Jump to content

Mole

Legacy Members
  • Posts

    2666
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by Mole

  1. Proverbs 27: 15 A nagging wife is like water going drip-drip-drip on a rainy day. 16 How can you keep her quiet? Have you ever tried to stop the wind or ever tried to hold a handful of oil? I know you need to prime the pump, but this religion thread is still in its infancy. It’s all friendly right now; wait until we’ve all decided to hate each other for a few days and then you’ll get that sweet metaphysics talk that you crave. We live in an ordered universe, so this thread must also follow the God-ordained natural order of things.
  2. 1. Read AP, Reuters, and BBC most days. 2. Every few weeks check the cable website headlines to understand what the crazy people in my life are ranting about. 3. Every month or so check the social media of my crazy town acquaintances to see what’s about to filter to the cable sites 4. There are a handful of folks here and elsewhere that I respect as thoughtful people and I’ll read what they link as well. 5. Occasional chats with porta potty girl so I know what’s coming down the pike. 6. Avoid listening to Trump’s demonic voice or even reading his words at all costs — I haven’t heard him speak more than two consecutive words since 1/6. Life is a little bit better.
  3. I missed when CNN got us out of our silo and had the Bin Laden town hall.
  4. That pairs well with field training on how to handle a sucking chest wound.
  5. Sad, yes. Satire? Where’s the exaggeration?
  6. In the military, chaplains fill a vital role for maintaining the spiritual health of young people — of all and no faiths — facing the stress of operating in an absurd and abusive bureaucracy with enemy combatants lurking around every corner. How are schools different?
  7. Here I am trying to read and decipher that Fort Bragg headline and determine whether or not I’m experiencing a suddenly increasing mental impairment or if the writer was impaired. I think I know what it means — I wish I didn’t — but I’m also not sure if that’s what it’s saying.
  8. All of the calculations underestimate the likelihood of a repetitive stress injury on our old man elbows and shoulders. I don’t think I could put up the necessary number of shots every day for long enough to get a lucky streak before my body broke down.
  9. My son’s Who Was Abraham Lincoln book says that Tad was so nicknamed because he looked and moved like a tadpole when he was born.
  10. Bill’s relationship with Monica was by modern definition non-consensual. He also lied about it to cover it up. Take partisan politics out of it and pretend he was the CEO of the world’s largest bomb distributor. We all would agree that an ethical bomb distributor would fire him immediately or we should shop elsewhere. If two decades later, they named his wife their new CEO and named him national spokesman, we’d all laugh at how terrible this company is. Even if Hillary was perfectly ethical and honest, the Bill Clinton stench still looms pretty large. It’s probably not fair to her and she was 100% right about Trump, but such is life and we get the worst kind of leader.
  11. Kid Rock turning into a clown is one of the more surprising and disappointing developments of this era. He had such promising intellect and musical gifts. Seeing your heroes descend into the absurd is hard to take. Sad!
  12. This whole thing makes me sick to my stomach, but the Sean Feucht thing is trippy for me. I’m one step removed from some of his relatives and have performed right before him on shows. At the time, he seemed like the stereotypical worship musician — a very limited musical knowledge, put on a good enough show, not openly rude but not all that welcoming or friendly (mostly stemming for insecurity for his lack of musicianship), and also REALLY into guns. I never thought I’d see or hear about him again, yet every few months he bubbles up on MAGA circles. I have nothing to add; it’s just weird.
  13. Mole

    LBGTQ

    As a parent of a small and opinionated child, I may have considered this myself at times.
  14. On this Holy Week, where we commemorate the savior of the world and His betrayal and resurrection, we are reminded of the words of Jesus from Mark 6:4: Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor except in his own town, among his relatives and in his own home.”
  15. Also back on point, I don’t carry and haven’t touched a firearm since Uncle Sam stopped asking me; there’s no interest on my part. I don’t hunt or camp and have no internet in visiting neighborhoods where the risks of carrying outweigh the risks of not carrying. I question the assumption that not carrying or not having a firearm in the home is taking on additional risk. There are certainly scenarios where guns come in handy, but also scenarios where even a responsible gun owner acting responsibly makes things more dangerous for everyone involved. The risk calculations are different clearing rooms in Fallujah vs. clearing your plate at the Plano Chuck E Cheese. It’s a bit confusing to me to read gun owners (somewhere on this thread, in the midst of the CR talk) describe scenarios where there turned out to be no threat as some sort of argument in favor of owning. Unless there is actually an intruder, skulking about your house and backyard in your boxers looking for a bad guy gets infinitely more dangerous with a gun vs. a can of wasp spray, an air horn, or just a rapier wit. A gun might make you feel safer, but unless there’s actually a bad guy, it’s way more dangerous. Even if there’s a bad guy, it still might be more dangerous to start a gun fight. The real question — and it depends on the circumstances — is what kind of interactions are more likely to occur. Comparisons to wearing a seatbelt or other basic safety precautions just don’t make sense to me. Wearing a seatbelt imposes minimal risk on the wearer and no risk to those around them. Guns do the opposite. Sometimes the good guy with the gun saves the day, but other times he escalates a situation or isn’t prepared for the stress of gunfire, or the normally responsible gun owner gets complacent and acts irresponsibly, or there’s untreated mental illness and a dark moment turns into inconsolable grief for a family, or the bad guy intruder turns out to be a family member. I’ll grant that there are certainly cases where carrying is the wise, logical choice, but those cases are far fewer than most of us think.
  16. Ask it to give a numbered list of US states in the reverse in which they joined the union and watch it break. Good luck getting to the correct answer. It’s currently an impossible task for it, but it insists it’s just about to give the correct answer. Similar lists, particularly if you go backwards break it. It gets all sorts of other basic, factual things wrong as well. I ask it medium-depth questions in my field and get the exact opposite of correct.
  17. Not sure if this has been pointed out, but you probably mean gamut, which means the entire range. A gambit is a kind of sacrifice, which also applies in this situation, just not for the people you mentioned. Gamut comes from medieval music theory — gamma ut, which was the bottom note in their system. They derived their music theory from a mistranslation/misunderstanding of the Ancient Greek music theory, so the entire medieval system was essentially upside down and bore little relation to the original source materials; kind of like how our values and understanding of the 2nd amendment is upside down and has lost all touch with the context in which the amendment was conceived. The medieval church felt they needed to assert control and uniformity, so they decided upon a set of common chants for church services and attributed them to Pope Gregory via inspiration of the Holy Spirit. They used this Gregorian Chant to suppress competing chant forms, so eventually, most of the other forms died out.
  18. Was Sunday some sort of racist holiday? The confederate flags were out in full force for my Deep South Sunday drive. I saw a desecraty US/Confederate hybrid. One confederate flag had lettering on it and appeared to say “Keep It White,” but I couldn’t quite make out the last word when passing down the highway.
  19. Tough D, a little out of control on offense, hopefully RT led some breathing exercises during the TO.
  20. That’s not even absurd literalism, it’s something else. A number of OT books have authorship claims pretty explicitly in the text. That’s not to mention Moses narrating his own death.
  21. It’s an issue inherent in dealing with ancient texts. If you’re dealing honestly with the scholarship, there will be ambiguity. That seems preferable to me to having one authorized version that doesn’t honestly deal with the source materials. We tend to import our modern thinking into ancient texts and then wonder about all of the problems.
  22. There are some passages that have some debate about whether or not they were actually in the original manuscripts. Depending on the source material the translation uses can impact whether or not they will include this. Sometimes they’ll include it with a note at the bottom explaining the issue or sometimes they’ll include it just in the footnotes. Someone that has King James as their default mental version will find some missing notable passages in other versions. Wikipedia has a list with explanations: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_Testament_verses_not_included_in_modern_English_translations
×
×
  • Create New...