18 Comments

1. What is a “Bible-based curriculum?” I read the article, and in third grade, à propos of nothing, students will learn about Mary and Joseph schlepping (for they were Jewish) back to Bethlehem, their hometown, to be counted in the census. Mary was heavily pregnant with our Lord and Savior, but what is left unsaid is that Mary had a virgin birth with Jesus, and in fact she herself was Immaculate and not the product of sexy times. So the whole family was like products of parthenogenesis.

   Lately I’ve been obsessed with the idea of Jesus’s siblings. Apparently he had more than one, and where the older ones figured in the schlep to Bethlehem I don’t know. Maybe they stayed with Bubbe and caught up later. Imagine playing a version of stickball with a young Jesus. “You play like a girl.” “I can cure leprosy and raise the dead.”

   O, Heavenly Father, please don’t let there be an afterlife. Although if I’m allowed to wander around in the bowels of Hell I wouldn’t mind seeking out Hitler and asking him a few questions.

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   • At least from what I’ve seen its:

     No Sex Ed -abstinence baby!

     No Geology – plate tectonics makes Baby jeebus cry

     No real physics – the big bang makes Baby Jeebus cry (so does the The Big Bang Theory)

     No evilushun – questions and Darwin make Baby Jeebus cry

     Theory/Scientific Method – is all about questions and makes Baby Jeebus Cry

     Math – Calculus makes Baby Jeebus cry

     History – Murrica Bad makes Baby Jeebus cry

      

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     • No Sex Ed -abstinence baby!

       going by the internet since the election and assuming they really means it for reals (and i really get the impression they do)

       might be a little redundant that

       looks like theres going to be more abstinence than they bargained for from here…none of that till marriage shit either

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   • …it’s not what I imagine they have in mind…but…if we round up a few jesuits we could probably turn it into some sort of insurgency…I mean…there’s a few ways you could go with this one, to pick just one example

     And Samson said, With the jawbone of an ass, heaps upon heaps, With the jaw of an ass have I slain a thousand men.
     [https://www.bible.com/bible/compare/JDG.15.16]

     …from…say…who needs an AR-15 if you’re man enough to take out a thousand men with an ossified cudgel…to…the jawbone of one damned orange man with no discernible soul slew many more than that…&…cutting off sampson’s hair was what did for him…so…feel free to draw some conclusions & have a whip-round to supply a stealthy sort with some cordless clippers in the interests of…err…being pro-life, maybe

     …it’s a versatile book

     …not my first choice of a foundation for an education…but then I’m not the one stuck adding all the “& methuselah lived to the ripe old age of a dozen or so lifetimes & he begat…” numbers together to decide the fossil record is a lie & actually the world is barely a teenager in geological timescales…so I got that going for me, too?

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   • This reminds me [OH GOD NO] that I took a really fascinating PoliSci class my freshman year of college and the prof, during the last lecture before the blue books were distributed for the final (that’s how old I am) said something very profound. I’ll paraphrase:

     “Many people were disappointed that Hitler wasn’t taken alive, tried, and hanged at Nuremberg. But what would that have done? Would that have atoned for the millions and millions who died needlessly because of him? No. You must believe in an afterlife. You must believe that Hitler is in Hell, and will be there for all eternity, suffering every kind of pain and indignity. That is the justice.”

     I don’t know about that, but as a theater queen, even at 18, like the odious Carrie Bradshaw I got to thinking, “What if I wrote an operetta called ‘Hitler in Hell?’ I could workshop it at the university’s respected theater department…” but alas I got too busy with academic affairs to pursue my true calling as a latter-day Moss Hart. Or Bertolt Brecht.

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2. Someone explain to me Trump’s treasury pick. I really can’t bring myself to read anything about the hostile takeover. How does a Soros mentee wind up working with a bunch of right wing fucks?

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   • Normally I’d jump in but, like you, I can’t bring myself to follow this insanity. Eventually the dust will settle and the cast of buffoons and grifters will be decided, and then Trump will start firing them. This guy is probably going to get used as a cut-out to shift the blame for the economic downturn. Not sure it’s even worth learning his name.

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     • …maybe?

       …I’ve been hearing one or two things that speculate about the importance of one to the other between him & elon…& one of those mentioned the part where he’s threatened people that opposing him means musk-bankrolled lawyers coming for them…because everyone knows elon’s imaginary money is much more real than his & nobody has as much of it so that’s like buying the pot before the cards are even on the table

       One of the president-elect’s senior advisers warned senators that if they vote against his nominees, they could be forced to face primary challenges funded by Musk, ABC reported.

       “If you are on the wrong side of the vote, you’re buying yourself a primary,” a senior adviser told ABC’s chief Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl.

       “That is all,” the adviser said. “And there’s a guy named Elon Musk who is going to finance it.”
       [Trump team weaponizes Elon Musk in threat to senators who won’t confirm cabinet picks – Independent]

       …&…there’s reasons he likes this guy…he doesn’t spook wall st…&…by pure coincidence means

       one of his biggest financial backers as the top economic official of his second administration.

       …which naturally has nothing to do with it…or how much of elon’s money he’d throw at punishing any senators who don’t give him this cookie

       The hedge fund manager’s economic philosophy seeks to bridge traditional free-market conservatism with Trump’s populism. He has defended the president-elect’s repeated threat of raising tariffs against accusations that they would upend relations with US allies and raise consumer prices, saying they are a trade negotiating tool and a way to raise government revenue.
       […]
       Bessent will also be responsible for steering the administration’s sanctions policy, including on Russia over its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, as well as the rules that govern Wall Street. His appointment will need to be confirmed by the US Senate, which will be controlled 53-47 by Republicans next year.

       Trump on Friday evening also selected Russell Vought to once again lead the Office of Management and Budget. “Russ knows exactly how to dismantle the Deep State and end Weaponized Government, and he will help us return Self Governance to the People,” Trump wrote. The president-elect also picked Lori Chavez-DeRemer, a Republican Congresswoman from Oregon, to be his labour secretary.

       Wall Street bankers across the political spectrum were digesting the news of Bessent’s appointment. They pointed out that a lot would depend on how much independence he would have to manage the economy.

       A dealmaker at a large bank said Bessent had a strong pedigree managing complex financial situations but was concerned that he would be a “puppet” of Trump.

       “Bessent is a very skilled investor, he has a great track record over decades but I fear he won’t have much autonomy,” the dealmaker said.

       The 62-year-old Bessent is a Wall Street veteran who has been among Trump’s most vocal advocates and closest economic advisers in recent months.

       It will be his first government position. He currently runs the hedge fund Key Square Capital Management. Bessent previously worked closely with billionaires George Soros and Stanley Druckenmiller.

       …he’s…not mnuchin…but the pitch is “safe pair of hands” as far as I can make out?

       Many economists have warned that Trump’s protectionist economic plans, and his pledge to deport millions of immigrants and slash taxes, could reignite inflation and dent growth — criticism that Bessent has strongly rejected.

       In an interview with the Financial Times in October, Bessent framed tariffs as a “maximalist” threat that could be pared back during talks with trading partners. He also denied that the Trump administration would devalue the dollar.

       “My general view is that at the end of the day, he’s a free trader,” Bessent told the FT, referring to Trump. “It’s escalate to de-escalate.”

       …or enough of a weight to throw about to be able to really rock the boat

       But Bessent has floated more unorthodox ideas, including taking steps that would infringe on the long-standing independence of the Fed.

       Speaking to rightwing ideologue and Trump ally Steve Bannon recently, he also floated cutting government spending by $1tn over the next decade.
       [Donald Trump picks Scott Bessent as Treasury secretary – FT]

       …it’s truly fucking something that this guy & RFKjr are on the saner end of his first choice roster…but…it’s not like DoJ in that he didn’t just audit a course on day-trading at community college for a semester before making a career of pandering to assholes about how unfair it is for people to tell them they’re assholes & how much better the world will be when they get to say “who’s the asshole now?” & not have stadium crowds scream “you fucking are” like they do in their head on a minute-by-minute basis to judge from the rawness of the open wound they wear on their sleeve in lieu of a heart?

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   • We really don’t know what cabinet picks mean.

     Going all the way back to Reagan, David Stockman was the one really driving domestic policy as the head of the White House Office of Management and Budget, not the cabinet secretaries. Obama gave control of much of the recovery effort and health care reform to Larry Summers  chair of the National Economic Council, and people like Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, had luttle input.

     You know under Trump this will be even further in the weeds, and thre press today is both far less capable and far too complicit to pull off the expose of Stockman that happened in 1981.

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3. I remember that Wicked duet from back when it happened. It was a really cool moment.

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4. Dream job.

   Sharp elbows and raised voices: Inside Trump’s bumpy transition

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5. …I know it looked bad @bryanlsplinter…& I probably shouldn’t have called it an “@jack rental” with respect to the whole fediverse thing

   In May, The Verge reported that Mr. Dorsey had left Bluesky. He posted a message on his X account that appeared to recommend that people stay on Twitter.

   “Don’t depend on corporations to grant you rights,” he wrote on X one day before Bluesky confirmed his exit from the board. “Defend them yourself using freedom technology. (you’re on one.)”
   [https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/21/technology/bluesky-social-media.html]

   …but…I was being mad about what you could get away with calling the same sort of sausage rather than saying I tried it & it left a bad taste in my mouth…so…I’m kinda curious…this pops a whole series of red flags for me that track pretty well with the sort of people who you say the moderation features make mad

   https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/11/22/bluesky-is-hell-on-earth/

   …but in among the bullshit it lands a few pavlovian body shots, you might say

   Bluesky aims to recreate the previous iteration of Twitter, before that awful, vulgar Elon Musk got his filthy mitts on it two years ago. Those were the good old days when the people who ran Twitter colluded with the FBI and suppressed any opinion slightly to the right of Hillary Clinton’s. In this alleged golden age, an army of faceless moderators would chuck users off for having the temerity to express hateful Nazi slurs like ‘there are two sexes’. Bluesky is the new go-to site for people who like peace, brotherhood and dobbing their neighbours in to the authorities. For people whose feelgood movie is The Lives of Others.

   …the “collusion” one links to their own in-house content about the twitter files & I figure it ain’t hard to guess where they try to go with that…the elon link is to more of their own jokes they’re laughing at…this one about “musk derangement syndrome”…because once you buy in to the MO of

   …you know what…here’s an experiment…find a boy with a sister…ask him if she’s ever deliberately wound him up so that he’ll do something that she can tell their parents about so he’d be in trouble with them & then leaned out from behind them & gloated at him so he can see her do it but they can’t

   …tell him he has “sibling derangement syndrome” & then ask if he’s ever heard of the term gaslighting

   …these are not questions I relish asking children but apprently if you don’t get them to understand how they feel about that kind of thing a bunch grow up to buy guns & adulterated bibles & vote for playing that card like the one true hammer in a world of nails

   …anyway…the suppression one is about “un-personing” flabby mcbingo wings the florida fly-by-night…because he’s so all about everyone having the right to personhood that not giving him the respect he demands in lieu of anything he might deserve is apostasy…so since I routinely call him names I can’t generally be bothered to remember for long presumably even without joining bluesky I’d be dropped into the “probably watches films about life under the stasi for shits & giggles” basket with you as far as this dude is concerned…but I don’t have a bar to gauge the last bit against so I was wondering

   What would the #BeKind crowd do if they ever achieved their aim of a pure, high space above the fray? You can’t feel superior if there’s nobody to feel superior to. They need their out-group, for how else would they know that they are the in-group? All they can do then is turn on each other like starved piranhas.

   They are the most rancorous, disputatious people on the planet. Now they are rats in a sack. Bluesky will only drive them insane. More insane.

   …if the motivation for what he’d be calling the “in-group” to leave twitter is because that just reversed the polarity on who’s in & out of management’s good graces & rendered it the red state not enough others are willing to endure to mitigate its disproportionate weighting in focusing the overton window…are the rats leaving the sinking ship for life in a buesky sack…or are the passengers picking a different cruise while the rats keep patching the holes because there’s nowhere they can flee that won’t treat them like vermin?

   …I know how it looks to me…but I genuinely wonder how that particular snowflake would be descibed…for science?

   …not so much a chilled flake as a molten moron…or a simmering simpleton who actually believes the “reasonable” variants of semantic culture war wedges actually have a relationship with the places people try to take them that isn’t a drive by wire fig-leaf…or did he boil all the way over & make it from merely ridiculous to the full solid->vapour sublime?

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   • Here’s a pretty good explanation of what’s happening and why right-wing nutjobs are screeching about Bluesky:

     Explaining the right: Why they hate liberals fleeing to Bluesky

     MAGAs want to bully people. That’s all they want to do. It’s literally impossible to bully anyone on Bluesky, so it enrages them.

     There’s no need for anyone with a scrap of intelligence to “expose” themselves to the MAGA viewpoint. It’s hate, all the way down, in every conceivable form. Idiots like this spiked writer (can’t be arsed to find the name) want us to sit there and take the abuse. And like every abuser, when the target manages to escape, they get hysterical.

     Not coincidentally, liberals are also a significant chunk of the consumer base. We leave Xitter, there’s nobody left to advertise to. You’re reduced to MyPillows, guns and ammo, and camouflage clothes. And Elmo’s dumpster fire continues to burn.

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6. As someone who went through 12 years of Catholic school, I’ll say this until I’m blue in the face. If religious education is that important to parents, send your kids to fucking private schools. Put your money where your mouth is. Aren’t you supposed to tithe anyways??

   Anyways, back in the 90s and early 00s when I was in Catholic school, religious education meant we used public school textbooks and then had a religion class with a textbook decided by the archdiocese. Mass once a week, no meat on Fridays in Lent in the lunchroom, morning prayers during homeroom, etc.

   But also, religious stuff didn’t bleed into other courses. With notable exceptions like making fun of Kansas for having to teach intelligent design unlike our biology classes which taught evolution.

    

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7. …I dunno if it’ll wind up in tomorrow’s DOT for different reasons…but…for the record…this is bullshit

   In an interview in 2013, he talked about how, as a teenager in the grip of an existential crisis, he discovered Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, “which you should not read at age 14. It is bad, it’s really negative.”

   …it’s just not…I read that stuff at that age…& a whole bunch more…I even joined in sometimes when people I knew played D&D…though the video games I was mostly a spectator for…& I didn’t turn out like he did…stop blaming tom & jerry for serial killers, asshole

   Burnt by German philosophy, he buried himself in science fiction: Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series books were formative texts, a sprawling epic about a Galactic Empire on the verge of collapse, and a hero — Hari Seldon — who leads his followers to a hidden location at the edge of the galaxy in a battle to preserve the sum of human knowledge from annihilation.

   …of course if you can’t understand what the concept of a rhetorical device is then the mismatch between mathematics – the “pure” version of which is internally coherent but definitively abstract – & “psychohistory” isn’t there because there isn’t a dichotomy…& then maybe you think you can “basically do that” with a lot of money & enough confirmation bias not to disintegrate your ego anywhere along the way…I guess…I mean…look at the dude…presumably something of the sort has to be true?

   But the book that Musk keeps returning to is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In Douglas Adams’ cult classic, a supercomputer takes 7.5mn years to calculate the “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything”, which turns out to be 42. The point of this meaningless response, Musk told the same interviewer in 2013, is that “a lot of times the question is harder than the answer. And if you can properly phrase the question, then the answer is the easy part.” The question that The Hitchhiker’s Guide prompted Musk to ask is: how to “expand the scope and scale of consciousness and knowledge”.

   …I can’t help it…he keeps doing this shit & honestly it makes me hate him more than all the twitter shit…which would just be someone else if it wasn’t him I’d be mad at about the same stuff…but fucking miss me with every time some asshole gives him a pass for takes on works that would have their authors spinning in their graves fast enough to power a fucking gigafactory

   …fuck knows where we’d all be if he’d read jack vance…the demon princes & the dying earth…or…fucking dahlgren…actually…that might have broke him…I’m not entirely convinced he made it through banks’ feersum endjinn…so…delany is probably too rich for his blood…& in fairness to the FT they do throw this in

   The Harvard historian, Jill Lepore, herself a connoisseur of science fiction, suggests that Musk has fundamentally misunderstood the message of The Hitchhiker’s Guide. It is, she writes, a “razor-sharp satiric indictment of imperialism”, pointing out that the wealthy interplanetary characters of Adams’ imagination are not bold visionaries saving humanity from extinction but rather restless wanderers in search of a home that can never quite satisfy them. “Either the climate wasn’t quite right in the later part of the afternoon,” she quotes from The Hitchhiker’s Guide, “or the day was half an hour too long or the sea was just the wrong shade of pink. And thus were created the conditions for a staggering new form of industry: custom-made, luxury planet building.”

   …& fucking peter thiel isn’t hiro fucking protagonist, neither

   Musk is not the only powerful Silicon Valley figure whose world view has been shaped by science fiction. Peter Thiel, the billionaire investor whose support for Trump in 2016 prefigured that of Musk, is a fan of Neal Stephenson. Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash, which coined the term metaverse, envisages a post-federal America where cryptocurrencies have sapped the state of its ability to collect taxes. The federal government has been reduced to an impotent rump; sovereignty has devolved into a series of franchised “burbclaves”, private statelets ruled by CEO-kings who provide their citizens, or customers, with the basic infrastructure of society.

   …he’s…more of a da5id, anyway

   Their visions of an intergalactic future populated by super-powerful, superintelligent beings unencumbered by governments came out of a fringe movement called extropianism. Founded in California in the late 1980s by Tom Bell and Max O’Connor (who later changed their names to TO Morrow and Max More), extropianism was techno-optimism on steroids.

   The inaugural issue of the Extropy magazine, published in the autumn of 1988 (they printed off 50 copies on an early Mac) was subtitled: Vaccine for future shock. It included articles on artificial intelligence, nanotechnology and cryonic freezing, as well as memetics and “mindfucking”. They believed humanity was on the cusp of a new technological revolution, driven by advances in computer technology, that would radically change human existence for the better.

   …the kind of tech-topia in the Culture books have “humans” who speak a language called marain…it’s not elvish…but banks did put some thought into it

   Marain is a synthetic language created towards the very beginning of the Culture with the specific intention of providing a means of expression which would be a culturally inclusive and as encompassingly comprehensive in its technical and representational possibilities as practically achievable – a language, in short, that would appeal to poets, pedants, engineers and programmers alike. The intention was to start with a linguistic blank sheet, yet with the accumulated knowledge of the hundreds of thousands known to those people and machines charged with the language’s devising. It had, therefore, no specific links to any of the main languages spoken by the people who came together to make up the Culture as a civilisation, save those statistically likely.

   …he said that himself…along with

   It should be noted that while Marain was designed to be as quintessentially clear, concise and unambiguous a language as it is within the wit of human and machine to devise – and is, like the best games, essentially very simple but offering almost infinite possibilities – experience has proved that the judicious dropping of buffer bits and the use of varying byte-lengths, usually without the relevant notification of those mathematical or other pattern, though just as often not, plus the equally unflagged, abrupt and sporadic switching to entirely alien binary codes (Morse code being a perfect example) thankfully enables the Culture Minds fully to indulge their seemingly congenital predilection of unnecessary obfuscation, wilful contrariness and the fluent generation of utter and profound confusion in others.
   [https://trevor-hopkins.com/banks/a-few-notes-on-marain.html]

   …I only mention this because the guy whose ex thinks he loved the player of games so much she named a song about him after that apparently overlooked the part in, what, the second chapter of that I think it is…where it’s made clear that it has only a single personal pronoun “to refer to all forms of sex, gender or biological makeup”…& was presumably so over-hyped about the idea of drug-glands allowing for on demand neuropharmacology to notice the part where they can also…change gender…takes a while but all they really have to do is think about it consistently for long enough to work around to being physiologically manifest…these are…fundamental aspects of an intentional society that had the option of subliming to effectively nirvana but pulled a stint as a cosmic bodhisattva as a civilisational entity instead

   …that’s what he claims to be formative to getting him to where his thinking is…so if you take the thing we know didn’t point him that way out of that equation how many times over does that make him a fucking asshole?

   The extropians were a motley collection of philosophers and scientists, coders and writers. They would gather in cafés and on university campuses. There was a strong libertarian, anarcho-capitalist flavour to their politics. When a journalist from Wired magazine attended an extropian party in 1994 he encountered a software engineer named Mistress Romana dressed as the State in a black vinyl dominatrix outfit, dragging along a companion on a leash, representing the Taxpayer.

   Never large in numbers, the extropians had an outsized influence on the culture of Silicon Valley. They included pioneers in artificial intelligence such as Marvin Minsky, and science fiction writers such as Vernor Vinge, who posited a technological singularity, the point at which machines would become more intelligent than humans. Along with space colonisation and AI, their interests included cryptocurrencies (they were figuring out how to create digital money a decade and a half before Bitcoin appeared), transhumanism (merging humans with machines), and radical life extension. The extropians wanted to turn science fiction into science fact, and they believed that progress was best achieved through the mechanism of pure market forces unencumbered by government.

   …honestly I’ve heard worse about oxbridge balls…but…it’s that last bit that really marks these people out as hard of reading…even when sci fi does paint the government into the villain’s corner it isn’t market fucking forces that are the stuff of plucky insurgencies…FFS

   As far as I know, Musk was never an active participant in this little-known movement that flourished at the dawn of the internet age. He may not even be aware of its existence. But whether he knows it or not, Musk has become the ultimate embodiment of extropianism: SpaceX to take us to Mars; Neuralink to implant chips in our brains; xAI to develop superintelligence. Through a combination of ruthless business acumen and maniacal urgency, Musk and a handful of other tech entrepreneurs have pushed technology to a point where some of the sci-fi dreams of their childhood look almost possible.

   What, in their view, is still holding humanity back? Why regulation, of course. Government. Enter Musk with his porcelain basin and his mandate to radically reduce the size of government. Let that sink in.
   [The myths that made Elon Musk – FT]

   …I don’t care how fucking rich or powerful or influential the man gets…I will never for a single moment believe he understands anything better than he does the things he cites that are very clear about how much of a self-own it would be for a man like him to claim alleigance with them in any capacity…the part where the world keeps telling him how smart he is according to the numbers he thinks his psychohistory is written in will never bring him being actually right in his understanding of them into phase with this reality

   …we do seem to have done an outstanding job in making being the most wrong the most profitable approach in the history of the species, though…which may be making me…narked?

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8. Who had Gaetz joining George Santos on their bingo card?

   https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2024/11/22/congress/gaetz-joins-cameo-00191352

   MAGA (Make Air travel Great Again!!!)

   https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/11/enjoy-your-air-travel-this-thanksgiving-next-year-will-be-much-much-worse/

   Only the best & brightest…

   

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   • …see, now I know I should do some due dilligence & check out what it seems like that guy might have done & if he really got elected & not just take it for granted that a screenshot that conforms to my implicit biases is on the money

     …but…I gotta tell you…I was having a bad enough day before that turned out to be on the cards & I don’t appreciate the ask…if you’re listening, reality?

     https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/19/indiana-john-jessup-sexual-assault

     …they say “manifest” made word of the year so wishful thinking is a lifestyle choice now & you have nobody to blame but yourself, reality…you made our bed…don’t blame me for all the people shitting in it…& don’t anyone let the words “at he least he copped to it” come anywhere near the sentiment that there’s a worse he could be anywhere near me, please…I might pull something…in several senses that don’t require invoking the 2nd amendment?

     …if my agnostic ass is wrong about the whole god thing…& christianity really is the only way, truth & light when the messiah gets home…I’m pretty sure I’m in less trouble than these scions of the promised land

     …jesus wept is going to be the least of their fucking woes

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9. since the election dark brandon has popped up into my recs a lot

   tho im not the intended audience i cant say im complaining

   makes good points

   still…wierd quirk of the algorythm to send it my way…. im blaming titus

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