Non-theist Christian and elder in Community of Christ. I have Mormon roots and aspirations to do better with justice and peacemaking—especially in the digital sphere but also in Lexington, Kentucky, the U.S., and the world more broadly.
You can subscribe to this content through this RSS feed or this Mastodon account. This also gets pushed to Bluesky along with content from my other subblogs.
🍿 movieblog: When the Wind Blows (❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️)
I still want to read the original comic that this and the radio adaptation were based on, but the Internet Archive copy is hard to read, and I had some work to do this afternoon that made it easy to put this on in the background.
I liked this a lot (well, “liked” as much as one can appreciate a black comedy horror story about nuclear war. Some of the experimental animation choices and blending of animated and film footage seemed odd, and I’m torn between appreciating them and finding them distracting.
🔗 linkblog: War heroes and military firsts are among 26,000 images flagged for removal in Pentagon's DEI purge'
If I don’t bookmark this article, I will quickly forget how dumb this whole thing has been (not to mention petty and mean).
🎙️ radioblog: When the Wind Blows (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)
There’s something especially dark about the voice actor who played Wallace (of Wallace and Gromit) starring as a naïve Englishman in this story about the horrors of nuclear war.
I’ve wanted to read the book this is based on for quite some time—and may yet read it now that I’ve found a copy on the Internet Archive—but I got to the radio adaptation first. The couple at the heart of the story are so naïve as to make the story heavy-handed, but it’s also a good literary device for just how helpless one is in the face of nuclear weapons.
📚 bookblog: Picks & Shovels (❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤)
I was intrigued when I heard that Mormonism would feature prominently in the third (but first?) Martin Hench book. Mormonism is hard to get right in fiction, and I wondered how Doctorow would do. The answer: Some things were off, but overall, he got things right. It nagged at me some, but overall, I appreciated his take.
That’s not the most important part of my review, but it’s representative of everything I want to say about this book.
🔗 linkblog: Bluesky Deletes AI Protest Video of Trump Sucking Musk's Toes, Calls It 'Non-Consensual Explicit Material''
Honestly, I get the original call, but I’m glad Bluesky backtracked. Content moderation is hard.
🔗 linkblog: Exclusive: US could cut Ukraine's access to Starlink internet services over minerals, say sources'
I have qualms about the U.S. providing military support to any cause, but if there is such a thing as good U.S. military support, Ukraine is a clear example of it, and either way, this is an embarassment.
🔗 linkblog: SCOOP: Ashley St. Clair sues Elon Musk for custody of new son'
Some bonkers details in here.
🔗 linkblog: While Democracy Burns, Democrats Prioritize… Demolishing Section 230?'
I soured on Section 230 for a bit, but I came back and largely because of arguments like this one.
🔗 linkblog: Bannon’s Salute at CPAC Sparks Outcry, Even on French Right'
If Jordan Bardella thinks it was a Nazi salute… gift link
🔗 linkblog: DOGE Puts $1 Spending Limit on Government Employee Credit Cards'
DOGE continues to insist on the dumbest way to carry out its dumb goals.
🔗 linkblog: Trump State Department official has called for mass sterilization of ‘low-IQ trash’'
It’s all bad right now, but it’s still important to call out the particularly bad stuff.
🔗 linkblog: Trump firings cause chaos at agency responsible for America's nuclear weapons'
One more thing right out of the Twitter playbook from DOGE: Firing people without understanding how important they are.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️🖤🖤 for The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, by David Graeber
When I was in grad school, I was pretty centrist: more liberal than most of the students from BYU (where I’d just finished my bachelor’s) but more conservative than most of the students at MSU. I had an odd experience one day when a fellow student far, FAR to the left from where I was teasingly chided me for a Facebook post I’d made defending Common Core from one of my BYU friends who was convinced it was a communist plot.
🔗 linkblog: Trump Is Just Threatening to Do Something Stupid as a Terrible Negotiation Tactic'
Bookmarking this in case I need to show it to a family member.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Joseph Smith and the Mormons, by Noah Van Scriver
This is an excellent graphic novel adaptation of the earliest of Mormon history. The art is good, the story is compelling, and I enjoyed reading it. I came close to buying this twice in the past year after finding it in comics shops, and I was delighted to find that my local library had a couple of copies.
I do wish that I either knew a lot more history or a lot less history going into this.
🔗 linkblog: Normalizing Indian Hate Makes Me a Good Father and Husband'
McSweeney’s pulls no punches, but Vance has earned no mercy.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Decolonizing Palestine: The Land, The People, The Bible, by Mitri Raheb
This book has been on my radar for a few months, and I’m glad to have found an audiobook I could check out (though I doubt I’d have regretted an impulse buy—this would be a good book to have on hand).
Palestinian Christian ministers and theologians always call me to account in a way that I appreciate. I don’t think I should need someone from my own faith tradition (broadly speaking) to tell me how bad the situation in Palestine is (i.
🔗 linkblog: How close is Elon Musk to controlling a nuclear weapon?'
The headline is a little provocative, but it’s scary that we live in a world where it makes some sense.
More broadly, though, I found that the first Trump administration converted me to nuclear disarmament—yes, this president is scary, but that any president has access to that much destructive power is scarier still. I expect I’ll go further in that direction this time around.
🔗 linkblog: Staffer with Elon Musk's DOGE amplified white supremacists online'
Starting to sense a pattern.
🔗 linkblog: Trump’s FBI Pick Kash Patel Took Up to $5M in Stock From Chinese Ecommerce Giant Shein'
The rules seem to be that it’s okay to do whatever in the GOP, but no Democrat can even seem to be in a sticky situation. What a joke.
📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for Debt: The First 5,000 Years, by David Graeber
Like everything I’ve read from Graeber, I appreciate the overall argument that he’s making and I find the evidence he marshalls compelling. At the same time, there’s a density to the latter that I admit having trouble following, so I don’t always see how it leads to the overall argument.
Even with those caveats, I’m happy to endorse this read. I’m interested in how Graeber explores the relationship between moral thinking and economic modeling—as I posted earlier, I also find his thoughts on the moral dangers posed by abstracting interpersonal obligations into quantifiable debt with the help of money.
🔗 linkblog: The Far Right Has a New Hero: Elon Musk'
Bookmarking for… sigh… teaching purposes.
🔗 linkblog: First Cracks Appear: Some Conservatives Admit We’re In A Constitutional Crisis'
As usual, lots to like in this post from Mike Masnick.
🔗 linkblog: A 25-Year-Old With Elon Musk Ties Has Direct Access to the Federal Payment System'
Resubscribed to WIRED because despite my efforts to focus more on tech news than political news, THEY HAVE BECOME ONE AND THE SAME IN REALLY WORRYING WAYS.
🔗 linkblog: The Twitter Files Playbook Comes For The US Government'
More good writing from Masnick on scary stuff coming out of DC.
🔗 linkblog: The NTSB chooses Elon Musk’s X to update the press on plane crashes'
Lots of bad things are happening right now, but this one stands out. There’s no good reason for this except to make Musk happy.