I gotta have my orange juice.

My Soul Among Lions released some older tracks. I love this version of Psalm 23:

Here’s a free tip: if you are designing a screen that says “do not remove card,” make sure that the very next screen says “remove card.” The only change you should consider making to the screen in the meantime is to update some kind of progress meter.

Have you ever been near someone wearing a mask and smelled their breath as they talked to you? I have. True, it may have only been a stale mask. But either way, isn’t this a ridiculous charade?

[Ransom] was only too well aware that such resolutions might look very different when the moment came, but he felt an unwonted assurance that somehow or other he would be able to go through with it. It was necessary, and the necessary was always possible. (C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet, 79)

Every Christian man is called to get involved in God’s work in some way. I like to think of it as going into “the family business.” (Richard Phillips, The Masculine Mandate, 49)

Too bad for Soros and Bloomberg (among many others):

When fire breaks out and reaches thorn-hedges, and a sheaf-stack or the standing-grain or the field is consumed,
he is to pay, yes, pay, he that caused the blaze to blaze up. (Exodus 22:5, Everett Fox)

In addition, fighting everywhere, all the time, is likely to distort God’s redemptive intention for the world. As we look at the unbelieving world, we should see it as that which the war is over, and not simply those whom we are fighting with. Who are we fighting against, and who are we fighting for? This is a war of liberation. We are fighting with the slave-masters over their slaves.

Our chief adversary is not flesh and blood. Our chief adversary is made up of principalities and powers, and is a world system that holds millions captive. If we get sucked down into the sin of personal malice, then we have actually been taken captive by the other side. We are not overcoming their ways of accusation, we are surrendering to them. (Doug Wilson, Rules for Reformers)

At the beginning of things, few people realize, or admit, where they are going:

The impression is left that the air of Solovki strangely mingled extreme cruelty with an almost benign incomprehension of where all this was leading, which Solovetsky characteristics were becoming the embryo of the great Archipelago and which were destined to dry up and wither in the bud. After all, the Solovetsky Islands people did not yet, generally speaking, firmly believe that the ovens of the Arctic Auschwitz had been lit right there and that its crematory furnaces had been thrown open to all who were ever brought there. (But, after all, that is exactly how it was!) People there were also misled by the fact that all their prison terms were exceedingly short: it was rare that anyone had a ten-year term, and even five was not found very often, and most of them were three, just three. And this whole cat-and-mouse trick of the law was still not understood: to pin down and let go, and pin down again and let go again. And that patriarchal failure to understand where everything was heading could not have failed entirely to influence the guards from among the prisoners also, and perhaps in a minor way the prison keepers themselves.

No matter how clear-cut the declarations of the class teaching, openly displayed and proclaimed everywhere, that the sole fate the enemy deserves is annihilation—still it was impossible to picture to oneself the annihilation of each concrete two-legged individual possessing hair, eyes, a mouth, a neck and shoulders. One could actually believe that classes were being destroyed, but the people who constituted these classes should be left, shouldn’t they? The eyes of Russians who had been brought up in other generous and vague concepts, like eyes seeing through badly prescribed eyeglasses, could in no wise read with exactitude the phrases of the cruel teaching. Not long before, apparently, there had been months and years of openly proclaimed terror—yet it was still impossible to believe!

Here, too, on the first islands of the Archipelago, was felt the instability of those checkered years of the middle twenties, when things were but poorly understood in the country as a whole. Was everything already prohibited? Or, on the contrary, were things only now beginning to be allowed? Age-old Russia still believed so strongly in rapturous phrases! And there were only a few prophets of gloom who had already figured things out and who knew when and how all this would be smashed into smithereens. (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, Vol. 2, 45–46)

It turns out that “fascist” has been a very malleable term for quite a long time:

“So you are the Fascists? Are all of you Fascists?” The approaching [prisoners] asked us hopefully. And having confirmed that yes, we were the Fascists—they immediately scurried off and left the scene. There was nothing else about us that interested them.

(We already knew, of course, that “the Fascists” was a nickname for the 58’s, introduced by the sharp-eyed thieves and very much approved of by the chiefs; previously they had well named the 58’s—KR’s [counter revolutionaries]. But then all that had grown stale, and a catchy label was needed.) (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, Vol. 2, 169)

Biden has been in public office for 50 years.

That he makes so much he has to pay $3.7m in taxes ought to be a far, far bigger scandal than 107IQ journalists not understanding how real estate works. https://t.co/usx3XNAZ0t

— Eighth Century Woodchipper 🌳🪓 (@BonifaceOption) September 28, 2020

Aaron had all the Infinity Stones already.

— Michael Bull (@MrBully67) September 28, 2020