Everyone does, and we have some queer and trans congregants too. Our official position is that we welcome all queer people in every way. Actually a bunch of people at another church left and joined us because that church came out as non-affirming of queer people.

Does that work for Google Play books? Is it an app?

Almost everything on Amazon is cheap trash, and they promote the hell out of all that trash instead of products of any quality. I am also so sick of the click funnels where you search for a specific item and they just give you pages full of knockoff trash as search results even if you go to a specific brand store. It’s nonsense.

I’m a practicing Christian and go to church every week. I also think homophobes are shitheads who don’t deserve the love and mercy of God.

The biblical scholar Walter Bruggeman wrote a great essay on the interpretation of homophobic biblical verses that is really good (https://outreach.faith/2022/09/walter-brueggemann-how-to-read-the-bible-on-homosexuality/).

But also just plain old have some common sense that the people of the ancient world didn’t have the same insight we do into human attraction and sexuality, and we can grow and evolve and know better. Also, even if you don’t agree with people being queer, you also have the ability to shut your mouth about it and keep it to yourself, and be the loving Christian you profess to be no matter what your personal beliefs are, and you have no right to tell people who to love, period.

Everything feels like it happens so fast now and yet I have nearly no free time despite all this convenience. I did things one at a time and had to make an effort to do things like shop or go to the bank or pay bills or whatever. I cannot believe how many books I read and all the time I spent in the local library just browsing the stacks of all sorts of random shit; it was not routinely pared down to popular books, but had all sorts of odds and ends. I deliberately listened to music by putting a tape in the machine, and it was active listening. Radio was creative and beautiful. The local bar I spent time at was home to all sorts of burgeoning local bands. Food was not “small plates” at trendy bistros, but was sizeable satisfactory portions of ordinary food. A trip to the mall was an adventure, and my mall even had a library branch in it. You went to fish fry dinners at the Royal Canadian Legion on Fridays. One restaurant we used to go to we had to write our order down on a pad inside the kitchen, and the cook would come and slap your food in front of you. If you phoned someone and they weren’t home, you just phoned later on.

Nothing felt shitty and overly marketed and ads just existed and weren’t tailored to you. Television sitcoms lasted 26 seasons and you had to wait until next week to see the next one.

Even social media was better before Facebook, it felt organic and you made friends for life. Even early Twitter felt like this constant humorous conversation even if you didn’t agree with someone. Nobody was routinely crucified for misstepping in public (not that they shouldn’t sometimes). Things were definitely more generic but didn’t feel fake and marketed and inauthentic. Google was better and actually found things and didn’t just spit out a few results and then start adding unrelated things.

I’m not trying to sing the ballad of the boomer in B Minor; I appreciate convenience. I am tired of seeing bloated companies turn everything into shit. I want art and music and local watering holes to flourish. I want food to be good and satisfying. I don’t want every episode dropped at once. I just want things to slow down.

So my advice is slow down. Do one thing at a time. Go places and do one thing. Go to old restaurants. Go read paper books at the library. Go listen to a band at a bar. Do things. Don’t reduce it all to your phone. This is my goal for the new year is to do things.

They’re morons, and they’re just conservatives who want to smoke weed. Whatever your opinion of size of government, you have to have some central systems to run a society.

I think if people knew a lot more about how children are exploited online they would understand more. It does seem extreme, but also it’s scary what happens.

There was a good interview in Rolling Stone with Carl Newman of the band The New Pornographers. Last year the band’s drummer was arrested and later convicted of sexually pestering children and CSAM possession. (Yes the name is an unfortunate coincidence but was their name for many years before this drummer was a member, and it refers to something else).

Carl talked about how devastated the band is by all of this, and a family member who works in the court system gave him some advice, talking about how pedophiles are always looking for an opportunity, and how you really should not have anything about your children online because they WILL use it no matter how innocent, and how you should watch your kids incredibly carefully online, that it’s not just kids from vulnerable families getting trafficked.

I see that it feels intrusive, but I myself read a lot of judicial decisions online, and the pedophile ones are always HORRIFIC. Just because there isn’t a physical victim doesn’t make it better. One case the police were notified by an ISP about a guy and they went to his house and found a child sized sex doll in his home. One thing leads to another. A lot of the testimony by men who have not committed physical crimes talk about how they were depressed and just began going into more extremes of porn, and just ended up beginning to watch CSAM as an extension of this. They would get phallometric testing which would show they are sexually oriented to children so this isn’t always true, but the easy access to literally anything via the Internet sure isn’t helping anything.

Bunch of ugly bugs. This photo smells like gas station boner pills.

Registered midwives here have university degrees and a professional college to answer to. The US seems to have “lay midwives” which is pretty much nothing more than a doula, and certified nurse midwives. The level of education is very different.

There have been midwives in Australia prosecuted for not transferring to hospital, and this lunatic woman in Canada who was dismissed from practice but still attends births, and recently a baby she attended died. I kind of get it in the US simply because of lack of public health care probably driving this due to cost, but in countries with public health care and so many midwife options it’s insane. I’m glad finally someone is shining a light on this, perhaps it’ll save some babies. A nurse on the medicine subreddit once said she had seen complications and deaths from home birth and freebirth that are in the triple digits.

Even when they do successfully get baby out, there’s SO much they don’t know, and when they take them to ER because baby is breathing funny (because their lungs are wet) or came out stunned or they didn’t wrap them up warmly and now they’re cold, or they turn blue because mom has untreated gestational diabetes and their sugar has crashed or whatever. It can be temporary but it’s just so not necessary.

Common, but if your placenta stops working baby is gone.

I think part of the culprit for this trend is the fact that Americans have to pay for maternity care, which is stupid (paying privately for any health care is also stupid). This makes them shop around and get sucked into this.

That’s actually a great idea. Why should any asshole just get to make shit up and influence people to make bad decisions?

Although those fuckers at Facebook and the like could do their jobs and actually moderate too.

And it goes wrong SO FAST. You couldn’t convince me to birth anywhere but a large tertiary care hospital with the stories I’ve read and heard and seen. Wouldn’t even get an ultrasound at a smaller hospital. I’ve seen a couple of things missed that ended up with difficult consequences, and I think it was the quality of the ultrasound.

Also, listen to your care providers. If they say you need the glucose challenge do it, if you have gestational diabetes listen carefully to the advice, if they say you need to be induced they aren’t saying that lightly, a placenta ages like milk and your baby WILL die if you go overdue. Don’t listen to people on the Internet about vitamin K and vaccines and all that crap, they are recommended with good reason, and you don’t want a baby with a bleed with permanent consequences.

I want everyone to have a peaceful successful uncomplicated birth, but be prepared for anything to happen. Don’t gamble with your baby’s life for what some jackass on Facebook says. They’re idiots.

I think some of it is access to care too; some women in the US do this simply because of the cost of a midwife or doctor, it seems.

But also in Canada we have WAY higher standards for who can call themselves a midwife than they do in the US, and the midwives here have university degrees. Also, I think people here and other countries who have public health care seek help faster than Americans simply because cost isn’t a barrier, even if they do get sucked into this nonsense.

In his younger years it was sort of like a souffle

Mulder!

As an aside, a great deal of CSAM is shared through Facebook, they’ve been asked by CSAM survivors to stop this and they said no. The advocacy survivor group Phoenix 11 submitted six formal questions in the US Congress to old Zuckface fuckface about it, as he deployed end to end encryption which makes this possible, which he dodged like the lying fuck he is. Zuck would sell it himself if it made him a whole dollar and nobody should forget that.

It’s true. He also keeps licorice in there for a snack.