Interesting. Sometimes seeming coincidences are just that. But sometimes not.
From Father Z’s Blog.
The Catholic Church that is across the street from the Butler fairgrounds has an outdoor grotto to Our Lady of Fatima and the visionaries. The statue of Our Lady faces in the direction of the fairgrounds.
You can see this on Google maps: HERE
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In case anyone forgot:
This is not the complete tally.
Please note that this list does not mention votes gathered in ways not permitted under the US Constitution.
Specifically, if the state legislature has not changed the voting method, but some officer of the executive branch, or a judge ruling from the bench, has changed voting methods (e.g. drop boxes allowed, mail-in ballot restrictions removed, voter ID restrictions removed) this is unconstitutional.
I have not followed the cases closely, but as best I know, no law cases concerning the 202 voter fraud have been heard on the merits. All were refused hearing on the grounds of standing, or some other facetious grounds. If anyone has heard otherwise, please tell me.
List taken from Darwin-to-Jesus, like myself, a recovering atheist.
1. North Korea: Christians face extreme persecution, including imprisonment in labor camps, torture, and execution if discovered practicing their faith. The regime has intensified measures to prevent Christians from escaping to China.
2. Afghanistan: Christians must practice their faith in complete secrecy. Discovery can lead to execution by the Taliban, who view conversion from Islam as a betrayal.
3. Somalia: The small Christian community in Somalia faces severe persecution from al-Shabaab militants and societal pressure. Being a Christian is seen as a betrayal to family and community, often resulting in death.
4. Libya: Christians, particularly converts from Islam, face intense persecution from Islamic militant groups and are at risk of abduction, torture, and murder.
5. Pakistan: Blasphemy laws are often misused to target Christians, leading to imprisonment or mob violence. Christian communities face social discrimination and violence.
6. Nigeria: Islamist militant groups like Boko Haram and Fulani herdsmen frequently attack Christian villages, resulting in mass killings, abductions, and the destruction of churches and homes.
7. India: Hindu nationalist groups frequently attack Christians, and new anti-conversion laws in several states have increased the persecution of Christians, leading to violence and harassment.
8. China: The government has intensified its crackdown on Christianity, including the demolition of churches, arrests of church leaders, and increased surveillance and control over religious activities.
9. Iran: Christians, especially converts from Islam, face harsh treatment, including arrest, imprisonment, and torture. House churches are frequently raided, and members are detained.
10. Eritrea: Christians face imprisonment in inhumane conditions, with many held indefinitely without trial. The government heavily restricts religious practice, targeting evangelical and Pentecostal communities.
This is the most interesting and even moving interview this year.
Public figures speaking honestly in public is as rare as a two-tailed comet in Aquarius. Men willing to admit past wrongs, confess the sin of having been deceived, even moreso.
And to let a man speak without interruption? This is like something from long ago, from long lost Atlantis, when newsmen did things called interviews, or had shows that were not scripted and fake.
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This was too crude and rude to download, but too funny not to link to.
Language warning. Bad language. Southpark levels of TEAM AMERICA WORLD POLICE language.
Assuredly, everyone and his cousin wants to hear what legal scholar, failed lawyer, and intellectual bigwig John C Wright has to say about the constitutional and philosophical nuances of the recent Loper decision overturning Chevron Deference.
Naw. No one want to hear that. We want to hear the profanity laced screed by the Mountain Who Writes, the Lord of Sad Puppies, the monster of Monster Hunter himself, Larry “International Lord of Hate” Corriea.
https://monsterhunternation.com/2024/07/03/chevron/
(and leave thanks and comments at his site.)
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This was remarkably insightful from the immortal Sargon of Akkad:
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Here in the far future year of AD 2024, rockets land on their tailfins as God and Robert Heinlein intended.
Elon Musk, the D.D. Harriman of our timeline, posted this on the worldwide computerized Telstar-linked visiphone system we use.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/
I would like to see this man as vice president and then later as president. He is a powerhouse of a speaker.
I post this to draw attention, my brothers and sisters in Christ, to his first dream of seeing who will visit him in his mansion in heaven. Amen to what he says.
From the pen of “Darwin to Atheist” on Twitter. He is answering a crackpot who casts doubt on the historical figure of Jesus on the grounds that no contemporary written accounts of Him survive.
***
Below are other historical figures, and the earliest accounts we have of them.
Alexander the Great
•Lifetime: 356-323 BC
•Earliest Accounts:
•Arrian: “Anabasis of Alexander” written around AD 130-150, about 400 years after Alexander’s death.
•Plutarch: “Life of Alexander” written around AD 100, about 400 years after Alexander’s death.
Julius Caesar
•Lifetime: 100-44 BC
•Earliest Accounts:
•Suetonius: “The Twelve Caesars” written around AD 121, about 165 years after Caesar’s death.
•Plutarch: “Life of Caesar” written around AD 100, about 150 years after Caesar’s death.
Tiberius Caesar
•Lifetime: 42 BC – AD 37
•Earliest Accounts:
•Tacitus: “Annals” written around AD 115, about 80 years after Tiberius’s death.
•Suetonius: “The Twelve Caesars” written around AD 121, about 85 years after Tiberius’s death.
Socrates
•Lifetime: 470-399 BC
•Earliest Accounts:
•Plato: Various dialogues written soon after Socrates’s death, but the best-preserved texts are from about 50-100 years later.
•Xenophon: Writings also from about 50 years after Socrates’s death.
**Comparison with Jesus**
•Lifetime: Circa 4 BC – AD 30
•Earliest Accounts:
•Paul’s Epistles: Written between AD 50-60, within 20-30 years of Jesus’s death.
•Gospels (Mark): Generally dated to around AD 70, about 40 years after Jesus’s death.
•Josephus: AD 93-94, about 60 years after Jesus’s death.
•Tacitus: AD 115, about 85 years after Jesus’s death.
For a crucified Jewish carpenter to have records of his existence earlier than all of the above figures… that’s pretty impressive, don’t you think?
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Postscript: an added bonus, from another account called Autocorrect:
Regarding the carefully folded burial cloth found by St Peter in the tomb.
In Hebrew tradition, when a Master was done eating he would wad up the napkin and toss it on to the table, so the servant would know to clean up. When he carefully folded his napkin, that meant “don’t touch anything, I’ll be back”
Found on Twitter: https://twitter.com/BradMiller1010/status/1800188977665728828
From the pen of a Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Army, Brad Miller.
3 yrs ago on June 10, 2021, I assumed battalion command fully knowing I’d be fired soon after. I was relieved of command Oct 28, 2021 for not complying with the covid shot mandate implemented in Aug 2021. The first 10 days of June 2021 were the hardest of my 19+ years in the Army. Even harder than the “10 toughest days in the Army” (Air Assault School).
I arrived at Fort Campbell, KY on June 1 juggling a variety of emotions – excitement & nerves for command mixed with the sickening feeling that I’d soon endure the ignominy of being relieved of command & losing my career. There was no way I was going to take the covid shot & didn’t want to order others to take it against their wishes.
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Star Wars is dead to me. At one time, it was my favorite franchise, more cherished to me than Star Trek or Babylon Five. Now? I cannot even provoke a sense of contempt for it.
It reminds me of going into an art museum, seeing paintings by Dutch Masters or Pre-Raphaelites, and then going into the modern art wing, and seeing a toilet, or a crucifix in a urine jar.
But, for those of you still able to give a tinker’s damn, the Dark Herald of Arkhaven has a review:
Okay, I now know why they launched this thing during Pride month. It was no happy coincidence that the gayest Star Wars ever was let loose in the wild during June.
This review will cover the first three episodes of the Acolyte. The first two were available for streaming last night and the third was made available to me by means I’m not going to discuss in public.
I’ll start with the third episode because the first two are overloaded with mystery boxes that are packed with so much foreshadowing the story is more comprehensible if I just jump ahead. The episode opens on the Planet of the Space Lesbians. The protagonist and antagonist are introduced as a set of young identical twins (girls naturally because there are no men at all on this idyllic world). The Space Lesbians are powerful Wiccans who have secret knowledge of the Force. The Force is actually, quite literally, female. It comes from motherhood. They have two mothers, one who was their birth mother and the one that knocked her up using the Force. I’m grateful they couldn’t get away with showing the conception because I have a horrible feeling it would have involved scissoring and force lightning
There is a lecture held on the womanly power of the Force. It’s not a “force” at all as that is far too masculine of a concept, it is in fact a thread that sews the cosmos together and it can be tugged upon to accomplish certain… This is all Wicca stuff, if you’ve ever become acquainted with that neopagan Marxist bullshit of a “religion” you’ll recognize the concepts pretty quickly.
Read the whole thing here: https://arkhavencomics.com/2024/06/05/star-wars-the-acolyte-first-impressions/
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An interview with Steven N. Gosney of Crimelaw, a friend and a fan, on the deep topics of faith and fealty.
GULAG ARCHIPELAGO by Solzhenitsyn, published in the West in 1973, reaches its Golden Anniversary of 50 years. Gary Saul Morson writing in the New Criterion pens an ode to the work and the writer, so deeply despised by the Left in the West, who put paid to their fool’s gold.
Required reading for Memorial Day, to recall what demonic vision of dystopia all soldiers in the Twentieth Century died to curtail and turn back.
It is also required reading for those of us who hope to live to see the day when the Soviet and Red Chinese genocides, lies, mass expropriations, slave-camps, human butchery, and sadistic atrocities are condemned in the West with equal hatred and fervor as are Nazi ones.
Historical note: GULag is an acronym for the Russian term Glavnoye Upravleniye ispravitelno-trudovyh Lagerey (Главное Управление Исправительно-трудовых Лагерей), or “Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps.”
Morson lauds Solzhenitsyn’s work and titles his column as the Masterpiece for Our Time.
The column reads, in part
Western intellectuals usually supposed that Russian dissidents might suffer the sort of punishment that in their own countries is reserved for dangerous criminals. At worst, Westerners pictured conditions like those in tsarist Russia, long considered the model of an oppressive state. That is why Solzhenitsyn devotes so many passages to contrasting what passed for tyranny in nineteenth-century Russia with ordinary Soviet conditions.
Begin with numbers. Solzhenitsyn instructs: from 1876 to 1904—a period of mass strikes, peasant revolts, and terrorism claiming the lives of Tsar Alexander II and other top officials—“486 people were executed; in other words, about seventeen people per year for the whole country,” a figure that includes “ordinary, nonpolitical criminals!” During the 1905 revolution and its suppression, “executions rocketed upward, astounding Russian imaginations, calling forth tears from Tolstoy and indignation from [the writer Vladimir] Korolenko, and many, many others: from 1905 through 1908 2,200 persons were executed,” a number contemporaries described as an “epidemic of executions.”
By contrast, Soviet judicial killings—whether by shooting, forced starvation, or hard labor at forty degrees below zero—numbered in the tens of millions. Crucially, condemnation did not require individual guilt. As early as 1918, Solzhenitsyn points out, the Cheka (secret police) leader M. I. Latsis instructed revolutionary tribunals dispensing summary justice to disregard personal guilt or innocence and just ascertain the prisoner’s class origin: this “must determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning of the Red Terror.”
On this basis, over five million peasants (classed as “kulaks,” supposedly better off than their neighbors) were forcibly exiled to completely unsettled wastelands with no food or tools, where they were left to die. The same punishment later befell whole nationalities deemed potentially disloyal (such as ethnic Germans, Chechens, and Crimean Tatars) or dangerous because of the possibility of receiving subversive support from a foreign power (as in the case of Koreans and Poles). “The liquidation of the kulaks as a class” was followed by the deliberate starvation of millions of peasants. All food for a large area of what is now Ukraine was requisitioned, and even fishing in the rivers was prohibited, so that over the next few months inhabitants starved to death. Idealistic young Bolsheviks from the capital enforced the famine. In total, Stalin’s war on the countryside claimed more than ten million lives. As Solzhenitsyn makes clear, this crime is not nearly as well known among intellectuals as the Great Purges, which claimed fewer victims, because many purge victims were themselves intellectuals.
Arrests also took place by quotas assigned to local secret-police offices, which, if they knew what was good for them, petitioned to arrest still more. After World War II, captured Russian soldiers in German slave-labor camps were promptly transferred to Russian ones, as was anyone who had seen something of the Western world. Even soldiers who had fought their way out of German encirclement were arrested as traitors, simply because they had been behind German lines. Still more shocking, the Allies—who could not imagine why people would not want to return to their homeland—forcibly repatriated, often at bayonet point, over a million fugitives, some of whom committed suicide rather than face what they knew awaited them.
By all means, read the whole thing Masterpiece for Our Time.
