Author Archives: John Lusk

A Statement of Faith of the United Church of Canada (UMC Affirmation of Faith #883)

Leave a reply 
We are not alone, we live in God’s world. 
We believe in God: 
  who has created and is creating, 
  who has come in Jesus, the Word made flesh, 
    to reconcile and make new, 
  who works in us and others by the Spirit. 
We trust in God. 
We are called to be the church: 
  to celebrate God’s presence, 
  to love and serve others, 
  to seek justice and resist evil, 
  to proclaim Jesus, crucified and risen, 
    our judge and our hope. 
In life, in death, in life beyond death, 
  God is with us. 
We are not alone. 
Thanks be to God. Amen.

POSSE desires

Leave a reply

Ya know, I’m starting to be surprised this hasn’t been done yet (maybe it’s hard), but what we really need is an app (or web app) that acts as a front end for composing POSSE posts, and:

  • Gives you various indicators/metrics as you type of the character limits of each of SEVERAL social media apps to which you wish to crosspost;
  • The ability to include multiple links and indicate which one is the most important for those stupid sites that only embed one;
  • Ditto images;
  • Maybe makes it REAL EASY to provide summary slugs w/in character limits for various social media sites;
  • Tagging in a way that meshes with each of several different social media apps….

And probably a bunch of other stuff I can’t think of off the top of my head.

Josh Hawley uses fake quote from antisemitic nationalist mag | The Kansas City Star

Leave a reply

Josh Hawley is an idiot. Except that none of his base will care.

《Hawley wrote: “Patrick Henry: ‘It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason, peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity, and freedom of worship here.’”

The problem? Henry never said that. The quote is false. Made up.

Instead — as Hawley’s readers pointed out in a fact-checking Community Note appended to his tweet — the line is from a 1956 piece in a magazine, The Virginian, that was about Patrick Henry. Not by him. It appeared in another magazine, The American Mercury, as a Henry quote later that year and apparently took off from there.

The kicker? As historian Seth Cotlar of Willamette University pointed out, The Virginian was “virulently antisemitic (and) white nationalist magazine.” The American Mercury, for that matter, was also an “antisemitic rag.”

That ugly provenance comes through in the piece that originated Hawley’s quote. “There is an insidious campaign of false propaganda being waged today,” the magazine complained, “to the effect that our country is not a Christian country but a religious one — that it was not founded on Christianity but on freedom of religion.”

“I’d like to put a plug in for this thing called “Google,” Cotlar pointed out. “If you type in a quote from a Founding Father you’re thinking of tweeting out, in a matter of seconds you can quite easily discover if it’s for real or not.”

Good advice for us all.》

https://www.kansascity.com/opinion/editorials/article277023863.html

The All-Volunteer Force Is in Crisis – The Atlantic

Leave a reply

Hmm. 😕

《Since the end of the draft, the American republic has quietly, steadily acquired a military caste.》

…

《The AVF’s problems should give pause to any politicians or policy makers who are somehow still sanguine about America’s ability to win wars. In any major conflict, the military will have to dramatically expand and adapt in ways the AVF cannot manage. America has not even begun to have a conversation about what comes next.》

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/07/all-volunteer-force-crisis/674603/