No, but I’ve watched Disneys Descendants. A bunch of villain’s kids get to go to school after being cut off from society all their lives due to their parents choices. The kids come in to school dedicated to evil, but the more they learn & get to know people, the more they all decide to be good people.

I have no idea how that relates to anything in the real world in the past however many years.

Why choose? Use electricity and destroy living creatures: https://time.com/6982015/bitcoin-mining-texas-health/

It’s not just nerds with a spare laptop mining anymore. This money wants returns in ‘not being regulated.’

There have been a lot of good books in the last few years about how Christian came to be so culturally interchangable with Republican. One I read and got a lot out of was “Jesus & John Wayne”, and the author does a good job tracking the rightward shift from a lot of different organizations and how they were able to permeate through multiple denominations. Just sharing in case anyone wants to go look at some of these connections themselves.

And who have just relocated their best hostages to within Putin’s power. Yes, bring your nine children and wife along to Russia–now stay in rank on the front line, or maybe your oldest gets to come serve in your place (earlier than they would have anyway)!

So I think that you’re missing that this “controversy” started before this year’s Olympics began. In 2023, a boxing organization (IBA) based out of Russia flagged Khelif as not passing eligibility after she defeated a previously undefeated Russian boxer. Khelif’s disqualification meant the Russian woman kept her undefeated title. I’m lazy & going to copy from Wikipedia here:

The Washington Post stated, “It remains unclear what standards Khelif and Lin Yu Ting failed [in 2023] to lead to the disqualifications”, further writing, “There never has been evidence that […] Khelif […] had XY chromosomes or elevated levels of testosterone.” The IBA did not reveal the testing methodology, stating the “specifics remain confidential”. At the time, Khelif said the ruling meant having “characteristics that mean I can’t box with women”, but said she was the victim of a “big conspiracy” regarding the disqualification. She initially appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport but the appeal was terminated since Khelif couldn’t pay the procedural costs. After the appeal, Khelif organised her own independent tests in order to clear her name and return to boxing.

Alright back to my own words here. So the article goes on to say that in July of this year, the IBA said Khelif failed the test, but would not release the specifics about why exactly. The IOC said the ruling was “arbitrary” and “without due process”. That is the background that sets the stage for what happened when the Italian quit this year at the Olympics and everyone subsequently lost their shit.

Here’s the Wikipedia article, though feel free to check out other reputable sites for more detail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imane_Khelif?wprov=sfla1

I hear your point, and you’re not wrong that certain birthers just won’t listen. Obama had neither of the people involved in this birth, his parents, around to speak about the conditions of his birth. Harris, though, will have people able to say, “No, I was there, I remember how it happened” in her corner.

I got the $5 meal deal the other night. Dr Pepper for my drink was an upcharge. I’m not sure what drink is supposed to come with it then.

I’ve found periodically cleaning mine with rubbing alcohol and a qtip vastly improves charging, fit, and sound. Still thinking about upgrading sometime soon tho.

They weren’t wanting to talk about project 2025. Now there’s a different conversation to have, kind of.

I’m so sorry that happened to you.

I really tend to hate the parents’ rights crowds. Children deserve rights and knowledge and community.

I read most of that (think I missed the last few chapters, but he was out of Elan and had done some traveling)–it was horrifying. There’s also a 3 episode documentary on Netflix called “The Program” where the documentary maker revisits the now closed school where she went (The Academy at Ivy Ridge) and by episode 3, she’s followed the money to one family behind a lot of these institutions. But as she and former AaIR students actually see other facilities far from where they were locked up, they’re all carbon copies of each other, they’re all just the same punish-for-everything camps with no escape. Fucked up that there’s like a formal recipe for how to do this to families and not get caught. And that there are so few legal protections for children.

Not exactly fantasy, but Great Expectations by Dickens has a boy who grows up totally normal and then has his life transformed by a mysterious benefactor. It doesn’t go the way the kid expects.

Also, Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive & Tress and the Emerald Sea feature kinds of magic that can be accessible by anyone if they engage with it right. So perhaps give those a go. SA is a long series, but Tress is pretty approachable.

Maybe that’s what pope Franky was talking about when he said surrogacy was a threat to human dignity.

I can appreciate that approach. But the biggest problems I have are when they nest in the railing of my little wooden deck. Every year it’s the same fight. So I’m a little leery of using fire.

Lol, not while I’m holding the bottle.

But seriously, where are the drones made specifically to spray stuff on wasp nests? I wouldn’t feel the need to use the foaming, bad stuff that hurts the bees if I could try a robot applying something like this. Or at least if it sprayed foam, it could be in significantly smaller amounts, much closer the the nest of trouble.

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Our Albertson’s (including most Safeway brands) in my region want to merge with the Kroger brand stores. They say it’ll be good for customers. 🙄

Because future generations have to safehold and not misuse extremely destructive knowledge. We have a world where North Korea has nuclear weapons, but do they have the ethics to use them responsibly, understanding their full potential? Do the other countries with nuclear bombs have that ethical responsibility, especially over generations? Cuz that big red button is going to be around for a while.

What people identifying as Christian do and act doesn’t represent Christianity as a whole.

I mean, religions are what people define them as, use them as. If two million people use the Christian Bible to prop up child abuse, slavery, and sexual, then that is part of the tradition of that faith. Perhaps you didn’t ascribe to faith that seeks to sever people from God via thoughtcrimes. Perhaps the church you attend works to alleviate those injustices, and that seeks conservation of the planet we were gifted. But I know when I asked about racism at church, when I asked about what we as a congregation were doing about it, I was told that was a heart issue that we just had to pray people would resolve on their own. Women, again, could not hold positions of authority because that was against God’s will, gay people were sent away, but racists, what can you do? Again, my experience isn’t unique. There was never any talk of care taking the planet. Fair bit of talk about the dude who buried his Talent vs the one who invested it, though.

I think you identify a lot of real evils in this world, and people really do create a lot of problems. I fundamentally don’t believe we are overwhelmingly evil, and I think teaching people they are evil is more likely to create people who grow up to be evil. People live up to what those around them believe them to be. When people believe to their core that they are truly evil and cannot trust themselves, that they instead must trust the human layers between themselves and God., that’s gonna come up as trauma and/or abuse somewhere down the line.

And while any environment can become abusive, churches preach truth and morality; tied in with that is a strong sense of community and family. Trying to call out abuse from an elder or a pastor often results in the pastor getting moved and ‘prayed for’ and the victim pressured to forgive before is appropriate. They’re bullied to say they forgive when they are not actually ok. And the abuser gets to move on and find new victims. We’ve all seen the scandals about the Catholic Church over the last couple decades. The Southern Baptist Convention had a list of 700 abusers they covered for. But still don’t be a loud lady, that’s against God. The SBC is one of the biggest evangelical denominations in the United States. I don’t think they’re what Christianity is supposed to be. But they are Christians and this is how they express their faith, so this is how I understand Christianity.

Bad theology hurts people. And to pretend there isn’t bad is to be unable to fix.

I do think that there are a lot of good branches of Christianity out there, where the main focus is on loving thy neighbor and opening the way to God to all people, not being exclusionary.

My experience of religion, like so many others though, hinged (more and more strongly over the years) on a literal interpretation of Genesis. One in which eating a bad piece of fruit causes inseparable rifts between parent and child; one in which the creator of all, the knower of all, created rules that unless I grovel and beg and pledge constant devotion, I deserved eternal conscious torment for existing. That’s an abusive belief. Especially to teach children.

That’s before the curse of Eve, for eating the bad fruit first, causing the pain of childbirth, hereditarily (the biggest cause of death in women throughout history), as well as god-sanctioned subjugation of women. (For example, a woman doing everything right knows not to try to teach a high school group–those are men that she’s not qualified to minister to. She knows it’s better not to vote in church matters, even if she’s allowed, because the head of household, her husband does that). This creates social structures that disempower women as a point of culture, another abusive trait.

Children also deserve subjection. They are to be obedient at all times, it’s literally one of the commandments. Our denomination taught that “Obey thy father and thy mother” also applied to all earthly authority over us. Authority and structure mattered more as a culture than understanding and insight.

And the social culture of church can feel toxic or stifling. Often outright sinning, even as a repetitive behavior is tolerated in church spaces (especially in cases of child or domestic abuse), but someone who has reason to think a little differently (like believing in Jesus without believing in Genesis, being queer, being progressive) is shunned or made to be quiet. They know from a young age that their voices can never be respected in those spaces, the number of sermons I heard about how evil/misguided/ other awful stereotype that non believers were supposed to be… It teaches othering, it teaches people to reduce other people to stereotypes of what the pastor says instead of what the person’s lived experience is.

This isn’t unusual for Christianity, especially in the States. My experience with abuse patterns in Christianity may truly not apply to you. But I think they apply to many.

And I’m not even going to touch on the abuse that happens to homeschooled children, often strongly correlated with religion.