Jordan Peterson made a great point about Harry Potter.
The real heroes in the story aren’t the perfect rule-followers, and they’re not the delinquents either. They’re the kids who break the rules when it actually matters.
That’s why the books became such a massive phenomenon, kids instinctively recognized the archetype.
In a world full of rigid systems and blind obedience, true character shows up in having the wisdom and courage to break bad rules when necessary.
This is the most “The European mind can’t comprehend this” moment of my life. One of my friends said, “Punch me five times tomorrow and I’ll still think this isn’t real.”
@MattMoscona The NCAA is neutered. The adults in the room (SEC & Big 10) need to step up and reorg the system. This very well may do away with the NCAAA, or severely limit it's scope. It's an institution whose time has passed. College sports needs a governing body that can actually govern.
Can I return back to college football?
I only played 2 seasons, should have 2 more eligibility years left….
Can you find me a judge in Louisiana who can see to it that Honey Badger gets to finish his last 2 years of college football?
Who’s going to say no ?????
Why am I just seeing this now? This might be the greatest MLB X account interaction. A lot of screenshots but definitely worth your time. Follow along in the thread below because this might be the best thing you’ll see on here all week.
I wonder if these two are married or still together.
Seeing some response to my statement on @MikhailaFuller's podcast about speaking in tongues. Some potentially helpful clarification:
First, I am not a cessationist (though I see myself being accused of it). I state in the interview that I believe that the spiritual sign gifts (tongues, prophesy, healing) still take place today, just not normatively like they were in the Apostolic era.
Nonetheless, I hold to the standard exegetical position that biblical tongues refer to known languages. In Acts 2, the foundational instance, foreign speakers understood the disciples in their own native languages, establishing the clearest precedent for interpreting the phenomenon throughout Scripture.
Secondly, while bliblical specialists and theologians debate whether tongues encompass human languages alone or include angelic speech, the consensus recognizes that a tongue functions as a language -- either immediately intelligible to hearers or requiring interpretation. The requirement that Paul places on interpretation in 1 Corinthians 14 indicates that tongues contain objective, propositional meaning subject to translation, and his statement that “every valid instance of tongues contains intrinsic, propositional meaning" reinforces this understanding.
A prominent scholarly argument identifies glossolalia as “the miraculous ability to speak unlearned human and (possibly) divine or angelic languages,” with the most common usage of “tongues” referring to ordinary human languages. The term γλῶσσα throughout the NT carries two primary meanings: the human organ or a human language, and careful word studies demonstrate that it never denotes non-cognitive utterance.
However, scholarly consensus isn’t absolute the core agreement across interpretations centers on cognitive content: tongues communicate meaningful, intelligible information rather than incoherent utterance.
Third, the early church evidence after the Apostolic era is virtually unanimous: the Early Church Fathers consistently interpreted the gift of tongues as the capacity to speak the many languages used across the earth. Their writings indicate the gift served an evangelistic purpose enabling communication with non-Christian populations.
The Patristics universally understood “tongues” in Acts and 1 Corinthians to refer to human languages, and ancient Christians understood the biblical gift of tongues as a miracle involving intelligible human languages. When the fathers described the phenomenon, they used concrete language: John Chrysostom wrote that believers “would suddenly speak in Persian, another in Latin, another in the language of the Indians or of some other people” (Homilies on First Corinthians, Homily 35), and Augustine stated that disciples “spoke in the languages of all the nations” (Sermon 269, Sermo CCLXIX.
The most significant, and almost exclusive, early figure associated with ecstatic speech for tongues was Montanus, a 2nd-century prophet whose followers emphasized speaking in tongues; he was actually excommunicated (not necessarily for his position on tongues) around AD 177. By the late 2nd century, ecstatic interpretations of tongues were present but only in context of ecclesiastical concern.
One interesting nuance appears with Philastrius in the 4th century, who understood angels as capable of conversing in all languages and believed the apostles received this same ability at Pentecost. However, this doesn’t represent a departure from the “knowable language” framework rather, the Early Church Fathers understood the gift of tongues as the ability to speak all languages spoken by people. The Church Fathers agreed the gift was the ability to speak all languages known to humankind, an ability they ascribed to angels, suggesting the “languages of angels” would not refer to a distinct heavenly language but rather to the capacity to communicate with anyone encountered.
The historical record shows no discussion among the fathers of ecstatic utterances, unknown languages, or supernatural unintelligible speech. The gift remained firmly anchored to practical, learnable human languages throughout Patristic interpretation.
So if you've stuck around this long, I think my position is both exegetically and historically sound.
No British government ever imagined an American president might finally tell the truth about the “special relationship.”
Until now.
Spare me the pearl-clutching obituary from The Economist, that decaying salon of transatlantic nostalgia where the ghost of Churchill is still being pimped out like a rent-boy for Davos subscriptions.
Your precious bunting of flags in the bin isn’t some tragic metaphor for Trump’s “betrayal.”
It’s the autopsy photo of a one-way parasitic bargain that America has carried on its back like a drunk uncle for eighty goddamn years.
And the drunk finally woke up, looked around, and said: Fuck this.
This isn’t “turning his back.”
This is a sovereign nation refusing to keep subsidizing a continent of strategic eunuchs who have spent decades castrating their own militaries, hollowing out their industrial bases, and importing the very pathologies that make them security liabilities rather than allies.
You want the special relationship?
Earn it. Reciprocate it. Stop treating the United States like an ATM with nuclear weapons.
Geopolitically and militarily, the numbers don’t lie and they never have.
The United States still shoulders roughly sixty percent of total NATO defense spending...$845 billion out of a collective $1.4 trillion last year.
Most of your European “partners” couldn’t hit the 2% GDP target even after Russia parked tanks on Ukraine’s border and started lobbing missiles at civilian infrastructure.
Britain under Starmer talks a big game about “global Britain” while quietly slashing capability, courting CCP-linked cash, and letting its own streets burn under the weight of demographic transformation and speech codes that make the old East German Stasi look libertarian.
You lecture us about values while your own government criminalizes tweets and turns Rotherham into a cautionary tale the media still refuses to fully autopsy.
Historically, the ledger is even more damning. We bled for you in 1917 and 1941 when your empires were on the ropes.
We bankrolled your reconstruction, anchored your defense for the entire Cold War, and let you punch above your weight on the world stage because sentimental Anglosphere nostalgia still meant something.
In return? Suez 1956, where you expected us to back imperial nostalgia while we were trying to contain Soviet expansion.
Vietnam, where you sat it out. Iraq, where you half-assed it and then spent the next twenty years sneering at us in your broadsheets. And every single time an American president dared put America First, your commentariat wailed like Victorian widows about the death of the alliance...as if the alliance was ever meant to be a suicide pact.
You’ve internalized a victimhood narrative so profound it borders on the clinical...projecting your own national decline, your own loss of agency, your own self-inflicted castration onto the one country that still possesses the will to act like a great power.
Trump doesn’t “deprioritize” the relationship; he simply refuses to indulge the delusion any longer.
He sees what you refuse to admit:
the United Kingdom of 2026 is no longer the reliable offshore balancer of 1945.
It’s a mid-tier European power wrestling with internal entropy, elite disconnect, and a demographic trajectory that makes long-term strategic partnership… let’s just say, complicated.
We are sick of it. Sick of the free ride. Sick of the lectures from people whose capitals are turning into no-go zones while their defense ministers beg Washington for more F-35s and more carrier groups to patrol waters they can no longer secure themselves.
Sick of the pomp, the pageantry, the royal visits, and the hand-wringing editorials that treat American self-interest as some kind of moral failing.
The special relationship isn’t dead. It’s being stress-tested by reality.
And reality, Mr. Economist, is a vicious bitch with a ledger in one hand and a mirror in the other.
Look into it.
💀⚖️🗡️
America went to war in Iran because Iran made itself a Chinese weapon. I explain in detail in my piece in @TheFP.
America didn’t need to do this -- to invest so much political capital and military firepower -- just to shore up a second-run Israeli operation, nor is it reasonable to believe, as Secretary Rubio claimed, that it's all because of potential Iranian counter-strikes against US forces.
Months of American buildup, America setting the timing and pulling the trigger on the operation, and the growing and increasingly dangerous strategic ties between Iran and China for America's ability to face down its chief adversary in the Pacific -- these are all evidence that this was an American decision, and that Israel is playing second fiddle this time around.
There are now two wars underway in Iran, not one: The longstanding Israel-Iran war playing out on the regional chessboard, and the much larger US-China confrontation on the global chessboard.
They overlap significantly in terms of the two nations' banks of targets in Iran -- but that overlap may not hold to the end.
Two wars, not one. If you can only see one of them, you'll misunderstand what's happening now and what happens next.
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This Isn’t Israel’s War. It’s America’s. https://t.co/yk9Ajb3uw7
@Tristan0x@CGTNOfficial They haven't figured out hands. Notice, the strange hand on the swordsman, notice that the nunchuck bots never switch hands, notice the fingers don't appear to articulate.