Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. GOP Rep. who wanted to “protect” girls from trans people arrested for preying on young girl (March 18, via) "Eichorn is a co-sponsor of S.F. 2531, a bill that would allow anyone to accuse a female athlete in school sports of being transgender. Any player accused of being trans would then have to get a signed physician’s statement indicating the athlete’s sex that is based solely on their internal and external reproductive anatomy; their naturally occurring level of testosterone; and an analysis of the student’s chromosomes."

2. Lungfish (March 17) From xkcd.

3. Jury says Greenpeace owes hundreds of millions of dollars for Dakota pipeline protest (March 19) "In the lawsuit, Energy Transfer says Greenpeace participated in a publicity campaign that hurt the project and the firm's bottom line — allegedly raising the cost of construction by at least $300 million."

4. NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams return to Earth after 9 months stuck in space (March 19) Very happy to hear this! This is why I'm not going to space. I don't want to get stuck up there.

5. Ohio Appeals Court Rules Trans Care Is Healthcare, Strikes Down Ban For Trans Youth (March 19)

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. As always, if the news is stressing you out, you don't have to read everything. Instead, make sure you *do* something. Make friends with immigrants, protest, donate money, check on your trans friends, etc. Here's an action item, for Americans: Submit a public comment about the Removal of National Environmental Policy Act Implementing Regulations (via). Deadline is March 27. Here's some info on what the NEPA is: Trump Administration Seeks to Unravel NEPA 

2. Musk Said No One Has Died Since Aid Was Cut. That Isn’t True. (March 15) [content note: child death] "Another household kept alive by American aid was that of Jennifer Inyaa, a 35-year-old single mom, and her 5-year-old son, Evan Anzoo, both of them H.I.V.-positive. Last month, after the aid shutdown, Inyaa became sick and died, and a week later Evan died as well, according to David Iraa Simon, a community health worker who assisted them. Decisions by billionaires in Washington quickly cost the lives of a mother and her son."

3. I’m the Canadian who was detained by Ice for two weeks. It felt like I had been kidnapped (March 19, via) "Everything felt like it was meant to break you. Nothing was explained to us. I wasn’t given a phone call. We were locked in a room, no daylight, with no idea when we would get out."

4. 15 Ways You Can Fight for Democracy (March 19) 

5. March 17, 2025 (March 18) "The rejection of a government that works for all Americans in order to concentrate power in the executive branch appears to serve individuals like Musk, rather than the American people."

6. Protesters arrested after storming Trump Tower to demand release of Mahmoud Khalil (March 13, via) "'As Jews, we’re here today, mere hours before the holiday of Purim begins – a holiday where we honor Esther who used her voice to speak out and demand that the king not commit genocide,' the woman said in the video. 'Today we are using her same courage to speak out.'"

Related: ‘Rules aren’t clear anymore’: Trump crackdown on student protesters sends shock waves across US universities (March 18) "'This case sets a terrifying precedent for all students, particularly international students, particularly those on visas and green cards, but I think students in general should be horrified,' said Zaid, a student at the University of California, Berkeley, who asked that his full name not be used for fear of retribution."

7. First They Came for Columbia (March 14, via) "So far, America’s leading universities have remained virtually silent in the face of this authoritarian assault on institutions of higher education. That must change."

8. Justice Dept. says ending Louisiana petrochemical case helps ‘dismantle radical DEI programs’ (March 8) What?

9. Here are all the ways people are disappearing from government websites (March 19) "'And that's a tragedy because it's going to make our military weaker,' says Fulton. 'It's not just about getting rid of trans people and gay people and women and black folks. It's about getting rid of leaders. It's about disrupting units, taking people out of those units who are fully trained and fully qualified and replacing them with who? People who pass Trump's ideological test?'"

10. “Soaked in Animus”: Federal Judges Strikes Down Trump’s Trans Military Ban (March 19) "'Neither document contains any analysis nor cites any data,' Reyes writes. 'They pronounce that transgender persons are not honorable, truthful, or disciplined—but Defense counsel concedes that these assertions are pure conjecture.'"

Blogaround

1. Voyager 1 Is Back! NASA Spacecraft Safely Resumes All Science Observations (June 14, via) "After more than six months of long-distance troubleshooting—Voyager 1 is more than 15 billion miles from Earth, and any signal takes more than 22.5 hours to travel from our planet to the spacecraft—mission personnel have finally coaxed Voyager 1 to gather and send home data with all its remaining science instruments, according to a NASA statement." This is so cool!

2. Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic (June 14, via) What the actual ****?! 

If you followed my blog during zero-covid, you know I was really unhappy with how western news organizations were covering the situation in China. (See: WTF, CNN? and Wow, the Anti-China Bias in Western News Media.) This article is about a disinformation campaign that the US created in the Philippines, because China exported vaccines to the Philippines and other Asian countries. So, a different thing than what I was mad about, but it makes me wonder if the biased news reporting on China was more deliberate than I thought.

3. Environmental impact of LLMs (June 16) "This comparison is unimpressive on its face, because a bottle of water is very obviously not that much?"

Also from Siggy: Journal Club: Mental health bias on asexuality, non-monogamy, and BDSM (June 20) "This article summarizes prior research on mental health provider bias for three groups–aces, consensual non-monogamy (CNM) practitioners, and BDSM practitioners–and suggests avenues for future research."

4. US sues Adobe for hiding termination fees and making it difficult to cancel subscriptions (June 17, via) "The government says Adobe pushed consumers toward the 'annual paid monthly' subscription without informing them that canceling the plan in the first year would cost hundreds of dollars."

5. Thailand passes historic bill recognising marriage equality (June 18) Awesome!

6. China to include Australia in visa waiver programme, Premier Li Qiang says (June 18) Good news if you're Australian and want to visit China.

7. Gilead’s twice-yearly shot to prevent HIV succeeds in late-stage trial (June 20, via) "None of the roughly 2,000 women in the trial who received the lenacapavir shot contracted HIV." Great!

8. Maybe They Should Post The 10 Commandments In Mega-Churches? (June 20) [content note: child sexual abuse] "I’m not sure what even the slickest or sleaziest 'crisis management' firm can accomplish here."

9. Hey What If We Let People's Undocumented Husbands And Wives Stay In America? — Joe Biden (June 18) Support all immigrants!

10. Hundreds of Muslim pilgrims died in heat-stricken Hajj (June 21)

11. Pascal's Wager Triangle (June 17) "In contrast to Pascal's Wager Triangle, Pascal's Triangle Wager argues that maybe God wants you to draw a triangle of numbers where each one is the sum of the two numbers above it, so you probably should, just in case."

Blogaround

Hi readers, so recently I thought to myself "hmm is it strange that nobody has left any comments on my blog recently?" and I JUST REALIZED that actually people ARE commenting on my blog, but the email notifications have all been going to spam, oh my goodness. So sorry that I haven't read and replied to y'all's comments. I really do appreciate getting comments. I am working on going through and reading all the ones I missed.

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1. Antichrist Clarification Hotline (June 2, via) "Do I think my governor and both my United States Senators and my representative in my House of Representatives have succumbed to a spirit of antichrist when they tweet calls to prayer and Bible verses and hop on their official government social media accounts to target brave jurors in New York City? I do. I really do."

2. Disney Channel's Theme: A History Mystery (2022) 1-hour-31-minute youtube video. This is incredible. It's a deep dive into the branding of Disney Channel in the early 2000s. I watched a lot of Disney Channel back then- this is nostalgic and also it's a fascinating look at how history is preserved.

3. "Seldom Typical of Anything": An Ace Reading of Stefan Uccello's Blood Bond with Mercy Thompson (June 10) "Vampire bites resonate with ace experiences through their simultaneous intimacy and asymmetry. In its most classical form, a vampire bite is one-sided: the vampire desires and bites a living person who does not innately reciprocate those desires. This parallels the relationship that some aces have to sex."

4. What Do Google’s AI Answers Cost the Environment? (June 11, via) It's good that people are researching the environmental impact of generative AI and writing articles about it, but also, I don't really have any sense of how significant these things are. 

The article says, "She and her colleagues calculated that the large language model BLOOM emitted greenhouse gases equivalent to 19 kilograms of CO₂ per day of use, or the amount generated by driving 49 miles in an average gas-powered car. They also found that generating two images with AI could use as much energy as the average smartphone charge. Others have estimated in research posted on the preprint server arXiv.org that every 10 to 50 responses from ChatGPT running GPT-3 evaporate the equivalent of a bottle of water to cool the AI’s servers." So... is that bad? 19 kg of CO₂, is that a lot? I get that having more and more CO₂ in the atmosphere is bad because it causes climate change, but is 19 kg a big deal or not?

Same thing with the water for cooling the servers- how much of a big deal is that?

5. What Happens to a Dream Deferred? (June 6) "When did standing up for DACA stop being 'the right thing to do'?" Very concerned about this. I support all immigrants.

6. Supreme Court rejects challenge to abortion pill accessibility (June 13, via) "By a unanimous vote, the court said the anti-abortion doctors who brought the challenge had failed to show they had been harmed, as they do not prescribe the medication, and thus, essentially, had no skin in the game." Good news~

Blogaround

1. It’s Year-end Party Season For Chinese Companies — Do Workers Like Them? (January 15) Ha. Yeah, so this is a thing in China. Every company has a big party for Chinese New Year. Lots of fancy food, dance performances, "lucky draw" prizes, managers giving speeches about how great the company is, going around to everyone else's table to drink with them, it drags on and on for hours...

I remember at my first job in China, another international employee astutely asked, "Why do parties always need to have performances?" Why indeed.

At my current job, we have annual parties which are a lot more casual than that, and I really like that. Just rent a party room and hang out and eat, some people can play mah jong or do karaoke if they want, and maybe win "lucky draw" prizes, and that's it.

Also from Sixth Tone: For China’s Plus-Size Women, Going Out Is a Daily Struggle (January 19)

2. There’s A Version of A Christmas Carol Where Scrooge is an Attempted Rapist (December 27) "The tremendous irony is that this adaptation adds so much darkness and evil to the Scrooge story but does not add more meaning. A worse Scrooge does not produce greater redemption – it produces less."

Also from Dr. Laura Robinson: How Much Exodus is Too Much Exodus? The Prince of Egypt and The Ten Commandments (December 31) It's an analysis which compares the movies "The Prince of Egypt" and "The Ten Commandments." Oh I am so here for this.

3. Wheaton College restricts employees’ ability to state preferred pronouns (January 10, via) This is just ridiculous. What if your name is Alex or Sam or something? Also, using a trans person's correct name and pronouns is BARE MINIMUM level of human decency.

4. Michigan’s new anti-poverty effort: $7,500 for Flint moms, no strings attached (August 1) "Beginning in January, Flint moms will receive up to $7,500 to help boost their infant’s footing in the first year of life — a one-time $1,500 payment in mid-pregnancy, followed by $500 per month for the first year of a child’s life." Great news!

5. China to grant Ireland unilateral visa-free treatment (January 17) and Swiss travellers to be allowed to enter China visa-free (January 16)

I tried to find a source from a more well-known western news outlet, but I only found this one from Bloomberg and it's paywalled: China Has Scrapped Visa Requirements for 11 Nations in Past Year (January 18)

Very interesting! China is very intentionally trying to improve relations with other countries, and encourage tourism. This is good news, from my perspective as an immigrant in China, but also I'm American so none of these new policies actually apply to me directly.

6. A few articles on Biden not taking a stand against genocide in Gaza:

Why is Biden engaging in disinformation on Gaza? (January 10) [content note: infant death]

Joe Biden Wants You To Believe He Is Opposed To Genocide In Gaza (January 17) "But his statement, which emphasized the Israeli deaths on October 7 and the hostages who remain in Hamas’s custody, made no mention of the 10,000 dead Palestinian children and what they never should have gone through."

US Democrats push Biden administration over civilian toll in Israel's Gaza campaign (January 20)

7. Enforcing the Law to Disqualify a Violent Insurrectionist Is Good, Actually (January 16) "Even if you wish really hard, Clarence Thomas is not going to recuse himself from this case; Donald Trump is not going to stop claiming everything is rigged because the liberal justices joined an unanimous opinion; and Senate Democrats are not going to betray every single warning they’ve raised about Trump being a threat to democracy for the past eight years to give him a special exemption from the Constitution’s insurrection ban. Donald Trump exists in the real world, not a law school exam hypothetical, and strategies for opposing him need to be rooted in reality."

Also on that topic: Catching up on Donald Trump (January 8) "But whether or not the Constitution bans him from holding office again is a question of law, not politics. The whole point of including things in the Constitution is to take them out of politics. If constitutional provisions are subject to politics, then all the rights the Constitution supposedly gives us are up for grabs. Your right to do any particular thing will depend not on the Constitution, but on whether your action is politically popular."

8. In Juneau, Alaska, a carbon offset project that’s actually working (January 4) "In an effort to mitigate a portion of that CO2, some of those going whale watching or visiting the glacier are asked to pay a few dollars to counter their emissions. The money goes to the Alaska Carbon Reduction Fund, but instead of buying credits from some distant (and questionable) offset project, the nonprofit spends that cash installing heat pumps, targeting residents like Roberts who rely upon oil heating systems."

Blogaround

1. 2024 Arrives With A Sudoku Miracle (January 1) 1-hour-54-minute sudoku solve video. Wow, this ruleset is very complicated. I'm super impressed by Simon solving it.

2. If Trump Is Not an Insurrectionist, What Is He? (January 5) "The unspoken assumption behind the idea that Trump should be allowed on the ballot and that the public should have the chance to choose for or against him yet again is that he will respect the voice of the electorate. But we know this isn’t true. It wasn’t true after the 2016 presidential election — when, after winning the Electoral College, he sought to delegitimize the popular vote victory of his opponent as fraud — and it was put into stark relief after the 2020 presidential election."

3. 'Jane Roe' is anonymous no more. The very public fight against abortion bans in 2023 (December 31) "Now, it's different. 'Women and pregnant people in this country are so angry and so shocked at the treatment that they are receiving at the hands of the state that they have been compelled to tell their stories,' she says."

4. UN experts alarmed by Alabama plan to kill prisoner using untried gas method (January 3) [content note: death penalty] "In a joint statement released on Wednesday in Geneva, the four independent UN monitors call on the US government and Alabama to halt the execution scheduled for 25 January. They accuse the state of rushing ahead with an experimental execution technique that could inflict grave suffering on Smith in violation of the international ban on torture."

5. Epiphany: One Of Us (January 7) "And then God Almighty — God who laid the foundation of the earth, who determined its measurements when the morning stars sang together, God who commands the morning and causes the dawn to know its place, God who bound the chains of the Pleiades and loosed the cords of Orion — wept."

6. WHO Guideline for complementary feeding of infants and young children 6-23 months of age (October 16) New guidelines released by the World Health Organization, about how to feed babies, and WOW there are big changes here! This link has the very long report documents, I will try to see if I can find a shorter summary. But just to give you an idea of how big the changes are: They are now saying that babies can start having cow milk rather than formula at 6 months old (used to be 12 months!). Still saying breastfeeding is best, and recommending that you continue to breastfeed until the baby is 2 years old, and beyond, but wow big changes in the guidelines around formula.

7. Changing Course: Why More Chinese Students Are Eyeing Southeast Asia (January 9) "For instance, in Thailand, Chinese students comprised the majority of international students in 2022, with 21,419 enrollments, a 130% increase from 9,329 in 2012."

8. Who Gets to Be a Person? (January 4) [content note: miscarriage] "In pursuing the case, prosecutors deny Watts the full expression of her grief. They deny her the right to feel pain and shock at her miscarriage, to act like a traumatized human being. Even if the grand jury does not indict her, she has experienced hell."

And an update on that: Ohio woman who miscarried at home won’t be charged with corpse abuse, grand jury decides (January 12)

The main thing here is... a miscarriage at 22 weeks, that's horrible. That's devastating, to lose the baby when you're already 22 weeks into the pregnancy. Watts needs compassion and support; she needs to be allowed to grieve, because that's a terrible thing to go through. But instead she was treated like she had done something bad to her baby.

9. More delays for NASA’s astronaut moonshots, with crew landing off until 2026 (January 10)

10. Do pregnant women have a right to urgent medical care? No, according to a US court (January 10) This is just BONKERS. Doesn't the Texas abortion ban supposedly have an exception for "life of the mother"? So why is Texas now arguing that ERs shouldn't be required to do abortions which are necessary to save pregnant people's lives? So that whole "exception for life of the mother" thing was totally fake, then?

11. In Hottest Year On Record, US Cut Carbon Emissions. Good Start! (January 11)

12. China rolls out new measures to facilitate foreigners’ visit to country (January 11) I saw this in the news, but I don't understand what it actually means in practical terms (like, I'm an immigrant in China, is this gonna benefit me?). We'll see.

Blogaround

1. First Amendment protects satanic display in Iowa, but GOP lawmaker took abuse for saying so (December 12, via) Yessss, Representative Dunwell is saying that he *personally* does not like the satanic display in the Iowa State Capitol, but by law we have freedom of religion and that means the government cannot and should not decide which religious displays are okay and which are not. This is my favorite part: "The display is an inanimate object that has no real power in and of itself. We have nothing to fear."

And then an update on that: If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine (December 15) 

2. Laudatory categories (December 13) "In politics, people are quite committed to the idea that their own political ideology is the good stuff, and the stuff that isn’t good doesn’t count."

3. Real vs Artificial Christmas Trees: Which is Killing Us Faster? (December 15) "Overall, those are the reasons why most sustainability experts say that a real tree is better for the environment than a plastic tree." Yes, really great to have actual numbers to attach to questions like this. I think people's tendency is to think "real trees are wasteful because you only use it a few weeks and then throw it away, artificial trees are sustainable" but that's not *automatically* true- you have to do the math. 

I saw a similar site recently which calculates whether your carbon footprint is bigger for using disposable or cloth diapers for your baby- it depends on a lot of factors! Reusable is not automatically "more sustainable."

And I've also seen discussion in some mom groups about "I bought a big sack with my child's name on it, to put her Christmas gifts in so we don't need wrapping paper. Wrapping paper is so wasteful." Well, I don't know if buying a bag that you use for many years is actually better or not- you have to do the math. Depends on how many years you use it, and how much wrapping paper (and what kind of wrapping paper) you would have used otherwise, etc.

4. Meghan Trainor gets candid about painful intercourse and vaginismus diagnosis (April 27) "I thought that every woman walking around was always in pain during and after sex. I was like, ‘Doc, are you telling me that I could have sex and not feel a single bit of pain?’" Oh my goodness that's so real. 

I missed this news when it happened back in April. Glad to see more people are talking about vaginismus.

Also this: Meghan Trainor’s comments about painful sex helped me realise I had vaginismus (May 10)

5. Greedflation: corporate profiteering ‘significantly’ boosted global prices, study shows (December 7, via) Recently I've heard people talking about "greedflation" which means companies are raising prices and causing inflation just because they want more profits and not because their costs are actually higher- and to me this explanation doesn't add up. Wouldn't the market correct for that? If that's really what's happening, wouldn't it create an opportunity for other companies to swoop in and set their own prices more reasonably, and attract all the customers away from these "greedflation" companies? So I didn't really believe that "greedflation" was a real thing.

(Also this seems to be a US thing. It's not happening in China. So I don't have direct experience about it.)

Well this article has some actual data to back it up. Specifically, the actual numbers show that profits have grown much faster than wages and other business costs. So, I guess there is something to this "greedflation" concept- though I still feel like there's a lot that doesn't add up. Why is this happening *now* specifically, when surely companies would always like to raise their prices and get higher profits? (Like this is talked about as if suddenly these companies had this amazing idea that they had totally never thought of before, "hey let's raise prices for no reason, just because we want to.") And why isn't the market fixing the problem on its own?

(Maybe in the long run, the market will fix this, but in the short term this happened because of the societal disruption caused by the pandemic?)

6. How Can This Sudoku Be Real? (December 11) 1-hour-19-minute sudoku solve video. Wow, very interesting ruleset. I like this one because you have to spend a lot of time thinking about what's even possible under the ruleset, before you can even start the sudoku.

7. More Chinese Fathers Helping, Yet ‘Widowed Parenting’ Persists (December 18) "The data shows a significant disparity in caregiving roles: About 80% of children are dropped off and picked up from school by their mothers or grandparents, while only 7% primarily receive this support from their fathers."

And these ones also from Sixth Tone:

Amid Rescue Efforts in Quake-Hit Gansu, a Race Against Time and Cold (December 19) 

Meet Rural China’s ‘Wonder Woman’ (December 19)

8. The Red State Brain Drain Isn’t Coming. It’s Happening Right Now. (November 22, via) "Republican-dominated states are pushing out young professionals by enacting extremist conservative policies. Abortion restrictions are the most sweeping example, but state laws restricting everything from academic tenure to transgender health care to the teaching of 'divisive concepts' about race are making these states uncongenial to knowledge workers."

9. Jonathan Majors Guilty of Harassment and Assault (December 18) [content note: domestic violence] He's the actor that plays the villain Kang in the Marvel Cinematic Universe- but, not anymore.

10. Thailand to legalize same-sex marriage (December 13, via) Great!

11. They just won a $148M verdict against Giuliani. Now they’re suing him again. (December 18) "Three days after a jury delivered the massive decision over Giuliani’s false claims that the pair engaged in fraud in the 2020 election, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss filed a new lawsuit Monday seeking to block Giuliani from repeating those allegations — as he repeatedly did during and after last week’s trial."

12. A nation where there is no refuge to seek (December 19) "The sick and cynical strategy that opponents of reproductive freedom will use is definitely going to be to blame doctors for failing to perform medically necessary abortions, while refusing to at any point withdraw the threat of prosecution."

Also from Lawyers, Guns, Money: Exceptions to abortion bans are a fraud (December 12) "'I think it’s the clearest message you could have possibly received from an anti-abortion state that they never meant the medical exemption to mean anything at all,' said Duane."

Blogaround

1. Dig All Day in the Hot Sun: Prison Labor & the Ethos of Productive Suffering at Camp Green Lake [Meta] (2020) "More broadly, this also positions Camp Green Lake's mission as deliberately individualistic, in opposition to collaboration and teamwork. The hard work of hole digging needs to be undertaken alone in order for prisoners to supposedly 'learn their lesson.' This means that the 'lesson' they're supposed to be learning is explicitly not anything to do with cooperation, coordination, or learning how to get along and work well with others. Otherwise, if these skills/values were compatible with 'building character' as the authorities understand it, then there should have been no reason to object to prisoners working together to dig the same amount of holes." (An analysis of the movie "Holes.")

Also from Coyote (osteophage): The Violence of Fate (or, How To Tell the True Kind of Lie) [Meta] (2022) "Reflecting on this helps to articulate my understanding of the concept of 'fate.' Becoming legible in terms of 'fate' requires highlighting that an outcome is unresponsive to any attempt to change it. It is something that happens to matter what you do, what you choose, or what you want. It is a way of conceptualizing events to say that your will—desire, permission, consent—fundamentally does not matter. In this way, it requires the capacity for violence."

2. ‘Too much to bear.’ The incalculable emotional toll of the Maui wildfires (August 19) "At least 114 people have died in the western Maui wildfires and more than 1,000 people remain missing."

3. This tweet: 

I was talking to my dad about those 1-10 pain scales they use at doctors' offices and how they don't really work and my dad, an engineer, said they should have a standardized needle they stab you with as a benchmark and tell you, "This is 5."

— Abby Denton's favorite Digimon is Koemon (@mizabitha) August 18, 2023

Wow I love the way this guy thinks. Remember when I blogged about the 1-10 pain scale and what it actually means?

4. The Queer Vibes of Guardians of the Galaxy (August 19) 2-hour-15-minute video from Jessie Gender. "I relate to [Nebula] so hard as a trans person, because both of us have had our bodies literally forced to be something that we didn't want them to be."

Also, I love this song from "Guardians of the Galaxy 3": Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3 - Dog Days Are Over 

5. A Brand New Puzzle Type - This Is LOVELY (August 12) 31-minute video. Wow this is a cool little puzzle. I didn't understand the rules at first- I thought you were supposed to put a number in every box, like a fillomino (and that wouldn't be possible). No, you don't put any numbers in at all, it's just about dividing the grid up into regions such that the given numbers are in valid places.

6. Meet ‘creation care,’ the evangelical substitute for environmental activism (July 13) "As part of their self-declared role as ambassadors, evangelicals pretend that Jesus is very nicely allowing his most beloved and trusted followers to manage things for him in his absence, like parents allowing small children to help with light housework so they feel involved."

The Slacktivist has also written about how "creation care" is seen as "controversial" in evangelical culture, because it's "liberal" or something:
The Late Great Planet Earth (2017)
Climate change (2005)

When I was an evangelical... typically nobody discussed the question "should we protect the environment?" in a serious way, but there was a lot of mocking of environmentalists- which taught me that Christians aren't supposed to care about the environment, but never gave any reasons why. There was 1 time though, I was at an InterVarsity conference, and we did a bible study about why "creation care" is important. And a lot of us kind of responded like "I always thought Christians shouldn't care about this, but... but yeah, of course we should protect the environment." Like if you actually think about it, there aren't any good arguments to support "let's trash the planet, it doesn't matter" even though we all had been implicitly taught that's what Christians are supposed to believe. (Possible arguments given are: Jesus is going to come back any minute now, so no need to care about the future; the bible says the world was perfect when God created it, and just getting worse and worse since then, and there's nothing we can do to change that; climate change isn't real. None of these arguments really work, though.)

7. Customers wing it, as fried chicken store drums up crowd (August 20) A Popeye's restaurant opened in Shanghai.

8. What put Hurricane Hilary on a collision course with California? (August 20, via) "For at least the last 165 years, these conditions have kept California hurricane-free, experts say."

Blogaround

1. My 2023 Reader Survey is open until June 19~

2. How Mae Martin Is Reshaping the Way Trans/Non-Binary Individuals Are Viewed in Comedy (April 21) Cool!

3. The Politics of Nothing: Visualizing Wasteland and Restoration in Terra Nil (June 4) "As I wrote about in Who Gets To See The Future, arid lands have long been viewed by colonizers as 'wasteland,' and this is a view with devastating ecological implications. To see land as 'wasteland' is to see it as worthless and disposable. In practice, this means viewing it as an always-appropriate site for everything from uranium mining to nuclear detonation."

4. How Scooters Caught China’s Urban Planners Off Guard (June 6) "In 2022, there were 350 million scooters in use in China, compared to approximately 230 million private cars. Some industry insiders believe that the true number of scooters may be much higher, as smaller cities rarely bother to register the vehicles even though they are one of the main forms of local transportation in the country’s vast interior."

5. Stack Overflow Moderators Are Striking to Stop Garbage AI Content From Flooding the Site (June 5)

And also these posts, on the Stack Exchange site itself:
Moderation strike
Moderation Strike: Stack Overflow, Inc. cannot consistently ignore, mistreat, and malign its volunteers "Content posted without innate domain understanding, but written in a 'smart' way, is dangerous to the integrity of the Stack Exchange network’s goal: To be a repository of high-quality question-and-answer content."

6. Pat Robertson, broadcaster who helped make religion central to GOP politics, dies at 93 (June 8)

7. “Love is love” (June 8) "In my experience, some of the most passionate haters of 'love is love' are aromantics. After all, all the stereotypes of loveless people are laid directly on their doorstep. 'Love is love' is used to legitimize queer love, but at the cost of tying legitimacy to love."

Blogaround

1. Thank you to the readers who have taken my 2023 Reader Survey! If you haven't taken it yet, go ahead and do it. (Survey will be open until June 19.)

2. The veil of gender ignorance (May 19) "To correctly follow the veil of ignorance argument, we ought to imagine ourselves not as ourselves, but as some random young’un who may or may not be like who we are in actuality. So we would have to imagine ourselves as many different things: as cis, as trans, as straight, as gay, as ace, etc. If you grew up today, maybe you would believe you were trans, and maybe you would also be trans."

3. The Shanghai Museum Keeping Memories Of Jewish Refugees Alive (May 18) An important bit of history. (I visited this museum in 2018, here are my photos.)

4. Celebrating #Affirming Sunday (May 16) Very cool- some churches are celebrating "Affirming Sunday" on June 4, the first Sunday of Pride Month.

5. Ecological Stations of the Cross: #6 – The Ruthless Death of Eco-Crucifixion (April 7) "On Good Friday, we remember the ruthless death Jesus endured in the crucifixion.  This year, 43,000 animals died a ruthless death from a toxic train derailment in Ohio.  It’s just one more example of eco-crucifixion."

6. May Anti-Trans Legislative Risk Map (May 20, via) "Every day, I’ve gotten messages from worried people wondering how they are supposed to assess their risk of staying in their home state. The messages range from parents of trans youth wondering if their children will be taken from them to trans teachers wondering if their jobs will be safe in coming years. Sometimes people just want to know if there is a safer state they can move to nearby."

7. Trans Teen Hatches Nefarious Plot To Undergo Years Of Medical Treatments And Counseling To Win At Swimming (May 16, via) "'It’s oh, so simple: several years of sweet-talking medical professionals, receiving hormone therapies, and enduring complex gender-affirming surgeries, and that swimming trophy will be mine!' said the 17-year-old high school senior, who provided a step-by-step account of her knavish conspiracy to take fourth or even third place in a high school or Division III collegiate swimming competition by transitioning to a female identity."

8. Rudy Giuliani accused of sexual harassment by ex-employee (May 16) [content note: sexual assault] Wow this is bad.

Blogaround

1. The shredder of history and the oldest song in the world (May 2) "To reach the present day, it must be the case that no person or thing destroyed the document—not just in its own time, but also in every year, every decade, every century that followed."

2. This post is about the pruning process I associate with trying to manage the risk of escalation in a conflict. (May 8) "If I'm concerned about escalation in a tense conversation online, sometimes I'll go back over my message draft and try to prune down the number of provocations."

3. Daddy’s Little Interpreter (May 10) Video about a girl in China who helps her deaf father by acting as a sign language interpreter at his nail salon.

And this article, also from Sixth Tone: A Tale of Two Giants: How India’s and China’s Demographics Differ (May 9) "Additionally, India has a much younger population than China. While the median age in China in 2023 is around 39, India’s is just above 28."

Also from Sixth Tone: US Returns Two Stolen Relics Worth $3.5 Million to China (May 11) "According to the district attorney’s office, thieves used saws to cut the antiquities from a tomb in China in the 1990s then smuggled them out of the country. They were then loaned to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for more than two decades by private collector Shelby White, with one of the two never exhibited, 'never cleaned and … caked with dirt.'"

4. LinkedIn to cut 716 jobs and shut its China app amid ‘challenging’ economic climate (May 9) 

5. Revealed: more than 90% of rainforest carbon offsets by biggest certifier are worthless, analysis shows (January 18, via) "The research into Verra, the world’s leading carbon standard for the rapidly growing $2bn (£1.6bn) voluntary offsets market, has found that, based on analysis of a significant percentage of the projects, more than 90% of their rainforest offset credits – among the most commonly used by companies – are likely to be 'phantom credits' and do not represent genuine carbon reductions."

6. The Meltdown of a Gay Bank (March 31, via) "Curtis said there was a big new funding round to toast — but first there were team-building exercises, and they quickly got uncomfortable. For a 'speed-dating' session, managers handed out white labels and instructed employees to fill in their identity, which led to workers wearing stickers that read 'formerly homeless' and 'sexual assault survivor.'"

7. Brief interludes with hideous men (part 1) (May 11) [content note: John Piper] "A man like that is not going to see her as a stranger in need of simple assistance but as a bit player in his own personal dirty joke, or porno, or horror movie, or treatise on divinely ordained gender roles — or even some combination of all of those."

8. Deliver Us (Opening Song) | The Prince of Egypt | TUNE. I've been listening to the soundtrack from "The Prince of Egypt", as one does.

And here's the same song in Mandarin Chinese.

9. Girlhood, Purity and Religious Trauma: A Taylor Swift Study (May 2) 42-minute video which analyzes Taylor's Swift's song "Would've, Could've, Should've", which is (apparently) about her relationship with John Mayer when she was 19 and he was 32.

Blogaround

1. Not Your Mom’s Trans 101 (2010) "'Cisgender' is the term for people who have no issue with the gender that they were assigned at birth. For whatever reason, they are able to live somewhat comfortably within the gender in which they have been cast. No one really knows why so many people are capable of fitting into such arbitrary categories."

2. “The sub is the one who’s really in control” (2016) "And in this style of response, instead of affirming that not being in charge is okay and delving into the ethics of hierarchy, the approach is to bizarrely abandon D/s practitioners’ habitual language (in which dramatic power-loss is fine and okay and also sexy) to, suddenly, define the sub as a dom, which makes it okay because it’s understood that being a dom is best."

Reminds me of Christians who say "I don't have enough faith to be an atheist"- like, uh just a minute ago weren't you talking about faith like it's a good thing? And now suddenly you're saying atheists have more faith than you but that's bad?

3. ‘No Way Out’: Why China’s Mortgage Strikers Refuse to Back Down (November 29) This is wild to me- buyers paying mortgages on apartments that are still under construction, and then the building company stops construction, with no timeline on when the apartments will actually be built, so the buyers stop paying their mortgages, and then the financial system acts like the buyers are the bad guy here?

4. New era begins with China’s launch of crewed mission to its space station (November 30) Cool!

5. Jiang Zemin: Former Chinese leader dies aged 96 (December 1)

6. The Svalbard seed vault: A survival bunker for civilization (December 1) "What if we wanted to reconstruct the entire planet as a unified survival village, rather than a jostling sprawl of rivalrous nations? How would we re-engineer civilization to be resilient against catastrophe?"

7. The longtermism that works—and the kind that doesn’t (November 25) "The problems begin when we presume that what imaginary future people, along with people elsewhere in the world today, really need is someone else to make decisions for them."

And this, linked in that article: Best intentions: When disaster relief brings anything but relief (2017) "There was no time for disaster workers to sort and clean old clothes. So the contributions just sat and rotted."

8. Cryptocurrency's Dirty Secret: Energy Consumption (May 4) "Perhaps even more concerning, some companies in the U.S. are now bringing retired power plants back online in order to cash in on crypto."

9. Senate passes bill to protect same-sex and interracial marriage in landmark vote (November 30) "While the bill would not set a national requirement that all states must legalize same-sex marriage, it would require individual states to recognize another state’s legal marriage. So, in the event the Supreme Court might overturn its 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision that legalized same-sex marriage, a state could still pass a law to ban same-sex marriage, but that state would be required to recognize a same-sex marriage from another state."

Also interesting how this bill is called the Respect for Marriage Act, but laws that stopped same-sex couples from getting married have also had similar names (for example, the Defense of Marriage Act). So, here's a question: Do you respect/defend/protect marriage by limiting it or expanding it? 

And, on the topic of limiting it- I also think there are certain situations where a couple should not legally be allowed to marry (for example, an underage girl getting married to an older man)- but I don't think of that as "protecting marriage" in some big abstract sense. 

Blogaround

1. All 81 Sudoku Digits Completed In 14 seconds! (2021) A 33-minute sudoku solve video- in this one, Simon fills in the ENTIRE grid with colors before even getting 1 digit. I love it.

2. Where did these guys come from? (September 16) "I’ve never heard a sermon on Ezra 10:15. There should be sermons on this passage. Lots of them. It should be the stuff of altar calls and bonfire dedications reserved for the last night of Bible camp or youth-group retreats. This should be one of those verses that appears on T-shirts and bumper stickers, inspirational posters and tattoos. It should’ve been one of the verses that Tim Tebow penciled into his eye-black."

(And, related to that, here's the Ezra fanfic I wrote a while ago: Love Wins (an Ezra fanfic))

3. Gray-Ace & Gray-Aro Survey: Results (September 16)

4. Mainland China reports first imported monkeypox case (September 17) 

5. “My Chains Are Gone”: When White Evangelicals Sing About Slavery (2021) "This is perhaps the central irony of White evangelicalism’s continued use of these images: those whose theology leads them to sing the most of enslavement and freedom as the central metaphor of Christian salvation are simultaneously the group most likely to downplay the significance of slavery’s lasting impact on the people of the United States and promote (or at least not oppose) policies that do harm to African Americans—the one group that knows the ongoing injustice and traumatic effects of enslavement."

6. Parents shocked that Christian school will kick out openly LGBTQ students (September 19) "You almost want to pat her on the head for being such a decent human being that she couldn’t imagine a Christian school doing anything this monstrous."

7. Is Joe Biden The Best President Unions Have Ever Had? And If Not, Why Not? (September 20) "The difference between Biden and most other presidents, though, is that through most of American history, the actions of presidents have been to just crush the union. In 1877, railroads forced workers out on strike in West Virginia after reducing pay for the second time in a year; soon the Great Railroad Strike swept the nation as a general protest against the dominance of the railroads over the lives of Americans — polluting them, killing them on the job and in the cities, dominating the economy through corruption, laying them off. President Rutherford B. Hayes sent the military to crush it, turning a nonviolent strike into a bloodbath."

8. The Cruel Story Behind The 'Reverse Freedom Rides' (2020) "Fuming over the civil rights movement, Southern segregationists had concocted a way to retaliate against Northern liberals. In 1962, they tricked about 200 African Americans from the South into moving north. The idea was simple: When large numbers of African Americans showed up on Northern doorsteps, Northerners would not be able to accommodate them. They would not want them, and their hypocrisy would be exposed." Relevant now because of what Texas and Florida are doing to immigrants.

Lying to people, transporting them hundreds of miles, and just leaving them there, to make a political point. Aren't these Republican politicians worried about going to hell?

DeSantis claims credit for sending 2 planes carrying migrants to Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts (September 15) "'Our island jumped into action putting together 50 beds, giving everyone a good meal, providing a play area for the children, making sure people have the healthcare and support they need,' Fernandes wrote in another tweet. 'We are a community that comes together to support immigrants.'"

Migrants on Martha's Vineyard flight say they were told they were going to Boston (September 15)

I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you cared for me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.

9. Patagonia company owner gives it away to Planet Earth in perpetuity (September 16) 

10. On the Operating Table, Supply Chain Issues Can Be Life or Death (September 20) "Five cardiovascular surgeons across China told Sixth Tone that the country has been suffering a shortage of artificial grafts since early in the pandemic, aggravated by the two-month lockdown of Shanghai."

11. Data polls and money polls (September 21) "Every other month, at least, we get news articles and commentary fretting about some recent poll showing that some allegedly worrisome percentage of some group either believes in something apparently anathema or else refuses to believe in something that’s supposed to be elementary and fundamental for that group."

12. Died: Ron Sider, Evangelical Who Pushed for Social Action (July 28) "For nearly 50 years, Sider called evangelicals to care about the poor and see poverty as a moral issue. He argued for an expanded understanding of sin to include social structures that perpetuate inequality and injustice, and urged Christians to see how their salvation should compel them to care for their neighbors."

Blogaround

1. A whirlwind history of asexual communities (August 7) Very cool.

2. Why The Rebelution’s Modesty Survey Was A Bad Idea: Shaney Irene’s Story (2013) "The survey allowed little to no room for the idea that, 'Hey, maybe just because the majority of guys think a girl is being immodest, doesn’t mean she actually is.'" PREACH!

I'm sure I've linked to this on my blog before, but I just came across it again and had to share it again because The Modesty Survey had a big effect on me back when I was so pure and repressed and on fire for God. (It has since been removed from The Rebelution's website.)

I remember reading carefully through all the stats, very concerned, putting numbers into an excel sheet to try to sort out which of the questions had a high enough rate of guys saying "this is a stumbling block" that I would need to take them into account and change my own clothing-wearing habits. 

Thinking about it now, if I came across something like that now- where a bunch of boys give their opinions on what clothes girls should or shouldn't wear- I'd be like "What on earth? This is none of their damn business" and not even bother to read through it. And actually, I remember back then, when I had so much confusion and anxiety over it, over the idea that I had to let this minefield of impossible standards control my clothing choices every morning, and also boys are all raping me in their minds- I remember I shared a link to The Modesty Survey on Facebook, as an attempt to find someone who would leave a comment and help me make sense of it. And someone did comment- she said it made her so angry that apparently people believe women's clothing is to blame for men's behavior. She called it "rape culture." This was an acquaintance that I had argued with A LOT about LGBT issues (because, back then, I was doing the whole "hate the sin, love the sinner" thing, like, of course we love gay people, but it would be unloving not to tell them that "acting on it" is a sin). I remember being so confused by her comment- rape culture? what? but Christians believe you can't do anything sexual at all! so of course we believe rape is a sin!- but I mean, yeah, she was right, it's rape culture.

Also, I always felt it was COMPLETELY ABSURD when Christians who believed in the concept of modesty (ie, "you need to cover up, to help the boys") were not on board with The Modesty Survey. (They said it was "too extreme" or they tried to add disclaimers that said "women should be modest so as not to cause men to lust, but that doesn't mean we should put men in charge of dictating what women should wear" like what on earth, that's EXACTLY what it means.) Like, the very thing that these Christian role models are teaching girls is "oh you just can't understand what it's like for boys, because you're girls, that's completely different, oh but if only you knew, if only you could understand how hard it is for boys, how much they STRUGGLE with LUST, and how boys consume and sexualize girls who dress like that" like OBVIOUSLY if you buy into that, the logical thing to do is to make a survey and ask a bunch of boys detailed questions about what does or doesn't "cause them to stumble." Like, wow, what an incredibly useful resource, if you buy into that ideology. That is exactly the set of the statistics you would want to have, if you truly believe that "girls need to cover up, so they don't cause a brother in Christ to stumble."

3. 3 Doors Down - Here Without You (Official Music Video) (2009) A song for those of us- like me- who are homesick.

4. All Rainwater is Unsafe to Drink According to Study (August 15)

5. 太卷了！为拍上海外滩的环金串月，摄影爱好者前一天晚上就抢占好机位... ["Wow! To get a photo of the moon passing through the eye of a Shanghai skyscraper, photographers claim their spots the night before..."] (August 14) This is incredible! The article is in Chinese, but it has a lot of pictures, so don't be intimidated. (Although, uh, I am not sure if the pictures will load if you're outside of China...)

Basically, it's about this:

A full moon is visible through the trapezoidal hole at the top of Shanghai's "bottle-opener building," A tall post from another skyscraper is in front of the moon, looking like the pupil slit of an eye.

(Here it is on douyin too.)

Shanghai's Eye of Sauron.

6. The Feds are investigating the Southern Baptist Convention for sexual abuse (August 13) GOOD. FINALLY. Like Jesus said, there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed.

7. Salman Rushdie will never be safe. That’s what fundamentalism is. (August 12) "Thirty-three years have passed since Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini pronounced a fatwa (an Islamic legal ruling) demanding Rushdie’s execution for the nonsensical crime of blasphemy."

8. Kindergartner kicked out of Baptist school after adoption by lesbian couple (August 11) "You’ll never see a news story about a Christian school kicking out a child because her parents spent a weekend gambling in Vegas. But if that child has loving same-sex parents, it’s a five-alarm fire."

9. The ‘blasphemy’ of Beth Moore crushing on Jesus because of grapes (August 19) This is... wow, this is bonkers. Imagine getting all bent out of shape and throwing around accusations of "blasphemy" just because someone tweeted about having a crush on Jesus.

Like on the one hand, I'm fascinated, and I want to explore the nuances of this. Evangelical Christians constantly sing songs about how we love Jesus so much, and it's a well-known running joke that you can play "is this a song about your boyfriend, or Jesus?" with A LOT of popular Christian music. But the moment Beth Moore uses the word "crush", suddenly that gets a different response- perhaps because "crush" is an explicitly romantic word, and maybe has some connotations of being something that happens to silly teenage girls. 

Being in the asexual community, I think a lot about the different kinds of attraction (sexual attraction, romantic attraction, sensual attraction, aesthetic attraction, etc), and now I'm wondering, which ones are "okay" ways to be "attracted" to Jesus? What would that even mean, using "attraction" in a religious context?

But on the other hand, I'm like, lol patriarchal Christian men are mad about something, what else is new, it's not worth my time to care.

Blogaround

1. How do you live in one of the world's busiest cities, but you cannot see? (August 11) It's about Yin Tianbao and Yin Tianyou, blind twins living in Shanghai. One interesting thing I want to point out- the article mentioned "tactile paving" (and you can see it in the video too). Every sidewalk in China (okay probably not "every", but seems that way in my experience) has this- it's a path of tiles about 1 foot wide, with long bumps/grooves you can feel with your feet, and the intention is for blind people to be able to follow this path. It helps them figure out where the sidewalk turns and things like that. 

But I have seen this badly designed A LOT. Like, the path runs right into a tree or something. And the article mentions that the tactile paving is often not useful for them because the sidewalks are blocked with bicycles and things like that.

But anyway, I think the tactile paving, if it's done well, is a great example of a small thing that society can do that can help disabled people a lot. I remember being so curious about it when I first came to China and I had no idea why all the sidewalks were like that.

You can see the tactile paving on the ground in this photo in a subway station. At the base of the stairs, the pattern of the tactile paving is different.

2. Single women's reproductive rights remain frozen in regulations (August 11) So in China, unmarried women don't legally have the right to freeze their eggs. Like, WTF?????? And there are various other things in China that bizarrely require a marriage license as part of the process to get them. NOT COOL.

(Being pro-choice should be about a lot more than just abortion. Being pro-choice means unmarried women should have the same rights to freeze their eggs as married women do.)

3. Christians, Stop Using ‘Pharisee’ as an Insult. (August 11) "Our modern associations of Pharisees with hypocrisy owes far more to millennia of anti-Jewish rhetoric than it does to Jesus."

4. ‘It’s hard to hear them celebrating’—church musicians after Roe’s demise (August 6) "Is anyone else having a really hard time justifying working at a church right now? I work at one part time as a choir director for some additional income and it was really hard to sit there today and hear them celebrating my rights being taken away with the most recent Supreme Court ruling."

5. A Texas church illegally performed ‘Hamilton’ to spread anti-gay bigotry (August 6) Wow this is WILD. A church put on a whole production of "Hamilton"- like, wow, they must have put a lot of work into this- but with some parts slightly edited so it's about Hamilton finding Jesus or whatever. And then when the internet found out about it and people were mad, they made up some confusing lies about how oh we cancelled it, oh no actually we didn't, oh actually we have permission from the Hamilton team to put this show on, etc etc etc.

But I believe that the headline of this article- which says the church did it "to spread anti-gay bigotry" really misrepresents the situation. It seems that the only anti-gay part of it was, after the show was over, a pastor came on stage to talk to the audience and said "maybe you're struggling with homosexuality" along with a list of other things that one might be "struggling with." As far as I can tell, that was the only anti-gay part of it. And that's certainly bad, don't get me wrong, it's bad to view being gay as a problem that one struggles with- but that's just a completely normal thing that you always hear in evangelical churches. It's like, you barely even notice it, because it's so normal in that churchy culture. This church did NOT put on the Hamilton play "to spread anti-gay bigotry." They certainly are anti-gay bigots, and you see that in this pastor's words after the show, but it's because that's just who they are all the time, not because they specifically intended that that's what their performance would be *about*.

So yeah, feels very weird to me that the article focuses on that one little part, when there's so much other wrongness that this church is also doing.

6. How I Pray {Part One} (August 10) "In my view, when we pray, we are joining our energy with this flow." I don't personally believe this, but I'm sharing it here because it's nice to see different ways that Christians conceptualize prayer. I wasn't familiar with this idea before.

7. Take the Earth as your lover: Exploring ecosexuality (August 8) [content note: this is about a sexual kink] Yeah so, this is not for me, my eyebrows climbed higher and higher as I read it (as I told myself "your kink is not my kink, but your kink is okay"). But I'm sharing it here because it actually gives very concrete examples of what it means by "ecosexuality." I feel like I have seen articles about things sort of like this and they are all very vague, talking about having "feeling sexy" or whatever, and I have no idea what that means. But this one, this actually says what it means. It's not for me, but I am glad to say I can at least understand what they're talking about.

Blogaround

Anakin and Padme meme. First panel: Anakin says "I'm going to prove 3 * sum from 1 to infinity of 1/(2^2n) = 1". Second panel: Padme says, "Algebraically, right?" Third panel: Anakin looks at her skeptically. Fourth panel: Where the fourth panel would be, it's just the entire image but shrunk down to 1/4 size, and in the 4th panel of the 4th panel, there's the whole image again shrunk down to that size, and so on forever. Image source: Facebook.

1. Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials (2003) "The relevance to parachute use is that individuals jumping from aircraft without the help of a parachute are likely to have a high prevalence of pre-existing psychiatric morbidity. Individuals who use parachutes are likely to have less psychiatric morbidity and may also differ in key demographic factors, such as income and cigarette use. It follows, therefore, that the apparent protective effect of parachutes may be merely an example of the 'healthy cohort' effect."

2. ‘They Aren’t Who You Think They Are’ (2021) [content note: child sexual abuse and coverup] "Nobody resigned as a result of the failure to stop a decade of abuse. There was no disciplinary action against any of Newman’s supervisors, and Joe White is still the head of the camp today."

3. ‘An Evangelical Childhood is a Total Mindfuck’ New Memoir Recounts the Anxiety and Thrills of Growing Up a Conservative Christian (June 18) "I mean, the white evangelical project is wracked by inner anxieties, but [for many] it feels that it would be somehow unholy or unseemly, if not even sinful, to interrogate those inner anxieties."

4. Care Tactics (July) "While Amazon and insurance companies report billions of dollars in revenue, and innovators fantasize about the augmented reality glasses that will 'fix' deafness, caregivers and disabled people are left to crowdsource improvised hacks to navigate a world indifferent—if not outright hostile—to their actual needs and desires."

5. Mary the Tower (July 22) "She went through the whole manuscript of John 11 and John 12, and lo and behold, that editor had gone in at every single place and changed every moment that you read Martha in English, it originally said, 'Mary.'" Wow. If this is true, it's huge.

6. Waste Expert Answers Garbage Questions From Twitter | Tech Support | WIRED (April 13) Wow this is really cool and informative! I always feel suspicious about how it's so easy to buy new things- won't all those new things end up being thrown out eventually? Shouldn't society be taking that into consideration and treating it as the responsibility of the manufacturers? Everyone is focused on the new things, but nobody is talking about the old things being thrown away- but in the long run, those two things will be equal, so it seems like something is wrong here...?

7. My Journey From Concerned Parent to LGBT Ally (August 3) Good article about a Chinese mom of a gay son. There are ways that queerness intersects with Chinese culture differently than how it intersects with western culture. For example, in every culture it's hard to come out to one's parents, but in China it's harder because of how much one's behavior/success/failures is seen as representative of the entire family. And because of the one-child policy, there's so much pressure for the kid to be everything that the parents want them to be, because the parents just have the 1 kid.

8. US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi lands in Taiwan amid threats of Chinese retaliation (August 2) Yeah this is worrisome.

9. World Breastfeeding Week. The theme for World Breastfeeding Week 2022 is "Step Up," meaning that society (governments, companies, etc) have to step up in support of breastfeeding. I love this, because usually when people talk about breastfeeding, it's seen as just an individual choice and then people argue about whether or not it indicates if you're a "good enough" mom or whatever. This is all kinds of wrong, because the systems aren't in place to provide new moms with the resources and education they need to actually be successful at breastfeeding. (And what's even more ridiculous is people who say "breastfeeding is free!" like omg, it is very much NOT free- you either have to quit your job, or buy a bunch of pumping equipment and hope you're lucky enough to have a job that provides break time and a a good private space with a table, chair, and outlet so you can pump, and also a fridge. Like what on earth is this nonsense about "breastfeeding is free"?) 

Society does NOT give moms the support they need, and then says "oh it's okay if you use formula, it doesn't mean you're a bad mom." That's not good enough.

(Btw I exclusively breastfed my son and I have Some Opinions about it.)

10. Stunning Kansas vote shows just how badly the Right has overplayed its hand (August 5) "It’s middle America Kansas, reliably red Kansas, that delivered a breathtaking rebuke to a ballot effort that would have allowed legislators to ban abortion in the state."

11. Carbon12 – The new reserve currency for Christians (August 4) Oh this is 100% a scam.

Blogaround

1. The Nasty Logistics of Returning Your Too-Small Pants (posted October 2021) "Perfectly good stuff gets thrown away in these facilities all the time, simply because the financial math of doing anything else doesn’t work out; they’re too inexpensive to be worth the effort, or too much time has passed since they were sold."

I also wonder a lot about what happens to stuff in stores that doesn't get sold. I have friends who worry about "oh no, I bought lunch and they gave me a disposable plastic spoon with it," but really, businesses must be throwing away tons of stuff that doesn't sell... what's the point of you getting yourself all worried about throwing away plastic packaging or "wasting food" or whatever, when your choice not to buy it means the business will be the one throwing it away instead of you?

I haven't done any research into the actual facts of that, so don't take what I say too seriously I guess (although, if anyone has sources about what happens to unsold products and how that should inform our worry over using too many plastic bags, please do leave them in the comment section). But I just find it really really suspicious that every store has a huge huge selection of things, and I get to browse through them all and choose the one that fits my specific needs- so what happens to all the others? Sure, some things can sit on the shelf indefinitely and they'll eventually find a customer who happens to need that exact thing, but what about more time-sensitive things like food or seasonal clothes or new books, etc?

2. We Don't Talk About Bruno (From "Encanto") (posted December 29) Hendrix and I just saw the new Disney movie "Encanto" in the theater, and wow it has a lot of good songs!

I also love how the Madrigal family had such a fun mix of interracial relationships. :)

3. Joey I’m not angry anymore (posted February 2) This is one of the Slacktivist's frequent link roundups, and I'm posting it here because of this part: "You might be thinking that the beginning of February is way too late for any thought of New Year’s Resolutions, but don’t fall into that trap. This is a trap I’m well acquainted with thanks to having grown up in white evangelical purity culture, a framework that trains you to think of virtue as a kind of original innocence and purity you must struggle to preserve, gripping it tight with white-knuckled determination."

Yeah, as an ex-evangelical, I can relate to that.

4. Where is Noah’s Flood in the Geological Column? (posted 2021) "What is going on here? Are we to understand that lions, panthers and leopards existed as separate species prior to the flood, and yet just one single pair from the entire 'kind' walked on to the Ark, only to walk off less than a year later and hyper-evolve back into the very same species once again? This is quite a convenient occurrence."

5. Creation Science Exposed: When Ego and Creation Science Meet: A History of the Answers in Genesis Split (posted 2008 maybe?) Okay maybe this is not interesting to anyone except me, but... It's the whole long story of how the creationist organization Answers in Genesis split in 2006, with the part that split off becoming Creation Ministries International. Wow, I did not know any of this! I was a devoted follower of AiG back in, what, 2003, 2004, and then didn't really think about creationism for a few years, then I heard of CMI in, what, 2008? AiG and CMI seem to be pretty much doing and teaching the same things. I had no idea there was a history there.

But also, I gotta say I'm 0% surprised that Ken Ham- whose entire job is writing articles about how atheists are evil and how Christians who don't believe in young-earth creationism are bad Christians who don't really respect the bible or care about God- was mean and unfair to people. 

6. Eileen Gu's HUGE final run grabs big air gold from Tess Ledeux | Winter Olympics 2022 | NBC Sports (posted February 8) This is INCREDIBLE.

Like, suddenly seems like everyone in China is a fan of 谷爱凌  (Gu Ailing), Eileen Gu. The story is, she grew up in the US but is competing for China in the 2022 Olympics. My son has both Chinese and US citizenship, so it makes me wonder about Gu's situation and her reasons for choosing China. Because my son will eventually have to choose too.