O símbolo de Flamel de Fullmetal Alchemist é originalmente cristão.
O símbolo da cruz com uma serpente é associado ao copista Nicolas Flamel (séc. XIV), um católico devoto conhecido por suas grandes doações para a Igreja e para os pobres.
Ao contrário da lenda, Flamel nunca foi um alquimista, mas sim um escriba. A Cruz e a Serpente, antes de ser interpretado como um símbolo da alquimia, já carregava um significado bíblico.
>Há uma ligação direta com o Nehushtan da Bíblia (Números 21): Moisés ergueu uma serpente de bronze numa vara para salvar o povo de picadas mortais. Quem olhasse para ela era curado, uma prefiguração profética de Jesus na cruz (João 3,14).
>A serpente representa o pecado original (Gênesis 3) e Satanás, a tentação e o mal que entrou no mundo.
>A cruz representa Cristo, e a serpente sobre a cruz simboliza Sua vitória sobre o pecado: Jesus tomou sobre si os pecados da humanidade e os venceu por meio da crucificação.
No contexto da série, o símbolo nos casacos dos irmãos Elric reforça o tema central: a arrogância humana (querer “brincar de Deus” com a alquimia) leva ao sofrimento, mas o verdadeiro poder vem do sacrifício, humildade e redenção, exatamente como ensina o cristianismo.
I was talking to my father this evening & i said the same thing. He countered with what i think is a better idea. He said, “no, we dont completely leave. We built those bases, our men bled in wars for them. You leave a skeleton maintenance crew at every single European base, but you keep them. You redeploy every one not part of the care taker group & every asset out of Europe, but you dont give those bases to those ungrateful traitors to use. You just take away all the jobs there for Europeans, all the Americans who contribute to those countries economies, you take away all the military people & weapons that keep them safe.”
And you know what? It makes perfect sense. Because if you dont do that, China moves into those bases.
What’s neat about being an American is, even in civilian life, if you’re ever in a place where the shit is *really* hitting the fan (e.g. a bad guy decides to take control of the army and turn the internet off in an entire country, roads are getting blocked, buildings on fire, food stores close down, commercial air travel stops) the U.S. government will aggressively help locate us and help us leave. They answer and won’t abandon you to your fate. When this happens and you’re saying good byes in the hotel lobby there’s always some forlorn French or South Africans just like “we can’t get ahold of anyone and have no idea what to do.” People who don’t constantly marvel at American greatness aren’t living in reality.
I’m noticing a lot of foreigners who seem to not understand why we’d risk hundreds of lives, spend millions of dollars, and sacrifice several aircraft to rescue one guy. And the reason they don’t understand is also the reason people can’t be made American by a piece of paper.
The Talmud basically says “yeah nothing supernatural in our religion worked anymore after Jesus died for some reason” and then Jews still deny Christ’s divinity.
The science of fetal microchimerism should have broken the internet by now.
It hasn’t.
When I read about a research I was so curious to know what’s actually happening.
Fetal cells — carrying the child’s own DNA — cross into the mother’s bloodstream during pregnancy and never fully leave. They embed into her organs. Her heart muscle. Her brain tissue.
Researchers have found a child’s living cells inside mothers in their 90s, from pregnancies six decades old. The child left the womb. The cells didn’t.
And they don’t just sit there. They migrate toward damage. Women with heart injuries show fetal cells concentrated at the wound site. Women with thyroid disease show their children’s cells inside the affected tissue.
The body that built the child gets tended to, in return, by the child’s own cells. Nobody designed this consciously. Evolution quietly built a repair system out of the mother-child bond itself.
The brain side of this is equally staggering. Pregnancy triggers gray matter reorganization — a structural rewiring that sharpens threat detection, deepens empathy, fundamentally alters how a mother processes the world. These changes persist for years after birth.
Possibly permanently. A mother’s nervous system doesn’t return to its factory settings. It was updated by the experience of carrying another person, and that update sticks.
The part worth sitting with longest — women who experienced pregnancy loss carry fetal cells too. The cellular merging doesn’t require a birth. It doesn’t require years of raising someone. Those cells remain regardless of what happened after. A mother grieving a child she never brought home is grieving someone biologically still present inside her. The world consistently underestimates that grief. The science says we have no business doing that.
Mothers always knew the connection didn’t end at birth.
Turns out it doesn’t end at the cellular level either.
Texas vs. Seattle, Washington – this comedian is from another country. He’s visited two places in the United States: Texas and Seattle. He compares the differences. It’s hilarious. Enjoy – I hope you get a laugh.
When the tariff chicken game happened last April my boss and I were glued to the phone talking to factories in China. Every day the number was changing so we were on Wechat, emailing, and on the phone negotiating prices.
I won't lie, it was an incredibly stressful week, I didn't know if I'd keep my job.
When the change was from 30% to 50% (consumer electronics) they told us they would drop their prices to compensate for the import duty.
When it went from 50% to 80% they told us they would drop their prices to compensate for the import duty.
When it went to 125% the factory said that we could buy the product, discounted, from their Indonesia facility.
People like Billy have never worked in the real world, they don't understand that the factory cities of Dongguan are viewed as geopolitical assets by the Chinese government. He doesn't understand how it works over there, that the Chinese government was going to subsudize the factories to drop prices to maintain their geopolitical position as the manufacturing monopoly.
But even then, IF PRICES WENT UP, they would never go up commensurate with the tariff. The reason why? NO COMPANY IS LEAVING 10-30% MARGIN ON THE TABLE THEN SUDDENLY CHANGING THEIR MIND BECUASE OF A TARIFF.
If the price went up for a product it's because a multi-billion dollar organization, which is actively paying MILLIONS for consumer research, was given a graph, and on that graph the point moved for price maximization when weighed against price and consumer pool.
But Billy doesn't know anything, he thinks that normal every day Americans pay for tariffs when in reality it's a corporate tax, and it's the most effective and best corporate tax that exists.
This is why economists oppose it by the way. All the hallowed economists that hate tariffs have been clamoring about corporate taxes, pushing UCG, and everything else under the sun. The reason being that it doesn't disturb the national order, it doesn't do anything, and there are loop holes to avoid paying those taxes.
But this doesn't apply to tariffs. Tariffs are the most effective way to tax large corporations that also incentivize pro-America business practices.
That's why status-quo enjoying, no-nothing morons in the neoliberal hellspace hate them.
Everyone should read the book, “When Children Became People” by historian OM Bakke.
In it, he explains how the ancient pagan world justified the slaughter and mistreatment of children. Scholars believed at the time that a person’s worth was determined primarily by their possession of the “logos” or their ability to reason. Only the adult free male were thought to have the fullness of rational capacity, so women, slaves, and children were seen as inherently less-than. Children got the worst of it, as they were considered in the same category as animals and barbarians.
Thus, children were, without qualm, aborted, murdered, trafficked and objectified. Unwanted newborns were left to die on what were called “exposure hills.” Babies would be left there —alive and screaming— to be exposed to the elements until they died.
But about 2,000 years ago, the perspective on children started to change. Eventually, the practice of infanticide was stigmatized, then criminalized, then replaced— with orphanages, hospitals, and other means by which desperate parents could ensure their babies were cared for.
Children became people. Slowly but surely, they went from a class of sub-humans to be discarded and oppressed to a special category of vulnerability deserving of love.
Those of us in the West consider this sentiment the norm. Even with our raging debates on abortion and other child-centered issues, the Western instinct is still to show compassion for the child above and beyond the compassion we show for adults.
But it was not always so, and it is not so in most of the world today. The game changer for children— and the impoverished, the sick, the elderly, slaves, and women— two millennia ago was Christianity.
Christians changed how the world saw children.
This strange and persistent group worshiped a man named Jesus, whom they claimed to be God. Yet unlike the pagan gods of the day, their God came to earth in weakness and meekness.
In fact, He arrived first as an embryo. He was heralded by the kicks of a newborn John the Baptist. He was worshiped by angels and wise men as an infant. And, against the protestations of His disciples, insisted: “Let the children come to me, for such as these belong the Kingdom of Heaven.”
This Jesus had another name— one with which the pagan scholars at the time would have been familiar: Logos. The Word.
Pagan scholars said “logos” determines a person’s worth. But the Logos said, “Your worth is defined by me.”
Christians popularized the concept of the Imago Dei — that all people are equally valuable just because they are people. And they preached this radically equalizing gospel that said that all people are dead in sin apart from Christ but all can be made alive in Him.
Christians, through this message, because of Jesus, completely changed how the world saw people.
You cannot have all the things we cherish in the West: compassion, dignity, human rights, and forgo the foundation upon which these things are built.
Look to the non-Western world today and see the unbroken chain of oppressing women and children.
Perhaps so-called “Christian nationalism” isn’t the bogeyman you should be most afraid of.
Something to consider.
When He had called the multitude to Himself, He said to them, “Hear and understand: Not what goes into the mouth defiles a man; but what comes out of the mouth, this defiles a man….Do you not yet understand that whatever enters the mouth goes into the stomach and is eliminated? But those things which proceed out of the mouth come from the heart, and they defile a man. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies. These are the things which defile a man, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile a man.”
"Turning the other cheek" isn't about submission. It is an act of defiance.
Modern society interprets Christ's command as a call to be a doormat, to be passive, weak, and defenseless.
In 1st Century Judea, the left hand was considered unclean. You would never use it to strike someone. Therefore, to slap someone on the right cheek (as Jesus specifies), you had to use the back of your right hand.
A backhand slap was an act of insult. It was how a superior hit an inferior. It said, "You are beneath me."
By turning your head and offering the left cheek, you physically prevent them from backhanding you again. You force the aggressor to use their open palm or a fist.
Why does this matter? Because a fist is how you hit an equal.
Jesus wasn't telling his followers to cower. He was telling them to stand their ground, look their oppressor in the eye, and say without words: "I am not your slave. I am a man. If you are going to hit me, treat me like one."
It is not an act of cowardice. It is an assertion of dignity that requires terrifying courage.
St. Nicholas used to sneak into the homes of poorer class people and leave gold in them so their children would be able to have a better life.
When caught he'd tell the parents to say the Gold was from Jesus Christ.
This is where parents saying Santa gave them gifts comes from.