Hit me with your best zap ⚡⚡⚡⚡ #zapathon

Never done this #zapathon thing and I got no gif game 💯⚡💯⚡💯⚡

A quick setup guide for zaps on Alby:

Alby Blog

The 2-minute Alby guide to Nostr

Things are happening fast in Nostr land. Really fast! So I spare you some random introduction and explanation. There are more and more great resour...

#plebchain #grownostr

This bitcoiner right here 🙋 will be choosing a different name for his parish center

The Leaven Catholic Newspaper

Overland Park parish breaks ground on Fiat Center - The Leaven Catholic Newspaper

"Even with the economy, people stepped up and were very generous."

#bitcoin #grownostr

Beautiful Spain #grownostr

I came upon a kildeer nest on a walk last evening

As election season approaches, I'm thinking about changing my party affiliation to Independent. I realize that this means I don't get to vote in a party primary. But I am so disgusted by party politics and the way these machines are run, I am in conscience driven to flee. Political parties, at least in the present two-party system, seem to me to be the enemy of the people. What am I missing?

As I have remarked throughout the book, American exceptionalism is not just something that Americans claim for themselves. Historically, Americans have been different as a people, even peculiar, and everyone around the world has recognized it. I am thinking of qualities such as American industriousness and neighborliness discussed in earlier chapters, but also American optimism even when there doesn’t seem to be any good reason for it, our striking lack of class envy, and the assumption by most Americans that they are in control of their own destinies. Finally, there is the most lovable of exceptional American qualities: our tradition of insisting that we are part of the middle class, even if we aren’t, and of interacting with our fellow citizens as if we were all middle class. The exceptionalism has not been a figment of anyone’s imagination, and it has been wonderful. But nothing in the water has made us that way. We have been the product of the cultural capital bequeathed to us by the system the founders laid down: a system that says people must be free to live life as they see fit and to be responsible for the consequences of their actions; that it is not the government’s job to protect people from themselves; that it is not the government’s job to stage-manage how people interact with one another. Discard the system that created the cultural capital, and the qualities we have loved about Americans will go away. --Charles Murray, COMING APART

The so highly acclaimed “dominion of man over nature” turned out to be merely an enormous capability to kill. --Nicolás Gómez Dávila

To face the elements is, to be sure, no light matter when the sea is in its grandest mood. You must then know the sea, and know that you know it, and not forget that it was made to be sailed over. --Joshua Slocum, SAILING ALONE AROUND THE WORLD

M. Gillenormand, who was full of life in the year 1831, was one of those persons who have become interesting simply because they have lived a long time, and peculiar because whereas they were once like everyone else they are now like no one else. --Victor Hugo, LES MISERABLES

Remember your absent friends when you are with those who are present, that they may hear and know you do not forget them either. --Eugene Vodohlazkin, LAURUS

[All] are taught some simple truths as children, only to discover as teenagers or young adults that those truths were far too simple and that they themselves were embarrassingly simple to have accepted them. They strike off on their own, leaving the comfortable mental world of their childhood to find a wider and stranger world of ideas. They may experience this world as disturbing or as liberating, but in any event it is more exciting. If they are fortunate, however, they may come to rediscover for themselves the truths they were taught as children. They may return home, as T.S. Eliot put it, and know it for the first time. If so, they may see that, although they first learned these truths as simple children, neither the truths themselves nor the people who taught them were quite as simple as they supposed. This requires, however, the difficult feat of questioning twice in one’s life—of undergoing two revolutions in one’s thinking. It requires being critical even of the ideas that one encountered in the first flush of critical thinking in one’s youth. --Stephen Barr, Modern Physics, Ancient Faith

It is commonly affirmed, again, that religion grew in a very slow and evolutionary manner; and even that it grew not from one cause; but from a combination that might be called a coincidence. Generally speaking, the three chief elements in the combination are, first, the fear of the chief of the tribe... second, the phenomena of dreams, and third, the sacrificial associations of the harvest and the resurrection symbolized in the growing corn. I may remark in passing that it seems to me very doubtful psychology to refer one living and single spirit to three dead and disconnected causes, if they were merely dead and disconnected causes. Suppose Mr. Wells, in one of his fascinating novels of the future, were to tell us that there would arise among men a new and as yet nameless passion, of which men will dream as they dream of first love, for which they will die as they die for a flag and a fatherland. I think we should be a little puzzled if he told us that this singular sentiment would be a combination of the habit of smoking Woodbines, the increase of the income tax, and the pleasure of a motorist in exceeding the speed limit. We could not easily imagine this, because we could not imagine any connection between the three or any common feeling that could include them all. Nor could anyone imagine any connection between corn and dreams and an old chief with a spear, unless there was already a common feeling to include them all. But if there was such a common feeling it could only be the religious feeling; and these things could not be the beginnings of a religious feeling that existed already. I think anybody’s common sense will tell him that it is far more likely that this sort of mystical sentiment did exist already; and that in the light of it dreams and kings and corn-fields could appear mystical then, as they can appear mystical now. --G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

Usually even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics, and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn... If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe our books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow or their wiser brethren... To defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture, … although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion. --Saint Augustine, On the Literal Meaning of Genesis