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Which naturally, scared the hell out of everyone.

So he had to follow it up with this:

Women outperform men in many sports, and in many instances, the men's versions of these sports are rewritten into completely different versions so that they can't be compared.

And if your reaction to this is "well women don't outperform men in skills that we typically find impressive" I would implore you to think about why things women tend to be better at than men are valued less by society.

If your reaction is "well that's cherrypicking examples, its such a small handful of formalized sports" I'd implore you to think of why so many popular sports are structured around the specific set of skills men are better at.

It turns out that working 40 hours a week is just too much. Full stop, no ifs ands or buts. The tiredness and loss of focus it induces is enough that you're about 25% less productive per hour when you're on a 40-hour work week, and so the extra 10 hours a week cancels out. This effect is a little bit more pronounced for white collar work and a little bit less pronounced for blue collar work, but there's functionally not enough of a difference to care. And people who are working more than that actually become less productive in total.

The thing is that you don't immediately gain the benefits of being fully rested and focused by working less on just one day, or even one week. It can even take months to settle into the pattern of higher productivity per working hour, and that's frankly miraculously quick given that full burnout can take years to recover from. And during that transition you will be less immediately productive. Particularly for people who pride themselves on being hard workers and how much overtime they put in, the notion that working less can get just as much done can feel absurd and even insulting. Because it seems so painfully obvious that you get less done when you do less, and any experiences of being invited to do so feel like they back that up.

But it's true. We are all simply working more than we need to, pointlessly, to no benefit at all. It is an appallingly pointless waste of human life.

FEMA has been forced to transfer employees to ICE mid-hurricane season.

100 Federal Air Marshals are being offered to ICE. 250 IRS agents are detailed to ICE. The Postal Inspection Service too. 2,000 people from the Justice Department - FBI, DEA, etc - and Department of Defense civilians are now being authorised to be transferred, either to ICE or military operations like the border or the occupation of DC.

More than 6,700 personnel have been reassigned to ICE. 80% of the ATF has been ordered to focus on immigration instead of their other work. 24% of the Diplomatic Security Service.

Like, I'm a Christian so I get praying for someone. Personally I would love to be prayed for right now (the shutdown has affected my family pretty badly), but not while I'm at the food bank! Like there's already a ton of indignities you suffer going to the food bank. I, personally, have experienced expired food, being given food I can't eat with no option to exchange it, limits to the number of times I visit each month (2 days of food for a WHOLE MONTH), and having to give my paystubs over to even receive food.

People don't realize how hard it is to be broke. Everyone polices you to make sure you're Truly Worthy of being helped. We don't need to make that worse by performing religion in a way unasked for by the person that only serves to humiliate them and belittle their struggles (trust me -- if prayer alone could fix this, you wouldn't be at the food bank).

Pray with your actions, not your mouth -- hand over the food. Make sure it's not expired and it's something they can eat, and make sure they know you're here to help and they can come again if they need it.

Being a good Christian is not that hard, but all talk no action isn't going to cut it.

There was a free breakfast on Sundays if you attended the church service. This seemed reasonable to me because we lived in a very Christian town. I was 16ish at this time, didnt know many people outside of school and church.

Then we took a trip to another church in another city that had a similar mission. They fed the hungry, ran a shelter, and did language tutoring for immigrant children.

If the kids were there on Friday, then we would be taking a field trip to the museum.

But these kids were Muslim, and they go to mosque on Fridays.

This put a really sour taste in my mouth and it colored how I view missionary work as a whole. So when I get back to my city and I get back to volunteering at our shelter, I start thinking about how many people in my city were going hungry because they weren't Christian and didnt want to have to pretend to be Christian to get a free meal.

Probably more than I initially thought. Begin my opinions on colonization.

I then learn about some shelters and missions that actively discourage people from going to non-Christian food banks and some other shady stuff and im like... I can't be the only person who thinks this is weird.

So fast forward. I'm now volunteering for a nonprofit that runs a 'no-questions-asked' food pantry. This project was started because some of our members are food insecure and the local 'resource ministry' makes you submit income information and prays over you, so they wanted options that were a touch less humiliating. We have a little white board on the side of it where people can make suggestions for what to add.

And what do i see?

Someone had erased everything that was on the board (it was a pretty full list last week) and written in a request for information about that resource ministry.

It could be innocent. It could be nothing! It could be that someone truly wants information about that place. Though- they are literally everywhere, it would be hard to not know about them.

However- did you have to erase... all of it? I was there doing inventory and checking expiration dates so we could put in an order, but we're going to have to guess.

Anything that does good is doing good. But after looking through my relationship with Christian orgs somewhat carefully, I got that sour taste again.

I hate the sense that we're competing. What i will probably do is put a copy of our resource guide out instead because it also has... where you can get free clothes and stuff.

But.

I am always finding pamphlets and business cards and tracts in our little pantry and its very frustrating that even when we make intentional secular spaces- guess what! Jesus is here anyways. If you want free food, you have to deal with Jesus.

If you believe that good things come from Christ, then the mission is the food itself. You, the person giving the food, should not be proseletyzing to the person who is hungry. The message is in the kindness. This is what I was always taught! You do good things and then maybe someone else does good things because kindness is infectious!

people carved trenches 3,000 years ago and filled them with chalk in the shape of a horse but what’s interesting is that if you fail to maintain the horse by adding new chalk regularly, it will disappear. for 3,000 years, we’ve been filling in chalk in this horse so it doesn’t disappear.

we’ll never know what the purpose of the horse was originally. we’ll never know if it had ritual or spiritual significance or if it was just art. but we do know that people maintained it then, and, even though the meaning of the horse has long been lost to time, we continue to maintain it now.

the people who made this horse are long dead, but they live through us still, don’t you think?