PhD, Am Religious History, minor Reformation+ history of science; MA, Semitics. Apple fan, LDS, francophile, bibliophile, gourmand, cyclist, husband.
Joined March 2009
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Ben S retweeted
Your baby loves repetition.
Your baby loves repetition.
Your baby loves repetition.
It’s true. Routines and rituals help your child to feel safe and secure.
And predictable patterns not only help your little one to make sense of the world - but gradually assume roles of their own.
Watch this fantastic video, edited together by alliewojciak on IG.
Each day as they arrive home from preschool, Allie greets her son in the same way as they get out of the car: a dramatic door open that reveals her smiling face and a tender “Hi.”
You can tell this is a beloved ritual.
Watch her son’s expectant face in videos shot across multiple days. He knows just where to look and what’s coming next - greeting mom with the same delighted grin each and every time.
After enough repetitions, he begins beating her to the punch - taking responsibility for the daily “Hi!”
Isn’t it lovely? Mom has made the whole thing possible by making this interaction so predictable.
As adults, endless repetition can sometimes be a little maddening (when your little one wants to read the same book for the 20th time this week, for example) but know that the routines you are establishing are a normal part of development - and provide not only comfort, but a familiar foundation from which your toddler can begin inserting themselves into the process.
So cool!
Ben S retweeted
1/ I'll explain exactly how this happened because I'm the person at Forbes who calculates these numbers.
This is going to take some unraveling, but here's a spoiler: The president's answer here is nonsense.
Ben S retweeted
Ok, I didn’t expect a story time on Saturday, but here we go. What I’m about to write is TRUE. It is insane, stupid, and very dumb, but it is true. Earlier today Donald J Trump, the p[resident of the United States, posted that he had offered the job of Press Secretary to Dana White. Well, it was the wrong Dana White… 🧵
Ben S retweeted
This is wild.
The story keeps getting crazier. To recap everything that has been reported so far:
- The US intelligence community discovered that Jensen Huang, the CEO of the largest company in the world, was sleeping with Alice Huang, a Chinese spy and an executive at Megaspeed. (FT)
- Multiple independent investigations have concluded that Megaspeed is likely a Chinese cutout, which helps Chinese companies access AI chips or circumvent export controls. (NYT and Bloomberg)
- The US intelligence community also concluded that Alice Huang’s goal was to convince Jensen to lobby the U.S. government to loosen export controls on advanced AI chips. (NYT)
- The intelligence community relayed this information to “a small group of top US government officials” earlier this year. (FT)
- Over the last year, Jensen Huang has repeatedly lobbied the U.S. government to loosen export controls on advanced chips. @BISgov has done so, not only by permitting the export of H200 chips to China, but also not enforcing export controls that would have required a license for exports of the most advanced Blackwell chips to Megaspeed and Southeast Asia.
- Although @CommerceGov leadership was presumably briefed on this information by the U.S. intelligence community, @BISgov has taken no actions to tighten controls on Megaspeed or Southeast Asia.
- Megaspeed remains a preferred cloud partner of Nvidia, and continues to receive Nvidia Blackwell chips despite employing a Chinese spy who reportedly is romantically engaged with the CEO of Nvidia.
- Tens of billions of dollars worth of AI chips have been exported to Southeast Asia this year alone, and Malaysia and Singapore are now two of the four largest importers of AI chips in the world.
What is going on here??? We need answers. The question of who gets the most advanced AI chips in the world is literally the defining strategic question of our time. And not only does it seem like the MSS may be directly influencing the debate on export controls in the United States, but also @CommerceGov is refusing to listen to the warnings of the IC on this issue. What is a POSSIBLE good explanation for why Megaspeed is still receiving chips? Why is there not a license requirement for AI chip shipments to all of Southeast Asia? This is beyond strange at this point.
The fallout from this story will be massive. Obviously, the motivations underpinning Nvidia’s policy views opposing export controls must now all be questioned. But also, how did @BISgov sit on this information and has still taken no actions? We need answers.
Ben S retweeted
This is a real issue, glad to see it covered in @TheAtlantic
Young boys are being discouraged from getting into reading—and it’s because more books are missing one key element, @sophiah_n reports: theatlantic.com/culture/2026…
Ben S retweeted
My friend Ayako has translated American movies and TV shows into Japanese subtitles for 22 years.
Above her desk, taped to the wall, is a handwritten list.
"American sentences that do not exist in Japanese."
She let me copy it.
1. "I'm good."
Means yes. Means no. Means I'm full, I'm fine, I'm leaving, and please stop asking. She has translated it 31 different ways. She thinks she was right about half the time.
2. "Bless your heart."
She translated it as a blessing for six years. Then a woman from Alabama explained it to her, very sweetly. She had to go back and fix four movies.
3. "Hold my beer."
Japanese has no phrase for the moment right before a man does something stupid for a cheering crowd. She subtitled it "Someone please call an ambulance." Nobody has ever complained.
4. "Love you, bye."
American men say this to their fathers. On the phone. Fast. Like "see you later." In Japanese, "I love you" to your father is a deathbed sentence. The first time she subtitled it, the whole Japanese audience thought the father was dying.
He was asking about the Cowboys game.
5. "Come here."
An American sees someone crying, says two words, and opens his arms. In Japan, we ask "Are you okay?" and look very carefully at the floor.
6. "Proud of you, kid."
Japanese has the words. Japanese fathers just don't use them. Ayako has typed this line more than 400 times. She had heard it in her own house zero times.
Her father is 78. A retired machinist. The quietest man I know. He speaks maybe ten words of English.
Last spring, he went to see a movie she had translated. Alone. He didn't tell anyone.
That night, her phone rang.
He said it in English. Exactly the way the American dad said it on the screen.
"Proud of you, kid."
Then he hung up. Immediately. Before she could say a word.
Japanese fathers have not changed that much.
She sat on her kitchen floor for an hour.
He didn't say it in English because he forgot the Japanese.
He said it in English because in English, it was allowed.
America, you think you're just talking. Love you, bye. Come here. Proud of you.
You've been handing the whole world words we didn't know we were allowed to say.
Some of us are finally using them.
Ben S retweeted
“You have placed me on a pedestal so impossibly high and not to honor me. Not to honor me. But to spare yourself the effort of the climb.” -Vision
I think we see this by people in our own faith, unintentionally.
What a lightbulb moment hearing this line. #VisionQuest
Ben S retweeted
You know why non-religious people don't have children?
The answer is simply this:
They don't like kids
They "just didn't want to have kids"
Meanwhile, among older religious folks who don't have kids -- a lot of them wanted to be a parent.
It just didn't happen.
Ben S retweeted
The single dumbest thing the Democratic party can do right now is nominate Kamala Harris in 2028.
Every donor , every politician, every party leader needs to text her tonight and say with clear voice "Don't even think about it."
Ben S retweeted
I have been holding my tongue about something that happened during the Ohio gubernatorial race. I refused to speak while the election was underway because I did not want my words mistaken for an attempt to influence anyone’s vote.
But now that the election is over, I have something to say.
For nearly twenty years, my ministry has taken me among the homeless, the abused, the exploited, and the forgotten. I have sat with victims of sexual violence and witnessed the lifelong wounds of childhood trauma.
What Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign did to Amy Acton was among the most morally repulsive things I have witnessed in American politics.
They took a woman whose stepfather was indicted for raping her when she was twelve years old and featured her mother, from whom she had been estranged for nearly fifty years, in a political advertisement attacking her credibility.
The advertisement challenged Acton’s account of her childhood without mentioning the sexual abuse allegations or the circumstances of that estrangement. When people expressed their horror, the campaign defended it.
Imagine examining another person’s childhood suffering and fractured family relationships, then deciding those wounds might help win an election.
Anyone who has worked with survivors of childhood sexual abuse understands the painful realities of denial, betrayal, shame, and estrangement. A child growing into a successful adult does not erase what happened. Nor does a parent’s denial make that suffering disappear.
I find it equally disturbing that an elderly mother, whom Acton herself described as unwell, was brought into this spectacle. Whatever her own struggles or responsibility for the past, exploiting that fractured relationship was grotesque.
To everyone who defended this, consider the message you sent to survivors. To the young woman whose family refuses to believe her. To the man who has carried the shame of childhood abuse for forty years. To the frightened child who has yet to tell anyone.
What did you teach them about the value of their suffering?
I am a priest. I believe in repentance, forgiveness, and redemption. But none of those things requires me to pretend that deliberate cruelty is anything less than a grave moral failure.
Your political allegiance does not absolve you of moral responsibility. You do not get to set aside your conscience during an election and retrieve it afterward.
If your loyalty requires you to defend the exploitation of a childhood sexual abuse survivor, your loyalty has become an idol. And if your conscience cannot recognize the wrong here, examine what political tribalism has done to it.
This is not about Republicans or Democrats. We have a choice as a people: continue excusing cruelty from our preferred political camp, or summon the courage to condemn it wherever it appears.
Amy Acton deserved better. Every survivor who watched this unfold deserved better.
And God help us if we have reached the point where winning an election matters more than protecting the dignity of a wounded human being.
Ben S retweeted
It begins. theguardian.com/us-news/2026…
Ben S retweeted
In 2019, during the first Trump Administration, I wrote: “One day in the not too distant future, Republicans will wake up and say, ‘We did this for this man?’” It’s taken longer than I thought, but I think that day is finally coming.
Ben S retweeted
The pilots on this private jet were on the radio with air traffic control while it fell from higher than Mount Everest to a Florida street in about 80 seconds. You can hear them realize they aren't going to make it.
Their trouble started right after a request that sounds totally reasonable. They asked to fly higher.
This was a Learjet 60 carrying nine people from Austin to the Bahamas, a little over two hours into the trip. When they checked in with Miami Center at 35,000 feet, they were getting bounced around hard enough to swing their altitude 600 to 700 feet. They also had a thin layer of clear ice on the plane that the pilot called manageable. It was minus 47 Celsius outside. Then it started precipitating, so they asked to climb to 37,000 to get out of it, and Miami said okay.
Climbing out of bad weather is standard stuff for pilots, and up that high it comes with a catch most of us have never heard of. The air is so thin that a jet has a weirdly small window of speeds it can safely fly. Go too slow and the wings stop holding it up, and if you go too fast, shockwaves start forming on the wings. Every thousand feet you climb, those two limits squeeze a little closer together. Pilots literally call the spot where they meet the coffin corner.
A Learjet 60 normally cruises right around Mach 0.76, and its limit is 0.81. So even on a calm day it's flying pretty close to the edge, and turbulence knocks your airspeed up and down inside that window.
Within seconds of starting the climb, the tracking data shows their groundspeed jumping from 437 to 505 knots as the jet started falling at almost 20,000 feet per minute. The pilot's mayday said the same thing. "We are in an overspeed condition, descending 20,000 feet per minute." Another call said they were banking.
When you get those two at once, things get ugly fast. Once a jet blows past its speed limit, the wing can start pushing the nose down by itself, which adds speed, which pushes the nose down even harder. If the wings are tilted on top of that, the lift that normally holds the nose up is pointing off to the side. The nose keeps dropping and the plane winds into a spiral. Your gut tells you to pull back on the controls, and with the wings banked that mostly just tightens the spiral. You're supposed to level the wings first and only then pull up. Now try doing that inside a cloud where you can't see the horizon while the overspeed alarm is going off.
By 12:49 Eastern they were down to 8,750 feet and dropping more than 32,000 feet per minute. That works out to about 360 miles an hour, straight down. At that speed the last 8,750 feet goes by in around 16 seconds.
The dashcam video shows the jet coming in nearly vertical over Military Trail, with cars still driving on the road under it. It hit right next to a mobile home park. About 600 people who live there are being moved out, and officials say nobody on the ground was hurt, which is honestly hard to believe when you watch that fireball.
The NTSB will probably take a year or more to officially say what caused this. The last thing on the radio was the controller repeating their tail number, November seven two two Bravo Delta, over and over, with nobody left to answer.
Ben S retweeted
The single-most successful effort of the Trump admin is the Office of Evangelical Pandering.
Ben S retweeted
I think the appeal with TNG was that it was like a simulation of a world where, if you made compelling arguments, people were swayed and it changed the course of the episode.
The characters are all competent and fair-minded, and their universe is one that rewards this.
Ben S retweeted
As I’ve been saying since 2014, if you think defending Ukraine is expensive, Russia winning would be exponentially more so.
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon warns a Russian victory in Ukraine could shatter global alliances, reshape the world economy, and force nations to question whether they can still rely on America. 🇺🇸
Asked what a Russian victory in Ukraine would mean for the global economy, Dimon responded:
“It could be a potential disaster.
This is the first war in Europe where a free, democratic nation was invaded by 200,000 or 300,000 Russian soldiers under the threat of nuclear blackmail.
We’ve never had nuclear blackmail before.
You’re also teaching the whole world that maybe having nuclear weapons is a pretty good thing, because people will be afraid of you, and you can abuse a neighbor if you feel like it.
Russia would be on the border of NATO. Obviously, NATO is rearming right now.
But the other thing is, it’s affecting all alliances, military alliances and global economic alliances.
And the nexus of Iran, North Korea, and China makes it very hard, in my view, for the Chinese-American relationship.
China says they’re neutral, but they’re helping. We are clearly not neutral.
If Russia wins, you might see a lot of people deciding: Will America stand up for Europe? Can you rely on them? And if you can’t rely on them, what are you going to do?
That includes economically.
Every nation is going to say, what makes me secure? Energy, food, all the things I need.
I’m worried that if Russia wins, you could see the world enter a little bit of chaos as people realign alliances and economic relationships.”