215 Lent 4: The State of Disunion
“Oh, give thanks to the Lord, for He is good! For His mercy endures forever. Let the redeemed of the Lord say so…Oh, that men would give thanks to the Lord for His goodness, and for His wonderful works to the children of men!“ ~ Psalm 107
The State of Disunion
Somewhere along the line, the music is going to stop and everyone is going to grab a chair. It is evident that the distresses that are moving among us can be seen most Platonically in the relationship of the person to the state. Thus, it is here that we focus all our solutions.
But could it be that arguments about the form of administration proper to a kingdom ("government" for the Gnostics,) is a secondary problem, behind which lurks the nastier beast built of social-religious ideas? Could it be that it is not the total state that is the problem, nor constitutional law that is the solution, but the gods whom the people worship that matters?
What is clear is that, as a whole, we are merely treating the symptoms. The majority neither feel the need nor recognize the theological call to defend the existential reality of our ecclesiastical and Christian existences. We are too busy deluding ourselves with boogie men and unicorns to see the real trial that approaches.
That is the point: we don't want to see it. We've already given up hope.
The language of the Bible is a hedge against chaos. As the fragile fabric of agreed-upon meanings, knit and woven by centuries of work toward good faith in society, is dissolved in a matter of years, for what amounts to some new money for a few global royals from the colonies, attention to the permanent texts of the Bible are an anchor in the storm of crazy. Language is always in danger of unraveling in the face of avarice. Once rent, trust is not easily won again. But we also know that good faith is repaired and knit up in the experience of living Christianity.
This is the testimony: chaos is overcome, and life and meaning are restored in the hands of Jesus Christ. 
Till angel cry and trumpet sound, The Mad Christian
Lent
The steady work of Pastor Franson and his paladin crew has resulted in this year’s MadPX Lenten Devotional. This is a wonderful, free resource to accompany your observance of the season:
The Blitz
Births, Deaths and Marriages
America’s first over-the-counter birth control pill will soon be available. American women and teens will be able “to purchase contraceptive medication as easily as they buy aspirin.” (NBC, AP)
CVS and Walgreens have announced will begin selling the abortion pill, mifepristone. (The Hill)
No victory lap yet: “No generation has ever had less use for abortion than this one.” CDC stats suggest that drop in abortion rates in the last thirty years is due to the fact that there are less pregnancies. This data point may not account for chemical abortions which are harder to track, but Lord have mercy! (FrontPage)
Alabama has increased protections for IVF providers. A recent court ruling that frozen embryos must be considered to have the same rights as in uterine children sent jitters through the fertility industry. Governor Kay Ivey said Alabama is a “pro-family” state and that she supports growing families through the use of IVF. Pro-life groups called for IVF practices to be tempered by responsibility for the life of the embryo. (WNG)
Marlene Strege, the mother of the first “snowflake baby” spoke to Issues Etc about the noble work of adopting a frozen embryo. A story that also crossed our path: a Kansas City couple is keen to let infertile couples know about the potential to give a frozen embryo the opportunity to live their life. (Issue Etc, Facebook)
Health, Medicine and Food
Gateway drug: Sports gambling apps are” expanding beyond football and basketball” with the aim to be to “get people to gamble on everything”. The more socially acceptable gambling becomes, the “the more possibility gambling addiction becomes a bigger issue.” (Business Insider)
Oregon lawmakers have moved to recriminalize drugs after a massive spike in overdose deaths. (AP)
Hypervaxxed: A German man has received over 200 jabs of covid vaccine in just over two years according to new reports. The man, who voluntarily received the shots is said to have suffered no harm from the shots but also no immunity benefit over those who only had three shots. (Epoch Times)
The CDC has just reduced its recommended five day quarantine for covid. (PBS)
Is it long-covid or long-vax? Does the government even want to know? (The Hill)
2024 Thunderdome
The United States’ Supreme Court ruled last week that states do not have the right to disqualify candidates from running for presidential office. The Justices voted 9-0 (with some noted differences) with the majority opinion concluding that only Congress can remove nominees from the ballot. The decision answers Colorado’s efforts to remove Donald Trump from November’s race. The news had progressives accusing the SCOTUS of interfering in elections with references to the controversial 2000 Bush-Gore decision while conservatives worried that Democrats could still find a loophole in the ruling to overthrow a victory for Donald Trump if he were to win. (BBC, The Federalist ,AP)
Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley has announced she is suspending her campaign after losing Super Tuesday primaries to Donald Trump. “Haley didn’t endorse the former president…Instead, she challenged him to win the support of the moderate Republicans and independent voters who supported her.” (AP)
Politics
North Carolina’s lieutenant governor, Mark Robinson who is running for governor in November has been annoying news media by saying things like “there are only two genders” and that abortion should be banned. (NBC, The Federalist)
We neglected to mention last week that Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell announced he will step down from that position in November. The 82 year-old is the longest serving Senate leader. We found an interesting clip of Senator McConnell from 1987 expressing concern that elections could be stolen at all levels of government. (AP, MazeMoore)
Crime and Punishment
Former Twitter executives are suing Elon Musk for $128m in unpaid severance pay. (CNBC)
Three Alaska Airlines passengers are suing the airline and Boeing for damages after an emergency where an airplane door plug blew out mid-flight. The passengers say they suffered physical injuries and post-traumatic stress. (CBS, Hot Air)
The Digital Age
Meta experienced a global outage last week with hundreds of thousands of users unable to log in to their accounts for a number of hours. The fact that the network went down when Americans were heading to polls to vote on Super Tuesday made for some fine speculation. (BBC, Tech Crunch)
A new bipartisan House bill would require social media platform TikTok to break away from its parent company, Chinese tech giant ByteDance. Lawmakers say they would rather not move to ban TikTok in America, but currently it “poses enormous national security risks because the Chinese government could gain access to data from millions of American users.” (Reuters)
New AI darling, Anthropic, says its Claude 3 Opus may have demonstrated some sort of metacognition after it seemed to twig that it was being tested. (ArsTechnica)
Public trust in AI is dropping. (Axios)
Nissan announced it would no longer support older electric vehicles with its smartphone app in the UK, since they rely on 2G connectivity, which is scheduled to be switched off directly. (Semafor)
Money, Markets and Jobs
Cryptocurrency BitCoin reached a new record high last week, peaking just below $70k before retreating 8%. Its value is expected to jump again with the next “halving event” in April. (CNBC, BitCoin Block Half)
The European Commission has fined Apple almost $2bn for anti-competitive behavior against music streaming apps. (CNBC)
New analysis suggests that millennials are set to be the become the wealthiest generation from assets handed down to them and also the opportunities to make money available to them. (Yahoo)
The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau has capped late fees on most credit cards at $8 (down 75% in some cases) as part of the Biden administration’s promise to get rid of “junk fees”. (Forbes, Yahoo)
Boeing can’t catch a break: A United Airlines' flight from Houston to Fort Myers had to make an emergency landing after an engine caught fire soon after take off. (ZeroHedge)
Religion and the Church
Dr. Gene Veith joined a former student to discuss how God uses our vocations to bring neighbors into our lives, so we may serve them. (Concurrently, Poetry Foundation)
What Would Jesus Do is an idea promoted by a socialist. (CarlWhy)
Why are there so many abandoned churches? (Atlas Obscura)
From the Mad☧Tank
Mad☧Mondays is your reliable white noise filtration system! If you like reading about just news that matters, then support Mad☧Mondays! Get early access to Think Tank articles and join the chat by signing up through Substack. Or support Frisby’s efforts with any amount here.
This week:
Recent stuff from our archive:
Arts, History and Sport
Media psychologists explain how children’s television programs are designed to make moral themes “stick”. Using test audiences, shows like Sesame Street refine ways to teach about “difficult things” like death, divorce and racism. “If children do not learn the intended message, or are not engaged and attentive, then the episode goes back for editing.” The authors advise parents to watch television with their children to help them understand, but it might be more efficient to cut out the middle man and teach them yourself! (The Conversation)
What is it with detective stories and gardens? There are lots of possible links between “homicide and horticulture”: the practical (gardeners make good detectives) to the spiritual (“Whether it is the author’s intent or not, every sin committed in a garden invariably harkens to the Biblical story of Adam and Eve, who, after eating forbidden fruit, were promptly expelled from Eden…Gardens are a battleground for good and evil, a meeting place of life and death.”) (JSTOR)
About one-third of movies mention their titles during the film. (Titledrops)
The Fallout TV series hopes to be more than just a videogame adaptation. (Den of Geek)
Dune director Denis Villenueve fulfilled a dying man’s wish, flying his laptop to Canada so the patient could watch the film before its release. Hopefully someone told him about Jesus too. (CBC)
Actress sports a handmade cardboard clutch made by her 9 year-old daughter for her red carpet awards ceremony. (Modern Met)
Rare 11th-century astrolabe suggest “Jewish-Islamic scientific exchange.” (Phys)
Last week in history:
161 Marcus Aurelius becomes emperor of Rome. (Britannica)
1770 The Boston Massacre. (The Federalist)
1876 Alexander Graham Bell successfully patented his telephone. (Library of Congress)
1923 King Tut’s tomb opened. (Britannica)
2014 Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 disappears. (BBC)
Science
A detailed visual explainer about airfoils and how airplanes fly. (Chiechanow)
Humanoid robot maker Figure has secured a contract to add OpenAI to its machines. “Figure is hoping to give its future robots the ability to understand language using AI, giving them new capabilities that could have them learning at much faster rates.” (Futurism)
A “bonkers” jet with no moving parts in its engine just completed its first flight. (Robb Report)
A company determined to bring back woolly mammoths is one small step closer. (ArsTechnica)
For all the important things in life, there’s the word of God, for everything else,
there’s coffee…
God’s Green Earth
Indiana sheep farmers find a use for waste wool: wool pellets are soil improvers. (Ambrook Research)
Six months isolated together, researchers may have developed an “Antarctic accent”. (BBC)
Rural fire departments are asking farmers to join volunteer as firefighters. (Ambrook Research)
Coming to America
Investigation by the Center for Immigration Studies has revealed that the Biden administration has “flown at least 320,000 migrants into the United States” to disguise the amount of illegal immigration by reducing the number of border crossings. (ZeroHedge)
A bill known as the Laken Riley Act has passed the US House. It would require Immigrations and Customs Enforcement to “detain any illegal alien who committed burglary or theft.” (Hot Air)
War
Germany has confirmed that top generals discussed blowing up a bridge in Crimea. Audio of a phone call intercepted by Russia then leaked suggests that British soldiers are already fighting in Ukraine. (ZeroHedge, The Guardian)
The US has made over 100 separate sales of munitions to Israel since Hamas’ October 7th attack. (Semafor)
Houthi rebels have continued their attacks on ships in the Red Sea with their first fatal strike claiming the lives of at least two sailors. Deep sea internet cables have also been damaged, disrupting services in India, Pakistan and parts of East Africa. (CNN, Semafor)
Stories from Far Away
🇭🇹 The Haitian government has declared a state of emergency due to gang violence in the capital, Port-au-Prince. Gangs have reportedly taken over much of the city over the last few years, recently trying to take control of the airport. The gang leaders are calling for Prime Minister Ariel Henry (who is not in the country) to step down and are attempting to prevent him from returning. The history of gangs in Haiti is a long one with political actors at times sponsoring various groups and US-backed international interventions often destabilizing the country. (BBC, Vox)
🇳🇬 More than 280 school students have been kidnapped by bandits in Nigeria’s north west. Kidnap gangs usually let their victims go once a ransom is paid. (BBC)
🏴 An English man has been sentenced to two years in jail for placing pro-white stickers in London. (Not the Bee)
🇨🇳 A Chinese-American pastor, John Cao has been freed from prison in China after seven years. He had been working as a missionary in Myanmar, regularly crossing the border into China to assist with humanitarian work. (WNG)
🇸🇬 Singapore has made its neighbors cranky after paying Taylor Swift to play exclusively in the city-state. Swifties in Indonesia, Thailand and the Phillipines will miss out. (Al Jazeera)
🇰🇿 Kazakhstan has just moved to single time zone. Kazakhstan is just over half as wide as the USA. (Astana Times)
🇬🇧 British police say they have recovered a Ferrari believed to be the one stolen from Austrian Formula One driver Gerhard Berger in 1995. (AP)
🇬🇧 A British couple has discovered a World War II bomb shelter in their yard. (Men’s Journal)
🇮🇳 A runaway train has travelled 40 miles without a driver. (Sky)
Quick Hits for the Eyebuds
🥕 Carving produce into works of art
🐟 Little fish, big sound
🌿 Tumbleweeds take over Utah
🍺 Now that’s product placement!
📖 A Massachusetts library is encouraging people to pay late fees with cat pictures
💡Things you might not have realized were named after people
🇦🇪 Dubai hosted the world’s first jetpack race
🏆 A woman has documented her attempt to complete a marathon in a Costco store. She got the job done in 11 hours, finishing it in the carpark after hours.
Promo of Friends
“What God has Joined Together - A Lutheran Conference on Marriage” May 3-5, 2024, Ontario, Canada. Featuring keynote speaker, Dr Adam Koontz. Details here.
A Good Word: Links from the Show Notes
Stop the White Noise was a genial affair with Jonathan and Meridith chatting about movies and music and Christian contemplation… You can catch it on YouTube or Rumble. If you missed it, Meridith put out a call for anyone who would like to make a quilt for men who stay at the Hebron Collegium. If that is something you would be interested in doing, please reply to this email or send a message through madpxm.com/contact. Some things that popped up in the show:
The Apocrypha to enliven New Testament reading
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcom Gladwell
The Canon of Scripture by F F Bruce
and some toons from the Fisk playlist..
Honestly we just need Jesus by Terian
Breathe by Influence Music
Tabernacle by We the Kingdom
Our disclaimer: These are some resources the Fisks have found edifying, but when dealing with human-authored texts, apply discernment liberally!
Sweetness You May Have Missed
This Week Preached:
Podcast Release:
Let us pray. Almighty God, our heavenly Father, Your mercies are new every morning; and though we deserve only punishment, You receive us as Your children and provide for all our needs of body and soul. Grant that we may heartily acknowledge Your merciful goodness, give thanks for all Your benefits, and serve You in willing obedience; through Jesus Christ, Your Son, our Lord, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.
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