heck yeah

This afternoon, I joined Archbishop Elpidophoros and faith leaders at St. Nicholas National Shrine to mark the 25 years since the horrific terror attacks of 9/11 and reflect on the resilience of our city.

if this was in an evangelical movie about the antichrist you'd think it'd be a bit much

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 2d ago

Trump: "Please right your right hand. I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States. That loves us so much he can't even breath. That I will go out with my family, my friends, I'll do it any way - I don't care if I'm registered or not, I'm going to try to cheat like hell..."

My life's trajectory was shaped- mostly for, I think, the better, however perverse sounding that is to say!- not so much by 9/11 itself as the aftermath, specifically the temporary vogue in higher education for the study of Islam; I doubt my graduate career would have been possible otherwise.

For a while my son was telling time using Pokemon names and their numbers- ie 1:40 pm would be Vlorbop because it's number 140 (made that up because my son is in bed asleep and I can't ask him right now), but it only worked up to whatever the last Pokemon number is currently, 1,030 or something

Martyn Wendell Jones@martynwendell.bsky.social · 3d ago

group of kids in the front yard (including my 7yo and 5yo) "playing Pokémon," which seems to them to mean sitting in a circle and taking turns placing a new card down on top of the last and then declaiming about it

I was able to pull up this gorgeously executed map, made in 1991, from the Library of Congress digital collections in about thirty five seconds, and it does not contain dozens and dozens of egregious errors and butcheries of spelling that AI slop contains, wild isn't it

Stephen Moran.@moranstephen1000.bsky.social · 3d ago

"The transformation of this hillside, and of many other similar places around Chattanooga, from an ecological and social wasteland, almost entirely devoid of life and of purposeful meaning and use, involved very little exchange of money, but it required a great deal of work and self-giving."

A Gift But Not Free

Newsletter for the Second Week of September

foodforestschattanooga.substack.com

My home rivers are the Piney River that drains off of the east escarpment of the Cumberland Plateau and was a regular childhood destination, accompanied by the Leaf River of Mississippi, it and its tributaries flowed through my teenage and college years, I can still summon the feel their warm waters

Richard Waite@waiterich.bsky.social · 4d ago

RS with your home river. The Potomac River, border between Maryland (right) and Virginia (left), pictured here about 15 miles upstream from DC and from there flowing into the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean.

Thinking about how someone- maybe several people in fact- spent many many hours of exacting pious labor to create this charmingly beautiful Coptic Orthodox wall hanging a millennium and a half ago and how it is still bringing joy after all these long fraught centuries, man

Bro reinvented Taoist semen retention (huanjing bunao) from first principles, wild

Bad Medical Takes@badmedicaltakes.bsky.social · 4d ago

This is followed by an article by Zachary Young, "Two Arabic Orders of Mass: The Liturgical Inflection of Morisco Christianity, 1493–1596." brill.com/view/journal...

Two Arabic Orders of Mass: The Liturgical Inflection of Morisco Christianity, 1493–1596

Abstract In early modern global Catholicism, both Catholic evangelists and native intermediaries regularly made attempts to translate between local cultural practices and Catholicism. This article pro...

brill.com

Things are not especially great out there in the world of historical events but on the other hand the groundnuts (Apios americana) in my home food forest have started blooming

"I sing the pictures of the book and see them spread out; I am an elegant bird for I make the codices speak within the house of pictures"

Just as the ancient texts foretold,

Phil Lewis@phillewis.bsky.social · 4d ago

Malibu residents evacuate after massive, expanding sinkhole opens at Nicolas Cage’s house

it really do be like that sometimes

Absolutely fantastic fragment of a dress, dating from somewhere between 265 and 40 BC, found in a tomb in Shanpula in the Tarim Basin, of unclear cultural origin but perhaps of a some sort of Iranic derivation (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco 2003.142.3)

The recent blockade of the port of Dover by "Patriot Platform" almost concurrent with the AfD winning a near majority in Saxony-Anhalt both strike me as instances of a sort of leveling up of resurgent fascists' organizing and power projection capacities in Europe. No close analogue, yet, in America-

Should have taken the shot

Telephone Friend@ironyhat.bsky.social · 5d ago

Remember when New York wanted to kill all the computers

One of the more I think underappreciated aspects of technological modernity that is truly novel is the sheer volume, amount, and ubiquity of true noise: sounds that are only the meaningless residuum of activity, as opposed to birdsong, which is fundamentally meaningful per se

This led me down the path of morbid curiosity into what is apparently a vast YouTube ecosystem of entirely AI generated "priests" and "pastors" giving talks, different channels recycling the same material but under different names, the comments full of elderly people unaware of their AI nature

ADHDad@barley-jones.bsky.social · 6d ago

The Youtube algorithm is WAY OFF

The property of the wealthy holds them in chains which shackle their courage & choke their faith & hamper their judgment & throttle their souls. They think they possess, when they are possessed; slaves of their profit, not lords of their own money, but the slaves. — St Cyprian of Carthage

Seems like the combination of aging populations that already struggle with sifting true from false online with still improving gen AI that can be tailored to convince said aging population with little difficulty is probably a pretty bad combo but it's hard to talk about in a non-patronizing way

Very clear that the massive roll-out of data centers as not just new aspects of but as a central load-bearing pillar of contemporary capitalism happened so fast that the propaganda and branding work, instead of being preparatory or gradated, has lagged well behind and is just starting to catch up

The Economist@economist.com · last wk.

There is a respectable argument for slowing down AI research, but it rests on the danger to all humanity of the technology being abused or going rogue—not the local harms of data centres

In lieu of a parish hall our church has a wooden pavilion and shade trees, which while perhaps not as ideal in the winter works pretty well the rest of the year; brightened the tables up this Sunday with flowers from our garden, which we encourage people to take home after the post-Liturgy lunch:

Pope Leo at Angelus: “There is one debt we owe to one another that does not enslave us: the debt of mutual love….Complaining and speaking ill of others are easier, but they accomplish nothing and leave many situations paralyzed.” www.vatican.va/content/leo-...

Hadn't really thought about it but I can't really remember the last time we cooked beef in our household- pretty much all the meat we eat these days has come from a pig in the freezer (raised by a friend down the road) or the eggs our chickens lay, and we only eat meat so many days a week

Finch 🇵🇸 🇪🇭@finchowar.bsky.social · last wk.

There has never been a better time in US history to cut beef from your diet

Fantastic doodles and Arabic writing practice from a medieval or early modern fragment originating in Fustat, fellow in the bottom right corner looks a bit like a Pharaoh, a bit like Napoleon lol (Dallas Museum of Art K.1.2014.1138)

It's striking that the bridge too far for a number of liberals on here with AOC was not her wishy-washy equivocation on Israel but instead her trying to poach some MAHA types for the progressive side of the aisle

Bidens aristosa has begun to bloom, always a happen point in the year, one of the first indicators of autumn, even if it nearly cracked 100 here yesterday...

Mumford captured what I'm trying to get at beautifully well a half century ago- the dynamics we are now seeing are of course nothing new per se, we are merely experiencing intensification of long-existing patterns:

Jonathan Parkes Allen@jparkesallen.bsky.social · last wk.

There is something incredibly deeply perverse, so perverse that it is hard to articulate it well, about the drive to hand over human creativity and self-direction to non-human machines, to totally collapse the most vital aspects of being human into instrumental capitalist logic and control