illegitimate' and says they are 'bright red lines' for the company."

OpenAI announces Pentagon deal after Trump bans Anthropic (February 28)

4. A nearly blind refugee is found dead after Border Patrol agents drop him at Buffalo doughnut shop (February 27) "'A vulnerable man — nearly blind and unable to speak English — was left alone on a cold winter night with no known attempt to leave him in a safe, secure location. That decision from U.S. Customs and Border Protection was unprofessional and inhumane,' Mayor Sean Ryan said in a statement."

5. Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, And The Construction Of Political Crisis (February 21) [content note: child sexual abuse] "The broad Epstein files scandal is already salient. But the questions of how it will ultimately be understood, and where political accountability will fall, are still up for grabs. Is this mostly a story about elite impunity, bipartisan failure, bureaucratic incompetence and/or corruption? Or will it be just as much a story about how the country was deceived into electing a sex predator angling to cover up his own crimes and got caught. Where we look back and say there was a specific moment when the government had to decide whether there would be any consequences for this depravity, and we, the public, got to see in real time who tried to do the right thing and who sided with the dregs of humanity?"

6. Vanderbilt To Drop Major Gender-Affirming Surgeries For Trans Adults (February 24) "It was only after reaching out to VUMC that she received a message in her patient portal—a pattern seen across the country, where hospital gender care rollbacks have often been haphazardly announced through terse press releases from nameless hospital bureaucrats."

Also from Erin in the Morning: Kansas Sends Letters To Trans People Demanding The Immediate Surrender Of Drivers Licenses (February 26) "The Kansas letters arrive amid an accelerating nationwide campaign to strip transgender people of accurate identification documents."

7. Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been killed (February 28)

3 American troops killed, and Trump says more 'likely,' in war against Iran (March 1)

8. Federal judge blocks new DHS policy that would allow arrest of thousands of legal refugees (February 28) "'The Government’s actions in this case beg the question: Why?' Tunheim wrote. 'The Government suggests that they are looking for terrorists, but there is not a shred of evidence in the record that the Named Plaintiffs or the putative Class they seek to represent pose serious national security risks.'"

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. ‘It’s AI blackface’: social media account hailed as the Aboriginal Steve Irwin is an AI character created in New Zealand (January 15, via) "The choice to create an avatar of an Indigenous person has raised ethical concerns."

2.  Because of Who You Are - Vicki Yohe (2008) I like this worship song, but in a complicated ex-evangelical way.

Same thing for this video, of the song "I Have Decided to Follow Jesus."

I like the song. I like the singer's passion. I'm really into that. But seeing the crowd of Christians participating in this worship song, I just really feel unsafe in that kind of environment.

3. Chilean Cherries: Why Prices in China Plunge Every Winter (January 16) "To reach tables in China, Chilean cherries need to travel more than 19,000 kilometers, and for a long time, air freight was the only viable option. However, with the widespread application of cold chain technology, maritime transportation has become dominant in recent years."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. A Pregnant Woman at Risk of Heart Failure Couldn’t Get Urgent Treatment. She Died Waiting for an Abortion. (January 14) "As ProPublica has reported, doctors in states that ban abortion have repeatedly denied standard care to high-risk pregnant patients."

2. Rapid Response Networks in the Twin Cities (January 15) "When ICE operations switched to fast, random street abductions and door knocks, the only possible way to predict where they would act was to identify ICE vehicles as they approached, so people shifted focus to identifying ICE vehicles on the roads and staying on them. ICE needed to rely on surprise and ambush tactics, so responders employed noise—whistles and honking—to quickly give warning across distance. ICE officers don’t like to operate when outnumbered and don’t like to be surrounded, so patrollers amass cars and form impromptu traffic jam blockades."

Judge rules immigration officers in Minneapolis can't detain peaceful protesters (January 16) "The ruling prohibits the officers from detaining drivers and passengers in vehicles when there is no reasonable suspicion they are obstructing or interfering with the officers."

It’s The Videos (January 17) "Everyday citizens all over the country are racking up hundreds of millions of views with on-the-ground videos, and seem increasingly willing to film ICE agents on job sites, at traffic stops, and even on their doorsteps—even while being threatened at gunpoint. It’s a scrappy, diffuse content campaign against the Trump media machine, which likes to turn ICE arrests into highly produced hype videos that look as if they were produced by an SEC football program."

Minneapolis church has delivered more than 12,000 boxes of groceries to families in hiding (January 15, via) 

Dispatch from the occupation (January 17, via) "All of this means that the following dystopian scenario plays out in the open dozens of times per day in the Twin Cities: Multiple masked and armed agents in combat gear amass in unmarked cars outside a house or business. A bystander notices and alerts the neighborhood. A dozen or more neighborhood residents appear within minutes to legally observe, legally film the encounter, legally make sure the targeted people know their rights, and legally warn others by blowing whistles and honking car horns."

I’ve Covered Police Abuse for 20 Years. What ICE Is Doing Is Different. (January 21, via) "The lies this administration is telling about Ms. Good aren’t those you deploy as part of a cover-up. They’re those you use when you want to show you can get away with anything."

3. Expand your vocabulary: the Dual State (January 19) "But your life goes on normally, until it doesn’t."

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Scott Adams, 'Dilbert' creator and conservative commentator, dies at 68 (January 13) 

2. China’s Viral New App Is a Safety Tool Called ‘Are You Dead?’ (January 13) "The app, known as Demumu abroad, functions as a daily check-in. Users input emergency contacts, then press the check-in button on the interface’s home screen each day. If a user misses two consecutive check-ins, the app alerts their contacts via email."

3. Planetary Alignment (January 9) From xkcd.

4. The lumpers, the splitters, and me (January 13) "So when somebody like Matthew Avery Sutton comes along and says 'evangelicalism is best defined as a white, patriarchal, nationalist religious movement made up of Christians who seek power to transform American culture through conservative-leaning politics' it can feel for them exactly the way it has felt for them over the past several decades when the gatekeeping goons said to them — repeatedly and regularly — 'You are a fake Christian and your story of being born again and transformed by your religious experience must be a lie and you must hate Jesus and the Bible because what it really means to be an evangelical is to be like us — to be part of a white, patriarchal, nationalist religious movement seeking power to transform American culture through conservative politics.'"

5. The Rape of Dinah and The Shame of Adults (January 10) [content note: rape and victim-blaming] "Dinah’s rape and her brothers’ reactivity show us the shame of adults: that adults will, time after time, do nothing but negotiate and cover up the rape of their children by powerful people."

6. This country taxes menstrual pads as luxury goods. She's aiming to end the tax (January 15) "The link to child marriage contributes to the secrecy around periods and makes it an extremely isolating experience."

7.  Sesame Street: ABC-DEF-GHI Song Love this classic Sesame Street song.

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Image source

Image source

Links related to the antichrist:

1. In Defense of Pretexts (January 9) "What I came to is this: For my entire adult life, I've watched American leaders justify war and atrocity with lies about democracy and freedom and self-defense."

2. Chaos continues (January 12) "Businesses are locking their doors even while open to keep employees and customers safe. As I type this, I’m standing guard at the locked door of our neighborhood burrito joint while I wait formy takeout order, so the employees can focus on their jobs. The place is packed with neighbors supporting this small business."

Also about Minnesota: Minnesota federal prosecutors resign after DOJ push to investigate Renee Good's widow (January 13) "The investigation allegedly centers around any possible ties to activist groups [Becca Good] may have. That, of course, is protected First Amendment activity."

A Common Occurrence (January 14) "I’m sharing this so you’re aware that the ICE abuses we’re seeing since Renee Good’s killing is – aren’t new."

The Fascists are Lying about ICE Murdering an Innocent Woman (January 14) "Fuck Michael Shermer and the rest of his rightwing pro-murder pro-fascism sniveling grifters, who spread this lie even as we see ICE now enabled to literally go door to door, breaking into people’s homes, and dragging them away with zero accountability."

3. US aircraft that attacked suspected drug boat reportedly disguised as civilian plane (January 13) "'Fundamentally, the debate about ‘war crimes’ is a distraction – the whole operation is illegal, and the conduct of an extrajudicial execution by means of a plane with civilian markings is in fact reminiscent of a death squad operation,' Bhuta said."

4. Hundreds of nonconsensual AI images being created by Grok on X, data shows (January 8) [content note: contains descriptions of sexually explicit images (does not contain the images themselves)] 

Elon Musk's X faces bans and investigations over nonconsensual bikini images (January 12)

5. For Immigrants, Citizenship Now (January 13) "We have effectively created a class of criminalized residents who do not have full rights and protection under law. Immigration enforcement is a small fascist state within our polity."

I can't really agree with this without seeing an actual policy with more details- automatic citizenship? for who exactly? wouldn't there have to be some kind of criteria, like how long they've lived in the US? What about people from countries that don't allow dual citizenship, so they would have to renounce their other citizenship in order to get US citizenship, and they might not want to do that- there should be a way to have them legally protected anyway. It sounds too big and pie-in-the-sky to actually be a real policy- but, what if we think about it this way instead: What if the path to get US citizenship was a lot easier? What if it was less about bureaucracy and proving that you're "good enough," and more about a principle that people who live in the US and want to be US citizens should have a reasonable pathway to do so. Yeah, I support that.

6. Hillary Clinton May Finally Get Lock-Her-Upped For Refusing Stupid Subpoena From Dipsh*t James Comer (January 15) "You should definitely give the full Clinton letter a read, because it lays out not just why the Clintons won’t go along with Comer’s attempt to shift attention away from Trump and the DOJ’s foot-dragging, but also why this government’s corruption must be resisted wherever possible, from the streets to closed-door hearing rooms."

7. A federal judge dismisses the DOJ's effort to get voter data from California (January 15) "In 2017, one Republican secretary of state famously said the Trump administration could 'go jump in the Gulf of Mexico.'"

8. Behind the front lines of the legal battle against Trump's National Guard deployments (January 15) "Earlier this month, President Trump pulled hundreds of National Guard troops from California, Oregon and Illinois after the Supreme Court ruled against the administration in the Illinois case."

9. UPenn faculty condemn Trump administration’s demand for ‘lists of Jews’ (January 13, via) WTF

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Build a Tensegrity Structure (2020, via) 3-minute video. Oh this is very cool! It looks like it's floating.

2. The network of mutuality is not escapable (January 1) "So it’s jarring, here, to read an explicitly evangelical condemnation of racism that contends it refers only to disparate impact and does not at all include sinful personal animus — that contends, instead, that there is no such thing as sinful personal animus."

3. A single Chick-fil-A store congratulated a gay couple, and conservatives lost their damn minds (January 5) "The conservative Washington Stand (which is published by the Christian hate group Family Research Council) posted an article claiming this harmless post was 'controversial' and proof that Chick-fil-A hasn’t 'weeded out the LGBT extremism' within its ranks."

4. 'A Directive From Above': Former NYT Editor Lays Out How The Paper Pushes Anti-Trans Bigotry (January 2, via) 

5. Experience with AI coding (January 6) "The rest of y’all can confidently spout opinions about AI coding, because you’re not actually doing it, so you never risk the humility of learning that you were wrong."

6. Superstition (January 7) From xkcd.

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. RFK Wants to Un-cure Cancer (December 24) "This will not shock you, but RFK, Jr. is not suggesting that we adopt any other part of Denmark’s public health policy–not the universal health care, not the guaranteed parental leave, not the guaranteed medical follow-ups after birth. None of the things that make Denmark’s vaccine schedule work for Denmark’s population."

Also from Skepchick: Somali Americans are Good, Actually (December 31) "And, gosh, I hate to be a broken record, here, but…GOOD. GET THOSE PEOPLE HEALTHCARE. Get them food stamps and stuff, too, but YES HEALTHCARE IS GOOD. Treating people for their illnesses benefits EVERYONE. I don’t even care that this is hyper-focused on the Somali community in Minnesota (where about a third of all Somali-Americans live). Get them all healthcare. Get them all food stamps. Helping each other is good, actually."

2. Four key lessons that we can and must take out of 2025 (January 1) "Pushing back is essential — and it works."

3. The Case For Hope: Transgender Rights Going Into 2026 (December 31) "And yet, we have not met our doom—at least not yet. Gender-affirming care for transgender adults remains available in all 50 states, with Florida imposing some restrictions, ones that transgender people have nevertheless found ways to work around."

Also from Erin in the Morning: Vermont Bill Would Create State Trust Fund For Private Trans Youth Care Clinics As Trump Threatens Hospital Funding (January 8) "The bill comes as families scramble to locate alternatives to hospital systems that are abandoning them. With more than 20 hospitals closing their doors to transgender youth care out of fear and preemptive compliance with the Trump administration, many families have been forced to seek alternatives."

4. An Ode to Corruption: Announcing 2025’s Golden Duke Winners (December 29, via) "Trump’s $300 Million White House Ballroom takes the cake for, as one reader put it, the most visually 'on the nose' corruption of Trump’s second term and the 'raw indulgence of the gold plated ballroom funded by shady crypto guys.'"

5. The Venezuela attack is a constitutional crisis for the United States (January 5) "If Congress were taking seriously its constitutional obligation to preserve our system of checks and balances, it would immediately launch an impeachment."

6. 12 Senators Describe What It Was Like as Rioters Stormed the Capitol on January 6 (January 6) "At this point, there were so many breaches, and the doors that we have really weren’t going to—the outer doors weren’t holding. We knew the inner doors weren’t going to hold. So we needed to get the Senate out of there."

This Jan. 6 plaque was made to honor law enforcement. It's nowhere to be found at the Capitol (January 6) "This summer, two officers who fought the mob that day sued over the delay."

7. Sen. Mark Kelly fires back after Hegseth threatens his rank and retirement pay (January 5) "I will fight this with everything I've got — not for myself, but to send a message back that Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump don't get to decide what Americans in this country get to say about their government."

8. ‘This is not normal’: Minneapolis on edge and angry after ICE killing of woman amid federal surge (January 8) "Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey said succinctly Wednesday after the shooting: 'To ICE – get the fuck out of Minneapolis.'"

9. A once rare legislative tool is causing headaches for Mike Johnson (January 7) "'It is idiotic and shameful,' Lawler said on the House floor. 'This place is disgraceful. Everybody wants the political advantage. They don't actually want to do the damn work.'"

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Why people like your quick bullshit takes better than your high-effort posts (November 29, via) "but the attention of the internet is best modeled as a random swarm of locusts that will occasionally land on your ripe fields based on its inscrutable whims."

Oh yeah this has happened to me. The posts that get the most views aren't the ones I really really care about and spend a lot of time on. Hey if you really want to make my day, you can leave an appreciative comment on any of my very long blog posts about the bible.

2. Apples (December 12) From xkcd.

3. Journal Club: The Quoiromantic Manifesto (December 17) "'Quoiromantic' was especially a response to asexual discourses where romantic orientation is so common that people are expected to have it as a slot in their identity. Quoiromanticism expresses unwillingness to participate in this framework."

4. I usually do a "Christmas music roundup" post in December, but it turns out I just like all the same songs every year. So instead of doing a whole post, I'll just share them one by one here and there.

Emmanuel (Michael W Smith & Amy Grant- w/lyrics)

5. OpenAI says dead teen violated TOS when he used ChatGPT to plan suicide (November 27, via) [content note: suicide]

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. ‘Good will to all’ rejected as ‘political’ and ‘divisive’ (December 9) "'Peace on earth, good will to all' is the same thing Christians have been reciting every year at Christmastime for centuries, but those Christians can’t say it this year without being — correctly — perceived as 'political' and 'anti-Trump' and 'anti-ICE' and 'anti-MAGA,' because 'peace and good will to all' is the opposite of everything that Trump and ICE and MAGA stand for."

Also from the Slacktivist: The end of 20th-century white evangelicalism (December 15) "I remember what it feels like to identify as an evangelical because loving Jesus and loving the Bible was the most important thing to me only to be told, constantly, that this did not matter at all — to constantly have the gatekeepers of evangelicalism reminding me that loving Jesus and loving the Bible wasn’t nearly as important as voting Republican no matter what. And then seeing 'no matter what' ratcheted into something ever more extreme."

This is so real. I'm also one of those evangelicals who followed Jesus right out of the church.

2. Trump Finds Way To Be Bigger Piece Of Sh*t Than Ever, Re: Rob Reiner (December 16) This is really shocking and horrific, what he posted on social media.

3. Her Christmas lights were going up. Then Border Patrol showed up (December 13) "'It looks completely ridiculous,' she said. But she decided to leave it that way 'as a symbol of what happens when ICE and Border Patrol get involved in your world. Things don't go as planned. And a lot of work doesn't get done.'"

4. DOJ releases Epstein files and the first batch is short on new information (December 19) 

5. A radio station in Amsterdam is a lifeline for Sudan. After USAID cuts, it's faltering (December 21) "From Amsterdam, the journalists at Radio Dabanga try to shed some light on the dire situation. They report on where fighting has erupted, on disease outbreaks in refugee camps, and the aftermath of recent atrocities, such as those in the Sudanese city of el-Fasher."

6. Trump's push to end transgender care for young people opposed by pediatricians (December 19) "Goepferd, who is the founder of Children's Minnesota Gender Health Program, says that for the medical community, nothing has changed about the evidence supporting gender-affirming care that could justify the government's actions."

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. The cookies that fueled votes for women (December 14) "Cookies, cakes, pies and treats like these little kiss cakes were sold at bake sales around Salt Lake City and all over the West. The proceeds helped suffragists crisscross the country to make their case for women's rights."

2. To 'graduate' from poverty, they can borrow to build a business. So why aren't they? (December 13) "'What we're seeing clearly is that it's deeper than you need money to make money,' he says. 'You also need to be able to take on risk to make money. And that's a double whammy for someone who's poor.'"

3. Questions of accuracy arise as Washington Post uses AI to create personalized podcasts (December 13) "In a statement, the Washington Post Guild — which represents newsroom employees and other staff — tells NPR, 'We are concerned about this new product and its rollout,' alleging that it undermines the Post's mission and its journalists' work." This sounds like a bad idea.

4. LET’S PLAY: ‘Text With Jesus’ (December 1) "That’s a nice dodging of the actual question. But real talk here: The chatbot can’t actually answer this question because no Christian can."

And Captain Cassidy's other posts on "Text With Jesus": AI meets Christianity in ‘Text with Jesus’ and Text With Jesus: Why an AI Satan scares some Christians 

So apparently there's this "Text With Jesus" app which uses Chat GPT to create chatbots of bible personalities, like Jesus. Okay, so, the first thought I had was, wouldn't it be something, to be able to pray and then get an actual response back? Whomst among us has not had the experience of desperately praying, asking God why, and never receiving any answer? But a chatbot- it *has* to reply. Wow, prayer would be a totally different thing if it came with a guarantee like that.

But as Captain Cassidy's investigation shows, the answers that "Jesus"/the other bible characters give are very boilerplate, Christian cliche answers. This is all stuff you can hear at church. Nothing new. Nothing real. And, I mean, of course it can't be anything new, it's just a chatbot. It's not real. 

(And apparently you can choose options about which denomination of Christianity you are in, and the chatbots will answer according to the beliefs of that denomination. I feel like that kinda breaks the illusion. Here, choose the set of things you already believe, and then this chatbot will regurgitate them back at you, in a quirky bible-character voice.)

If I had the real Jesus captive and required to answer me, I would ask extremely pointed and emotional questions about the problem of evil. I kinda wanted to try that on this chatbot, but you have to download it first, and that's too much trouble, also, it's just silly for me to treat this as if there's a possibility of actually getting new truths from it- it's a chatbot.

I wonder what kind of person uses this app and views it as helpful for their spiritual life. Are there people actually texting all their prayers into this app, and it feels better than just praying the normal way and "listening to God"? That seems... bad because it's fake. Like instead of experiencing the actual struggle of trying to "listen to God", looking for answers and getting nothing, overanalyzing your thoughts and "signs" you might have seen, you just get this easy-to-read AI response. 

But also, this seems quite limited in how much enjoyment you can get out of its responses. It's all very boilerplate, nice-sounding churchy language. Don't know how long one can stand to listen to that, when one wants *real* answers.

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Trump administration's 'worst of the worst' includes pregnant, postpartum women (December 12) "In one Louisiana facility, according to a Senate report, at least 14 pregnant women were visible during the staff’s visit."

2. WHO expert group’s new analysis reaffirms there is no link between vaccines and autism (December 11, via) Can't believe we really have to keep talking about this.

3. The Trump administration's authoritarian house of cards is starting to fall down (December 12) "Kilmar Abrego Garcia is '[o]n his way home.' Another grand jury rejected DOJ's effort to indict Letitia James. And, Indiana Republicans said no to Trump's redistricting pressure."

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Love's Work in "Go, Dog, Go" (December 6) "I ask you, who has been changed by their first meeting? She has only become more of herself, while he has adopted a brand-new hat habit."

2. If you hear any noise, it ain’t the boys (December 5) "In practice it’s a lot more complicated because the cover charge and the price of drinks is never the only variable being considered by the “ladies” that Ladies Night is trying to attract."

3. The Reality of AI Animal Content (December 5, via) "AI videos and heavily edited clips can show animals doing things they would never do in a healthy, ethical setting, such as jumping into a person’s arms at a zoo, endangered species at your doorstep, or dancing on cue. This can create unrealistic and even dangerous expectations."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Alina Habba Quits Job She Never Legally Held (December 8) "Habba has now pretended to resign the job she’s been pretending to have."

2. Jesse Watters says criticizing boat strikes makes people sound “effeminate” (December 8, via) Jesse Watters really went on tv and said that people *like* the videos of military strikes on defenseless boats, murdering people. "People love these videos. They hit your feed, they're like, yes, let's go." This actually says more about what kind of person Jesse Watters is, yikes.

3. Immigrants kept from Faneuil Hall citizenship ceremony as feds crackdown nationwide (December 5) "'As an immigrant takes the oath of citizenship, it’s a reflection and recognition of the tremendous sacrifice of time, energy, and financial resources they have made in the hopes of becoming a full member of our community and nation,' said Elizabeth Sweet, Executive Director of MIRA Coalition. 'To have that final step canceled is unnecessarily cruel and does nothing to make this country a safer place.'"

And: How Trump is remaking one agency to aid his deportation push (December 10) "'They're reaching deeper into the weeds of immigration policy, and they may be more successful in slowing legal immigration, which at least some members of the Trump administration have stated is their goal,' said Julia Gelatt, associate director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute. 'That's a pretty different stance towards immigration than we've seen over recent decades.'"

4. Border Patrol left Charlotte. The damage stayed behind (December 10) "Many immigrants in hiding have relied on allies to help with basic services like delivering food and medicine. Volunteers have set up a support network. People deliver supplies, take reports of vehicles suspected of belonging to immigration agents and go check them out, and wear bright yellow vests while they watch over children walking to school."

5. Afghan CIA fighters, like National Guard attack suspect, face stark reality in U.S. (December 10) "After being evacuated to the U.S. in 2021, when the Taliban swept into Kabul, many Zero Unit soldiers came to feel they had been abandoned by CIA officials."

Sharing this because I will always be on the side of 'we should give immigrants the support they need, to deal with bureaucracy/cultural/language/etc barriers.' But also, I'm a little uncomfortable with the implication that 'the big lesson to be learned from the Washington DC shooting is [whatever my pet cause is]' which I've seen a lot of- from the felon, when he uses this as a reason to discriminate against all Afghan immigrants (and also other countries he doesn't like????), and from those of us on the left, saying this is the MAGAs' fault for sending the National Guard there in the first place, and perhaps I'm also participating in this by sharing this article, as if to imply that the actual problem wasn't the shooting itself, but the lack of support received by Afghans who worked for the CIA. Which is why I am writing this disclaimer. No, let's be clear about this, this is the shooter's fault, there is no excuse to go around shooting people.

6. The fight to beat neglected tropical diseases was going well. 2025 could change that (December 10) "'A group of scientists went to the Hill and made the point that there is a known strategy in treating communities that are infected,' says Wainwright. 'You go in, treat them once a year and if you do it for a set number of years, you can either eliminate or control the disease.'"

The devastation caused by the shutdown of USAID is terrible, but here's something we can do about it: Helen Keller Intl is working on this. Here's the link to donate to them. 

7. Democrats Must Reject The Premise Of Trans Healthcare Bans In Republican Healthcare Offer (December 10) "For these reasons, gender-affirming care has long been recognized as medically necessary for those who need it. Stripping an entire class of people of such care is unconscionable."

Also from Erin in the Morning: Federal Court Strikes Down Georgia’s Ban on GAC for Incarcerated Trans People (December 10) 

8. The Trump-Epstein Emergency Isn't in the Files (December 5) "Trump’s treatment of Maxwell—a convicted sex trafficker— is by far the most glaring, brazen, and openly corrupt part of the current moment involving the president."

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Elon Musk’s Grok AI Is Doxxing Home Addresses of Everyday People (December 4, via) "In response to prompts as simple as “[name] address,” we found Grok repeatedly offered up accurate, up-to-date home addresses of everyday people, while offering astonishingly scant pushback."

2. The Most Hated Children's Book (December 4) [content note: the Holocaust, also spoilers for "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas"] "And so we're left with this kind of hollow story. A boy who spends a year, a full year, talking to a victim of the Holocaust, who does not learn one single thing about it."

I haven't read "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" but the first time I heard about the plot, I assumed that it was meant to make these 2 points:

1. A lot of people in Nazi Germany really had no idea what was going on in the death camps, even military families who lived right next to them. Uh... is there historical evidence of this? If this is not true, then yikes it's extremely irresponsible to write it in a book as if this was a real phenomenon. Sort of saying that the Holocaust just kinda happened and it wasn't really anyone's fault except maybe the leaders at the highest levels.
2. I thought the point of the ending was a judgment on the father- the father is overseeing mass murder throughout the whole book and thinks it's fine, but then when it's his own son getting murdered, then it's a horrible tragedy which wasn't supposed to happen. I assumed- not reading the book but just a summary of it- that the point was to teach the father a lesson about how wrong he was- that the father was getting what he deserved. But I've read criticism of this book which says this is basically just played straight- like the book makes you feel like the tragedy is that the son of a Nazi leader was killed, that's terrible and wasn't supposed to happen, whereas the constant mass murder of Jewish people is fine. I thought the point of the book would be exposing this way of thinking and showing how immoral it is, but ... apparently it doesn't? Like I said I haven't read it, and maybe it's open to interpretation how much the book just kinda goes along with this "it only became a tragedy when this one German child died" and how much it calls out that way of thinking.

3. Chinese Backstreet Boys - That Way (2005) My husband told me this video went viral in China 20 years ago. It's 2 goofy students lip-syncing to "I want it that way." I love this.

4. Vibecession: Much More Than You Wanted To Know (December 5) "Are the youth succumbing to a “negativity bias” where they see the past through “rose-colored glasses”? Are the economists looking at some ivory tower High Modernist metric that fails to capture real life? Or is there something more complicated going on?"

5. UN humanitarian chief: world needs to 'wake up' and help stop violence in Sudan (December 7) "The United Nations estimates around 200,000 civilians were trapped in el-Fasher when the army withdrew, and there is evidence that many were systematically killed, with thousands still unaccounted for."

6. Reality Bites: Meituan’s ‘Rosy’ Delivery Ad Hits a Nerve in China (December 8) "'It’s clear from the video that not only has the director never been a food delivery driver, but also that he has never ordered take-out,' one user said in a video response on Xiaohongshu, also known as RedNote, receiving more than 29,000 likes."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Trump to Disaster Victims: Drop Dead (December 3, via) "Whenever someone comes to him in need, whether its Volodomyr Zelensky, helpless African children dependent on USAID, or rural Michiganers, his cruelty is activated."

2. HHS changed the name of transgender health leader on her official portrait (December 5) "Levine told NPR that it was an honor to serve the American people as the assistant secretary for health 'and I'm not going to comment on this type of petty action.'"

3. CDC advisers vote to overturn decades-long policy on hepatitis B vaccine for infants (December 5) "'Our question is why? Why is there pressure today to change something that has been working, due to safety concerns that may be more theoretical than real?' asked Dr. Grant Paulsen during Thursday's meeting."

Full-Service Movers (a post about being in charge of your own life)

Movers carrying boxes. Image source.

A few years ago, when my husband and I were moving to a new apartment, we heard about a moving service that said they would do everything for you. You don't have to do anything at all. You don't have to pack or do anything. They do it.

My first thought was "that's not possible."