the definite article 27
You may or may not like the Babylon Bee. It is a political satire site run by and often reflecting the orientation of the deeply Christian owners and operators. Like most political satire sites, sometimes they are brilliant, and sometimes it falls flat. But they found themselves in the middle of a free speech controversy a few years back when they named a famous political trans woman as man of the year. Twitter threatened to close their account if they did not take it down.
Tasteless or not, this is a basic free speech issue, and so the BB people felt as well. They refused to take down the page and their site was blocked by Twitter. What happened next was, well, unexpected…
https://www.newsweek.com/diplomatic-whiplash-ronald-reagan-donald-trump-opinion-1992409
An interesting article comparing the about-face in diplomatic orientation between he Carter and Reagen administrations and the Obama/Biden and Trump administrations.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/food/articles/back-roots-ginger-medicine
Guess what? i love ginger. And this article is about ginger.
What happens when a director casts a jewish woman to play the role of a jewish woman?
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-831629
“Authorities on Monday said they concluded that Capt. Omer Neutra, 21, was killed on October 7, 2023, and his body was taken by Hamas to Gaza. Omer’s parents, Ronen and Orna Neutra, spoke at the Republican National Convention in mid-July, pushing for his release and a deal. This didn’t change Hamas’s decision to keep holding their son’s body. In fact, Hamas could have saved them the worry and agony of a year of waiting for information by releasing the body in October 2023. Hamas felt no incentive to do so because it assumed it could kill as many Americans and Israelis as it wanted and get away with it.”
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/ethics-wont-save-us-from-ai
“When it comes to new technology, including artificial intelligence, it’s easy to succumb to the temptations of doom or boom. Ours is the best of times, ours is the worst of times — the debate is predictable. Others, seeking to escape bifurcation, propose a third way grounded in some principle, method, or procedure of neutral universality that avoids deadlock while delivering a rational solution acceptable to all, at least in principle. This motivation is understandable, even praiseworthy. But such projects inevitably fail: a reasonable account of the dangers and promises of technology cannot be neutral, because any principled argument about benefits and harms must be grounded upon a robust, thick notion of the human good, even though thick commitments are rarely acceptable to all.”
Two podcasts on Spotify that might interest you - they interested me!
The Mary thing is crazy. It seems like we're getting to a point where, as committed Jews and Zionists, we're going to have to argue forcefully for the Jewishness of Jesus, Mary and the apostles.