Emanick

Reported for plagiarism. Pretty sure this is a fake somebody else made. Enjoy rotting in Banville?, Adam?.

can I order an NFT I want to do NFT things to it

Your purpose is to end the scourge of Trolls forever by stoically submitting to the scythe.

Then you shall be the next to be purged.

Phoenix, why don't you have control over Paris? You're just going to squat in Vichy France and leave it at that? You're losing your touch, man.

Itt you are a fish. Discuss the implications thereof.

It's a good thing I got the link from the OTHER entry.

Ugandan activists have been asking for increased international help with the LRA for years. It's about time this happened. I could care less about the US government's motivations for this move; the immediate goal being sought here is highly laudable. This is the sort of thing the US should be doing with its surplus military personnel if it truly wants to improve the world - engage in low-resource humanitarian operations around the planet where its help is already being requested.

That would actually be a really good job for you. I don't know why I never thought of that before.

Well, we cuddle a bit and stuff. Nothing serious, but I like it. But yeah, it's weird and probably not ideal. I probably wouldn't have initiated the relationship if it was entirely up to me. You should be on MSN more! (I should be too, but I see no call for scolding myself in public about it. :P) And thank you. Yeah, I worry about this more than anything else. The other night I think she wanted me to kiss her, and I didn't. I don't think she's the "flipping out" kind of girl, but I might be wrong. Either way, I really don't like the idea of making her upset, in a romantic context or otherwise.

Haha, no. Hee hee! People with different opinions and perspectives than me are sheep! And I see the need to point this out with no provocation whatsoever! The debate about the relative value of the printing press and the value of science overall seems quite unimportant. Of course without the sharing of ideas, scientific progress from the 1450s onward would have been crippled, and of course science itself is invaluable to humanity. Both of those statements are practically unassailable. I'm not sure what they have to do with the topic at hand, though. When it comes to my views on death, as most of you guys know, I believe in God and I believe in the eternal souls that He has given all of us. The people who have come back from death and claimed to have seen heaven - there is no empirical evidence suggesting either that they were correct or that they were mistaken. My take on the matter is that it would be difficult for most of them to have been able to relate such extensive detail, especially detail that often differs radically from the stereotypical perceptions people often have about Heaven, without having experienced it in actuality. But I acknowledge that the human mind is complex and may be capable of more elaborate deceptions than we often expect. And people do, of course, consciously and deliberately lie. Nothing is definitive when faith and science collide. I find that logic, rather than science, is the best way to approach faith-related subjects on the intellectual level, a subtle but important distinction from a science-based approach. With science few things can be taken for granted (the bare minimums, such as "I think therefore I am" and "the universal is not playing practical jokes on me today"); with faith more things must be taken for granted. But logic can be applied to all intellectual spheres of life. I do not fear death. I fear dying a bit, I must confess; I regard the idea of being robbed of all my future years and causing my friends and family endless anguish with all the distaste that is reasonable. But like the apostle Paul, although I always attempt to live life full-bloodedly, to "run the race with joy," I also look forward to what lies at the end: perfection. I like to think that when I'm lying on my deathbed, the hope will be stronger than the fear. But in the meantime, I live for hope.

I read an interesting theory on CNN - that the factions opposed to Ahmadinejad (like Khamenei) deliberately set this plot in motion so as to further undermine the Iranian president's legitimacy and world standing. Stupid, cynical move, but Iran apparently did a very similar thing 20 years ago when a "reformer" president was in office. Or possibly Iran just didn't think it would be implicated in the plot. Or maybe this is a conspiracy by the US government or a simple mistake on its behalf. Usually I think conspiracy theories are rubbish, but this is one of the times when they might actually be plausible. The plot does seem a bit far-fetched and "convenient" (at least convenient to some people).

I'm pretty sure that British weather is too inhumane for the Netherlands to subject its prisoners to. Prisoners have rights too don'tchaknow.

hi i am play runescape and what is this travesty of a thread

Yeah, so college is pretty excellent. My last two months, in sound bite version: I went hiking in the Appalachians for two weeks with other freshmen who are entering Gordon. Some of them are already my new best friends. I'm in an Old Testament History, Theology and Literature class with Dr. Wilson, a world-famous Biblical scholar who was the most prominent translator for two books of the NIV Bible, the largest translation project in the history of the world. He's a friggin' genius, and his class is fantastic. Right now I'm at the top of the class of 124 students, although this rank is only based on a single grade so I don't expect it to stay this way. I'm taking Calculus I to fulfill my Natural World core thematic requirement. I'm considering a math minor, but I had my first exam today and didn't do particularly well. I knew most of the material, but had to rush through everything and didn't have time to answer two questions. Since you can't get much more basic than Calc I, I'm starting to wonder whether I'm equipped to get through 20 credits of collegiate math while maintaining the 3.5 my scholarship holds me to. I'm also taking The Great Conversation, a sort of blended English/philosophy course for honors students, and Intro to Language and Literature, which is required for all English majors. We all think the professor for Lang and Lit is a Marxist - borne out today by his lecture on Marxist criticism and his obsession with the Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Boston movements - which makes the class much more interesting than I would otherwise expect. I'm writing for the student newspaper, the Tartan, which appointed me to serve as a "beat reporter" for the student government after I turned in my first article. (I can only assume that this is a promotion of sorts.) This is probably the perfect job for me, since it lets me combine my English and political science aptitudes whenever I set finger to keyboard. I also get paid $10 per article, which seems like a pittance these days, though it's definitely better than nothing. I'm working as a member of the Idiom staff, which is the more informal student literary magazine. This lets me critique literature every Thursday night, which is a convenient way to keep my writing skills sharp-ish. For an English major, I don't seem to be doing much writing these days, and I think it shows. Oh yeah, and I have a girlfriend. :o It's surprising how things happen sometimes. For years I was obsessed with Gaia or trying to get over her, and it was difficult to get past the enormity of my inability to be with the girl I liked so much. I'm don't think I'll ever lose my soft spot for her. But suddenly I came to college and sat next to a girl in calculus and... well, everything changed. We go on dates. I take her to dances (well, not anymore - we both acknowledged that we don't really like dancing with another person). We eat dinner together and do calc homework together. We talk. We listen. It's so strange. I still can't quite take it in. For future blogging reference (in case I continue to post here), I'll call her Irene (in honor of the hurricane, I guess). She's majoring in economics and classics and she's fantastic at Latin. She has a sister three years younger than her. She lives in New Hampshire. She's a Republican. She has long dark brown wavy hair and likes wearing long, colorful, super-decorative dresses. We both go to Idiom meetings. She loves Owl City even more than I do and doesn't think that I'm gay for liking Adam Young's music. We sing Owl City songs together in her dorm (or in mine, sometimes). She plans to become a professor of economics and/or classics. I don't know how doable this is, but we haven't discussed it that much. I don't want to worry her. She worries a lot. I find her worrying strangely comforting. I don't know how I feel about the relationship. I enjoy spending time with her and I like and respect her. I'm not attracted to her, and this makes me feel clumsy and somewhat dishonest. She initiated everything about the relationship except its "Facebook official" status, which I had the balls to suggest. (If a ring makes an engagement formal, Facebook seems to be its equivalent for a "mere" relationship.) Often I wonder whether I'm doing the right thing by pretending to be romantically enamored. Everything I do is out of admiration, respect, friendship or duty rather than love or lust. This can't be right. At the same time, I'm not going to dump her like a dirtbag just because I don't think she's a "smokin' hot babe." At the very least, we're both getting valuable experience about what to do and what not to do. And we certainly have a lot of the elements of a good match. My RA (resident advisor, the upperclassman who's in charge of my dorm) fancies himself a matchmaker, and he says that he thought we would be a good match before he even knew we were going to the ball together. He believes strongly that lying is a sin. I believe him. Still, I feel a bit lost. I took Irene to an Indian restaurant tonight, and after we'd gotten back and I'd dropped her off at the dorm and spent half an hour listening to Owl City with her before meeting her father, I couldn't stop thinking about how lost I was in the relationship, and how unready I am for the real world. This is college, the Twilight Zone. You can't win and you can't lose. I can't understand a world like this. Maybe Irene can.