/ married to a Luke 10:39 woman / Puddleglum's less optimistic brother / steadfast friend of Aslan

Knoxville, TN
Joined September 2024
A growing number of scientists agree: Our universe and life were produced by intelligent design, not unguided evolution. This site exists to document the mounting scientific evidence for nature’s intelligent design. Through this site, you can explore the evidence for intelligent design for yourself. More at intelligentdesign.org
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A lot of Christians out here defending popular culture--horror flicks and the new quasi-Narnia adaptation--are making precisely the same mistake the authors of "The Green Book" from The Abolition of Man made.
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"But now the decisive confusion takes place. ... If all human beings are equal in dignity, why should they not all share equally in everything this society has produced? The question sounds morally unanswerable. It is not." This is precisely the confusion progressives have, like @VivekGRamaswamy ... that prosperity is dignity. In reality, dignity exist in spite of a lack of material prosperity.
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I swore a solemn oath to defend the US Constitution against all enemies, foreign & domestic. I am ready to die in pursuit of that oath, however... Dying is not the plan. Killing as many of those enemies as possible is the plan. DEATH TO TRAITORS 🏴‍☠️ PAX AMERICANA 🇺🇸
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This is precisely the process being used here.
Hollywood has a tactic that they use with their deconstructive films. They release news that makes things look blatantly woke, then reveal that it wasn't so bad. Why do they do this? So that folks in their relief will ignore the rest of the deconstructive vandalism done to the story. They did this will The Odyssey, when they let everyone think that Elliot Page would be Achilles. Then turns out that she is playing Sinon. Still bad, but not so bad. And the producers can now say, "Everyone who said the movie was deconstructive slop had to have been overstating the case, right?" It was an effective tactic, even as The Odyssey turned out to have quite a number of malicious deconstructions that undermined those elements that still cause Homer to be relevant to Western cultural foundations. And now, we're seeing the same thing play out with The Magician's Nephew. Turns out that they've digitally altered Meryl Streep's voice to sound like a man's. Now the producers can say, "See? All the concerns were just overblown patriarchal pharisees looking to ruin it for everybody. You can safely ignore them now, because see, we're not the cultural vandals they say we are." Of course, digitally altering Streep's voice begs the question of why a woman to voice Aslan at all. Personally, I suspect that the decision to digitally alter her voice came later, after the backlash began. Regardless, her casting is hardly the only element that has emerged as undermining Lewis's Christian narrative and all that he intended the story to be. But those who so hunger for scraps from the table that steadfastly refuses to make them a proper meal will now find ways to give their money to those who continually starve them that they might willingly pay for this slop.
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**Engineering Wednesday** It's actually the same old story... but lets go back to the beginning. In 1990 a set of tech companies looked at the same spreadsheet. Demand for engineers was rising. The supply of people who could do the work was not rising as fast. The result, left alone, was six-figure salaries. The millionaire tech bros. balked at that thought. Those salaries would have come out of the margin. Tech workers, mostly conservative, refused collective bargaining so were of little use to Democrats. Tech workers, red dots in blue districts that interfered with Chamber of Commerce interests were of little use to Republicans. So naturally... The Immigration Act of 1990 created the H-1B category. The public argument was a shortage of talent during a recession when people were hustling to tech degrees for a lifelong career. The private arithmetic was simpler. A larger pool of workers who needed the sponsor to stay employed kept the wage from clearing where it otherwise would have been with strictly American talent. The same arithmetic is now running on AI. The salary that used to leave the company as payroll can stay inside as revenue if the model does the task and the company sells the output. The worker trains the AI system as it had their replacement H1B- documents the edge cases, and corrects the failures until the failure rate is low enough to ship. Then the spot on the org chart is removed. The check that used to arrive every two weeks for the STEM employee now arrives as a subscription or a usage fee paid to the AI vendor. The vendor is not doing this as a public service. The price will be set at what the buyer will pay once the alternative has been reduced. It does not matter whether the replacement is a model in a browser or a robot on a floor. The structure is the same. The cost that used to be a wage becomes a payment to the owner of the AI system. The people who used to receive the wage are told the efficiency is a general gain. The gain is real. It is also concentrated. The CEO yacht and the private islands are not metaphors. They are what retained earnings look like when the largest line item on the old P&L has been converted into a product the same firm now sells. The H-1B version required a statute and a lobby. The AI version requires a training run and a contract. Both treat the engineer’s pay as a residual that can be captured. One imported the labor. The other is trying to delete the need for it. In every case our wages are seen as additions to their bottom line. Our prosperity is an afterthought. Question: Have you already been asked to document your own work in a form a model can use?
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Guys, life isn’t remotely fair. Shocking, I know. It’s ok to feel bad when awful things happen and it’s ok to seek justice for crimes. At the same time, if you’re expecting fairness in this life, you’re going to be angry forever. It’s hard to accept, yet true.
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So grateful for dedicated patriots like @DataRepublican who has been willing to bring much-needed light to pressing issues ignored by the media
Replying to @DataRepublican
@datarepublican is an American legend. Grateful and humbled by her invaluable skills! For the doubters questioning the audio's authenticity, there's the real thing. Internet do your thing, quickly 👇 fathom.video/share/zudxPzqEN…
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God wants to save everyone, but he can’t. Salvation is a restoration of fellowship with him, and some people refuse it. “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! Matthew 23:37 What more could have been done for my vineyard than I have done for it? When I looked for good grapes, why did it yield only bad? Isaiah 5:4
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It's not an attack on France. It's an attack on all of Western civilization: "Western civilization produced something rare in human history: a moral instinct to extend compassion to strangers. To the refugee, the outsider, the weakest. It's one of the most beautiful things we ever built. The globalist class turned it into a weapon against us."
Many in the comments are saying: "The French voted for this." Fine. Now ask yourself a better question. Why is it the same story in every Western country at once? France, Germany, Sweden, the UK, Belgium, Canada. Different languages, different histories, different voters. Same outcome. Same open-border policies, sold in the same beautiful packaging: progress, inclusion, integration, "our values." When dozens of peoples who never coordinated end up with the exact same policy, it wasn't the peoples who decided. It was the class that governs all of them. Same schools, same forums, same networks. For decades, they have systematically lied to Europeans about what was happening and what it would cost. They tried it with you too, America. You came close. What saved you was your Constitution, and a handful of people like Elon Musk and the All-In crew who refused to stay quiet when silence would have been easier. But don't celebrate too early. The West is not a country. It's a civilization. Athens, Rome, Jerusalem, and every nation that inherited or built on what came out of them: Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, Israel, and allies like Japan who share its institutions and its fate. If Europe falls, you don't get to watch from across the ocean. You lose half your civilization, your oldest allies, the cradle of everything you believe in. Nobody on either side of the Atlantic has any interest in waking up to an Islamist Europe. So understand that this fight has two levels. There is the national fight. Every people has to win its own battle at home, at the ballot box, in its own institutions, under its own laws. No one can do it for us. You can't vote in France, and we can't vote in Ohio. And there is the civilizational fight. The West is under attack on two fronts at once. From the inside, by a soft communism that hates its own history and wants to dissolve nations into a managed mass. From the outside, by Islamism, which sees our weakness and fills the vacuum. And the two have found each other: Islamo-leftism, where the far left defends the very ideology that would crush it first. The national fights are the battles. The civilizational fight is the war. And here's what the other side exploits: your kindness. Western civilization produced something rare in human history: a moral instinct to extend compassion to strangers. To the refugee, the outsider, the weakest. It's one of the most beautiful things we ever built. The globalist class turned it into a weapon against us. Gad Saad has a name for this: suicidal empathy. Empathy that no longer asks who it protects and who pays the price. Empathy that cares more about how it looks than about what it causes. Empathy so detached from reason that it ends up sacrificing your own people, the girl attacked on her way home, the worker priced out of his neighborhood, the town that no longer recognizes itself, just to signal virtue toward strangers. And every time you object, they don't answer your argument. They question your heart. "Where is your compassion?" That's the trap. They know a decent people will hesitate before being called cruel. They've been running that play for thirty years. Now add the money. A few left-wing billionaires understood long ago that you don't need to win elections if you can shape the institutions around them. The Gates Foundation became one of the largest funders of the World Health Organization. George Soros's Open Society Foundations have spent billions funding NGOs, advocacy groups and legal networks, with Europe as a major focus. Unelected, unaccountable, and extremely well organized. And it's not only private money. Brussels funds NGOs with taxpayers' money, and those same NGOs then lobby Brussels for the policies it already wanted. A closed loop. Citizens pay for it. Nobody ever asked them. This is the supranational machine: Brussels, the galaxy of NGOs orbiting it, the foundations feeding them, and the political class moving freely between all three. It answers to no voter in any country. It does enormous damage. And it can't be voted out, because no one ever voted it in. And if you want to know where its center of gravity is, look at Washington. The Democratic Party is its political headquarters. Not because every Democrat is a globalist, but because that's where the whole network converges: the big foundations, the NGO galaxy, the international organizations, the legacy media, the platforms. Same donors, same people rotating from one to the other, same worldview. Brussels is the branch office. Covid showed it in real time. Within weeks, almost the entire Western world adopted the same playbook. Same measures, same messaging, same "trust the science." Anthony Fauci became the face of the official line far beyond America's borders. The Gates Foundation, co-founder of the global vaccine alliances and one of the WHO's largest funders, sat at the center of global health policy. And anyone who questioned the line was branded a spreader of misinformation. The lab-leak hypothesis was a "conspiracy theory" right up until it became a respectable one. And in 2024, Mark Zuckerberg admitted in writing that senior Biden administration officials had repeatedly pressured Meta in 2021 to censor Covid content, including humor and satire. Government, foundations, international organizations, platforms. All moving in the same direction, at the same time, and no voter ever consulted. That's the machine. Covid was the moment it stopped hiding. That machine is what has to be taken apart. Defund the NGOs living off public money. Bring decisions back to elected national parliaments. Make every foundation that shapes public policy as transparent as a political party. Compassion is a Western virtue. Letting it be used against us is not. So let's not fall into the trap. The trap is Western nations turning on each other. Americans mocking Europeans, Europeans sneering at Americans, each country telling itself "they deserve what's happening to them, they voted for it." I'm pro-border. I'm pro-nation. I believe every people has the right to decide who enters its home and to defend its own culture. That will never change. But what we face today is not one nation attacking another. It's an attack on the civilization all our nations belong to. And a civilization under attack cannot afford to let its members watch each other burn. When you see France on fire, don't say "they chose this." Understand how it happened. Understand who did it. And understand that the same people are working on you. The West has to stand together against this, fully, without ambiguity, and its peoples have to understand each other. National pride and civilizational solidarity are not opposites. They are the same fight at two scales. A Frenchman voting to take back his borders and an American voting on November 3rd are on the same front, in the same war, for the same civilization. We lose it separately, or we win it together.
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From Citizen to Replaceable: How Unauthorized Labor Undercut American Work Post #3: The Contractor Layer Large companies rarely put unauthorized workers on their own payroll. They hire a contractor who hires a subcontractor who hires the crew. The prime contractor wins the bid. The general contractor manages the site. The labor broker or staffing firm supplies the bodies. The people swinging the hammer, hanging the drywall, or cleaning the rooms never appear on the company that owns the project. When ICE shows up, the prime points to the contract. The contract points to the sub. The sub disappears or pays a fine. The project continues with a new crew the next week. This is why small operators get charged and national firms rarely do. The small shop is the one that signed the I-9s or handed out the cash. The large buyer wrote a scope of work that never required E-Verify and never asked for proof the workers were authorized. The margin stays with the company that never touched the paperwork. The risk stays with the company that did. Federal law already covers the knowing use of a contract to obtain unauthorized labor. 8 U.S.C. § 1324a makes it illegal to hire or to use a contract to hire someone not authorized to work. Most buyers never face that statute because investigators stop at the first layer that has the workers on site. Its like arresting drug users and letting the dealers and their big connected sponsors go free. The public sees the facade and feels something is being done. The layer above keeps the relationship and the bid. The American carpenter, electrician, or cleaner never sees the opening. The wage is set by the contractor who can always find another crew that will take less. The prime contractor can claim it has a compliance policy while the actual labor never passes through its HR system. If you see a national brand or a large general contractor whose sites are always staffed by the same rotating subcontractors, and those subcontractors never seem to have American crews, that is the mechanism in Post #3. ICE tip line: 866-347-2423 Online form: ice.gov/webform/ice-tip-form You can submit without a name. Include the prime contractor and the sub if you know both. Bookmark this. Share or quote it. Comment if you have watched a big project stay insulated while the crew changes. Follow for Post #4.
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Language models (LM) have compressed pretty much all open-source codebases humans have ever written in their weights which makes LMs solve problems that are well represented in those codebases, simply by surface level remixing, but people confuse that feat with intelligence.
Lets not forget that an LLM can write code so fast today only because of the trillions of lines of code that were written by hand and released as open source. Try writing COBOL, ALGOL, or Eiffel with an LLM, where the training corpus is minimal, and then tell me.
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This is too true, just like admission departments in colleges.
HR is a feminized barrier to corporate access, actively screening for compliant, conformist, color inside the lines types who sit quietly and finish their worksheets. Then we all collectively scratch our heads when innovation and creativity die off.
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Greta Gerwig is a Unitarian Universalist. So we will be getting a Unitarian Universalist Aslan. And you can see it in the imagery already released. Sure, you might see echoes of Jesus. But also Buddha, Muhammed, Confucius, Vishnu, the Great Spirit. The so-called many faces of God. It is a deliberate attempt to not outright destroy, but weaken and blur. To seductively undermine with brilliant images and captivating music the objective truth of the Gospel and replace it with something that is just close enough to pull in those who really want this movie, but far enough to perhaps subtly change their own internal narrative and understanding. Of course, the telos of such an effort is destruction. But that will be left to follow. But follow it will. For it is no mistake that they are beginning at the start of all things with the Creation story of the Magician's Nephew. Altar the foundation, weaken it, and everything that follows from the original is either tainted, or simply crumbles and falls.
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If you still think these people in any way care about "affordability" or the price of gas, think again. Democrats care about one thing and one thing only: Absolute power at all cost.
ON UCHICAGO CAMPUS: U.S. Senator from Michigan Elissa Slotkin hopes planned political prosecutions of republican leaders will scare young conservatives from getting involved in politics. @ElissaSlotkin
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We're boycotting the Magician's Nephew, BTW. Don't even pirate it. It dies before its release outside theatres. Maximum money loss. I don't care that they can take it. There's no breaking ranks on this. Greta Gerwig's career takes a hit that makes her paymasters sweat.
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They support getting paid and that's about it
C.S. Lewis’ family has issued an official statement supporting Greta Gerwig’s Narnia and praising her lifelong passion for the books. bit.ly/4Buu39d
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bundyw retweeted
An old ape named Shift finds a dead lion's skin floating in a pool. He sits down with a needle and thick thread, and every time a bird flies over, he stops sewing and waits for it to pass. He knows exactly what he's making, and he doesn't want anyone in the sky to see it. C.S. Lewis wrote that scene in 1956, in the last Narnia book. It's the one most of us never got to as kids. I only read it a few years ago. When his friend Puzzle the donkey comes back from market, Shift ties the skin onto him and tells him to stand in the shadows. Then he tells the whole of Narnia that Aslan has come back. Lewis tells you how it works. No one who had ever seen a real lion would have been taken in for a moment. It only works from far away, at night, by firelight, with the donkey kept quiet while the ape does all the talking. Puzzle gets scared and says what if the real Aslan comes. Shift laughs and says Aslan never turns up nowadays. Right then there's a crack of thunder and the ground shakes under them. Puzzle says it's a warning. Shift says yes, it's a sign, and it means Aslan approves. Now Gerwig's Aslan has Bowie's face and Meryl Streep's voice. The lion who sang a whole world into being in The Magician's Nephew, the voice so deep it shook the ground, talks like someone else now. Shift did the same thing. He kept the lion's face and changed who was talking. Lewis is gentle with the donkey, and I want to be too. Puzzle isn't evil. He's tired and trusting, and someone he believed kept telling him he wasn't clever enough to judge for himself. Lewis saves his anger for the ape with the needle. A dad told me he was reading that first chapter to his kids and had to put the book down, because it read like these Hollywood headlines. Pick up the real books. Read all seven out loud, every night, until your kids know that voice. A child who has heard the real lion can't be sold a donkey in a skin.
C.S. Lewis’ family has issued an official statement supporting Greta Gerwig’s Narnia and praising her lifelong passion for the books. bit.ly/4Buu39d
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bundyw retweeted
The Hebrew word korban (קָרְבָּן), often translated “sacrifice” or “offering,” comes from a root meaning “to draw near.” Sacrifice wasn’t merely about giving something up. It was about approaching God. The offerings in Leviticus make much more sense when we understand this.
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