He died for our debts, not our sins - "Rather than sex and sin, both Christianity and Judaism is preoccupied with debt. As it turns out, Jesus was a socialist activist who paid the ultimate price fighting for the reinstatement of regular debt jubilees... the Lord’s Prayer, ‘forgive us our sins even as we forgive all who are indebted to us’, refers specifically to debt. “‘Schuld’, in German, means ‘debt’ as well as ‘offense’ or, ‘sin’. It’s ‘devoir’ in French. It had the same duality in meaning in the Babylonian language of Akkadian.”... People tend to think of the Commandment ‘do not covet your neighbour’s wife’ in purely sexual terms but actually, the economist says it refers specifically to creditors who would force the wives and daughters of debtors into sex slavery as collateral for unpaid debt. “This goes all the way back to Sumer in the third millennium,” he said. Similarly, the Commandment ‘thou shalt not steal’ refers to usury and exploitation by threat for debts owing. “To understand the crucifixion of Jesus is to understand it was his punishment for his economic views,” says Professor Hudson. “He was a threat to the creditors.”... In Sumer and Babylonia, whenever a new ruler would come to power, the first thing they would do was proclaim a “clean slate”, forgiving the population’s personal debt in what was known as a ‘debt jubilee’. But classical antiquity’s rulers who cancelled their subjects’ debts tended to be overthrown with disturbing frequency – from the Greek ‘tyrants’ of the 7th century BC who overthrew the aristocracies of Sparta and Corinth, to Sparta’s Kings Agis and Cleomenes in the 3rd century BC who sought to cancel Spartan debts, to Roman politicians advocating debt relief and land redistribution, Julius Caesar among them... Christianity was reshaped by Saint Paul, followed by the “African” school of Cyril of Alexandria and St Augustine."
Should Canada be worried about record consumer debt? | The Star - "So why, having imported America’s Black Friday and housing bubbles and mortgage refinancing, hasn’t Canada gone the way of the U.S. a decade ago, when such frivolous borrowing fostered the subprime mortgage crisis? It’s not just luck or that caution that Canadians are known for. Most economists tip their hat to regulators. After seeing the carnage next door a decade ago, authorities in Canada have taken some aggressive steps to curtail excesses here. Banks face narrower mandates to lend and customers face stiffer requirements to borrow."
Damn government regulation!
Sabrina Maddeaux: Given Canada's crushing consumer debt, Squid Game should have been set here - "Everyone’s talking about South Korea’s massive consumer debt crisis. The topic, normally relegated to more niche economic and political circles, is suddenly a pop culture lightning rod thanks to Netflix’s mega hit Squid Game... Canada’s consumer debt crisis is much worse than South Korea’s by just about every measure. Moreover, we’re still in such high-level denial about it that, unlike in South Korea, our politicians and banks aren’t even trying to curb rising debt levels. Rather, many are doing the exact opposite."
Meme - "You've been blessed with a very rare smiling Gordon Ramsay. Double tap for good luck."
Meme - "When you finally agree to a threesome and your man giving the guy all the dick *Arthur Cartoon*"
Meme - "When you finally agree to a threesome with your man but he's giving her all the dick... *Arthur Cartoon*"
👾Rani Timekey Baker, Noise Channel $400C-$400F on Twitter - "1978: Willie Nelson releases "Mamas Dont Let Your Babies (Grow Up To Be Cowboys)"
1996 (literally 18 years later): Paula Cole releases "Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?"
Amazing the patterns you start to recognize when you learn the history they refuse to teach you in school."
Mom Handcuffed, Jailed for 8-Year-Old Son Walking Half a Mile - "Heather Wallace's oldest son, 8-year-old Aiden, was driving his two brothers crazy in the car as they all returned from karate one afternoon in October 2021. Wallace asked Aiden to walk the rest of the way home—half a mile in quiet, suburban Waco, Texas—so that he could calm down. For this she was arrested, handcuffed, and thrown in jail. She was charged with endangering a child, a felony carrying a mandatory minimum of two years in prison... She is finally able to speak out after completing a six-month pretrial diversion program to get the charges dropped. But her arrest remains on the books—easily searchable by employers—which is disastrous for someone with a Bachelor's degree in education... Aiden agreed to walk home; after all, it was something he had done many times. There are sidewalks the entire way, and practically zero traffic... A woman one block away had called the cops to report a boy walking outside alone. That lady had actually asked Aiden where he lived, verified that it was just down the street, and proceeded to call nonetheless. The cops picked up Aiden on his own block. As they stood on her porch, the officers told Wallace that her son could have been kidnapped and sex trafficked. "'You don't see much sex trafficking where you are, but where I patrol in downtown Waco, we do,'" said one of the cops, according to Wallace. This statement struck her as odd. "They were basically admitting that this is a safe neighborhood"... Child services had the family agree to a safety plan, which meant Wallace and her husband could not be alone with their kids for even a second. Their mothers—the children's grandmothers—had to visit and trade off overnight stays in order to guarantee the parents were constantly supervised. After two weeks, child services closed Wallace's case, finding the complaint was unfounded. Wallace believes this could be due to the Reasonable Childhood Independence law that Texas passed in 2021 with the help of Let Grow, the non-profit I co-founded. It's part of HB567, a larger child welfare reform bill, and clarifies that parents are allowed to let their kids engage in independent activities as long as they aren't putting them in serious, likely danger... Unfortunately, HB567 amended only family law, not criminal law. This meant the cops were still free to punish Wallace. She obtained a lawyer, who told her that if she admitted guilt, she could participate in a pretrial diversion program that would close the case. On the other hand, if she went to trial and lost, she faced a minimum of two years behind bars and a maximum of 20. So she took the plea deal. Her diversion program required 65 hours of community service, which Wallace completed at an early childhood center. The program mandated that she only work there during the weekends, when there were no kids around for her to endanger. She helped develop the center's curriculum and also did some cleaning. Meanwhile, she was forced to resign from the pediatric sleep consulting business where she worked, for the same reason: child endangerment charges. There went half the family's income. She found work at a cookie store instead. To comply with the program, Wallace also had to take a parenting class and eight random drug tests. Ironically, that meant she sometimes had to leave the kids by themselves for an hour... Wallace's sister has started a GoFundMe for her. She is in debt after losing her job and paying for the lawyer and the diversion program. She also hopes to hire a lawyer to get her record expunged so that she can work with kids again. But in her pretrial essay, which required her to admit guilt and remorse, Wallace thanked the officers for teaching her how wrong she was to have her son walk half a mile on a warm day in his own neighborhood. From now on, Wallace wrote, "I will continue to grow more as a parent and a person.""
The moral panic over "protecting kids" continues
The reason why you shouldn't smile in custody mug shot - ""Does this look like a woman who is remorseful for the crime she committed, that ended up killing someone? "The jury is going to absolutely hate you... and by the way that woman is a real person, and she was sentenced to 11 years in prison.""
The Excessive, Unjust Enforcement of Petty Traffic Laws Causes Too Many Americans To Lose their Driver's Licenses - "Most Americans' most frequent direct encounter with their government is through their government's agents stopping them for moving through the world in a motor vehicle in a disapproved manner, then fining them for some infraction—often one harmless to others. Those fines need not be (and generally are not) adjusted to any poor citizen's actual ability to pay. As a result, many Americans find themselves criminals for not being able to afford these sorts of petty fines, commonly losing the ability to drive, which often means losing the ability to make a living to pay those fines without undue hardship. This situation got so bad in Virginia that at one point, one in six licensed drivers had their licenses suspended—not over behavior that actually harmed others, but often just over not paying the state the money it was trying to mulct from them... Focusing on their home state of North Carolina, the Wilson Center's researchers found around 1.2 million citizens had their licenses suspended dating back to the 1980s for either failing to pay a fine or failing to appear in court, with black and Latino citizens having suspensions disproportionate to their percentage of the population. A survey of state residents they conducted found 28 percent of those with suspended driver's licenses reported their suspensions had led them to be evicted from their homes. Many cannot possibly survive in America without the legal ability to drive, so they do so anyway—which can lead to more criminal prosecutions and fines merely for continuing to drive (even perfectly safely) without official permission. One in 12 North Carolinians has some unpaid criminal court debt, which builds on itself; another $50 is added to your debt to the courts if you are 40 days late on paying your old debt... Such "failure to comply" fines, the Wilson Center found, are more than 12 times as likely to be for traffic or other misdemeanors or infractions as for felonies. And they are, obviously, essentially crimes of poverty: Those making over $50,000 a year are 46 percent less likely to have license suspensions in North Carolina. (A judge in Tennessee in 2018 recognized that it's dumb and cruel public policy to punish people with such suspensions with no attempt to figure out ability to pay.) As the study concludes, "The steady increase in license suspensions and fines and fees can create a vicious cycle of court debt and consequences that often last for years. Indeed, for many people it never ends. People can accumulate thousands of dollars in debt they cannot pay off, in part because maintaining a job is exponentially harder without a driver's license….These policies offer little to no public benefit—and in fact, are counterproductive; they create barriers to working and contributing to the economy, punish the poor, and disproportionately cause serious harms to families and communities of color." That sort of punishment and disruption from combining poverty with minor traffic offenses should be rethought. Unfortunately, given how many localities are overly reliant on such petty fines to keep themselves afloat, it's a politically difficult fight"
Even if Modern Star Trek Doesn’t Think So, the World Is Getting Better - "For decades, various incarnations of Star Trek have offered mostly positive visions for the future of humanity—one in which we've set aside petty, earthbound squabbles in favor of boldly seeking out new worlds (and, of course, finding the occasional conflict). But the first three seasons of Star Trek: Discovery (Paramount+), the seventh television series in the long-running franchise, have too often seemed tied down by storylines that might have more in common with real-world politics of the 21st century rather than the unbridled optimism that was such an important part of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry's original conception for the show. Discovery is highly serialized, more focused on a single calamity than a larger sense of exploration, and with far more internally focused characters who care more about their own interests than in a larger plan for society. As a result, Star Trek now seeks to reinforce the trepidation and existential doubt that is a hallmark of our modern culture. Instead of showing the potential of what humanity can become, Discovery seems to reflect more on what the feelings of the human condition are today. That's a shame, because society is actually moving toward Roddenberry's vision of a humanity that reaches beyond the petty conflicts of the day, rather than the fractured future presented in the newer Star Trek shows... To different degrees, modern Star Trek no longer seems interested in exploring a future where humanity has risen above the cultural and political swamps of the day. Through more than three seasons, Discovery has yet to produce an episode like "The Measure of a Man," in which The Next Generation's Captain Jean-Luc Picard made a convincing argument for why Data the android is, in fact, human. Or "Tuvix," the poignant early episode of Voyager that asked Captain Kathryn Janeway to make an impossible choice, one she confronts with conviction. That's true not only of Discovery but of other contemporary Trek series too. Star Trek: Picard depicts a retired and weary former starship captain now living as a recluse and processing the trauma of Data's death in Star Trek: Nemesis, the 2002 film that served as a send-off for The Next Generation crew... other key components of the Star Trek formula are missing too. Discovery seems to go out of the way to make the differences in the characters a central theme. And while diversity has always been at the core of Star Trek, its true virtue is that diversity didn't need to be celebrated or condemned, it just was—the natural result of a multicultural, multiplanetary society... Maybe it's no wonder that the original series and The Next Generation remain incredibly popular on streaming services, while Discovery has struggled with low ratings"
ENGLAND WON!!!!! : trashyboners (NSFW)
Frenchman wins legal right to not be ‘fun’ at work after fight over after-work drinks - "A man who was fired for being “too boring” has been vindicated after the French high court ruled his former company’s self-described “fun” culture violated his rights. The man, referred to as Mr T, was fired from working as a director for Parisian management consultancy company Cubik Partners in 2015 after refusing to take part in after-work drinks and team-building activities... Mr T said the company’s “fun” values included regular obligatory social events that involved “excessive alcoholism encouraged by associates who made very large quantities available” and “practices pushed by associates involving promiscuity, bullying and incitement to various excesses”. In its ruling the Court of Cassation pointed out it was not everyone’s definition of “fun” to engage in such activities and said the company’s values of “fun” violated Mr T’s “fundamental right to the dignity and respect for his private life”. Mr T also argued the company’s “fun and pro” culture was characterised by “humiliating and intrusive practices”."
Crocodile snatches Australian woman during night swim - "A woman struggled in vain to drag her friend from a crocodile’s jaws off a northeast Australian beach, police said. The pair were in shallow water at Thornton Beach in the World Heritage-listed Daintree National Park in Queensland state when the 46-year-old woman was taken by the crocodile late on Sunday... The two women might not have been aware that the area was well known as a crocodile habitat, Parker said. But Warren Enstch, who represents the area in the Australian Parliament, said the beach was beside a creek where tourism operators run crocodile-spotting tours. Enstch said the two tourists had to have seen plentiful crocodile warning signs in the region. “You can’t legislate against human stupidity,” Entsch said. “If you go in swimming at 10 o’clock at night, you’re going to get consumed.” The attack occurred near where a five-year-old boy was taken and killed by a 4.3m crocodile from a swamp in 2009 and a 43-year-old woman was killed by a 5m croc while swimming in a creek in 1985. Darwin-based crocodile expert Grahame Webb said while most crocodiles were found in rivers, swamps and other protected waterways, open beaches in northern Australia were not safe. “There have been quite a lot of attacks off beaches and off coral reefs where people are snorkelling,” Webb said. The number of crocodiles has boomed across Australia’s northern tropics since they became a protected species under federal law in 1971. They pose an increasing threat to human beings."
The Spinner - "The Spinner* is a service that enables you to subconsciously influence a specific person, by controlling the content on the websites he or she usually visits. The targeted person gets repetitively exposed to hundreds of items which are placed and disguised as editorial content. Select the message you wish to deliver to a specific person. That person will be exposed to 10 articles on major social networks and news sites over a three month period. The articles are picked by The Spinner's editors team in order to support the desired narrative." No hacking or downloading malicious software is necessary. Instead, a popular marketing technique is used to display native ads to the target audience. Select a campaign that best fits your needs and get started!
Get Back With Your Ex!
Propose Marriage!
Initiate Sex!
Get Your Kid A Dog!
Moving to the City!
Moving to the Countryside!
Settle. Don't Go To Court!
Buy an Electric Car
Recycle
Ride Your Bicycle To Work
Accept My Sexual Orientation!
Quit Smoking!
Polyamory Love!
Breast Augmentation!
Don't Do Drugs!
Stop Riding Motorcycles!
Stop Drinking!
Don't Divorce. Save Your Marriage!
Stop Eating Meat!
Quit Your Job!
Drive Carefully!
Lose Weight!
Stay In College!
Accept My Gaming Habit!
Accept My Pot Smoking Habit!
Prevent Phishing Attacks!"
hot wheels particle accelerator - YouTube
- "In the UK we sometimes joke about having to order the kids meal In America to get a normal sized meal Today I actually did it, this is what a $5.50 kids meal at olive garden looks like, it is legitimately just a regular amount of food"Roy Harryman on Twitter - "The ultimate tagline – I saw this exterminator's truck in OP Saturday: "Bringing joy and happiness by spreading death and destruction." #taglines #exterminators #pestcontrol #slogans #funnysigns"
I came out to my family about my fetishes and I’ve never felt better : rant - "We were halfway through dinner when I had worked up the courage to come out to my father, mother, sister, and brother as a toilet slave. My sister left the table angry. My brother, in his normal insensitive way, just laughed. My mother and father looked concerned so I explained to them that everything was fine and that being a toilet slave only meant that I derived pleasure from a woman defecating and urinating in my mouth. They seemed confused but also accepting of their toilet slave son, which makes me emotional just thinking about it. With the confidence that their love for me would not be tarnished, I continued and told them about my butt plugs. That over the last two years I have been inserting increasingly larger plugs."
Everything is a sexuality now
People with Untreated Mental Illness 16 Times More Likely to Be Killed By Law Enforcement - "People with untreated mental illness are 16 times more likely to be killed during a police encounter than other civilians approached or stopped by law enforcement... reducing encounters between on-duty law enforcement and individuals with the most severe psychiatric diseases may represent the single most immediate, practical strategy for reducing fatal police shootings in the United States, the authors conclude. “By dismantling the mental illness treatment system, we have turned mental health crisis from a medical issue into a police matter,” said John Snook, executive director and a co-author of the study. “This is patently unfair, illogical and is proving harmful both to the individual in desperate need of care and the officer who is forced to respond.”"
Of course, the cope is that the police are biased and shoot those with untreated mental illness for no reason
Meme - "When referencing art... Humans use them as inspiration
AI uses them as samples
Without references, humans can still visualize ideas, but AI cannot. Both benefit from references, but Al. depends on them. AI doesn't "learn" from art, it manipulates art beyond recognition as a deception to appear new. Without consent or compensation to the original artists, AI art is theft."
‘Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’: Passing on the loud, lively Black movie theater experience to my kid - "I was not the only person cheering, being exaggeratedly shocked and openly weeping. The theater was full of equally enthusiastic people, most of them Black, and seemingly there for a happening... This wasn’t just a movie one sits through quietly. It’s a whole raucous, happy and very Black movie thing, and I was so excited to introduce my son to it here, in my city. I’m aware that the idea of talking back to a movie strikes some as gauche, or uncouth. I don’t care... “when Black people choose to spend their time and money entertaining themselves, relaxing and best of all, laughing loudly, my entire being rejoices. It is a giant middle finger to the notion that quiet, incessant industriousness is the social tax Black people must pay to earn America’s approval and to ensure white comfort.”"
If black people are thrown out of the theatre for disrupting the screening, this is racism. Throwing teens out of theatres for gentleminions is good though, since they're not black
Elden Ring player tricks invader by pretending to be an NPC
Diablo 2 player completes pacifist Hell run previously only theorized to be possible - "MacroBioBoi (opens in new tab) finally did it: They completed the "world's first ever completely untwinked solo self-found Hell pacifist Sorceress run" in Diablo 2: Resurrected. In terms that'll be more familiar to people who aren't Diablo 2 speedrunners, Macro beat Diablo 2: Resurrected on the hardest difficulty without attacking anything, using only items they found during the run. ("Twinking," in Diablo 2 parlance, means using the trading system to give a character items.) Diablo 2 speedrunners had come up with theoretical ways to accomplish the run, but Macro was the first to do it for real... The Diablo 2 speedrunning community has created a detailed set of rules which define what a pacifist run is. You can't attack, of course, but there's more to it than that. You also can't force anything else to attack, set traps, or use damaging auras, either. For the most part, the damage you deal has to be dealt as a direct consequence of a creature choosing to attack you. To accomplish that, Macro loaded up their Sorceress with "chance to cast" items and abilities that sometimes cause a spell to be cast when their character takes a hit. By the end, they had a set of armor that caused them to cast the powerful area-of-effect Nova spell every time an enemy hit them. They also dumped points into the Cold Armor passive skills, which increase defense (the Sorceress doesn't have many hitpoints) and do cold damage to enemies who hit them."
List of games that Buddha would not play - Wikipedia - "The Buddhist games list is a list of games that Gautama Buddha is reputed to have said that he would not play and that his disciples should likewise not play, because he believed them to be a 'cause for negligence'...
1. Games on boards with 8 or 10 rows
2. The same games played on imaginary boards
3. Games of marking diagrams on the floor such that the player can only walk on certain places
4. Games where players either remove pieces from a pile or add pieces to it, with the loser being the one who causes the heap to shake (similar to the modern game pick-up sticks).
5. Games of throwing dice.
6. "Dipping the hand with the fingers stretched out in lac, or red dye, or flour-water, and striking the wet hand on the ground or on a wall, calling out 'What shall it be?' and showing the form required—elephants, horses, &c."
7. Ball games.
8. Blowing through a pat-kulal, a toy pipe made of leaves.
9. Ploughing with a toy plough.
10. Playing with toy windmills made from palm leaves.
11. Playing with toy measures made from palm leaves.
12. Playing with toy carts.
13. Playing with toy bows.
14. Guessing at letters traced with the finger in the air or on a friend's back. (letters in the Brahmi script)
15. Guessing a friend's thoughts.
16. Imitating deformities."
How GOG rescued 13 Forgotten Realms games from licensing hell - "“with classic games like those from the Forgotten Realms series, years of mergers, acquisitions and bankruptcies can really leave the rights sitting in very strange places... like banks, or enormous conglomerates. Sometimes the original documents aren't even digitized, so somebody has to physically head down to the figurative cellar and dig through countless cabinets.” On top of that, the art, the music, the license, the digital distribution rights, the code can all be owned by different people... GOG managed to recover 13 games this way. The party-based RPG Pool of Radiance; its sequels Curse of the Azure Bonds, Secret of the Silver Blades, and Pools of Darkness; C&C creators Westwood’s minigame RPG Hillsfar; the RPG construction kit Unlimited Adventures; Westwood’s first-person Eye of the Beholder Trilogy; the roguelike FPS Dungeon Hack; the two Savage Frontier games; and the Underdark exploration game Menzoberranzan. Then it they had the not-so-small matter of getting all 13 running and bug-free for modern systems including Windows 10. Considering these were huge games—and not bug-free in their release versions—that’s a massive task. One of the stranger challenges has been to get the Code Wheels working—the nostalgia-inducing cardboard security devices that came in the SSI Gold Boxes. “We considered trying to remove the need to use these codes during gameplay (much like we've done with several of our games in the past) but instead decided to opt for leaving that mechanic intact for the sake of a cooler, more authentic old-school experience.” So each game has a printable DIY code wheel for players to construct and a software version as well... “We have seen the D&D torch passed on to great games like Baldur's Gate, and members of those teams have gone on to make some games in the same vein, such as Pillars of Eternity.” said David Shelley. “It does trade off turn based detail for realtime excitement, but the story and style hearkens back to many of the games in these collections. Divinity: Original Sin is another with an excellent fantasy feel, and a similar experience.”"
Just How Rigged is the "Rigged Game"? - ""The Division of Light and Power," the new book by Dennis Kucinich, is an epic chronicle of American corruption"
70 Percent of the World’s Macadamia Nuts Came From One Tree in Australia - "The vast majority of the world’s commercial macadamia crops originated from a single 19th-century tree in the tiny town of Gympie in Queensland, Australia, according to a new study in Frontiers in Plant Science. It’s basically the Genghis Khan of macadamia nut trees, progeny-wise. The researchers collected hundreds of DNA samples from macadamia trees in the trees’ native habitat in Queensland and compared them to samples of commercially grown trees from Hawaiʻi, which produces 70 percent of the world’s macadamia varieties... Like many tree crops, macadamias are reproduced via grafting. So commercial orchards often contain thousands of trees but just a few individuals... This remarkable lack of genetic diversity places macadamia crops at a higher risk of succumbing to disease or changes in climate than trees with a more diverse population, according to a report in The Guardian. In comparison, wild Australian macadamias boast a rich diversity despite their narrow habitat of subtropical forest"
'Madam' used to retain a married woman's surname - "Where I live, it is a standard usage, although the woman is married, to refer to herself as Madam Elaine Ang ('Ang' is her surname) when she prefers to use her own surname. Do native speakers do the same thing?" "I know that, in Asia, many people are taught to use "Madam". But I've never yet come across any foreign women who like this form of address: it sounds either obsequious (especially when used by peers) or, as I said, has faint undertones of female sex-workers!"
Commentary: Arts and humanities can set you up for life in post-coronavirus world
Ironically, there's a lot of rhetoric in here, but little actual hard data showing the link asserted (and many methodological issues come to mind for their claims the data are supposed to support).