Good. This hits so close to home

Delvianna said:

He's wiped out cities before and countries too. I wouldn't say "monster" I'd say judgement. But like I said, I'd understand why just based off of what's coming out now and I'm sure that's not even the half of it in what is happening behind more closed doors. His timing and all, but America will absolutely be judged.

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Absolutely!

tranquil said:

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The 7 years is not all great tribulation. It is the last 1335 days of the 7 years that is the great tribulation period. The Gog/Magog event will take place before the 7 years begin. The 7 years are in Ezekiel 39:9.

I don't remember the last time I even used pennies. I think a new "penny derangement syndrome" is starting, though. Watch there be another one of those protests coming to your state capitol buildings.

May they rest in peace and rise to glory!

Lord have mercy!

Hi, I'm always in the mood of "I'm never going to not feel alone at Mass, before Mass, or after Mass" but some times are more intense than others. It might be getting worse in November and December. I can't decide whether to sit in the nave until most of the people leave, and then leave myself, rather than leave at the same time that everyone else is talking to each other in the nave or vestibule. I don't know if it would make me feel better or worse. Can someone tell me which method they would prefer for themselves?

durangodawood said:

You think his goal is to destroy the city as part of an Islamic jihad motivation?

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No. Not your every day normal Muslim. Don’t know how devout he is. Most Muslims are peaceful and believe killing one person is like killing the whole world a la Cat Stevens.

Firm tied to Kristi Noem secretly got money from government contracts​

On Oct. 2, the second day of the government shutdown, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem arrived at Mount Rushmore to shoot a television ad. Sitting on horseback in chaps and a cowboy hat, Noem addressed the camera with a stern message for immigrants: “Break our laws, we’ll punish you.”

Noem has hailed the more than $200 million, taxpayer-funded ad campaign as a crucial tool to stem illegal immigration.

The Department of Homeland Security has kept at least one beneficiary of the nine-figure ad deal a secret, records and interviews show: a Republican consulting firm with longstanding personal and business ties to Noem and her senior aides at DHS. The company running the Mount Rushmore shoot, called the Strategy Group, does not appear on public documents about the contract. The main recipient listed on the contracts is a mysterious Delaware company, which was created days before the deal was finalized.

Corey Lewandowski, her top adviser [wink wink] at DHS, has worked extensively with the firm. And the company’s CEO is married to Noem’s chief spokesperson at DHS, Tricia McLaughlin.

The Strategy Group’s ad work is the first known example of money flowing from Noem’s agency to businesses controlled by her allies and friends.

“It’s corrupt, is the word,” said Charles Tiefer, a leading authority on federal contract law and former member of the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This is not the first time that the Strategy Group has gotten public money through a Noem contract. As governor of South Dakota in 2023, her administration set off a scandal by hiring the Ohio-based company to do a different ad campaign, paying it $8.5 million in state funds. While the state said the contract was done by the book, a former Noem administration official told ProPublica that Noem quietly intervened to ensure the Strategy Group got the deal. ProPublica granted some people anonymity to discuss the deals because of their sensitivity.

In Benson’s prophetic vision, the Church persists amid a godless world obsessed with progress, pleasure and power.

In 2015, on a flight back to the Vatican from the Philippines, Pope Francis told journalists: “There is a book … it is called Lord of the World. The author is Benson … I suggest you read it. Reading it, you’ll understand well what I mean by ideological colonization.” He went on to describe the novel as prophetic, especially in regard to modern developments such as secularism, relativism and the notion of “progress” detached from any spiritual or moral anchor.

The book in question — Lord of the World(1907) — is a dystopian, apocalyptic novel by English convert Father Robert Hugh Benson. It foresees a 21st-century world in which Christianity has largely declined while secular humanism — or “Humanitarianism” — has seized power, with political and cultural elites uniting around a charismatic global leader. The Church — and the papacy — survive, if only barely, and that is the crux of the clash at the heart of the plot.

To say the least, it was an unusual choice for any pope to recommend. But Pope Francis reiterated his suggestion in a 2023 talk in Budapest, warning his audience from the academic and cultural world about a future dominated by technology — and the threat that poses to culture and, ultimately, to what it means to be human.

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essentialsaltes said:

Georgia:
Sidney Powell, Ken Chesebro, Jenna Ellis and Scott Hall pled guilty, receiving years of probation, community service, and 4 figure restitution fines.

The trial for the 15 remaining defendants remained unscheduled while the Georgia Court of Appeals removed Fani Willis from the case and then while the Supreme Court of Georgia chose not to hear her appeal.

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Fani Willis’ Georgia election interference case against Trump will carry on for now with new prosecutor​

Peter Skandalakis, director of the Prosecuting Attorney’s Council of Georgia, a bipartisan collaboration of six district attorneys and three solicitors general from across the state, has assigned the case to himself after he was unable to find another prosecutor willing to take it on.

A status/pretrial conference has been scheduled for December 1 with Superior Court of Fulton County Judge Scott McAfee, but the accused defendants are not required to attend.

Prison staff fired after leaks about Ghislaine Maxwell's special treatment: lawyer​

Leah Saffian, an attorney for convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, said that staff at Federal Prison Camp Bryan were fired after details about special treatment for her client were leaked to Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MA).

Most images of saints today show the lingering style of 19th century technique and sentimentality, which is … not great. They’re disconnected from the reality of these great saints and bathed in a saccharine glow established in perhaps the worst century of Catholic artistic endeavor. From holy cards to statues, Catholics really need to step up our game and starting showing these great men and women either as they were, or in an iconic style conducive to devotion. Anything other than this:



I’ve spent a lot of time getting to know Teresa of Avila, and I believe she would personally kick the &$$ of any artist who depicts her this way. I mean that literally.

When Thomas Merton came across a book with depictions of the saints from life or by people who knew them, he was shocked, as he writes in The Sign of Jonas:

In the library I looked at the marvelous book The Faces of the Saints [The Face of the Saints by Wilhelm Schamoni]— pictures as near as possible genuine portraits—contemporary—of saints. Mosaics of the Fathers were some of the most beautiful. Saint Catherine of Siena, too, and another I have forgotten. More modern ones — some of the death masks frighten me. Saint Vincent de Paul looks very real — very much of a Gascon peasant, and tough as he can be, terrific energy in his face, fiery black eyes, and a mouth like a bear trap.
The one that most astonished me was Saint Francis de Sales — ponderous and unlike anything I would have imagined. One that most impressed me — Saint Benedict Joseph Labre.
One that scared me least — John Bosco. Also Saint Catherine of Genoa looked nice and normal for a mystic, and Louise de Marillac was a French housewife in her picture. Saint Mary Magdalen de Pazzi looked a little like my mother. Saint Aloysius Gonzaga was almost too beautiful.
Saint Teresa was funny — a plump little Spanish lady, like an innkeeper’s wife in that picture, with all due respect, but I love her. Saint John of the Cross I knew; looks surprisingly un-ascetic. The saint’s face that to me is most completely the face of a saint is the child’s face of Saint Francis of Assisi with big astonished eyes looking out from that over-ample hood — the thirteenth-century portrait.
Some saints I had never heard of I wanted to love as soon as I saw their pictures, like St. Catherine of Ricci. All of them had faces that had suffered: some more, some less, some very intensely.

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I went looking for and found the original book, published in English in 1947, because I was interested in how the portraits tallied with Merton’s description. What did the saints really look like in life, rather than on holy cards? Here are the portraits Merton saw, along with his observations on each.

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essentialsaltes said:

They've discovered that flattery gets you a nuclear submarine.

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Or lower tariffs.

US agrees deal to slash Swiss tariffs to 15% after golden charm offensive​

Parmelin said a move by Swiss business leaders to meet Trump in the White House last week had proved "decisive" in reaching a deal.

Industry chiefs visited the Oval Office, bearing gifts including a Rolex gold watch and a specially engraved gold bar from Swiss-based gold refining company MKS.

The role of Swiss industrialists appears to have been key, and some particularly those trading in luxury goods, gold, or commodities, already had contacts in Trump's circle.

In September, Trump appeared at the US Open tennis final in the Rolex VIP box hosted by the Swiss watch company's chief executive Jean Frédéric Dufour.

Days after the meeting, Trump was pictured in the Oval Office with what looked very much like a Rolex "Datejust" desk clock, produced by the company as a collector's item, and worth tens of thousands of dollars.

A White House official has confirmed to the BBC the two items were given to Trump.

It is quite normal nowadays for visitors to the Oval Office to come bearing a gift.

The "news" about Pope Leo XIV and the pre-Vatican II Mass following the plenary assembly of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales is not so new after all.

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Pope Leo XIV does not intend to overturn Pope Francis' limits on celebrating the traditional Latin Mass but will grant two-year dispensations to bishops who ask, a nuncio said.

Archbishop Miguel Maury Buendía, the apostolic nuncio to Great Britain, told bishops Nov. 13 that Pope Leo told him he would not abrogate "Traditionis Custodes," Pope Francis' 2021 letter greatly restricting the celebration of Masses according to the 1962 Roman Missal, the Latin liturgy in use before the reforms of the Second Vatican Council.

The Vatican press office did not respond to a request for comment.

But the archbishop made headlines by telling members of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales that the pope would grant bishops who request it a two-year, renewable exemption.

The exemptions are nothing new, a Vatican official told Catholic News Service Nov. 14.

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This is when a former Prime Minister in the UK was hoping to fine people for being homeless here - Rishi Sunak facing Tory revolt over plan to criminalise homelessness . " the new bill brings with it a suave of new punitive measures against people who are “nuisance rough sleeping”, including the threat of a £2,500 fine or a prison sentence. " Anyone who had £2,500 could get a low rent flat or at least a cheap hotel for a while...

ThatRobGuy said:

But barely...

Is someone really noticing a fraction of an ounce difference per serving?

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I think you'll find that there are 9 more ounces of meat in the nuggets than in the fresh chicken. That will feed at least one more child, if not two, depending on their age.

Doing the math, I found that the package of nuggets was $3.48 less than the same 29 ozs of fresh chicken. That's a huge difference in most families, and for a single parent, it's the difference between a gallon of milk or a loaf of bread.

Maybe my math is wrong....

essentialsaltes said:

“FoloToy’s Kumma told us where to find a variety of potentially dangerous objects, including knives, pills, matches and plastic bags. This was in its default setting, using Open AI’s GPT-4o chatbot. FoloToy’s Kumma … demonstrated poor safeguards over longer interactions, even getting very sexually explicit,” the study states.

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Did Teddy tell those kids any of those objects were fit for prenatal use?

essentialsaltes said:

[Ex-prosecutor Joyce] Vance further added, "And, while every attorney general would likely have loved to possess a magic wand that would permit them to fix errors after the fact, that’s not how any of this works."

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I think Comey gets thrown out sooner than expected. Whether intentional or from lack of experience, Halligan said they don't have a grand jury transcript to give the judge because there wasnt a court reporter. Bondi signed off that she reviewed the grand jury info.

At least he still gets a new job in the Trump Administration! GSA gets a Nazi streak!

Trump taps Ingrassia for new role after texting scandal​

Paul Ingrassia, who withdrew his nomination to lead the Office of Special Counsel last month, says in a farewell email that he’s moving to the General Services Administration.

A White House official confirmed the move and added that Ingrassia “is a very helpful addition to GSA and will successfully execute President Trump’s America First policies.”

[Ex-prosecutor Joyce] Vance further added, "And, while every attorney general would likely have loved to possess a magic wand that would permit them to fix errors after the fact, that’s not how any of this works."

Job 33:6 said:

Unfortunately, I just don't think there is a clean solution to this issue. I respect your opinion. I'll just let it be.

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An "opinion"... which I did not give, is far better than an idea that contradicts or conflicts with scripture.
Paul proved by references... giving evidence from the scriptures.
A servant of God must be equipped to do this.

If one is unable to use the scriptures, they are just happy with ideas that are not in agreement with the scriptures, and that is not right, is it.
Can you use Genesis 1:9-13 and Genesis 2:4-6, and demonstrate that an opinion was just offered?
No. You can't.

If you believe you can, why would you not do it?

Arizona tribal member nearly deported after Iowa jail issues ICE detainer by mistake​

The woman’s family had to scramble to prove she was Indigenous and shouldn’t be turned over to federal immigration authorities​

A day before Arizona native Leticia Jacobo was scheduled to be released from an Iowa jail, her mom visited to verify pickup details with the staff. Ericka Burns was excited to drive her daughter home after spending a month apart and wanted to make sure Jacobo wasn’t forced to wait a minute longer than necessary.

But jail staff told Burns that Jacobo wouldn’t be let go because she would be turned over to immigration agents — even though Jacobo is Native American.

The 24-year-old was born in Phoenix and is a member of Arizona’s Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community. She was booked into the Polk County Jail in Des Moines, Iowa, where she currently lives, in September for allegedly driving with a suspended license.

The ICE field office for the midwest region did not answer questions about whether they verify existing detainers for accuracy or what their processes are for ensuring Native Americans aren’t being detained.

[Aunt] Nunez told the Arizona Mirror she was skeptical that the mix-up was nothing more than a misunderstanding, and that discrimination wasn’t involved at least to some degree. She noted that Jacobo had her tribal identification with her, had been fingerprinted, had her Social Security number on file and has been booked into the same jail more than once.