The role of a husband is protect and provide, but what does that actually mean?

It means the role of the husband is to fully insulate his wife from all external stressors and responsibilities so that she can focus on the children.

If you have this you have everything.

All of Mankind isn't doomed and deserving of eternal hellfire because we do bad things by a layman's measure, but because our entire nature OPPOSES GOD.

It is against that backdrop that God's grace can be fully appreciated, that He would set aside some from the rotten lot to redeem to Himself, not in anything they did to deserve it, but to His own divine purposes.

The Son of God was sent to save Man, so that man could be made sons of God.

#ToChristAlone

Repelled. 🤝

I speak of Jesus Christ in a bold and offensive way, knowing that those whom God is drawing will respond, and those who aren't will be repelled.

#ToChristAlone

The entire Bible is about Christ.

The entire Advent is about Christ.

Christmas is for Christians.

🎄

#ToChristAlone

yes

Imagine if you won the lottery, but were in another state, and now had to get back to that state with the lottery ticket. If you were to somehow lose the ticket, you’d lose it all. Like carrying a single private key to a few thousand bitcoin in your pocket or something.

Anyway, here’s a review of Night Moves by Jared Dillian. It’s a collection of 16 short stories about situations like that, and although they are drastically different from each other, I’d say the overall theme is “dark comedy slice-of-life”. Most are about some variation of death, addiction, sex, temptation, or compulsion.

I’m primarily familiar with Dillian’s financial work- he’s a former Wall Street trader and a current financial newsletter writer. He’s also a DJ and fiction writer, which is the side of his work I’m less familiar with, until now.

I usually read full novels rather than collections of short stories. And the majority of the novels I read tend to be fantasy or sci fi; basically stories about the past or the future. This one consists of short stories that are mostly set near the present day.

The characters in the stories range from grungy teenagers to aging dentists, from up-and-coming weather forecasters to divorced ladies, from working professionals to homeless alcoholics, and everything in between.

More than half could be classified as tragedies in the sense that you’re basically reading a slow-motion trainwreck happening. But tragedy is not the theme of the collection per se; some of them are quite constructive and happy. Others are kind of neutral and comical. And that keeps you guessing as you read- any given story might end happily or sadly, or somewhere in between.

I found the writing to be clear and smooth, and was always happy to get to another story. I’d spend 10 minutes reading one between periods of work or exercise or something, as a mental reset. My mind would get to enter this other character’s weird life for a moment to see what problem or situation they’re dealing with.

If I have to critique what was otherwise a great read, I’d say some of the stories ended rather abruptly or anti-climactically. In those cases I’d find myself wanting a few more pages of resolution. But that seems quite intentional, and basically the best critique an author could receive is that the reader wanted a bit more of what they were reading. If I were reading a 300+ page book that ended anti-climatically I’d be annoyed, but weird slice-of-life short stories ending anti-climactically is indeed like real life, and feels like the correct writing choice in these cases.

Since this one was quite enjoyable, I’ll look to pick up one of his essay collections such as “Those Bastards” or “Rule 62” at some point.

If you haven't gone down the parasite rabbit hole... Let's just say it explains way too many things, particularly the morality around food and sexual mores of past societies.

Great listen as always Jack.

Mildly naive regarding authoritarian aggression.

Putin deceives and suffocates his own people.

CCP is also organized crime.

Unfortunately if large states are fucking their people in parts of the world - there is only one way to compete.

We must do the same.

I had this friend who had two older sisters.

When he was 13 his dad’s affair was exposed and his parents got divorced. Blindsiding all the kids and destroying what they thought was a happy family.

Later both his sisters got married and promptly cheated on their husbands destroying their marriages. One even getting pregnant by another man.

We were talking about it one day and I said “isn’t it interesting that both of your sisters cheated before they could be cheated on by the men in their life, as sort of a trauma response to the fathers affair”

He looked at me and was like “I don’t think the two things have anything to do with each other”

I think about that conversation a lot.