pachrist

Words are wind.

It’s an interesting stat. Is this individuals or households? Is it “head of household” or is it also counting minors?

Regardless, there’s enormous disparity.

The median wealth in India, according to Wikipedia, is $3755. There’s probably hundreds of millions of people there who fall into the less than $380 category.

Again, Wikipedia, but Africa has just over 700M inhabitants with a median $1242 wealth. That’s $879B. For everyone on the continent. 8 people have 1.5X more wealth than an entire continent full of people.

But maybe it’s not 3.6B people. Maybe it’s 3B or only 2B people. It’s still not OK.

I remember sitting in the theater for Episode VII. I had a sense of excitement because it could be anything. It wasn’t an adaption of a book I’d already read, like Game of Thrones. It wasn’t a remake, like the Disney live action stuff. It was a reboot, but in a totally new direction since they threw out all the EU stuff.

It was retreaded garbage.

The only movie I’ve ever been more disappointed in while sitting in the theater was Cowboys and Aliens, because I was so excited for it to be xenomorphs. So sad. But it did cement that I will never trust a movie with old Harrison Ford in it.

I live in Tennessee. The number of lives that Dolly Parton has changed for the better is immeasurable. The two things you’re supposed to do as a Christian are to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself.

She loves her neighbors more than she loves herself. Anyone talking trash about Dolly is the worst kind of person.

One of my favorite pieces of the Bible is the Parable of the Talents where Jesus tells a story about three men who are given different sums of money. The first two are given more. They do stuff with it and are rewarded. The guy who gets the least buries it in a field and is punished.

It’s often used an an example of stewardship, and regularly used as an excuse to not give drug addicts and homeless people money. They might use the money for drugs. That’s a sin and a “bad investment.” It ignores the fact that nobody looses money in the parable. The point of the story is that any good thing you do in good faith with the gifts you’re given is commendable.

I don’t understand telling 50% of your church that the most important thing they can do is be a PreK Sunday school teacher or nursery volunteer. That’s burying talents in a field.

Wow. We’d be lucky if that were true today. With slavery, it’s 3/5, but with things gerrymandered correctly, it’s essentially 0/5.

Recently, I noticed that a lot of the YouTube recommendations I was seeing were folks based out of Utah. My wife calls it Mormon YouTube. Outdoors Boys, Matt’s Offroad Recovery, Brandon Sanderson, and a few more Mormon adjacent channels started popping up everywhere. I started wondering what I had watched that started brining all these other things up.

It’s Mark Rober.

JK Rowling’s opinion about slavery is that most slaves like it, they’re better off in slavery, and it’s just the natural order of things.

When she speaks, she speaks from a place of fear and ignorance.

If you won the lottery, what’s the first irresponsible thing you’d do with the money?

No paying off student loans, no buying your parents a house. It has to be irresponsible but not necessarily indefensible. Great icebreaker question.

The US is the really annoying parent in a grocery store counting to 3 over and over to try to get their child under control.

Men are logical. Women are emotional.

Such an enormous generalization and oversimplification. Very false.

I mean, if the choice is instant, painless death or decade after decade of your parents asking why you don’t own a house, I guess death is fine?

I feel like that’s because we actually get to see them side by side. But if you were friends with one and saw the other as a stranger out in public, say the grocery store, it might warrant a “holy shit, I just saw someone who looks exactly like you,” text accompanied by an awkwardly zoomed in picture of them in the frozen foods aisle.

It’s one of the things I hated about the movies. Sam has a little Dutch angle moment, weighing whether to give back the ring with lots of facial expression acting.

It’s been a while since I read the books, but I don’t recall him really thinking to much about it. He just gives it back to Frodo, and as a reader, you’re left wondering whether the ring just didn’t have enough time to grab hold, or maybe Sam is just truly pure of heart.

Then you remember that Smeagol killed someone over the ring immediately. Sam is just that good of a guy. Better than Frodo, better than Bilbo, better than Galadriel, and even better than Gandalf.

I get that ads pay for a free internet. But that doesn’t mean that 60% of my screen needs to be malware to read a local news article.

Until advertisers act in good faith, I block as much as possible.

I think what Jobs really understood was that in a world of Ford, people crave a Ferrari.

Making the best be beautiful and accessible is hard, but you do it through focus and intentionality. Jobs, despite his many, many faults did that well.

When Trump decides the best way to handle a border crisis is to charge down the “wildlings” on horseback, he’s going to get his ass shot.

No, no… slavery, like knitting or moderating a small forum space, is obviously just a hobby, or at worst, a side hustle. It’s just a way to grow your personal brand, not the single worst atrocity across all of human history.

I mean, clicking links in any kind of comment/forum type place on the internet can be dicey, even if it is exactly what it says it is.

If you disagree, and the political standstill created by career politicians puts a sour taste in your mouth, visit www.lemonparty.org to find out more about how you can make a difference.

Nah, it’s definitely easier during a tornado to go outside, jack up my car, remove the wheel, remove the wheel liner, and then pull the battery from inside the bumper because that’s a really convenient place to keep a car battery. Then I just have to lug the battery inside, hook it up, and keep 2 small children and 3 dogs away from it. Much easier than a generator.