Goodeguy

One of the curious things about being a teacher is that you usually have no clue what kind of an impact you're having. Stack me up against a kid's parents, religion, social prospects, friends, and I will usually come in last. That's as it should be. But it does keep you humble.

@BonifaceOption @isaiah_p_taylor @valaratomics 😉

You know what would make the Strait of Hormuz merely a totally irrelevant stretch of seawater between rock and sand? 10,000 nuclear reactors.

A student just accidentally referred to the "crucifiction" of Jesus and now I'm wondering why the New Atheists back in the '00s weren't all over that.

I love that all the Papists are currently freaking out that Doug Wilson actually believes...in iconoclastic Protestantism. Where have they been the last 500 years?

Phantastes is a badly needed novel for our moment. You are not the main character, and never were. Reflections are magic. It's better to learn your lessons outside of the real world if you can. Dying is the only way out.

@TheBabylonBee We should be so lucky.

Donald Trump Appoints Grand Admiral Thrawn To Lead The Carrier Strike Group In Persian Gulf buff.ly/DWeKbQH

@Vicar1973 Not that a highly eccentric oddball inventor (whose best friend late in life was a pigeon) is the most reliable witness to such things...but even an oddball inventor finds a nut once in a while!

Nikola Tesla, diagnosing the problems with rising feminism and misandry, in 1924: "I had always thought of woman as possessing those delicate qualities of mind and soul that made her in her respects far superior to man. I had put her on a lofty pedestal, figuratively speaking, and ranked her in certain important attributes considerably higher than man. I worshipped at the feet of the creature I had raised to this height, and, like every true worshiper, I felt myself unworthy of the object of my worship. But all this was in the past. Now the soft voiced gentle woman of my reverent worship has all but vanished. In her place has come the woman who thinks that her chief success in life lies on making herself as much as possible like man - in dress, voice, and actions, in sports and achievements of every kind. The world has experience many tragedies, but to my mind the greatest tragedy of all is the present economic condition wherein women strive against men, and in many cases actually succeed in usurping their places in the professions and in industry. This growing tendency of women to overshadow the masculine is a sign of a deteriorating civilization. Practically all the great achievements of man until now have been inspired by his love and devotion to woman. Man has aspired to great things because some woman believed in him, because he wished to command her admiration and respect. For these reasons he has fought for her and risked his life and his all for her time and time again. Perhaps the male in society is useless. I am frank to admit that I don't know. If women are beginning to feel this way about it - and there is striking evidence at hand that they do - then we are entering upon the cruelest period of the world's history. Our civilization will sink to a state like that which is found among the bees, ants, and other insects - a state wherein the male is ruthlessly killed off. In this matriarchal empire which will be established, the female rules. As the female predominates, the males are at her mercy. The male is considered important only as a factor in the general scheme of the continuity of life. The tendency of women to push aside man, supplanting the old spirit of cooperation with him in all the affairs of life, is very disappointing to me."

@RealDMWPodcast @CrossPolitic @FightLaughFeast At this rate, it better be Gabe!

A @CrossPolitic @FightLaughFeast family battle for the ages! Who will find the hidden votes at 3am???

Best Reformed Podcast Round 2 Day 2 (Matchup #8 of 16) @GMRench vs @TJSumpter *MATCHUP OF THE DAY*

Remember the Alamo!

@foxandroot Y'know, you posting these while your store is out of stock is...a bit cruel. 😉

Have a great weekend, friends.

Am I the only one who dislikes the modern trend of double-spacing book layouts? It doesn't make it any easier to read, and it lacks the historical origin of academic double-spacing. Why waste all that paper?

“I would to God the magistrates would more sincerely set forth the worship of God among the people: or else, if this may not be obtained at their hands, yet then at least that they would be no worse nor godless than Caiphas, who, when he heard (as he thought) blasphemy against the name of God, did rent his clothes, and cry, that the blasphemer was worthy to die. For surely, unless our Christian magistrates do become more sharp and severe against blaspheming villainies, I do not see but that they must needs be a great deal worse than the wicked knave Caiphas.”—Bullinger, Decades II.III 244

For the faithful are purely cleansed by Christ, who washeth them with his blood; and but yet, because the flesh doth strive with the Spirit so long as life remaineth on the earth, therefore the godly have need with faith and the Holy Ghost to wash and wipe their feet.--Bullinger

Good reminder. How homeschoolers, private schoolers and charter schoolers are saving Idaho millions idahoednews.org/voices/how-hom…

"Christian" might be loose in the evangelical sense, but I would recommend The Great Bridge by David McCullough, on the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. It combines great scholarship with writing that reads like a novel. His one on the Panama Canal is also great.

Looking for book recommendations - biographies of Christians who built great things.

@AntigoneJournal No Latin or Greek in schools.

Why have there been so few great philosophers born in the last 100 years? Answers of no more than one sentence please.

Behold, yet another reason why you should read more Plutarch. You can know all of Antiquity after Herodotus!

@DougTenNapel I mean, Tesla's best friend in later life was a bird, so I find his opinion suspect...

I have always had hundreds and hundreds of friends. Too many friends, really. That might make me less intelligent or not very smart but I'd rather be dumb and have my friends. I think someone with no friends who would attribute that to being intelligent probably explains why they wouldn't have many friends. Probably not very intelligent either.

Why study Latin? This thread, for starters.

We should always try to use words as precisely as possible. IDEOLOGY should not denote a mere variety of things that people believe about the world. I believe, for example, that American football, as a GAME (I distinguish GAME from SPORT), is superior to soccer. I have reasons for thinking so: first among them is the fact that you can go from being behind in the game to being ahead, or from losing to winning, in a single play, a single instant. Second is that football, like baseball, is a stop-start game, with discrete plays, and for each play (in baseball, for each pitch) you come up with a distinct call or strategy. Thus both games invite precise analysis. What pitch do you throw to Carlos Beltran with an 0-2 count, bases loaded, bottom of the 9th, your team up 3-1? (Answer: you throw a 12:30-6:30 breaking ball to strike him out looking.) That's not ideology. It is not ideological for me to notice that a healthy boy will surpass his mother in physical strength somewhere between the ages of 11 and 16. All I have to do is to have my eyes open; or I remember my own case, or my son's, or my brother's. It is not ideological for me to be uncertain about things that are NOT in my direct experience, or that are NOT the conclusions of right reason. I say that I do not know whether a modest rise in global temperature will be good or bad for mankind. I say so because I wonder about the addition of millions of acres of arable land in the north temperate zones; and of the deeper and richer greening of crops in lands already arable. Since I demur on the point, I can hardly be accused of ideology. IDEOLOGY is an ersatz religion -- and necessarily a warped one at that. It is by nature totalizing. EVERYTHING in the world must be made to conform to it. It is not so much the result of reason, as it is reason's slave-master: reason seeks "reasons" ex post facto to justify a position already held, already REQUIRED by the ideology. This is not the same as what you do when you are presented with a truth, and then must, as it were, reason backwards from it to shed clearer light on related matters. If I believed that football MUST be superior to soccer because it is American, that would be bigotry, and it might, if it were part of some "system" of Americanist ideas, be IDEOLOGICAL. If I believed that we MUST stop using fossil fuels, regardless of any considerations from agriculture or human demography, that too would be IDEOLOGICAL. IDEOLOGY can turn murderous very quickly, because there can be no deviation from it without threatening the system with collapse. The kulaks HAD to be dispossessed of the lands they had turned into the breadbasket of eastern Europe, because the ideology demanded it, and then, when what used to be rich farms turned idle and weed-ridden, the kulaks had to be blamed, or the others who took their place -- anybody rather than the communist ideology itself. RELIGION names the duties that we owe to God; IDEOLOGY, taking the place of religion, determines the form of our enslavement to an abstract system of political demands. A religious man may be the most practical fellow in the world: see all the agricultural and technological advances the medieval monasteries invented; see the arts and crafts that the friars introduced to the Indians in the missions of California. An ideological man is practical only by accident. He is often the very reverse. You cannot say to the educational ideologue, "Your attempt to teach 'world civilizations' to American children who do not know where the Mississippi River is on a map is doomed to failure, nor is there much point to it, and here are reasons why." The ideologue will erupt into a rage. So did Stalin when those farms failed in the Ukraine.