It has taken the better part of 50 years to get from there to here. I wouldn’t say it was easy.

The evangelical bloc was the hardest to convince. They had to get some capitalist representation in the churches to counteract all of that business about “helping the poor” and “blessed be the meek” that Jesus was always going on about.

Once they got Joel Osteen to convince millions of viewers that Jesus wanted them to be rich, that really clinched it for them.

Every case of a random person hiring a “hitman” that I have heard of has, in fact, been someone hiring an undercover cop. And the people soliciting the services went to jail for a good long while.

There’s a big cake mix manufacturing plant near where I grew up, and I knew a lot of people who worked there. They all confirmed that the only difference between the name brand cake mix and the store brand they made was the box they put it into at the end of the process.

There are multiple references to this in the Bible. This is the most uplifting one I found.

Psalm 90

10 Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures; yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away.

11 If only we knew the power of your anger! Your wrath is as great as the fear that is your due.

12 Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.

13 Relent, LORD! How long will it be? Have compassion on your servants.

14 Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love, that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days.

A lot of my favorites have already been mentioned, but I don’t see “Caper” yet.

“Thanks for stopping by; thanks for breaking my cow lamp,” is still common parlance in our household.

And “The Cheat Is Not Dead” is a classic Strongbad hit.

I wonder what would happen if the world found out that Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone (or any other celebrity/athlete/role model) was using Chat GPT to respond to fan mail. My gut feeling is that people would find it disingenuous at best – and there would probably be significant outrage.

Where’s the AI that does my dishes and cleans my house so I have more time to write, create, and connect with others? That’s the technology I want – not one that does the meaningful part and leaves the menial stuff up to me.

The convicted felon?

It’s pretty telling that they are trying to portray Marxists, Hermeticists, Luciferians, and Gnostics as united – or possibly even as the same group. Those circles of the Venn diagram might share some overlap, but (in my experience) their goals and principles aren’t very similar.

We also would have accepted Rusty Shackleford.

Same. We can always sacrifice them for a faith boost if they keep asking questions.

Defiling corpses, fomenting communist insurrection, burning witches … That game has everything!

Agreed on both counts.

Let’s not forget Echo, November and Whiskey from Dollhouse.

For real. Every time I’m scrolling through a news article and I see a rectangle with an X in the upper-right corner, my initial reaction is, “Oops. Ad. Scroll past.” I’m quite certain I’ve missed some embedded tweets that way.

This is something I wish that more people understood. In almost any other democracy in the world, Bernie Sanders is only slightly left of center. On a global scale, US Democrats are a center-right party and US Republicans are a far-right party. There are no successful left-wing politicians in the United States.