Phillips is spinning this as Christian supernaturalism vs. secular liberal/Commie. He and MAGA evangelicals are invoking Acts 8:39 ("the Spirit of the Lord suddenly took Philip away") to say teleportation is "biblical." That's silly, but also potentially good ...

TTYF!

Pope quotes the Bible. Mike Johnson, baffled, "Where does he come up with this stuff?" White evangelicals do not read Isaiah. They have the "rise up with wings as eagles" verse on T-shirts, but they've never read the book.

Hey, if it's gonna be a senator, it should be the Judiciary Chairman himself. I say replace Alito with Chuck Grassley -- put his 92 years of hard-earned wisdom to good use!

Damn. Isaiah 1:10-18 is fire.

This absurdity -- "the court should pretend a 14-year-old is NOT a 14-year-old!" -- precisely echoes the perverse logic of the statutory rapist. "THIS child is preternaturally old for their age." "THIS child forced me to do this to them." "THIS child is, to me, an exception to childhood."

I clicked this link, but the paywall kicks in after the third ridiculous insult. Disappointing. As a Christian, I was prepared to get ridiculously insulted six more times.

I mean, if the guy really had healing hands, he would have healed his own hands.

Keep seeing it reported that Pope Leo claimed that God will not heed he prayers of those whose hands are full of blood. But that wasn't Leo. That was Isaiah. And, if you believe Isaiah, it wasn't him talking either. That was a "thus saith the Lord" situation.

🎵 Oh, your car got mags that be dippy dippy dope But the whole damn nation got the same Honey only flock to the bee that's the Pope Not the President with government lame ...So you can be the President (You can be the President) (Kick it) I'd rather be the Pope (Rather be the Pope) 🎵

This thread is a great example of social media as SOCIAL media, not a broadcast medium for reach or clout or clicks or one-way "engagement." Just a bunch of people who don't know each other IRL going "Check this out, you've GOT to hear this!" with genuine, contagious enthusiasm. A beautiful thing.

sort of hard to convey the sheer joy, scale and absurdity of it but Budapest's streets are currently so full, past midnight on a Sunday, that it feels like I'm personally walking back to my room, accompanied by my eight to twelve thousand best friends

Feels like an adult ticket to the “Super Mario Galaxy Movie” should cost LESS than a child’s ticket.

“earned”

“I want MONEY, Jack. I wish that I had some loftier purpose, but, uh, I’m afraid in the end it’s just the money, Jack.” Orban also has ethnonationalist, far-right ideological goals, of course, but for all these guys (Putin, Trump) “in the end, it’s just the money, Jack.”

This is what still stuns me about Dennis Hastert. He was paying hush money to keep his criminal secrets. But despite that, after Newt and after Livingston, with concerns about sex scandals at an intense level, he still thought, "Yeah, I should pursue a higher-profile position."

"if you were in charge of star trek, what would you do?" Meddlers. A non-Federation, outlaw movement that sees the Prime Directive as an obstacle to galactic aid and attempts to share and spread medical/scientific knowledge for altruistic reasons.

Just thinking again of how astonishingly good Kaitlyn Dever, Toni Colette, Merritt Wever, and Danielle Macdonald all are in "Unbelievable."

This is terrific. Also, whoever came up with the idea of naming puffins “puffins” did an excellent job with that. Bravo. Yes. That is what they are, God bless ‘em. They’re *puffins.* Absolutely puffiny creatures. Couldn’t be any puffiner.

the pope is not woke. american conservative christianity has spent the last few decades mutating into an evil doppelgänger of itself such that any conservative christian leader who says things like “it’s wrong to incinerate schoolchildren” scans as a titan of superhuman moral fiber.

Melania comes to the podium each day for the next week to make a new denial. "I know nothing about the Paula Abdul mystery plane crash" "I am not the subject of the song 'You Oughtta' Know" "I had nothing to do with Flight 370" "I am not Banksy." "I did not pay a lot for this muffler."

Imagine there's no humans, it's easy if you try.

just to be clear, everyone, when 8 pm EDT comes and goes, regardless of what does or does not happen, the president still threatened genocide and war crimes and we should still impeach, arrest, and try him

Additional irony here given that white evangelicals have spent the past decade praising Trump as "our Cyrus."

Called Sen. McCormick and Sen. Fetterman. (When I call Fetterman, my phone recognizes the number from contacts and says I'm calling "Sen. Pat Toomey." At first I was like "Ha! I've got to fix that." But then I realized it's probably more accurate not to.)

I drank a toast to Stanislav Petrov.

The radio DJ said “Arlo Parks,” but I heard it as “Arvo Part,” and so I listened, confused, thinking “This is lovely, but it’s really a radical departure from his previous work.”

“28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, and 12 seconds …”

The allegorical history of 1960s American popular music presented by Don McLean in "American Pie" deliberately omits the Beach Boys because McLean realized their existence cast doubt on his thesis of the death of "innocence" in rock 'n' roll. In this essay I will ...

The odious 2009 Five for Fighting song "Slice" is a nostalgic fantasy about the innocence of 1971, when Don McLean had a hit with a nostalgic fantasy about 1959. (Slice is older now than the plane crash was when McLean wrote his song.) Nostalgia for someone else's nostalgia is just sad.

Customer: Is this Spray Nine any good? Me: The gallon refill is genius. Square jugs. Most stockable design I’ve ever seen. MILK should be packaged like this. C: But how well does it clean? Me: Their 32-oz. spray bottles are an abomination. Twice as big as every other bottle. Totally unstockable.

The .gif that we should be seeing everywhere but that I haven’t yet seen anywhere is Michael Emerson/Finch in “Person of Interest” frantically beating the computer with a hammer from that scene where an early prototype of his Machine turned out to be evil.

The opposite of secular government is sectarian government. Sect, singular. Religious nationalism is like Highlander: In the end, there can be only one. It leads -- always and inevitably -- to Emo's Golden Gate Bridge joke, but with tiers of citizenship and state-sponsored violence.

Anyone saying this has never spoken to any writers, who mostly have two modes, either hyper "I *need* to get these 15,000 words out *right now* to make my brain shut up" or agonising for a literal hour about whether to use "a" or "the" in a sentence they then delete.

Wow, we're a mere 5 weeks away from Sir David Attenborough's centenary and 12.5 weeks from Mel Brooks's. A collaboration that never existed but I would possibly watch.

If the corrupt six of the Supreme Court decide to pretend the 14th Amendment does not guarantee birthright citizenship, then we will have a situation in which some are citizens of the states in which they reside, but somehow not also citizens of the nation. The absurdity will unfold absurdly.

The ugly history behind the Olympics’ new gender test www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

This is going to be "on the waterfront" in Miami. Because Trump's legacy is going to be as lasting and unchanging for future generations as the sea level in Miami.

Net migration is now negative. So America is now failing the Will Rogers test: "Is they tryin' to get in? Or is they tryin' to get out?"

According to this tradition, the religion of conservatives is authentic and worthy of respect while the religion of liberals is not quite authentic and undeserving of attention. The result is a political discourse that attributes to all religions the beliefs of the most conservative religions.

I cannot stress enough how these are PTA moms and soccer coach dads and I can best describe the vibe as “festively bloodthirsty”

This is terrific! (I love this bridge -- one of the few places you can get out of New Jersey without having to pay.)

Your periodic reminder that there is a website that lets you listen to local radio stations anywhere in the world This is honestly one of the coolest inventions ever, imo. Global access to hyper-local imagined communities

Oh did you want 3300 words from me on today's IOC sex testing rules? An essay on the nature of evidence and why we can't seem to stop getting stuck in the same traps around sex and gender in sports? Wow lucky you!! www.coyotemedia.org/the-olympics...

Recently apologized to someone because, while I have always pronounced their name correctly, I had — for more than a year — been spelling it wrong in my head.

Somebody asked me for directions the other day but, alas, I was not wearing a tactical vest or carrying a firearm, so I was unable to help them.

Colbert’s enthusiasm for the material should work, but the movie I want is a deadpan serious (pseudo-)documentary of talking heads in archives & university offices, based on the appendix about translation challenges in presenting the Red Book to English readers.

Yeats' "Second Coming" seems to be one of the poems in The BlueSky Anthology of Poetry. What else is in there? "This is just to say," surely. And Cohen's "Hallelujah." What else?

This is close to Yeats, but in Yeats it isn't a contradiction. To say "the best lack all conviction" is to say "the best" we've got are still *not good.* The category of "Good, but lacking all conviction" is not an actual category.