Theology 101: John Chrysostom: “The Church is not a theatre, that we should listen for amusement.” AmeriChurch, Inc.: “Can it, Johnny!”

Let me say this again: we have a large movement of “Christians” online who never talk about the gospel but only law, not doctrine per se but only application to the civil realm, detest pastors as a class, and are not members of local congregations. They will lead you astray.

An edifying spiritual lesson from an irksome annoyance.

“In spite of certain misguided representations of the doctrine, divine impassibility is actually good news for human beings. For impassibility entails that God cannot be deterred or discouraged in his pursuit of our good.” - Steven Duby

Online discourse is so broken and hypocritical at this point. It functions as a machine for feeding polarization and creating false dichotomies. If you're not 100% with us, then you're against us. If you won't denounce the right people, you're suspect. If you won't declare allegiance to the right people, you're disloyal. That has become the functional mantra of the age. We really need to stop respecting it. The answer, however, is not to pretend that every issue has some magical middle ground. Sometimes there really are only two options. Sometimes one side is right and the other is wrong. The problem isn't that people recognize binaries where they exist. The problem is that they impose binaries where they don't. The same thing goes for nuance. The problem was never nuance itself. Nuance is good when it helps us describe reality more accurately. But for years, calls for "more nuance" were often used to soften truths people didn't like and avoid making clear judgments. Adding precision to a true statement is one thing. Qualifying it until it means nothing is another. The result is that we've managed to corrupt both bluntness and nuance. Bluntness becomes sloganeering. Nuance becomes evasion. Binaries are imposed where they don't exist, and distinctions are erased where they do. There are often more options than the hard binaries people present. There is often room for careful distinctions. But there is also a time to say that something is simply true or false, right or wrong. Everyone seems to have overreacted. The people who abused nuance have convinced others that precision is impossible. The people who abused third-wayism have convinced others that every question has only two sides. The result is an increasingly irrational public discourse where people demand loyalty more than truth. We don't have to play along.

The Star-Spangled Banner hits different on home soil at the FIFA World Cup 🇺🇸

I’ll say it’s actually a shame I cannot in good conscience recommend or sing @elevation_wrshp to my congregants. The association with @stevenfurtick is far too dangerous to their souls. @elevation_wrshp on their own have written great songs depicting the Gospel and many of them (Trust In God, Firm Foundation, O Come to the Altar) depict strong biblical truths at a pace that makes for great runs and workouts. But their association with the Christless show of moralistic therapeutic deism at @ElevationChurch make promoting the band impossible and irresponsible. If Furtick’s messages could be as firm doctrinally as their songs, there wouldn’t be an issue. What makes this even more frustrating is the fact Furtick is a Grammy winning contributing writer on many of these tracks while his entire “worship service” is an abomination mocking God and the call to biblical discipleship. Enough said.

This is your reminder that 0.999̄ is exactly equal to 1 and that 0.499̄ is exactly equal to ½

Released in 1975, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi was an animated television special directed by legendary animator Chuck Jones and based on the classic story by Rudyard Kipling. The story follows a brave mongoose who takes on two deadly cobras to protect the family that rescued him. For a generation of kids, it was one of those rare animated films that felt genuinely intense. The stakes were real, the villains were terrifying, and you couldn't help but root for Rikki-Tikki every step of the way. More than 50 years later, it's still remembered as one of the finest animated adaptations ever put on television. Did you watch Rikki-Tikki-Tavi growing up?

In 1995 Philip R. Zimmermann (with MIT Press) published the full source code of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP). It was a genius idea. By printing the code on paper, users could scan it using OCR enabling international distribution without technically exporting "software". archive.org/details/pgpsourc…

A short history of how we got here, because the chronology is the whole story. January: the Pentagon demands unrestricted use of Claude for autonomous weapons and domestic surveillance. Anthropic says no. February: the President orders every federal agency to drop Anthropic. The Defense Secretary bans Pentagon contractors from doing business with them. A rival announces its classified-network deal within hours. March: the Pentagon designates an American company a "supply chain risk" under a statute written for foreign adversaries. A federal judge blocks it. May: the Pentagon signs AI deals with seven companies. Anthropic is not one of them. June 9: Anthropic releases Fable 5. June 12: Commerce issues an export control directive over a jailbreak that, by the government's own account, was demonstrated verbally, came with no written explanation, and involves a capability you can get from other publicly available models today. Two things are true at once. First: Anthropic spent months marketing Mythos as too dangerous to release. Sam Altman said it was "incredible marketing to say we have built a bomb." The Commerce Department has now formally agreed it is a bomb. If you describe your product as a munition in every press release, eventually a government takes you at your word. They wrote the legal predicate themselves and called it a brand. Second: we have run this experiment before. In the 90s the government classified encryption as a munition under ITAR. Activists defeated it by printing PGP's source code as a book, because books are protected speech and floppy disks were arms exports. A t-shirt with three lines of RSA Perl was legally a munition. The controls collapsed because math does not stop at customs. The new wrinkle is the "deemed export" rule: showing controlled technology to a foreign national inside the US counts as exporting it abroad. Which is why Anthropic's own foreign-national employees are now locked out of the model they built. The munition is in the building and the people who made it are not allowed to look at it. The jailbreak is the paperwork. The refusal was in January.

Why can’t they use normal time notation for soccer? Using ' for “minute” keeps making me think they’re talking about distance.

Prioritizing “customer experience” over “developer experience” isn’t the win you think it is. You don’t see 5-star chefs using dull knives and ovens that only get up to 170°…

When they tell you “we’ll fix it next year,” don’t believe them. They won’t “fix” it because in their eyes they don’t think it’s broken.

So yall are leading worship with ball caps on now? #sbc2026 #sbc26

Who is in charge of the stream for #sbc26? Why is the volume so low (it's been like this for years)? I have to boost it 600% to hear it. And no, I'm not that old...

It drives me nuts when "Yet Not I But Through Christ In Me" is played and they don't do the Csus to C at the end of the 4th line of the verse #sbc26

A lot of words to say he hates the Fourth Amendment. Get a warrant!

MAGA -- soon as they got right back into power -- went from "The evil Deep State is interfering in our politics" to "We demand that the NSA and CIA have the right to spy on American citizens without warrants." Pete Hegseth: give us this power or the terrorists will kill you.

This isn’t complicated: Get a warrant if you want to pilfer through Americans’ data. That’s what we ask, and what the Constitution demands.