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#Postive Stuff
Drew Dunn | Stand Up Comedy Special
31:37 min.May 30, 2025
Comedian Drew Dunn takes on the inevitable WWIII draft, the vaping vs. smoking debate, having a baby in today's world, and more in his hilarious Don't Tell Comedy special!
Embracing my humanity.
modwiz (2nd June 2025)
Will share this here ...
Selfishness Is Not a Virtue
June 5, 2025
"When Christianity goes wrong, it goes wrong in a familiar way.
Last Friday, at a town hall meeting in Butler County, Iowa, Senator Joni Ernst delivered a grim message to her constituents. In the midst of an exchange over Medicaid cuts in President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” someone in the crowd shouted at Ernst, “People are going to die!”
Ernst’s immediate response was bizarre. “Well, we all are going to die,” she said.
True enough, but that’s irrelevant to the question at hand. Yes, we’re all going to die, but it matters a great deal when, how and why. There’s a tremendous difference between dying after living a long and full life that’s enabled at least in part by access to decent health care, and dying a premature and perhaps needlessly painful death because you can’t afford the care you need.
All of this should be too obvious to explain, and it would cost Ernst — who occupies a relatively safe seat in an increasingly red state — virtually nothing to apologize and move on. In fact, just after her flippant comment, she did emphasize that she wanted to protect vulnerable people. The full answer was more complicated than the headline-generating quip.
By the standards of 2025, Ernst’s comment would have been little more than a micro-scandal, gone by the end of the day. And if we lived even in the relatively recent past, demonstrating humility could have worked to her benefit. It can be inspiring to watch a person genuinely apologize.
But we’re in a new normal now.
That means no apologies. That means doubling down. And that can also mean tying your cruelty to the Christian cross.
And so, the next day Ernst posted an apology video — filmed, incredibly enough, in what appears to be a cemetery. It began well. “I would like to take this opportunity,” she said, “to sincerely apologize for a statement I made yesterday at my town hall.” But her statement devolved from there.
“I made an incorrect assumption,” she continued, “that everyone in the auditorium understood that, yes, we are all going to perish from this earth.”
She didn’t stop there. “I’m really, really glad that I did not have to bring up the subject of the tooth fairy as well. But for those that would like to see eternal and everlasting life, I’d encourage you to embrace my lord and savior, Jesus Christ.”
Remember, this was not a snarky, impulsive rejoinder. It was a considered response. She decided to film the statement and release it. There is no ambiguity — the video delivered exactly the message she wanted to send.
The fact that a sitting United States senator was that callous — and then tried to twist her cruelty into a bizarro version of the Christian gospel — is worth highlighting on its own as another instance of the pervasive “own the libs” ethos of the Republican Party. But Ernst’s fake apology was something different — and worse — than simple trolling. It exemplified the contortions of American Christianity in the Trump era.
Americans are now quite familiar with the “no apologies” ethos of the Trumpist right. They’re familiar with Trumpist trolling and with MAGA politicians and MAGA influencers doubling and tripling down on their mistakes. My former Times colleague Jane Coaston has even popularized a term — “vice signaling” — to describe MAGA’s performative transgressiveness. Trumpists think it’s good to be bad.
But why bring Jesus into it?
America has always been a country with lots of Christian citizens, but it has not always behaved like a Christian country, and for reasons that resonate again today. An old error is new. Too many Christians are transforming Christianity into a vertical faith, one that focuses on your personal relationship with God at the expense of the horizontal relationship you have with your neighbors.
To understand what I mean, let’s turn to a much darker time in American history, when Christianity and slavery existed side-by-side in the American South. In 1970, Wendell Berry published “The Hidden Wound,” a book-length essay about the profound damage that racism had inflicted on us all.
Reflecting on the Christianity of the slave-owning South, Berry wrote this passage, which is worth quoting at some length:
The master hardened his heart to the plight of the slave by fundamentally rejecting the idea that his vertical faith in God carried with it a series of horizontal earthly obligations to love your neighbor as yourself, to do justice to the oppressed and to care for the vulnerable.First, consider the moral predicament of the master who sat in church with his slaves, thus attesting his belief in the immortality of the souls of people whose bodies he owned and used. He thus placed his body, if not his mind, at the very crux of the deepest contradiction of his life. How could he presume to own the body of a man whose soul he considered as worthy of salvation as his own? To keep this question from articulating itself in his thoughts and demanding an answer, he had to perfect an empty space in his mind, a silence, between heavenly concerns and earthly concerns, between body and spirit. If there had ever opened a conscious connection between the two claims, if the two sides of his mind had ever touched, it would have been like building a fire in a house full of gunpowder.
So long as the vertical relationship between God and man was secure, the horizontal relationship between men was of secondary importance, to the extent that it mattered at all. Why would this fleeting life matter when eternity was at stake?
Thankfully, we don’t live in such extreme times. We’re far from the dreadful days of slavery, and we’ve left Jim Crow behind, but I’m noticing a morphing of American evangelicalism back to the vertical, away from the horizontal, and that change is turning our gaze inward, to our own well-being above all, sometimes even to the exclusion of caring about the fate of others.
Let’s look at a different, more contemporary, example.
In April, I wrote about Paula White, one of Trump’s principal faith advisers, and her Easter offer of “seven supernatural blessings” in exchange for a suggested offering of $1,000. My piece was focused on the cohort of pastors and their Christian followers who behave more like Trump than like Jesus.
But I could have just as easily focused on the sheer selfishness of her message as well. Look again at the gifts White offered to her flock: “God will assign an angel to you, he’ll be an enemy to your enemies, he’ll give you prosperity, he’ll take sickness away from you, he will give you long life, he’ll bring increase in inheritance, and he’ll bring a special year of blessing.”
The emphasis is clear — look at what God will do for you. It’s all vertical. Honor God (by giving White a pile of cash), and he’ll make you healthy, wealthy and strong.
Consider also the evangelical turn against empathy. There are now Christian writers and theologians who are mounting a frontal attack against the very value that allows us to understand our neighbors, that places us in their shoes and asks what we would want and need if we were in their place.
But Christianity is a cross-shaped faith. The vertical relationship creates horizontal obligations. While Christians can certainly differ, for example, on the best way to provide health care to our nation’s most vulnerable citizens, it’s hard to see how we can disagree on the need to care for the poor.
Put another way, when the sick and lame approached Jesus, he did not say, “Depart from me, for thou shalt die anyway.” He healed the sick and fed the hungry and told his followers to do the same.
Or, as the Book of James declares, “If a brother or sister is without clothes and lacks daily food and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, stay warm, and be well fed,’ but you don’t give them what the body needs, what good is it?”
Again, these passages do not dictate any particular policy, but they do tell us that we must try to meet the physical needs of the poor — here, on this earth — even if our souls are far more durable than our bodies.
People often ask me if I think the evangelical church has changed during the age of Trump or if its true nature is being revealed. There is not a neat yes or no answer. Certainly Trump’s rise has revealed the extent to which the will to power has always lurked in Christian hearts. When faced with a conflict between their stated principles and their access to power, millions of Republican Christians chose power over principle — and they are continuing to do so every day.
At the same time, some things have changed. An evangelical community that once celebrated, for example, George W. Bush’s PEPFAR program — the AIDS initiative that has saved an estimated 26 million lives — has now either applauded or stood by passively as Trump has decimated American foreign aid and damaged the a program that was one of America’s greatest humanitarian accomplishments.
Ernst isn’t the chief offender here by any means. Nor do I think that she’s consciously trying to narrow Christian doctrine to the kind of purely vertical relationship that enables so much injustice. Senators aren’t theologians, and neither are columnists.
But politicians are weather vanes (as we’re all tempted to be), and there’s a foul wind blowing out of parts of American Christianity. Ernst’s first quip was a gaffe. Her apology video was no such thing. It was a premeditated effort to say exactly what she thinks Republicans want to hear."
Source pageDavid French is an Opinion columnist, writing about law, culture, religion and armed conflict. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator. His most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.” You can follow him on Threads (@davidfrenchjag).
The post Selfishness Is Not a Virtue appeared first on New York Times.
Embracing my humanity.
modwiz (5th June 2025)
Society’s Great Gaslight: Everything is Back to Normal After Covid
Teal Swan
14:17 min.Jun 7, 2025
Glad we are over all of what happened during Covid, right? I mean, it’s been five years after all. Life has pretty much gotten back to normal. Hasn’t it? Well, the answer is no. In fact, this is one of the biggest gaslights that is happening in human society the world over. Allow Teal Swan to un-gaslight you.
Teal Swan is a New Thought Leader and a Bestselling Author who is an expert in human development and relationships. She has over a decade of experience working with people of all walks of life with a mission to reduce human suffering.
Embracing my humanity.
modwiz (7th June 2025)
hmm ...
‘Dog Walking Is a Clear Crime’: Iran’s Latest Morality Push
June 9, 2025
When Iran banned dog walking in 2019, few dog owners were all that worried about the order. But after years of lax enforcement, officials in recent days have pledged to crack down, according to the state news media.
Prosecutors in at least 20 cities cited public health risks and threats to public safety in announcing the heightened enforcement of the bans, which include both dog walking and driving with dogs.
“Dog walking is a clear crime,” Mohammad Hossein Doroudi, the prosecutor in Mashhad, told reporters on Monday as he announced that city’s plan, according to IRNA, a state-owned news outlet.
Iran’s government has also long seen pet dogs as a sign of Western cultural influence. And much of the opposition to dogs in Iran stems from religious beliefs, with dogs considered to be “najes,” or impure, in Islam.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, had issued a fatwa, or religious order, explaining the logic: A dog’s saliva or hair would render anything it touched — like a person, clothing or a surface — impure.
“Prayer is invalid with the presence of dog hair,” his fatwa read.
Some Iranian veterinarians and pet surgeons, like Dr. Damoon Ansari, are skeptical of the recent moves.
“Each summer, new plans emerge to regulate citizens’ morality or lifestyles,” Dr. Ansari, who is based in Tehran, said in a phone interview. “This year, the focus is on dogs and dog walking.
“The popularity of pet ownership has surged in recent years,” Dr. Ansari said, pointing to a large number of veterinary clinics in cities across the country.
“Pets, including dogs, have become integral to Iranian family culture, even in religious households,” he said, adding, “Whether officials approve or not, they cannot eliminate the millions of pets in Iran.”
But even if officials are not planning to take away all pets, they are certainly trying to restrict their presence in public spaces.
Mr. Doroudi, the prosecutor in Mashhad, said that enforcement had lapsed over the past two years, but that officials now planned to be far more strict. He said that violators in Mashhad, Iran’s second-most populous city, would first receive a warning and that they could be fined or their dogs could be confiscated if they failed to comply.
“Dog walking is considered a threat to health and is considered a criminal behavior under the name of harassment of women and children,” Mr. Doroudi said, according to IRNA.
Some in Iran share the skepticism about dogs as pets, and while some tolerate the presence of guard dogs, they see the “man’s best friend” narrative as a step too far.
When the 2019 ban was announced, Hamidreza Taraghi, a hard-line politician, said in an interview with The New York Times that increasing numbers of people were complaining to the police about dogs.
“We are experiencing economic difficulties, but the dog lovers are spending billions of dollars each year for dog food,” he said. “We need that money for more important things.”
But many Iranians love their pooches. Speaking of her ShihTzu terrier, Teddy, Asal Bahrierad, a Tehran resident, said at the time, “No one, not even the police, can take him away from me.” She also said then that the ban was not being taken all that seriously. “The police are actually very friendly to us,” she said of her daily walks with Teddy.
Some even view walking a dog in public as a quiet rebellion against the Iranian government, which has long tried to enforce an Islamic lifestyle and restrict citizens’ civil liberties.
The efforts to restrict dogs’ presence in public cover cities like Tabriz, in western Iran, and Kerman in the east, according to the state-owned Iran newspaper.
In Isfahan, in the center of the country, the city’s prosecutor, Seyed Mohammad Moussavian, said he had ordered law enforcement officers to “seize violating vehicles” and “seal unauthorized related shops and veterinary offices.”
In Hamedan, in western Iran, the provincial prosecutor’s office said that walking dogs or driving with them was “against religious and social values,” and “considered a threat to public health,” according to IRNA. Abbas Najafi, the prosecutor, said that dog walking was “considered a threat to the health, comfort and tranquillity of citizens,” according to IRNA.
He pledged “serious action” against violators, IRNA reported, and said that the police had been ordered to “systematically and physically seize vehicles” of anyone caught driving with a dog.
In Tehran, dog owners appear to be undeterred by efforts to restrict their dogs, a stance that is perhaps evidenced by the growing number of veterinarians in the Iranian capital. About 25 years ago, the city had only one pet clinic, and it was staffed by trainee veterinarians. Now, there are dozens.
And Dr. Ansari, the veterinarian, is not worried. Clinics are still operational, he said, and people are willing to do whatever it takes to protect — and pick up after — their beloved pets.
“Citizens are accustomed to such plans and know to keep a low profile until enforcement eases,” he said. And, he said, pet ownership has continued to grow — despite the restrictions.
“This trend is unstoppable,” he said.
Source page
Amelia Nierenberg is a breaking news reporter for The Times in London, covering international news.
The post ‘Dog Walking Is a Clear Crime’: Iran’s Latest Morality Push appeared first on New York Times.
Embracing my humanity.
modwiz (10th June 2025)
We lost a great one today ...
Brian Wilson, founder of The Beach Boys, dies at 82
Brian Douglas Wilson (June 20, 1942 – June 11, 2025) was an American musician, singer, songwriter, and record producer who co-founded the Beach Boys. Often called a genius for his novel approaches to pop composition and mastery of recording techniques, he is widely acknowledged as one of the most innovative and significant songwriters of the 20th century. His best-known work is distinguished for its high production values, complex harmonies and orchestrations, vocal layering, and introspective or ingenuous themes. Wilson is also known for his once-high vocal range and lifelong struggles with mental illness. He is considered one of the greatest musicians of all time... More here
Sail On Sailor
Beach Boys
3:13 min.
Embracing my humanity.
Lord Sidious (11th June 2025), modwiz (11th June 2025)
Ní siocháin go saoirse
Thanks Sid for sharing the above ...
I've heard of this Aussie great lake Eyre, but had no cue it was so vast.
Learned something new today.
Embracing my humanity.
Lord Sidious (12th June 2025), modwiz (12th June 2025)
No worries nugg, I'll invoice you later................Originally posted by Gio
Thanks Sid for sharing the above ...
I've heard of this Aussie great lake Eyre, but had no cue it was so vast.
Learned something new today.
Ní siocháin go saoirse
Will share this here ...
Americans open up about their struggles to afford basic needs
7:45 min.Jun 12, 2025 #news #economy #inflation
America is facing a cost of living crisis. "CBS Evening News" spoke to three Americans
about what it's like trying to stay afloat as everyday costs surge.
00:00 Teacher on $37,000 salary shows what surviving as a single mom really looks like
2:36 Police officer shares struggle to buy first home amid rising costs
5:04 70-year-old widow on Social Security can't afford to retire
Embracing my humanity.
modwiz (Today)
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