A roundup of news and commentary from around the interwebs.
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Here’s a fascinating and disturbing essay (it’s quite long) on how Chinese spies operating in the open track down people in other countries, sometimes abducting them and taking them back to China.
Starting Wednesday, The Dominion of Canada General Insurance Company will start applying the female rates to Nova Scotia auto clients who identify as Gender X. In a ruling released Nov. 19, the Nova Scotia Utility and Review Board approved The Dominion’s application to change its rates and risk-classification system for private passenger vehicles.
I wonder if I could save some money by choosing “prefer not to say.”
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Portugal’s president has fended off yet another attempt to legalize euthanasia, vetoing a bill for the second time this year.
If you’re familiar with the pro-life movement in Canada, you’ll know that Trudeau’s government has been targeting pro-life organizations from the get-go, from his Canada Summer Jobs fiasco to his recent promise to strip charitable status from crisis pregnancy centres. In contrast, Pat Maloney of the Run With Life log reveals that Canada’s National Abortion Federation pays their employees quite handsomely.
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Some of you may have heard of Kristin Kobes du Mez’s book Jesus and John Wayne, which critiqued American evangelicalism and triggered all sorts of discussion last year. I had my issues with the book, especially the fact that although I couldn’t tell for certain what du Mez thought of issues like abortion, she clearly bought into the progressive framework of the pro-life movement as a backlash to the liberalizing of sexuality rather than to, you know, abortion. Recently, she had an interesting exchange with Denny Burk in which she noted that she’s reconsidering her own views on sexuality. I’m not in the slightest surprised.
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Megachurch prosperity gospel preacher Joel Osteen, who cannot even keep heresy out of the titles of his books (Your Best Life Now, Every Day A Friday) is being questioned after a plumber found “bags and bags of cash” stashed in the bathroom wall of his Texas church seven years after $600,000 dollars in donations were stolen. Color me shocked. Osteen may seem like a fringe prosperity gospel figure, but folks like Eric Metaxas—who, despite his talent as a writer, may be the least discerning figure in all of American evangelicalism—have vocally supported him.
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A 22-year-old man is smashing female swimming records by identifying as female, outraging those who recognize that this is both unfair and absurd. Welcome to 2021.
