https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/28/us/donald-trump-bible-christianity-cec/index.html

«Graves-Fitzsimmons holds a Master of Divinity degree from Union Theological Seminary in New York City and also works with the group Christians Against Christian Nationalism. He says things like the “God Bless America” Bible overlook the many, many Christians who do not agree with Trump’s politics or the blending of patriotism with faith.

“There is a diversity within American Christianity that gets overlooked whenever politics and religion intersect,” he told CNN. “There’s this false notion that most American Christians are pushing for anti-abortion restrictions, and are anti-LGBTQ, and the opposite is actually true. Christians, I would argue, are the ones who are most concerned about the effects of Christian nationalism in this country.”»

Well, sure enough…

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/

Crystal Mason goes to prison for voting illegally once (and spends 8 years fighting her wrongful conviction), and this guy…

«Brian Pritchard, first vice chairman of the Georgia Republican Party, was ordered to pay a $5,000 fine, as well as investigative costs, and be publicly reprimanded.»

https://wapo.st/3PDFzZe (gift link)

[edit: dammit, I can’t spell.]

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/4562312-kentucky-bill-strips-governor-power-appoint-senator/

This is what happens when you don’t vote Dem all the way down the ticket.

«The world posts on Facebook and Instagram; relatively few outside of China use WeChat or Weibo. TikTok was the exception—a potential goodwill ambassador for China’s rise, cut off at the knees by the hard realities of Chinese authoritarianism.»

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2024/03/tiktok-bytedance-bill-national-security-risks/677860/?gift=ly-h2TZGdDJyaoFv6n-KaTOG3DDkJfLT5DTcN5Le88s&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

(Gift link.)

Source: https://www.editorialboard.com/ignore-the-hate-no-one-is-better-prepared-than-kamala-harris/

«One thing won’t change, however. That’s public opinion about Kamala Harris. Why? Because — my second point – no one cares about vice presidents! The only people who are paying attention to this one are people who say she was “picked because she was Black and female.” Moreover, if voters know nothing else about her, and they almost certainly know nothing else about her, because no one pays attention to vice presidents, they do know she’s Black and female, and they know that fact very well, because people who say she was “picked because she was Black and female” can’t stop won’t stop talking about it. »

(It’s not just universities.)

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/03/computing-college-cs-majors/677792/?gift=ly-h2TZGdDJyaoFv6n-KaVm8z–QoVaXTzvFuQCez-g&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

«Universities are conservative institutions, steeped in tradition. When they elevate computing to the status of a college, with departments and a budget, they are declaring it a higher-order domain of knowledge and practice, akin to law or engineering. That decision will inform a fundamental question: whether computing ought to be seen as a superfield that lords over all others, or just a servant of other domains, subordinated to their interests and control. This is, by no happenstance, also the basic question about computing in our society writ large.

…

An American university is organized like this, into divisions that are sometimes called colleges, and sometimes schools. These typically enjoy a good deal of independence to define their courses of study and requirements as well as research practices for their constituent disciplines. Included in this purview: whether a CS student really needs to learn French.

…

Near the end of our conversation, Isbell mentioned the engineering fallacy, which he summarized like this: Someone asks you to solve a problem, and you solve it without asking if it’s a problem worth solving. I used to think computing education might be stuck in a nesting-doll version of the engineer’s fallacy, in which CS departments have been asked to train more software engineers without considering whether more software engineers are really what the world needs. Now I worry that they have a bigger problem to address: how to make computer people care about everything else as much as they care about computers.»

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/03/elon-musk-racist-tweets-science-video/

«“There’s a kind of fusion between old-school gutter racism that everyone can recognize and this new-school Silicon Valley, data-driven analysis. And I think that this is very confusing to people,” said Gusev. “They don’t know what to do with it. They say, ‘Hey, there’s this thing that I recognize as ugly, and then there’s somebody posting a hundred charts that seem to support it.’”»

https://chi2innovations.com/blog/discover-stats-blog-series/graphs-prove-correlation-not-causation/

Some people have been making granola. I present my sister’s* granola recipe, which in spite of the fact that it’s stellar, I have not made in years.

Granola

Mix in bowl:
3 cups oats
1 cup sliced almonds
1/4 cup sunflower seeds
1/4 cup flaxseeds

Heat, not boil:
6 tblsp honey
6 tblsp oil
1 tsp cardomom
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ( sorta) vanilla
Stir honey mixture into oat mixture

Spread on cookie sheet
Bake on middle rack at 325 about 12-15 min
Flip stuff over and bake 12-15 mom
Scrape
Let cool & stir in dried fruit

Goal: golden brown, not dark, although dark is edible ( voice of
experience)

*She got it from somewhere, but, for me, it will always be “my sister’s granola recipe.”

«Vierziger wasn’t wearing body armor; he’d claimed it would interfere with his driving. Now he reached left-handed into one of his tunic’s front bellows pockets and drew out a red-banded grenade that he had no business carrying.
He struck the safety cap off against the side of the building with casual ease. Malaveda had seen troopers trying to arm a grenade that way, proving how macho they were. He’d never seen anybody succeed so perfectly, and with such little concern, as Vierziger did now.»

David Drake, Hammer’s Slammers vol. 3, The Sharp End

How do you put this in a (video) episode of something?

(I keep thinking how this stuff would be so good on Netflix or Amazon.)

Al.com is teh bomb.

«Britt’s problem is an old one in Alabama politics — she couldn’t be genuine and win. So she chose to be fake.

There might be a simple explanation for Britt’s odd delivery Thursday night: Perhaps she couldn’t believe what she was saying either.

And like so many Alabama politicians before her, she left us asking …

Was she ever real?»

https://www.al.com/news/2024/03/whitmire-is-katie-britt-for-real.html