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On Christian Nationalism

Twitter has been aflutter around the term Christian Nationalism over the last few weeks. As I am on Twitter and part of the Christian world, I have seen a lot of the good and the bad. As with all dialogue and debate, definition of terms is extremely important. Even those under the blood of Christ can be subject to misunderstandings and erroneous assumptions, as we are still in a fallen world. Add in that this term brought out some ugly souls— folks that need a lot of prayer— that even I would consider to be racist.

As a 500 page book on Christian Nationalism sits next to me, a group of theologians came together and released a draft statement on Christian Nationalism & the Gospel. There is a long history of Christian statements that help clarify where a group stands in the form of affirmations and denials. This followed that history. I have read the majority of it.

If you are seeing Christian Nationalism being discussed or hear me discussing it, this is the definitive definition.

Now I need to read a 500 page book.

The Statement on Christian Nationalism & the Gospel

The Shameless v. the Unashamed

One of the heartening signs that has resulted from the ascendancy of this creepy clown world regime is that it has revealed to me that there are still seven thousand who have not bowed the knee to Baal. There have been many new voices, deserted by their former leaders, who have stepped into the breach. They are standing up straight, and they are unashamed.

It is true that things look bad. The leadership of Laketown was feckless and self-serving. The whole town is in disarray, and is under attack. The dragon has come and everything is hopeless.

But there is one man, Bard, and he has one arrow. And with that one arrow in his hand, one bird comes and speaks to him. And he sets the arrow to string, unashamed.

The Shameless v. the Unashamed by Douglas Wilson

No commentary needed here. Pastor Doug said it all. Christian, go read Pastor Doug’s post. Or watch the video.

View Transitions Tech Demo

Really impressive demo. First, this is for single-page applications. Second, there is an API for multi-page applications. Check it out in Chrome Canary and look at the code. I discussed this with my team yesterday. The demo is built on Astro. All that is shipped to the browser is 301kB. Of that 291kB is images. Less than 5.5kB for the document, CSS, and JS. CSS is powering the transitions and only a bit of JS intercepts the navigation event, loads the fragment of HTML, injects it into the DOM, and adds the necessary classes to trigger the animations.

This is a truly impressive demonstration. With very minimal effort, one can use an SSG like Astro— which can run as an SSR too— and deliver a fully working application that requires no JavaScript but progressively enhances to dynamic page transitions with easy— something that is extremely difficult even for SPA libraries— and asynchronous page loading. Only 150 lines of JS are in this project— 150 lines that ship to the browser.

For an old curmudgeonly standards guy like myself, this gives me some hope that we can get back to the days of the largest assets we send to the browser are images instead of hundreds of kilobytes of JavaScript.

Source: Bramus

Pugnacious

pugnacious (adjective)
having a quarrelsome or combative nature

Pugnacious individuals are often looking for a fight. While unpleasant, at least their fists are packing an etymological punch. Pugnacious comes from the Latin verb pugnare (meaning “to fight”), which in turn comes from the Latin word for “fist,” pugnus.

Merriam-Webster

I love looking up words that I come across. Looking into the origins. And then you’ll catch me laughing because your said porcelain. I know, I am weird. This word came up in reading through an old Spurgeon sermon this morning.

What Is the Nature of Your Prayer

You are in a public place, praying silently. No one else around. The police approach you and ask the nature of your prayer. They then arrest you because you are not allowed to pray in this public space. Clearly this is a Muslim country where Shariah Law is enforced, right?

No, it is Britain.

Watch the video. I’m not exaggerating this. This isn’t a case of a Christian “praying” but also screaming at people or blocking sidewalks.

Christian, the old howl of “Christians to the Lions” is returning to London, just as Spurgeon feared. Not long before it is here in the States.

Some Simple Ways to Make Content Look Good

Something non-designers understandably struggle with is how to make things look good. One of those things is long form content that’s well set and readable. Luckily, CSS makes this easy, you just have to know what to change. That’s exactly what we’re going to teach you in this article.

Set Studio

So many good tips in this article from Andy Bell. I’m using many of them already on this site. Long-form content can be hard to format, so if you need some help, tap the link above!

In Defence of the Single Page Application

There are many reasons to love the return of blogs. Folks taking the time to make a well-reasoned argument without truncating it to 140 characters is one of the biggest. And boy, William makes a great point here. Aside from the obvious spelling mistakes.

Don't be fooled by serverless

Clouds, and VPS’s before that, work on the age-old principle of buying in bulk and selling by the piece. You run one big server for $1,000/month, then you rent it out to seven people for $200/month, and voila, you’ve cleared a $400/month profit.

DHH, Don’t be fooled by serverless

This is something that has bothered me for some time. The prices of these services when compared to full servers is absurd. Hear that whole sentence. Compared to full servers. The response of many would be either a) “the prices are very low!” or b) “no one needs a full server!” The whole sentence matters. If you need a full server, the price is very high to rent it piecemeal. If you are going to eat a whole cow in a year, buying it pound by pound from the grocery store will cost substantially more than buying a whole cow.

But what happens if a customer needs the performance of a whole box, most of the time? Then they’re paying $1,400/month for $1,000’s worth of computing. Or maybe, because they’re reserving the whole box, they’ll get a deal at $1,250/month by committing to a whole year. That deal is far less obviously good on both sides. It’s basically a credit agreement at a 25% APR. Tread wisely!

But if you execute enough functions to fill the computing power of a whole box, it’s a terrible deal.

And then there is the lock-in. If you build an application in PHP or Ruby, you can basically run that anywhere. These cloud services are designed so you have to architect around them. If the pricing of my server for this site goes too high, I can take it elsewhere. It’s just HTML.

The further down the rabbit hole you go with “cloud-native” services in serverless, the harder it’ll be to climb out when you realize that you should own the donkey rather than rent it. And especially once you realize that paying to rent a whole donkey at the piece price of a hundred slices is an even worse deal than just renting the whole donkey by itself! […] And if you start off with a proprietary serverless setup, you might well find the lock-in impossible to escape by the time the rental math no longer works.

So who are these services best suited for?

The cloud is primarily for companies that have big swings in use – like Amazon’s original AWS case of huge demand around Black Friday and Christmas, which left them with unused capacity for the rest of the year – or for early outfits that don’t do enough business to either warrant owning a whole computer or spend so little on the cloud that it just doesn’t matter.

Very Loud Minority

Now when you look at it like that, it makes you wonder why we give these people such a large stage while the very quiet majority don’t get a voice at all. The very quiet majority are out there building more than 90% of the web, after all.

Even a slight change in that dynamic would likely have a massive positive impact.

The (extremely) loud minority by Andy Bell

This is something bothering me a lot lately. There seems to be a sense that the majority are using JavaScript-heavy solutions for all the things, but the statistical truth is they are in the minority.

Even if you discount that: considering React has been around for a decade now, < 4% share of the top 10 million websites is pathetic, considering how much we are made to feel like it is the “biggest framework” (well, at least in bundle size, that’s true).

Rigmarole

Edward I of England, also known as Hammer of the Scots, forced members of the Scottish nobility to swear fealty to him by signing oaths of allegiance that were collected on a number of parchments that together made up what came to be called the Ragman Roll (or Ragman Rolls, or Ragman’s Roll).

Over time ragman roll, for a long roll of parchment full of “nonsense,” eventually became rigmarole, a long, unnecessarily time-consuming hassle. No doubt a word that has always been useful.

Mental Floss

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