Trump admits he didn’t have to tear down East Wing for ballroom, but just wanted to

Trump also addressed reports that demolition has not gone over well with a notable group: first ladies



President Donald Trump has admitted that he did not need to tear down the East Wing of the White House in order to build his sprawling $300 million ballroom.

“I could’ve built the ballroom around it,” Trump told Fox News Monday. “I didn’t want to sacrifice a great ballroom for an okay ballroom by leaving it right smack in the middle.”

Marion County agrees to pay out $3M for newspaper raid, expresses regret​

Record editor says court cases against city continue​

“The Sheriff’s Office wishes to express its sincere regrets to Eric and Joan Meyer and Ruth and Ronald Herbel for its participation in the drafting and execution of the Marion Police Department’s search warrants on their homes and the Marion County Record. This likely would not have happened if established law had been reviewed and applied prior to the execution of the warrants,” the statement reads.

Marion County’s board of commissioners approved agreements Monday with Eric Meyer, the owner and editor of the Marion County Record, and Ruth Herbel, the Marion city councilor whose home was raided in tandem with the newspaper office, and two other journalists. The agreements coincide with consent judgments expected to be submitted in their federal cases against the county.

The county was a secondary player in the raids, in Meyer’s eyes, but the agreements could play a part in the paper’s ongoing cases against the city.

In another lawsuit against former Marion police chief Gideon Cody, who is also facing criminal charges, Gruver settled earlier this year for $235,000.

linux.poet said:

Do you actually keep the Sabbath as outlined in the 4th commandment?
I am simply wondering what the answer to the poll question is. No hard feelings to Sabbath worshippers intended, I am simply curious.
If you do keep the Sabbath, how do you observe it? How you do believe Christians should observe it?

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I voted, "Yes, I keep the Sabbath on Saturday every week as mentioned in the Decalogue, the Law, etc."

How I Keep the Sabbath

Applying Exodus 20:8-11

I am commanded to remember the Sabbath day, which scripture defines as the seventh day. Remember commands me not to forget, so I keep it every week as commanded. In the same sentence, I am not only commanded to remember, but to keep holy. The definition of holy is, "dedicated or consecrated to God or a religious purpose; sacred." I dedicate the day to God, to worship Him, and to focus on Him.

Six days are designated to do all of my work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath. Friday is what is called a "preparation day". The Sabbath starts Friday evening at sundown, so I make final preparations for Sabbath observance. I make sure meals are made for the Sabbath so that I don't have to work in the kitchen to eat (i.e. baking, making a dish from scratch). I make sure my laundry is done. Any chores that need done I have six days to do, and so I refrain from those chores on the seventh day Sabbath as they are work. I am retired, but this would also apply to my job.

The reason given for observing the Sabbath is because God rested on the seventh day after creating for six days (work), and sanctified the seventh day. It is because the fourth commandment points back to creation that the Sabbath is a memorial of creation, for us to remember.

Applying Nehemiah 10:31, Nehemiah 13:15-22

There was no buying or selling on the Sabbath day. I do not buy or sell on the Sabbath. I do not go to stores or restaurants. I do not buy off of the internet. I even try to plan package deliveries on days other than the Sabbath, but it doesn't always work out. Amazon likes to delay deliveries and push them to Saturday for whatever reason, and so it is often beyond my control.

Applying Isaiah 58:13-14

How to keep the Sabbath holy. "If thou turn away thy foot from the Sabbath," which some interpret as no travel, but it can also be interpreted as returning/turning back to the Sabbath (see turn; Strong's H7725). In my linked post (above) I said, "no travel," because travel is covered (next paragraph below). I do refrain from travel, but I will drive to local parks on the Sabbath and commune with Him through His creation; being out in nature. Travel would be acceptable if you're doing the Lord's work; witnessing to others, helping the needy or elderly, etc.

"From doing your own pleasure on my holy day," I apply it in my own life by refraining from doing anything that I normally do for pleasure any other day of the week. "And call the sabbath a delight, the holy of the Lord, honourable; and shalt honour him, not doing thine own ways, nor finding thine own pleasure, nor speaking thine own words." I refrain from doing anything that could be considered my own pleasure. If I go to the park I focus on the things of God, I don't play sports, I don't go swimming. I don't do what I want to do, I do what brings me closer to God and keeps my eyes on Him, because it is His day.

The Sabbath isn't a burden, it is a day of rest, and should be a delight, because it is a day to honor the Lord. As it says, the best way to do this is not doing your own ways, nor finding your own pleasure, nor speaking your own words, which are things you would do any other day of the week. The focus here is on God specifically, and Godly things. How I do this is by immersing myself in His word on the Sabbath. I essentially study and write all day. I spend time on forums like this one (and others), and answer questions about Christianity and the trials of life people are going through.

The sentence continues, "Then shalt thou delight thyself in the Lord; and I will cause thee to ride upon the high places of the earth, and feed thee with the heritage of Jacob thy father: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it." God promises blessings for keeping the Sabbath. I have been blessed in so many ways. In setting aside a day for God, you grow as a Christian. There is literally no down side to Sabbath observance unless the focus is on you and what you want to do, and then it is a burden. It is a matter of the heart. Matthew 6:21 For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

Applying Genesis 1, Leviticus 23:32, et al

Sabbath observance begins at sundown Friday evening and ends at sundown Saturday evening. No matter where you are in the world there is always a sunset each day.

Dan1988 said:

That may sound like a wonderful philosophy, to those who don't know that truth. But to those of us who do know the truth, it's nothing more than a vein attempt to offer false hope, because none of it is true.

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As it is you don't know the truth, at least not in its fullness, or else you'd recognize it in that post. You're locked into a handful of concepts developed by people strictly by reading a book, God's Word, centuries after the fact, divorced from its original historical context and recipients of its revelation, The concepts are plausible enough in some places, strained in others, often wooden and isolated interpretations in any case.

Dan1988 said:

You will never find anything in the bible to support your private opinion 1) Sin would be impossible without human freedom.

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The alternative is that God is the author of sin.

Dan1988 said:

You will never find anything in the bible to support your private opinion that 2) God so values the freedom He gave man to begin with that He won't override it. No such nonsense exists in the Bible.

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Dan1988 said:

God never said that He desires that we use our freedom for good, not evil, to embrace and choose the good He's shown us, to embrace and choose love to put it in the most correct terms. And no such nonsense exists in the Bible.

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"See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. For I command you today to love the Lord your God, to walk in obedience to him, and to keep his commands, decrees and laws; then you will live and increase, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land you are entering to possess."

"This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him." Duet 30:15-16, 19-20

"Seek good, and not evil, that you may live" Amos 5:14

"Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good." Rom 12:21

"Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” Matt 22:37-40

Dan1988 said:

This world is beautiful, everything is exactly as God predestined it to be. He is in full control of every single thing in the universe. From the smallest thing to the biggest things, nothing happens apart from His will.

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There's a reason why we pray, "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven". And that reason is because of the fact that His will is not at all necessarily done on earth as it is in heaven. God allows evil here, for a time, for a season, for His purpose, after which the two: good and evil, will be eternally separated, no longer allowed to co-exist as His plans for His creation are fully consummated. All truth and beauty and goodness in this world come from God while evil is done by man, coming from those who oppose Him and His will. So tell the victims of abuse, of rape, of torture, of genocide, of the holocaust about how beautiful this world is. You may get a different opinion.

Dan1988 said:

You mention Matt, 11:28-30 as if it was some kind of an offer of a better lifestyle or blessings, but it's nothing like that at all, it was hate speech and it got Him tortured, spat, His beard was ripped out and the flesh on His back was hanging of from being whipped before He was crucified and murdered. The same thing would happen if he came back today and tried that again, He is hated by religious people, today more then ever before.

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Geez! It was nothing but love-speech, calling man to God and the love He's shown us. But man preferred darkness. What else is new???? Are you saying the darkness is somehow preferable or superior to the light just because man rejected the light?

Phil G said:

But anybody who has done so can tell you that the ionosphere's properties are very dependent on conditions, even the time of day and solar flares affect its reliability.

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Not on a flat earth they don't, there are no solar flares on the flat earth sun.
This is why people need to reeducate themselves when it comes to the sun in more ways than one.

Ave, María, grátia plena,
Dóminus tecum.
Benedicta tu in muliéribus,
et benedíctus fructus ventris
tui, Iesus.
Sancta María, Mater Dei,
ora pro nobis peccatoribus
nunc et in hora mortis nostrae.
Amen.

House Democrats release new Epstein emails referencing Trump​

The publication of the emails comes on the same day that House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., is scheduled to swear in Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva, an Arizona Democrat who won a special election last month.

Once sworn in, Grijalva is expected to provide the final signature on a discharge petition to force a vote on a House bill that would compel the Department of Justice to release the government's full investigative files on Epstein.

stevevw said:

But your trying to explain this in scientific material terms which defeats the whole idea of alternative knowledge to the scientific paradigm.

The best way I can relate it to consciousness and phenomenal experiences like belief and material sciences. They belong in different paradigms or the lens by which someone sees fundemental reality. Whether its something transcedent or the causal closure of the phycial is all there is to understanding the world and reality.

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The lens by which someone sees a fundamental reality is ultimately the lense in our eyes. If it cannot be shown to exist, its effects cannot be observed or reproduced by experiment, if it has no tangible effect on the material world then science will not be able to come to a conclusion about it.

You are talking about "knowledge" that is, human ideas. The only way we can be aware of these ideas is by human action. Human action expresses those ideas in a tangible way accessible to science.

stevevw said:

Some theories in Quantum Consciousness posit that Mind is fundemental and actually creates the objective world we see. So obvious there are two ways to see the evidence. One measures the physical and the other the Mind or the phenomena beyond the mind.

Already we see a major difference where science could not even measure the transcedent aspect of reality. Therefore if there is a transcedent aspect then this must connect with the objective aspect fundementally. Thus being immersed in the transcedent or spirit gives a deeper knowledge behind what we see. Thus being able to manipulate or transcend the material world.

Its from this basis that I think ancient knowledge could be more advanced because its more aligned with fundemental reality. We can see how modern physics is now toying with the idea that Mind or consciousness is fundemental and could unlock the physical world.

But remember this is spectualtion and an hypothesis. I am not saying this is exactly the case. I don't know. I am just attempting to explain a possibility.

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You don't know, but you are sure that the Egyptians used this ancient knowledge instead of their own technology, even though you don't know what this ancient knowledge was or even very much about what Egyptian technology was capable of. OK.

Aldebaran said:

Um, why are the democrats in the Senate trying to stop poor people AND all the federal employees from getting anything? Think about that before answering.

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You misplaced an effect for a cause. The intention, the purpose, the cause was to force Republicans to address healthcare. But Republicans were too obstinate and the shutdown happened. It was Republicans who used it to get what they wanted. And they did.

Postvieww said:

Those are already tilted to the Democrats. My point is there is little left for them to change.

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That's more true of those vast tracts of red you mentioned.

You could fit nearly 100 Rhode Islands into Wyoming, but Wyoming only has one representative (and RI has 2). You can't gerrymander a state with only one district.

essentialsaltes said:

Colombian president says US military struck Colombian boat, killed his citizens​

White House called the allegation "baseless."

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To influence Trump on Colombia, Sen. Bernie Moreno brought a fake image of the country's president in a prison jumpsuit​

Two days before the lunch, Trump, at odds with Petro for months, posted on social media that Petro was “an illegal drug leader strongly encouraging the massive production of drugs” in Colombia. Trump said he was stopping all U.S. aid to the country and told reporters he would soon announce new tariffs on Colombia.

Moreno wanted to encourage Trump to take a more targeted approach — directly aimed at Petro. To do so, the senator brought along a document titled “The Trump Doctrine For Colombia and the Western Hemisphere.” In addition to five policy ideas, the one-page outline featured large images of Petro and Nicolás Maduro, the president of Venezuela, in orange prison jumpsuits.

Three days after the lunch with senators, the Treasury Department announced sanctions against Petro, his family and a government official over allegations of involvement in the global drug trade, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent saying in a statement that Petro “has allowed drug cartels to flourish and refused to stop this activity.” Petro has strongly denied involvement with the drug trade and has said he will fight the sanctions in U.S. courts.

On Sunday, the publication Cambio Colombia first reported on the existence of the document when it discovered that the White House had posted a photo from the Oct. 21 event showing James Blair, a deputy chief of staff, holding Moreno’s memo.

Petro posted on X that he was recalling the Colombian ambassador to the U.S. for the second time in a month and demanding to know why he is being portrayed “as if I were a prisoner,” calling the print-out “a brutal disrespect” to his supporters and nation.

Speak loudly and carry a banger meme.

AI is increasingly being used for scams.

Fortunately there are some who are using AI to fight back, although it remains to be seen how effective they will be.

Apate.ai, a spin-out from Macquarie University, uses conversational, realistic, multilingual AI bots to keep scammers on long fake calls, diverting them away from the many victims who lose money to global cybercriminals every day.

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Hans Blaster said:

He also rejects mine as he obnoxiously ties science to his religion. I can't stand either Lennox or Peterson. (What's an Oxford Don? SOunds like a mafia boss.)

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It's just what they call their tenured faculty.

eclipsenow said:

I was with you until you projected past the New Testament era. The REALITY amongst theologians that matter is Daniel's 4 kingdoms are REALLY complex to interpret - but that it's past. It's either fulfilled by Rome or not - and the complicated apocalyptic symbolism around the end of this sequence is pointing to Jesus. Or not. It's very, very tricky.

I was lucky enough to have a Professor of Old Testament at my church for years - and even he says it's very, very tricky.
There are debates about how it might unfold around Antiochus - or up to Jesus. The years don't work as years either way - but might work as chunks - as rough fractions of time in a symbolic sense.

And Revelation borrows from this imagery, but John does his own thing with it. The 4 beasts are amalgamated into one - representing ALL God's enemies.

Trying to get literal with calendars just makes me yawn.
It's just. Not. True!

That's the way of endless disputes amongst various tribes of futurist - and is why I leave this forum for 6 months at a time.

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When were you “with me.” You just disputed everything I said. None of which was futurism.
It’s only complicated when people try to make the Bible’s prophecy about the end of the world.

Pommer said:

Suddenly, social-Darwinism is cool.

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Yeah, and it always did seem odd to me that religious groups most likely to reject biological evolution should be so aggressively social Darwinist.

Valletta said:

There's already an obvious Constitutional violation,

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Is there though? Prosecutors requested a subpoena, got one based on showing probable cause, and collected the information that the subpoena allowed them to. Your disagreement with the prosecution's argument doesn't make it unconstitutional.

Nithavela said:

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/10/trump-proposes-50-year-mortgage-but-homeowner-savings-could-be-minimal.html

I think this is a wonderful idea. You get to save some money per month, and when you die halfway into paying back your mortgage, your legacy lives on.

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I understand my kind of conservatism no longer exist today.

But back then when my kind of conservatism existed , we used to think should not intervene in matters between individual citizens and banks.

Stopped_lurking said:

None, I would say a little sloppily because I think I get what you mean. My only objection is that your example is underspecified (perhaps mine was too, I should have said when a fluid flows over an airfoil) Automobiles don't all have the property of motion, but if we add some conditions I'm sure we could identify that as an emergent property as well. To me it only means it sometimes is meaningful to talk about phenomena at different levels of granularity.

Perhaps I stepped into a discussion without a good grasp of what was discussed.

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I agree that things emerge, but simply saying that doesn't explain anything. If my young son asked me "Daddy, how does a car move?", I could give him an actual explanation - all about the engine, the transmission, the axle, etc., etc. But if I just say to him "the car's motion is an emergent property", I'd be telling the truth, but not really telling him anything worth saying.

It's the same with the video that brought this topic up. The fellow says that human free will is an emergent property, but doesn't actually explain how it emerged.

Hans Blaster said:

Did you emerge from a jar of honey, or are you a regular human like the rest of us. Your confusion on the topic of where humans come from is baffling.

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Do you not understand the meaning of the word "ultimately"?

Hans Blaster said:

Why should morality depend on what a god is made of?

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What better option do you have?

Hans Blaster said:

I must conclude that there is no discussion available with you. You have made it clear that you hold that morality is a brute fact of reality because your god exists and because that is why morality exists, morality must be objective (as your god has no apparent mind to which morality is subject) and perhaps absolute. You will not even discuss with in any other possible framework or consider even a divinely imposed subjective (to the god) morality.

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Sure, but you hold that morality is sheer subjective opinion and expect that to be taken seriously. So what hope was there for discussion to begin with?

A2SG said:

That's all I asked at the outset. I simply found it curious when you stopped short of criticizing Abbott for his actions, but not Newsom, when the latter at least allowed the voters to weigh in before taking action.


Understood. I don't live in either state myself. But if the issue is the act of gerrymandering, surely one isn't required to be a resident of a particular state to voice an opinion.

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I suppose, but it's more of an issue if you actually live in one of the gerrymandered districts since it's directly affecting your representation.

A2SG said:

What did he spend those "outlandish sums" on, exactly?

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Ads where he claimed it was about having fair elections.

A2SG said:

Yeah, yeah, I've heard that bit before. Another pithy quote: "Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." (Winston Churchill)

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I'm not as sold as Churchill. I don't see the value in letting people who have no idea what the issues are hold popularity contests.

A2SG said:

But, if you don't like democracy as practiced in this country, you do realize that you're free to find a preferable form of governance if you so choose, right? Just a friendly reminder, nothing more.

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I've never found this argument very compelling..."If you don't like the government, move!"

A2SG said:

Well, morality is a subjective thing, while laws are objective. You can view his actions as immoral if you so choose, but that's only according to your personal moral framework. Others may view the morality differently, and their views are no less valid than your own. Given that, Newsom reacted to an unfair attempt to increase GOP representation in Texas, at the behest of Donald Trump, and asked the voters if they agreed with his plan to counter that. They did. Whether or not that shows integrity or a lack of it depends on individual opinion, I guess.

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I disagree about morality being subjective. And he didn't exactly tell the truth to the voters in the ad campaign he ran, so I wouldn't exactly call it asking the voters to approve of his plan. And that is, of course, not even dealing with the whole vote was asking voters to take away the voting efficacy of a group of voters which is literally one of the main complaints against democracy(where 51% of the voters get to take away the rights of the 49%).

A2SG said:

Actually, California voters do agree with his actions, as evidenced by the measure passing. Sure, not everyone voted for it, but that's how democracy works. You don't have to like that, but I'd suggest it's a better, more fair way to govern than by fiat, as evidenced by Abbott in Texas.

-- A2SG, and Donald Trump, let's not forget he gave the marching orders....

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A portion of voters who were lied to with extensive ad campaigns were convinced to take away the efficacy of another group of voters votes...that's literally one of the biggest knocks on democracy, and here you're holding it up as if it is in the favor of the system.