"The Church isn't respectable; the Church is eternal." — Stephen Colbert

I bought our daughter a 2010 Honda Accord in 2014. I told her I'll pay her insurance until she buys a new car. She's still driving it. Really shoulda thought this through. I'm driving a 2018 Civic with over 120,000 miles. My 2005 Accord had 192,000 miles when I traded it for the Civic.

Wait until you try to add a comment in "Review" mode and Word defaults to starting a conversation. Thankfully, there's a setting to disable that nonsense.

Sigh. I’m actually surprised it’s not higher.

Merciful God, we confess that we have often turned from Your ways. We have sought security in power and possessions, ignoring the needs of our neighbours. We have remained silent in the face of injustice, complicit in systems that harm and exclude. Forgive us, we pray. Turn our hearts toward Your justice and our hands toward Your work that we may live as Your faithful people. Amen.

My wife and I honeymooned in Savannah. We love your city.

Gulf of Alabama (Roll Tide!) Check out my custom Gulf of Alabama (Roll Tide!) map created with MapQuest!

Oh, what the heck.
gulfof.mapquest.com?name=Alabama...

What the bloody hell, Apple? I'm an Alabamian, and I know the name of the body of water off our coast. It's called the "Gulf of Mexico!" Get it right! @gruber.foo, please be a hero and call someone in Cupertino!

Opinion | Is This the End of Pax Americana? (Gift Article) We should aim to be a great power, not a big one.

If you think multilateralism and investment in other nations is a waste of time, you may well soon get what you want — including the consequences. www.nytimes.com/2025/02/04/o...

Mary Oliver ❤️

Same here, but I'm the minority in my denomination (PCA).

I thought y'all referred to it as "The Pond."

My money's on the grandma.

ChatGPT/DeepSeek reminds me of the '90's .com boom. Anyone who was anyone used $$$$ Sun servers running Solaris to host their websites. Then came Linux, and you could run a web server on a beefed-up desktop PC.

Federal Spending Freeze Does Not Apply to Student Loans and Pell Grants Students and parents panicked after news of the order, but the Education Department said the guidance would not stop the flow of money to students and schools.

Several students have asked about this: The Trump grant funding freeze does _not_ affect Pell grants.

www.nytimes.com/2025/01/28/b...

What Happened When America Emptied Its Youth Prisons (Gift Article) Lessons from a radical 20-year experiment and a quiet triumph of public policy.

"“If we invest in communities as relentlessly as we invest in prisons and police, we will get better outcomes. So that’s what I work on.”
www.nytimes.com/2025/01/28/m...

Opinion | How a German Thinker Explains MAGA Morality (Gift Article) Us and them is all the rage.

"Because our civics depends on our ethics, we should be teaching ethics right alongside civics. Sadly, we’re failing at both tasks." — David French
www.nytimes.com/2025/01/26/o...

A resolution does nothing. Any Congress critter can propose a resolution about anything, from honoring a local hero to condemning their hometown pastor.

“In Christ, there are no borders, no superior races, no earthly rulers who can claim ultimate authority over the preacher of God. … Perhaps Christians might be reminded that our savior caused all kinds of headaches for followers and powers alike.”

“Whether they admit it or not, it was Jesus, not an Episcopal Bishop, who offended them. It should be said that anyone who was offended by Bishop Budde’s two-minute homily will be even more offended by Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.”

Reading this reminded me that Jesus didn’t stutter when he uttered the words in chapter 25 of St. Matthew’s Gospel.

“The great majority of Americans are suspended between these opposing attitudes. They are uneasy with injustice but unwilling yet to pay a significant price to eradicate it.” Martin Luther King, " Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?", quoted by @gruber.foo

“Once to every man and nation
Comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth with falsehood,
For the good or evil side…”

“All I can promise is that those who continue to tell the truth as they see it will find it easier to live with themselves than those who don’t.” — @pkrugman.bsky.social

I've asked myself this question many times. History shows that godly rulers bless a nation, but few of those rulers governed justly without serious battle scars to show for it.

Medicare Versus the Insurance Industry: A Privatization-Driven Arms Race Forty years of gaming the system

Medicare is more than half privatized, and it's costing taxpayers a lot of money open.substack.com/pub/paulkrug...

My grandfather had an El Camino. My grandmother called it a "hypocrite:" It didn't know whether it was a car or a truck.

Darth Putin to the rescue!

“Thought having a tweet about Karen would cause what trolls we have to show up. Mostly it's the webcam girls. So here's Prez's list.”

bsky.app/profile/did:...

“Faith in God is, in the deepest sense, faith in life—… even the staunchest life of faith is a life of great change. It follows that if you believe at 50 what you believed at 15, then you have not lived—or have denied the reality of your life.”

theamericanscholar.org/my-bright-ab...