Quick Trick Brick Stack

@StalwartCoug @JanCBS Wow yeah I bet they haven’t considered that, good point.

@JanCBS They're making the same mistake (for conservatives) that Ginsberg made (for liberals). Noone is immortal. Better to retire while you can replace yourself with someeone who interprets the Constitution in a similar way to you.

BREAKING: Justice Samuel Alito NOT retiring. Sources close to Justice Alito confirm the Fox News report that he has decided not to step down this year. In addition, sources close to Justice Thomas tell me he’s not retiring. That indicates that this year, with the midterms on the horizon, Trump will not be making his 4th nomination to SCOTUS.

US fertility reached 1.57 last year, the lowest ever recorded, and the WSJ explanation is "uncertainty about finances, relationship stability, and the political climate" my great grandma had eleven children during the second world war, in a country being bombed, in a house with no running water, on rations. poor people have always had kids. the poorest people on earth right now still have kids and the financial excuse is a story we tell ourselves because it makes us feel good and the real one is unbearable the real mechanism is that we got rich enough to redefine children as an expense instead of the point. somewhere in the last fifty years the cultural goal inverted and a child stopped being what life is for and became a line item competing with the lifestyle. once you frame it that way the math never works, because the math isnt supposed to work. that's the point we are living in the richest moment in human history and we decided to use the surplus to buy ourselves out of the future. the most prosperous civilization that has ever existed is committing demographic suicide at the altar of personal optimization and comfort, and the official line is that we cant afford it the birthrate is a lagging indicator of a civilization that forgot why it was alive

@heal_soul49465 @holisticgrenade By what mechanism do you think people are having kids later?

@holisticgrenade Reality check: IVF didn’t grow because of birth control. It grew because people are having kids later, fertility naturally declines with age, and medicine now has technology to help.

So the birth control pill was given out like candy to every female millennial at age 15 and now IVF is a 50 billion dollar industry. Must be a coincidence.

The period goes inside the quotations you deranged maniac.

@jenningslawton @SeedOilDsrspctr Consider Classical Christian schools for your kids. In my kids’ elementary school, the boys sit in front of the girls when they gather in the corner for the required school shooter drills “so the boys can protect the girls if necessary.”

@SeedOilDsrspctr Sending boys to modern schools borders on child abuse.

This is how young boys are talked to by teachers in school if they’re even remotely acting like a boy

"If you didn't insist on enforcing the law, we wouldn't have to gun down your law enforcement in the streets" "If you didn't insist on saying things we don't like, we wouldn't have to kill you on a college campus." Same people. Same predictable shit.

@TradVat2 Loved this! Would be interested in hearing more about how an LDS spiritual life feels/works compared to a Catholic one. I have a theory that many peoples’ theology is more based in process/“fruit” than it is about rational theology.

A few months ago, a small film crew came to my home to interview me about leaving the LDS church and converting to Catholicism. If you are interested in watching (it's about 1.5 hours), you can see it here below. youtu.be/QO67zpPCuas?si…

@NickClairmont1 My favorite is 30 weeks: “beet (including the leaves)”

GRIEVANCE AIRING: So my wife uses a pregnancy info/tracking app called What To Expect that makes me so mad. Each week it tells us what size the growing baby is using a fruit or vegetable, but the sizing makes *no sense*. Here are the last few weeks:

@KnowleSpiritbro @sscjusa Yes and people kind of ruin the magic by making it 1/6+ of the year. The decorations don’t even feel special anymore.

@sscjusa don't be a scrooge. This season is one of the last good aspects of common culture we have left

@geoliberal @bruce_barrett @grok They also get to skip to the front of the security line and don’t have to do any of the work of carrying their own bags though the airport, finding their own gate, etc.

@bruce_barrett @grok I don't get this supposed scam. What is priority boarding? Like entering the airplane early? It's not first class? Why would anyone want that?

Air India says 30% of passengers on India-US flights ask for wheelchairs. Most are able bodied travelers scamming the priority boarding system. Real disabled passengers get left short.

@gyrfalc63587709 @ThymeToBeBorn I’m sorry, you’re “pro choice”? Does that only apply to people whose choices you approve of?

@ThymeToBeBorn Larger families are unacceptable. You can stop there. You're running a daycare, not a family.

I used to ask the older big family moms at church how certain logistics work and they were always vague or tried to change the subject and I think I understand why now, which is that the things you end up doing are so unacceptable to smaller families that you stay quiet about it.

@TradVat2 Would be very interested to hear his response to point #4.

So, as a number of people have asked me, here is my rough sketch response to this thread. 1. Let's start with the most quoted non-LDS author within the LDS world, C.S. Lewis. In the preface to his great work, Mere Christianity, he quotes others, critical of his work, "'Who are you, to lay down who is, and who is not a Christian? or 'May not many a man who cannot believe these doctrines be far more truly a Christian, far closer to the spirit of Christ, than some who do?'" As Lewis comments, "this objection" "has every available quality except that of being useful. We simply cannot, without disaster, use language as these objectors want us to us it.... When a word ceases to be a term of description and becomes merely a term of praise, it no longer tells you facts about the object: it only tells you about the speaker's attitude to that object." As he elaborates, "Christian" means those "who accepted the teachings of the apostles." Period. 2. If you accept terms of definition "Christian" like those put forward by the LDS, you quickly find out why Lewis's core argument makes so much sense: there must be a boundary for the term to be meaningful at all. The LDS get upset because they think "I affirm that Jesus is the Son of God" and "I try to follow Him" or "I read the Bible regularly" are sufficient conditions. That merely demonstrates, not solves, the problem. The Gnostics, for example, did all of these things. Muslims affirm a number of points about Jesus that would plausibly make them Christians, by the LDS definition. 3. Someone has to decide. There must be some authority to declare who is and is not a believer in the teachings of the apostles about Jesus of Nazareth. And it very much hinges on, at minimum, accepting the teaching about the nature of Jesus, i.e., that he is consubstantial with the Father. This is where the Church herself drew the line. LDS disputations about this issue are really just saying, "We don't agree with the authority, and we put forward our own contested authority to solve that problem." 4. Further, the LDS don't actually believe their own argument. How can I conclude this? By asking the question, Who is a Latter-day Saint? Who gets to decide that question? Why don't the LDS accept that, for example, the polygamists and Adam-God believers of Short Creek, Arizona etc. count as "Latter-day Saints"? Why can't Mormon Fundamentalists as equally claim the true teachings of not only Christianity, but of Mormonism? They believe Joseph Smith was a prophet, they believe all the things he taught, they read the Book of Mormon, etc. Is the reason the LDs exclude them is because those Fundamentalists contest what some of Joseph Smith's teachings actually were? Hmmmmm. Sounds awfully familiar. To be a "Latter-day Saint" entails both belief in a certain set of religious propositions and submission to a particular authority. The issue is there must be some authority that decides whether someone in fact accepts the correct beliefs that makes them part of X or Y group. The authority decided where the line is, more or less, many centuries ago. Stop crying about it, particularly because you do the exact same thing with groups that diverge from the authority to which you have submitted.

@rayengroves I take heart that God is sovereign and placed each of us here, in this specific time, for reasons perhaps unknown to us.

Hard not to blackpill when the US is actually too f*cked to fix. We’ve been invaded. It’s inevitable that we’ll become the cultural minority. I am scared of the country my children will inherit.

@Dirtdragonmom One of my kids once puked in the touch-a-stingray tank at the aquarium 🙃

My kid accidentally swallowed water during swim lessons, puked a ton at the edge of the pool, and they had to clear all the swim classes out of the water. So I need to go die of mortification now and I probably won't recover.

@awstar11 Oh don’t worry, they will now that they’re done using it as distraction for the VA races.

If only there was something Democrats could do to end this shutdown

@Cratscadle Put them in their room for a set time period every day. If they’re tired, they nap in their own. If they’re not, they can play until the time ends. This will pay off tremendously when they are older (5-9ish) and can manage their own bedtime after tuck-in.

Ok but fr it can’t be 2+ hours of crying and wriggling and shoving twice a day every day. I’m losing my temper pretty consistently.

@lucky___deluxe I’m one of two and I wish I had more siblings. When we were younger, everything was a competition (who’s better at school/sports/staying out of trouble — which means the other was by definition “the worse”). Now that our parents are old, everything is a debate with no tiebreaker.

@Dinendal13 @BradKetcher @EricLDaugh When a child learns that 2+2=4, it doesn’t mean that’s the ONLY way to get to 4, even if that’s the only way THEY know to get there. So while we know that persisting in the Christian life leads to heaven, that doesn’t mean there aren’t other ways that we aren’t fully aware of.

🚨 JUST IN: JD Vance says he's raising his children Christian, and he hopes his agnostic wife, Usha, comes around to the Christian faith Vance's 8-year-old did his first Communion "about a year ago," and his two oldest kids go to a Christian school "Most Sundays, Usha comes with me to church." "Do I hope eventually she is moved by the same thing I was moved by? Yes. I honestly do wish that. I believe in the Christian gospel, and I hope eventually, my wife comes to see it the same way." 🙏

@troulala @BradKetcher @EricLDaugh I think you’re thinking of limbo, which was never (and still is not) official Catholic doctrine.

@MonsterRatPack @BradKetcher @EricLDaugh What is. Because my understanding was if you weren’t baptized, it was purgatory at best - which is why Charlemagne want to change the practice to baptizing babies instead of adults, which elimiated the need for the old large separate baptisteries that were adult sized

@troulala @BradKetcher @EricLDaugh If a soul goes to purgatory it is guaranteed to end up in heaven. Purgatory is not “a place of second judgment,” it is a place to have some final impurities burned out (Rev. 21:27) to perfect you so you can go into heaven.