Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 302

this was a busy week for me — I’m amazed I read enough mate­r­i­al to pop­u­late this list!

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions. If you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

This vol­ume is the sum of con­sec­u­tive squares: 92 + 102 + 112 = 302.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. You Aren’t Actu­al­ly Mad at the SATs (Fred­die deBoer, Sub­stack): “Try­ing to fight edu­ca­tion­al inequal­i­ty by get­ting rid of the SAT is like try­ing to fight cli­mate change by get­ting rid of ther­mome­ters.”
  2. Meet the Nun Who Wants You to Remem­ber You Will Die (Ruth Gra­ham, New York Times): “In Octo­ber 2018, on her 455th day with the skull on her desk, she wrote, ‘Every­one dies, their bod­ies rot, and every face becomes a skull (unless you are incor­rupt).’ ”
  3. Adver­sary Drones Are Spy­ing On The U.S. And The Pen­ta­gon Acts Like They’re UFOs (Tyler Rogoway, The Dri­ve): “Yes, I real­ize that the idea that an adver­sary is pen­e­trat­ing U.S. mil­i­tary train­ing areas unmo­lest­ed, and has been for years, using low­ly drone tech­nol­o­gy and bal­loons, is a big pill to swal­low, but as one of the peo­ple who have repeat­ed­ly warned about the threat posed by low­er-end drones for a decade—warnings that large­ly were dis­missed by the Pen­ta­gon until drones made or altered in ram­shackle ISIS work­shops in a war zone were lit­er­al­ly rain­ing down bomblets on U.S. and allied forces in Iraq—it isn’t real­ly sur­pris­ing at all.” I saw this when it first came out and did­n’t share it for some rea­son, but it popped up again because of the upcom­ing Sen­ate UFO thing and I want­ed to let y’all see it.
  4. Is the ‘DEFCON 3 cul­ture war’ over reli­gious free­dom bills com­ing to an end? (Kelsey Dal­las, Deseret News): “Six years ago, Indi­ana law­mak­ers’ efforts to pass a new reli­gious free­dom law spawned protests, trav­el bans and boy­cott threats from nation­al ath­let­ic orga­ni­za­tions, includ­ing the NCAA, NFL and NBA. This year, when Mon­tana and South Dako­ta passed sim­i­lar leg­is­la­tion, the back­lash was so mut­ed by com­par­i­son that even some reli­gious free­dom experts didn’t hear about the bills until the Deseret News sent an inter­view request.”
  5. Who Makes More: Teach­ers or Cops? (Red­dit) — a coun­ter­in­tu­itive pre­sen­ta­tion of the state-by-state data
  6. The incom­ing Stan­ford stu­dent liv­ing under siege in Gaza (Cameron Ehsan, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Yousef AbuHashem ’25 has kept a small back­pack close to him since Israeli airstrikes tar­get­ing Gaza began 11 days ago. The bag is large enough to fit only the bare essen­tials: his birth cer­tifi­cate, pass­port, sec­ondary school diplo­ma, cloth­ing and cash.”
  7. The New Furies of the Old­est Hatred (Peter Savod­nik, Bari Weis­s’s Sub­stack): “All gov­ern­ments should be scru­ti­nized. But crit­i­cism of Israeli pol­i­cy is often just crit­i­cism of Israel’s exis­tence. We know this because the crit­i­cized poli­cies almost always involve Israel being able to defend itself against hos­tile neigh­bors (being able to exist); and because there is an obses­sion with Israel that dis­tin­guish­es it from any oth­er coun­try or for­eign-pol­i­cy issue. Count­less Mus­lims have suf­fered at the hands of the Chi­nese, Indi­ans and Rus­sians — to say noth­ing of the Assad regime hav­ing incin­er­at­ed as many as 600,000 Syr­i­ans, the near­ly 500,000 Pales­tini­ans con­fined to refugee camps in Lebanon, or the inden­tured ser­vants, includ­ing many Pales­tini­ans, in the near­by Gulf. This is not whataboutism. It is per­spec­tive.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

  • Cor­po­rate Pol­i­tics (Dil­bert)
  • Gross But Fun­ny (At Ran­dom Comics)
  • Sleuthing Cap­tain America’s Shield (Alan Katz, The Smith­so­ni­an’s blog): “SD-600 requires that the Smith­son­ian estab­lish legal title to any item to be acquired for the col­lec­tions with accom­pa­ny­ing evi­dence, such as prove­nance infor­ma­tion, per­mits, export/import licens­es, and intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty trans­fer agree­ments where applic­a­ble. Such evi­dence would prove con­clu­sive­ly that an item wasn’t, for exam­ple, already owned by anoth­er depart­ment of the US gov­ern­ment (i.e. S.W.O.R.D. in the case of Fal­con and the Win­ter Sol­dier) and sub­ject to repos­ses­sion by that enti­ty.” (rec­om­mend­ed by a stu­dent)

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Mak­ing Sense of the Num­bers of Gen­e­sis [pdf link] (Car­ol Hill, Per­spec­tives on Sci­ence and the Chris­t­ian Faith): “Joseph and Joshua were each record­ed as dying at age 110—a num­ber con­sid­ered ‘per­fect’ by the Egyp­tians. In ancient Egypt­ian doc­trine, the phrase ‘he died aged 110’ was actu­al­ly an epi­taph com­mem­o­rat­ing a life that had been lived self­less­ly and had result­ed in out­stand­ing social and moral ben­e­fit for oth­ers. And so for both Joseph and Joshua, who came out of the Egypt­ian cul­ture, quot­ing this age was actu­al­ly a trib­ute to their char­ac­ter. But, to be described as ‘dying at age 110’ bore no nec­es­sary rela­tion­ship to the actu­al time of an individual’s life span.” You will not agree with every­thing in this arti­cle, but it is full of fas­ci­nat­ing insights. (first shared in vol­ume 51)

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). And to the extent you can dis­cern my opin­ions, please under­stand that they are my own and not nec­es­sar­i­ly those of Chi Alpha or any oth­er orga­ni­za­tion I may be per­ceived to rep­re­sent. Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it. If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

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