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Disagree. Anyone who can turn policy on its head 180 degrees by musing thoughtlessly can screw up the country arguably worse than someone who has to put any time into it.

I'm not agnostic because I am afraid to admit I am atheist because I fear family or peer pressure, or fear violence from Christians around me. Neither my family nor my community swing that way. I am agnostic because I think it's literally impossible to know with certainty what the deity situation is. I can't bring myself to consider myself atheist because, to me, that requires the same conceit of certainty that evangelical Christianity entails. Speaking just from my experience on the ground (and explicitly excluding this forum), both evangelicals and atheists have always been glad to tell me exactly what they believe (and what I should believe) with identical energy and sense of purpose, and each side makes me uncomfortable with their self-professed certainty and ardor. There's only one possible way we can discover the truth, and once we do, we won't be able to come back and tell anyone what that truth is. I acknowledge that certain beliefs are probably closer to the truth than others, and that the evidence we have at hand to date seems to suggest lack of deity, but again, I'm loathe to profess any certainty about any of it. I just don't think either atheists or religionists can know for a fact who or what god/gods is/are or isn't/aren't with any certainty, and I'm suspicious of anyone who professes that certainty in any event. But more importantly, to me anyway, I don't feel I am required to pick a side either way and defend it with either my heart or my life. At least not yet.

Or those who say they are Christians because it makes them look cool and tough, but don't give a **** about or may not even be aware of any of the messages of love and empathy Jesus professes, which seems obvious to me when you read stuff like this: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/is-empathy-a-sin-some-conservative-christians-argue-it-can-be

I can see senile Trump talk everyone around him into military action in Switzerland which, not for nothing, is NOT in NATO. There's a lot of money to steal there he can split with Putin et al.

I had wondered how much stance contributes to the elevation of swing and miss over the years. Remember guys who used to hit like this? They almost never struck out.

Super interesting.

World War ONE! Zone Rouge: An Area of France So Badly Damaged By WW1 That People Are Still Forbidden To Live There

OK, this one is flat out dishonest. Portugal has nine different former colonies with larger economies than they? Sure, if you include China, India, Japan, and Canada, all of which had very small portions controlled by Portugal, and then you compare the economy of the entire country against Portugal's.

Really interesting map. Nobody wants to hurt no kangaroos. Is Switzerland really all that safe? Seems like being in the middle of Europe puts it at mortal risk regardless of its neutrality policies.

There's a correlation between this and which countries I most want to visit.

There's a western civilization argument somewhere in here.

Map Showing The Range Of Israel’s Jericho III Nuclear Missiles

I agree that McGonigle will start the season in Toledo unless he proves he is bulletproof on a process basis, and chances are he won't. I don't think this will be a cynical case of manipulating his earning power to save a few bucks, but it sure will be positioned that way, here and elsewhere. I also agree that McKinstry deserves a chance to show he can repeat, unless his mechanics completely break down in March. I mean, I would bet real money he won't repeat it, but he has certainly earned that opportunity to prove it coming into the season.

I have really ramped up my usage of LLAMAs just in the past few weeks, because it finally dawned on me when it makes sense to use search like Google versus a LLAMA like ChatGPT: Use Google when you need to know simple facts like who, what, where, when. Use ChatGPT when you need deeper explanations along the lines of why or how or does. Still, always check against original sources before you act on its advice on important matters. I’m now moving on to comparing the various LLAMAs versus one another, so I rigged one of my laptop browsers to always open to six main LLAMAs: ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Perplexity, and Meta AI. My plan is to occasionally run the same queries along different subject lines on all of them to see which ones provide the best answers and whether different LLAMAs are better than they others depending on subject matter. I will probably end up paring it does to a couple, but out of the gate, it looks like ChatGPT is the leader on breadth of “knowledge” and ability to filter results in an understandable way, and you can specify limits to its output within the query to defeat digital logorrhea.

Atheism and agnosticism may not be in the same certainty-of-belief bucket, but are they all that different as they relate to established religions, which involve choice of deity?

I have a sneaking suspicion that a high percentage of people who self-identify as "Christian" (or, as many might say it, "Chryis-tchyian") aren't really on speaking or praying terms with any deity. People like that seem to just use "Jesus Christ" as either a trump card or a punchline.

This is from Axios this past Friday. You wouldn't know this is happening because of the hyper-christian posturing of the MAGA elite and their red hat followers and the way they are using state resources to respect one particular establishment of religion. However, I don't think this is surprising given how bad a name those people are given Christianity with their wrong-headed, muscle-bound, indiscriminate prosecution of the least of our brothers. 1 big thing: America's great unchurching The U.S. is undergoing its fastest religious shift in modern history, marked by a rapid increase in the religiously unaffiliated and numerous church closures nationwide, Axios' Russell Contreras writes. Why it matters: The great unchurching of America comes as identity and reality are increasingly shaped by non-institutional spiritual sources — YouTube mystics, TikTok tarot, digital skeptics, folk saints and AI-generated prayer bots. It's a tectonic transformation that has profound implications for race, civic identity, political persuasion and the ability to govern a fracturing moral landscape. 🧮 By the numbers: Nearly three in 10 American adults identify as religiously unaffiliated — a 33% jump since 2013, according to the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI). That's quicker than almost any major religious shift in modern U.S. history, and it's happening across racial groups. About four in ten Americans ages 18 to 29 identify as religiously unaffiliated (38%), an increase from 32% in 2013, PRRI said. Gallup polling finds 57% of Americans seldom or never attend religious services, a jump from 40% in 2000. Zoom in: The shift in religious activity is leaving behind a trail of "church graveyards," or empty buildings that are now difficult to sell or have been abandoned. An unprecedented 15,000 churches are expected to shut their doors this year, far more than the few thousand expected to open, according to denominational reports and church consultants. These churches once served as community gathering places for Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, voting precincts, or town halls, leaving a void. Megachurches show signs of stability, but not enough to reverse overall declines. 🙏 The intrigue: As Americans unchurch, YouTube channels like Spiritual Manifestation attract hundreds of thousands of subscribers who share mysticism, spiritual insight, and "inner wisdom" content online. YouTube videos of speeches by the late agnostic and astronomer Carl Sagan and atheist and biologist Richard Dawkins attacking religion have drawn millions of views. Devotees to unofficial Catholic Latino folk saints such as Santa Muerte and Jesús Malverde have also become increasingly prominent outside official religion. Share this story.

I don't see anything?

So, does Trump spending so much time and energy redecorating the White House into a Third World Dictator Gold Leaf motif utterly charm and delight the red hats? If nothing else, it's certainly easy for them to understand.

They do have a history of "coloreds", so, close enough.

I love when people interpret "might" as being the same as "absolutely, unequivocally, definitely 100% will". 😉

It looks like he's got a pretty good eye, though.