Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Make It Myself (April 15) From xkcd.

2. Why cheap waste management is key to stopping plastic pollution (March 16, via) "In many low- and middle-income countries, people find themselves in a very different situation: less than half of solid household waste is collected. People often have little choice but to burn or dump it. But even the waste that is collected is often left in open dumps, where it’s at risk of leaking into the environment."

3. He won a major school prayer case. It took years to get a proper obituary. (April 16) "Despite all the backlash and threats his family received, Jaffree told an audience at the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s convention in 1985 that he would do it all over again because he was 'absolutely committed to the idea of separation of church and state. There’s no question that my religious view is a minority, and unless people like me are willing to challenge these cases, then we don’t have a chance.'"

4. Trolleyology bad (April 20) "Do we believe this stipulation? To state the obvious, it’s ludicrous."

5. Here's some good news: Despite Apocalyptic Warnings, California Fast Food Wage Hike Didn’t Kill Jobs (April 9, via) 

6. Chinese humanoid robot beats world record for fastest human half-marathon | ABC NEWS (April 20) This is really cool, and also you have to watch the video of the robot running- it looks very funny.

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Image source.

Links related to the antichrist:

1. Democrats file articles of impeachment against Hegseth for ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’ (April 15) He absolutely should be impeached. This particular attempt isn't going to get anywhere, because the Republican Congress members have all sold their souls, but it's good that Democrats are at least trying.

2. Businesses race to apply for tariff refunds (April 20) "In fact, many retailers find themselves in a similar quandary because tariff refunds will go to whoever paid the actual customs bill. It's unclear how, or if, the refunds might trickle down to store owners who paid tariff surcharges to their suppliers."

3. Logjam of U.S. immigration applications puts millions at greater risk of deportation (April 17) "The 11.6 million pending applications in the "backlog" include forms to become a citizen, acquire a green card, work or seek asylum. There are also 247,974 applications in what USCIS calls the "frontlog," which is tracked separately. Those are applications, likely sent by mail, that have been submitted but that the agency has not physically opened and assigned a category."

These are people who are following the rules, jumping through all the bureaucratic hoops, and the government is making it harder for them. I know a lot of average Americans say the problem is just *illegal* immigration, and want a system that works for people who are doing it the *legal* way- but the MAGAs in the government *never* wanted that.

4. Epstein survivors have mixed feelings on Melania Trump's call for hearing in Congress (April 10) "'You want to retraumatize us and ask us to go in front of Congress and tell them our story, which we have told some of them already,' Lacerda said. 'And then do absolutely nothing.'"

5. ICE deported 174 Daca recipients through most of last year, agency head says in letter (April 18, via) 

6. The white evangelical Bible in the news (April 16) "And so it was darkly hilarious to watch white American evangelical leaders rushed to Twitter and in front of the cameras to proudly reveal that they cannot recognize the Bible when someone quotes it back to them." This whole entire post is spot-on.

7. Montana Supreme Court Rules Its Constitution Entirely Protects Trans Citizens In Landmark Ruling (April 17) "Transgender discrimination is, by its very nature, sex discrimination."

Also from Erin in the Morning: Federal Judge Vacates Kennedy Declaration, Permanently Blocks Trump's Trans Youth Care Hospital Threats (April 21) "On the government’s core argument—that the Kennedy Declaration was merely Kennedy’s personal, non-binding opinion—the judge was withering: 'Defendants’ jurisdictional arguments are based on the bald-faced lie that the Kennedy Declaration amounts to nothing more than one man’s musings on gender-affirming care. This Court is not persuaded by Defendants’ attempts to gaslight it into believing that the Kennedy Declaration does anything other than what it says.'"

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. Defunctland After Dark: That Helicopter Thing at Chuck E. Cheese (June 7) 18-minute video. Oh my goodness, I love this so much. Kevin goes down the rabbit hole of trying to find information about this helicopter ride thing that Chuck E. Cheese apparently used to have. (I didn't even know this thing existed, but I am still SO into this video.) This is exactly what it's like, looking for information that you feel surely must exist somewhere on the internet, and you try all sorts of variations on search terms, scouring different websites that might possibly be related, etc.

2. The Unforgivable Sin of Ms Rachel (August 26) 2-hour-22-minute video from Lindsay Ellis. Wow, this video is incredible. It starts out with the criticism that Ms Rachel (who makes educational videos for toddlers) is getting for speaking up in support of the children in Gaza, and then it covers EVERYTHING: Mr. Rogers, Sesame Street, the way that children's education should include emotional intelligence as well as numbers/letters/etc, this newfangled right-wing idea that empathy is a sin (??????), a weird children's TV channel created by The Daily Wire as an alternative for parents who clutch their pearls because there's a family with 2 dads on Sesame Street, the entire history of the Jewish temple system, the entire history of Christianity, the entire history of anti-Semitism within Christianity, dog whistles for anti-Semitism, the Left Behind books, the definition of genocide, the Rwandan genocide, Schindler's list, the inadequacy of using statistics to describe atrocities, and what's currently going on in Gaza.

Really a must-watch if you want to understand American right-wing Christians' reasons for supporting Israel, and the whole history and context around all of it. Including the way the MAGA government is using "fighting anti-Semitism" as an excuse for doing whatever they want, meanwhile Elon Musk is on stage doing Nazi salutes.

3. New Mexico to become the first state to offer universal child care (September 10, via) "Starting in November, the state will offer child care, or reimbursement for child care costs, to every family in the state, regardless of income. Lujan Grisham’s office said the program’s expansion will save families in the state $12,000 per child per year on average."

This is really interesting! I always thought of this "the government should give us free childcare" as an unrealistic pie-in-the-sky idea, but here's New Mexico actually doing it. I have many questions! Will this result in better pay for childcare workers? Will there be requirements about what kind of expenses "count" as childcare expenses that can be reimbursed- surely there must be some requirements for a business to be a legit childcare provider. Does this plan also require the government to help more childcare workers get trained and more daycares to open? 

Really interested to see the results from this. It sounds like it could be a really good thing! But I grew up Republican so a whole bunch of "here's why this is actually bad and will ruin the economy" spring to mind. But let's *do it* and then analyze the results to find out what really happens.

4. Biblical slop (September 10) "There’s a great deal that could be said about the “translation” of biblical text to biblical imagery, and the choices that requires visual artists to make, whether it’s for an illustrated Bible or a “biblical” film or TV series. ... But we should save that discussion for situations where actual artists are making actual choices and doing actual work, which isn’t the case here. The only choice being made here is the choice not to do any of that actual work, or to hire actual artists, or to put any thought whatsoever into any of this beyond whatever pop-culture references to include in the prompts fed into the plagiarism machine."

!!! This is such a good point! I read a whole book earlier this year, Text, Image, & Otherness in Children's Bibles, about the way that children's media presents bible stories to children. A LOT GOING ON THERE! It's not like you can simply tell the story and that's all- there are so many choices that need to be made along the way, and those choices say a lot about your own point of view, what you think the bible even is, etc. If you just throw it into an AI, well, it's going to spit out *something*, but would that *something* be worth anyone's time to read?

5. What We Find in the Sewers (August 25) A long article about the history of how societies have dealt with sewage. I didn't really know anything about this before. I learned things~

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. Charlie Kirk, Trump ally and rightwing activist, shot and killed at Utah university (September 10) "'Political violence has no place in America,' said the former vice-president Kamala Harris in a statement. Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic House minority leader, expressed a similar sentiment: 'Political violence of any kind and against any individual is unacceptable and completely incompatible with American values.'" Agree with these statements- political violence is not okay.

And more on that:

Charlie Kirk’s killing, and Trump’s response, are a danger to liberalism (September 12)

Politicizing Charlie (September 12) "Now, color me skeptical."

Blogaround

Merry Christmas everyone!

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1. Power Banks: How Businesses Are Leading the Charge (December 20) An article about the little vending-machine-type things where you can rent power banks from, to charge your phone, at various little stores in Shanghai. I live in Shanghai, and yeah I think it's great how power banks are available to rent everywhere. And very cheap too- I can charge my phone for an hour or however long, for just a few yuan (about 1 dollar).

Also from Sixth Tone: As China Shivers, a Hot Debate Over Risks of Food Delivery (December 22)

2. Most people don’t realize how much progress we’ve made on climate change (November 27, via) "On the one hand, that’s not yet good enough to meet the target set in the Paris agreement. On the other hand, climate policies and clean technologies deployed over just the past eight years have already erased a full degree Celsius of global warming from the future world in 2100."

3. Journal Club: Gender Detachment (December 21) "Almost all of them, when asked, provided a specific gender identity label, but when prompted, described feeling detached from their gender."

4. Love Songs (December 20) Very useful graph from xkcd!

5. Missions, Race, and Me (November 14) "White American Christians were organizing and raising money and literally building corporation-like entities and taking months-long ship voyages and even dying of malaria in some places—oh and seriously abusing their own children but I’m not even going to get into that—to go and “serve” non-white people elsewhere in the world while AT THE VERY SAME TIME, IN THEIR VERY OWN COUNTRY, LITERALLY THEIR VERY OWN FOLK were lynching black people and generally doing everything they possibly could to disenfranchise and pillage and steal and discriminate against people of color of all kinds and generally behaving like really sh*tty human beings with very few exceptions."

6. Christian College Recovers After Campus-Wide Sex Week (December 19) "Those of you who don’t have personal life experience within the white evangelical subculture might think that the phrase 'Holy Sexuality' is a little bit cringe-y, but let me assure you that for those who have lived within this subculture, that’s not the case. It’s incredibly cringe-y."

One thing I will say, though, is that in this article and in a lot of other articles I've seen criticizing Christopher Yuan, Yuan's statement that "the opposite of homosexuality is holiness" is being misrepresented. (I have seen him speak in person, a loooong time ago, and even back then he was using this catchphrase. Back when I was an evangelical I thought it was very profound.) I've seen people on the internet assuming that he means "straight people are holy" and being mad about that- but that's not what he means. What he means is, for people who "struggle with same-sex attraction", the point isn't to become straight (because being straight also leads to sexual sin!), the point is to become holy. Like, it's okay if you're still not straight- but you definitely can't ID as gay! If you're not straight, you just have to repress your sexuality and try to be "holy" instead.

So, uh, I very much disagree with Yuan. But also I just wanted to point out that criticizing him for saying that straight people are automatically holy is a misinterpretation of what he's saying.

7. Finally, The EU Is Banning Fashion’s Dirty Secret: Destroying Unsold Goods (December 7, via) "The question of what happens to these unsold goods if they are not destroyed is yet to be answered. 'Will they be shipped around the world? Will they be reused as deadstock or shredded and downcycled? Will outlet stores have an abundance of stock to sell?' asks Grogan."

8. We were personally victimized by James Somerton (December 13, via) "So a combination of the fact that the projects you pitched to us that were allegedly in process, that allegedly had two Asexual characters, are just gone — you’re not working on them — you’re supposedly working on something else new and shiny, but the only thing you’ve actually done that you’ve told us that costs money is you’ve moved to a big city? What on earth?"

Also related: This 1-hour-42-minute video from Todd in the Shadows, I Fact-Checked The Worst Video Essayist On YouTube (December 4) Wow, I am very impressed by how much time Todd spent fact-checking. 

Blogaround

1. Michael Card - Chorus Of Faith - Here's a song from Michael Card, a Christian singer from the 80's. "He loves us with passion, without regrets, he cannot love more and will not love less."

2. Discarded toys are creating an e-waste disaster. Here’s how to stop it. (November 22) People are always giving my kid low-quality toys with pointless electronics in them. Turns out that these things shouldn't just be thrown out in the regular trash because they are "e-waste"- but wow I can't imagine, as a parent, actually having to do the task of figuring out how to throw them out "correctly" and doing it. That just sounds exhausting, and why should I have to do that, it's not my fault people keep giving my kid crappy toys. I would say the only actually workable solution is for the manufacturers to take the responsibility for how to recycle them.

3. A Mother’s Worst Nightmare (June 29, via) [content note: it's about the government taking babies away from their parents] "Federal law has put thousands of women on anti-addiction medications like Suboxone into an impossible bind: Give up your treatment or risk losing your child."

4. The Remarkable Biden Economy (November 27) "Biden has been an excellent president, particularly in his stewardship of the economy."

5. Take heart, it looks like China could send new pandas to the US (November 17, via)

6. ChatGPT generates fake data set to support scientific hypothesis (November 22, via) "'It seems like it’s quite easy to create data sets that are at least superficially plausible. So, to an untrained eye, this certainly looks like a real data set,' says Jack Wilkinson, a biostatistician at the University of Manchester, UK."

7. I Came Out as Intersex in Front of the Texas Legislature (September 15, via) "Does that mean that, because of my genotypic XY chromosomes, I’ve been using the wrong bathroom my whole life? No. It means who cares what bathroom I use?"