When you say “religion” are you speaking of God as told through the Bible or just the business side of religion
I find the words Spoken in the Bible to be very logical and the basis of our civilized nations, it is when you remove the “logic” of God from our society that civilized behavior stops being the norm
Based on 1,000’s of years and all the major atrocities over those years, I’m not sure GOD of the Bible was ever a dominant force on earth except during creation.
Your post compared with @peterma one highlights a major difference which is not immediately apparent when speaking of “Religious people” - Peter refers to “miracles” and often uses the phrase in his posts “A man once said …” whereas you seem to use the principles and biblical doctrine in a different way - as a guidance to your life.
I have to say that having listened to Jordan Peterson on the subject - many many times - I like his approach “I try to behave as though God exists” And I have heard him argue that because people used to use the bible as an instruction manual for their lives and therefore their behaviours were changed - then God DOES exist by virtue of the effects of his “teachings” - I like that !
And I have to say on the whole that the benefits of the Judeo-Christian belief system to societies have rendered those societies by and large better places to live. I am less convinced that other religious systems (with the possible exception of Bhuddism) have such beneficial effects.
This game has been played by Russia for years, but now that a war is underway, it can become more serious
Russia is preparing to deploy aircraft and combat naval vessels to the Caribbean to conduct military exercises in the coming weeks, its first exercises in the Western Hemisphere involving both air and sea activity in five years, a senior administration official told McClatchy and the Miami Herald.
The Biden administration is not expressing concern over the deployment, with the official stating it poses “no direct threat to the United States.” But the administration believes Moscow intends to use the exercises as a “messaging tactic” after President Joe Biden gave Ukraine permission last week to fire U.S.-made weapons across its border into Russia to defend its territory.
The official said the administration expects Moscow will “conduct heightened naval and air activity near the United States” that will likely include port calls by combat naval vessels in Cuba, and possibly Venezuela — two longstanding Russian allies that have seen occasional visits from Russian naval assets in the past two decades. The exercises may also include “aircraft deployments” and flights in the region, the official said.
Administration officials suspect that Cuba approved the Russian port call “at least in part” over an incident last year in which a U.S. nuclear submarine docked at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, angering the Cubans, a second U.S. official said.
Russia has sailed ships into the Western Hemisphere every year from 2013 to 2020, and has sent flights through the region that have violated the airspace of U.S. allies. But the anticipated activity would be the first coordinated air and sea exercise of its kind since 2019, during the Trump administration, the official noted.
Russia deploying air and sea assets for military exercises in Caribbean, U.S. official says
‘Miracles’ are an interesting thought.
Speaking to a man yesterday who 2 years back had a major stroke - he’s a hard worker and has made good recovery. His story encompasses a ‘miracle’ or maybe ‘God coincidence’
A digger driver rang him, a man he hadnt spoken to for 4 years, to caution him that he needed to take care especially when driving, that he the digger driver had received this in prayer.
Needless to say my mate said ok and drove his lorry home a little slower than usual - 2 days later came the stroke, luckily he wasnt driving.
aside from legal corruption / lobbying, Is America’s politics rife with fraud and corruption? 4 OF ILLINOIS’ PAST 10 GOVERNORS WENT TO PRISON
NEW YORK (AP) — A New Jersey businessman took his star turn on the witness stand in the bribery case against Sen. Bob Menendez on Friday, telling a jury he believed he had a $200,000-to-$250,000 deal in 2018 for the Democrat to pressure the New Jersey attorney general’s office to stop investigating his friends and family.
Jose Uribe testified in Manhattan federal court in the afternoon, providing key testimony against Menendez and two other businessmen charged in a conspiracy along with Menendez’s wife. Next week, Menendez’s lawyers will get to cross-examine the naturalized U.S. citizen.
“Next week we get the truth,” Menendez said just before stepping into a car that carried him away from Manhattan federal court, where he has been on trial for the last month. Although he generally speaks briefly in Spanish each day leaving court, he made the comment about truth in English.
Uribe, 57, who pleaded guilty to charges in a March cooperation deal, was the star witness for the government in its bid to win a conviction against the senator, who once held the powerful post as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He was forced out of it after charges were lodged last fall.
Menendez, 70, has pleaded not guilty to charges that he accepted gold bars, cash and a luxury car in return for doing favors for the businessmen. Two businessmen and Menendez’s wife, Nadine Menendez, also have pleaded not guilty. Nadine Menendez’s trial has been postponed until at least July after she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
Uribe testified that he was close friends with Wael Hana, who is on trial with Menendez, when Hana told him in early 2018 that New Jersey state criminal investigations swirling around the trucking business of a friend of his and his own insurance business could be largely put to rest if he was willing to spend $200,000 to $250,000.
Uribe said Hana told him that he would go to Nadine Arslanian, who had begun dating Menendez that year, and then “Nadine would go to Senator Menendez,” although Uribe did not testify about how the couple could resolve multiple investigations.
Uribe said he held a July 13, 2018, political fundraiser for Menendez, which the senator attended, raising $50,000. He said he attended an afterparty with Menendez and Arslanian that included cocktails, along with “some laughs, some jokes and some dancing,” but there was no mention of the work he expected Menendez to do on his behalf.
“It was a crowded and loud place,” Uribe said.
He said his confidence that the deal was working faded in the fall when an investigator from the attorney general’s office asked to interview his employee.
“I was not happy,” he said.
Who holds the supreme court justices accountable, Alleged ethics violations within the Supreme Court are typically enforced through a combination of internal accountability mechanisms and external scrutiny. But unlike other branches of government, there is no formal mechanism in place specifically designed to hold Justices accountable for misconduct.
Instead, enforcement largely relies on self-policing within the institution, with Justices responsible for upholding ethical standards among their peers.
Supreme Court justices have received nearly $5 million in gifts since the early 2000s, and one justice in particular, Justice Clarence Thomas, accounts for nearly all of it.
Data released Thursday by watchdog group Fix the Court unveils a list of gifts justices have received since January 2004. The dataset was released ahead of an expected release of the justices’ financial disclosure reports Friday.
Thomas, nominated to the high court by former President George H.W. Bush, made headlines last year after an investigation found he had taken dozens of trips paid for by separate billionaire friends.
According to the data compiled by Fix the Court, since 2004, Thomas has accepted $4,042,286, or 193 gifts. The group reported that, for Thomas, there’s an additional 126 “likely but not confirmed gifts.”
Of the nearly 200 gifts, the group said Thomas only reported 27 of the gifts on his financial disclosures.
The dataset included current and former justices dating back to 2004, tallying their gift totals, including Thomas’s, to be about $4.7 million.
“Supreme Court justices should not be accepting gifts, let alone the hundreds of freebies worth millions of dollars they’ve received over the years,” Fix the Court’s Gabe Roth said in a statement. “Public servants who make four times the median local salary, and who can make millions writing books on any topic they like, can afford to pay for their own vacations, vehicles, hunting excursions and club memberships.”
Roth continued, arguing that there is influence in who gives the justices gifts and what they are buying with their “generosity.”
To us in Europe, and I am in no way speaking for all, but the idea that the Supreme Court has become a political institution, where political beliefs are determining rulings, where judges elected for life can be so openly corrupt, and where the executive branch can dictate rulings (by threats, risk of ridicule, embarrassment or what have you), is unimaginable. It is old Eastern Europe style. Along with everything else going on in US politics, we are just in disbelief. Come November, if the incumbent wins… The world will be a very different place. World order will be challenged and for sure challenged. I fear an isolation-focused US, rise of dictators in the vacuume the US will allow by absence, and then everyone will have to fend for themselves. China, Russia and North Korea will prosper and grow strong, and boom. The US will face the greatest threat ever. All because of Trump and “America first”.
Biden is the incumbent. If he wins, the world will indeed be a different place.
I would expect the US economy to continue to decline, censorship to increase, illegals to be given amnesty (securing one-party rule), and the justice system henceforth be used to quash any resistance. Men are women, but trust the science! Marxist and postmodernist propaganda would be forever entrenched in the education system. China and the USA would probably rule together bonded by their mutual commitment to collectivism (with US officials on the Chinese payroll). Those in allied countries that are already OK with a 50%+ income tax might enjoy the new hegemon! (as long as they don’t end up in re-education camps)
Of course, that is if we all don’t get nuked first. People in Norway rooting for Biden? I get not liking Russia. I do not understand cheering on mutually assured destruction.
No matter which candidate wins, its a good idea to be ready for anything. The USA cannot protect you forever.
Biden winning would be worse than the most isolationist Trump administration imagineable.
Hey, maybe someone else will win.
Any way it goes, I wish you luck! Seriously! We live in crazy times!
I get why people voted Biden the first time. They wanted a return to times past. But, the Biden Administration is not 1970s 80s 90s or even 2000s Biden. He is not a moderate.
Voting Biden again would make no sense, unless you like dumpster fires.
Vote anyone else! Hell, vote for the freaking Green Party! Just no more Democrats! Please!
Also, corruption pisses me off. Both sides.
I remember years back reading an MI-6 report detailing that China and Iran were trying to get the Democrats to win Presidential race while Russia was trying to get the Republicans to win.
Foreign money is at play in our power centers.
China funds our Universities. Look at UPenn Biden Center and how rich Biden has become recently, as one example.
But, he’s not the only one.
I am only a humble engineer and I have a conflict of interest assessment each year. I have to sign off on and declare any conflicts and any gifts from vendors.
None of our major candidates for President would pass such an inquiry and its been that way for some time. Clinton had money coming in from China decades ago.
This should not be allowed.
And when is the last time we had a candidate that served? Almost all have been draft dodgers (or too young).
Yeah, I know. Situation is not good.
One way to fight back is don’t let them turn you against your fellow countrymen. We are in this together. We have to come back from this.
The list will continue to grow as corruption in politics increases
Alex Jones Is a disgraceful human being, where do they come from?
This is key - the enemies of America and everything it stands for attempt to to visit division - left vs right, dem vs rep, us vs them.
“And if a household is divided against itself, that household can never stand”
Rotten foundations are the foundations of all failures
Will the crack head be found guilty
Federal district Judge Maryellen Noreika is overseeing Hunter Biden’s gun case in Delaware.
Noreika, a Donald Trump appointee, was confirmed by the US Senate in August 2018 by voice vote. She had the support of both Democratic senators from Delaware. Under the Senate’s blue slip tradition, nominees for district court seats require the support of home state senators to move forward.
Sen. Chris Coons, a Democrat, praised Noreika in a statement after her nomination was announced. He described her and another appointee as “seasoned attorneys,” with “impressive trial skills, deep experience in federal practice, and profound respect for the law.”
Before becoming a federal judge, Noreika was a former patent lawyer in Wilmington, Delaware. She grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and graduated from University of Pittsburgh School of Law in 1993.
Noreika’s political spending has gone to both parties. On the presidential level, federal records indicate that she gave $1,000 to then-New York Sen. Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign for the Democratic nomination. She later donated $2,300 to the eventual 2008 Republican nominee, then-Arizona Sen. John McCain. She donated to the subsequent GOP nominee as well, giving $2,500 to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign in 2012.
Noreika also financially supported Sen. Tom Cotton, a conservative Republican from Arkansas, during his 2014 senate race. She also donated $1,000 in 2009 to the DSCC, the Senate Democrats’ campaign arm.
Jury deliberations began Monday and will resume tomorrow in Hunter Biden’s federal gun trial in Delaware.
The 12-member jury will decide whether the president’s son is guilty of three charges related to his purchase of a gun in 2018, which prosecutors say violated federal law because he was addicted to crack cocaine at the time. He has pleaded not guilty.
During the trial, the defense focused on the month Hunter Biden purchased the weapon, arguing that there’s no direct evidence he was using drugs then. Prosecutors, citing witness testimony and other evidence said the addiction at the time was well documented and that he knew he was an addict.
If convicted of al three counts, Hunter Biden could face up to 25 years in prison, though he likely will receive far less than the maximum as a first-time offender.
He would be the first son of a sitting president convicted in federal court if found guilty.
https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/hunter-biden-trial-06-10-24/index.html
This is not looking good for Sen. Bob Menendez, I expect to see him listed in the near future.
NEW YORK (AP) — A New Jersey businessman who prosecutors say bribed Sen. Bob Menendez testified Monday that the Democrat told him in summer 2019 that he’d look into a state criminal probe threatening his business and later assured him there was no threat and boasted about saving him.
At the time, Jose Uribe said in Manhattan federal court, he assumed that Menendez knew he had made a $15,000 down payment and was making monthly payments on a Mercedes-Benz for Menendez’s girlfriend, who married Menendez a year later.
Prosecutors contend that the car, along with gold bars and hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash found in the couple’s Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, home, were bribes paid by three businessmen, including Uribe, to get the senator to use his influence to serve their purposes and earn them money from 2018 to 2023.
New Jersey businessman tells jury that bribes paid off with Sen. Bob Menendez
It is expected that the list of 2020’s will keep growing over the next few years
Biden is at historically low approval ratings and nobody has ever been re-elected to the US Presidency below a 44% approval rating… Any votes for Biden is simply hate votes against Trump…
Stumbling, Mumbling and Bumbling Joe is suffering from a low approval rating… Not low polling…
If Biden shows up for the debate on June 27th (and I still think it is 50/50 that he’ll bail) that should be the end of his candidacy for 2024 (i.e. he’ll be replaced by the party) and maybe also his current presidency by invocation of the 25th amendment…
Biden has a 37.4 percent approval rating… Would the people that supposedly approve of Biden’s leadership trust a surgeon… Financial advisor… Or their kid’s teacher if any of those 3 acted/talked like Biden… Would those who approve of how he is handling things let Slow Joe babysit their kids… Walk the family dog… Would they give him the keys to the family SUV and take a ride with Slow Joe if he was driving…
Yet they believe Slow Joe is capable/qualified to be leader of the free world…
Rudy, like many others, fell for the bait.
PHOENIX (AP) — Rudy Giuliani, a former New York City mayor and Donald Trump attorney, was processed Monday in the criminal case over the effort to overturn Trump’s Arizona election loss to Joe Biden, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office said.
The sheriff’s office provided a mug shot but no other details. The office of the Clerk of the Superior Court for Maricopa County said Giuliani posted bond of $10,000 in cash.
“Mayor Rudy Giuliani — the most effective federal prosecutor in U.S. history — will be fully vindicated,” said his spokesperson, Ted Goodman. ”This is yet another example of partisan actors weaponizing the criminal justice system to interfere with the 2024 presidential election through outlandish charges against President Trump and anyone willing to take on the permanent Washington political class."
Giuliani pleaded not guilty in May to nine felony charges stemming from his alleged role in the fake electors effort. He is among 18 people indicted in the Arizona case, including Trump attorneys John Eastman, Christina Bobb and Jenna Ellis.
Former Trump presidential chief of staff Mark Meadows and Trump 2020 Election Day operations director Michael Roman pleaded not guilty Friday in Phoenix to nine felony charges for their alleged roles in the scheme.
The indictment alleges Meadows worked with other Trump campaign members to submit names of fake electors from Arizona and other states to Congress in a bid to keep Trump in office despite his November 2020 defeat.
Other states where criminal charges have been filed related to the fake electors scheme are Michigan, Nevada and Georgia.
Rudy Giuliani processed in Arizona in fake electors scheme to overturn Trump's 2020 loss to Biden
And there you have it.
WILMINGTON, Delaware (Reuters) -President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden was convicted by a jury on Tuesday of lying about his drug use to illegally buy a gun, a verdict Democrats may seize upon to counter Donald Trump’s claim of a justice system weaponized against him.
A 12-member jury in Wilmington, Delaware, federal court found the defendant guilty on all three counts against him, making Hunter Biden the first child of a sitting U.S. president to be convicted of a crime.
Hunter Biden, 54, lightly nodded his head after the verdict was read but otherwise showed little reaction. He then patted his lawyer Abbe Lowell on the back and hugged another member of his legal team.
He then left the courthouse without making a statement.
His father, Joe Biden, issued a statement saying he accepted the outcome of the case and would respect the judicial process as his son considers an appeal.
The judge set no date for sentencing, but added the timeline is usually in 120 days. That would place it no later than a month before the Nov. 5 U.S. presidential election.
Sentencing guidelines for the gun charges are 15 to 21 months, but legal experts say defendants in similar cases often get shorter sentences and are less likely to be incarcerated if they abide by the terms of their pretrial release.
In a statement on Tuesday, Joe Biden said: “As I said last week, I am the President, but I am also a Dad. Jill and I love our son, and we are so proud of the man he is today. So many families who have had loved ones battle addiction understand the feeling of pride seeing someone you love come out the other side and be so strong and resilient in recovery.
"As I also said last week, I will accept the outcome of this case and will continue to respect the judicial process as Hunter considers an appeal. Jill and I will always be there for Hunter and the rest of our family with our love and support. Nothing will ever change that,” the statement said.
Hunter Biden found guilty of lying about drug use to buy gun
Why would anyone give a politician or justice a large gift? A $250k RV because we’re friends?
A gift out of the kindness of their heart? No. We all know the purpose. It’s for influence.
Glad to see someone is watching, but ultimately it won’t lead to any changes. At least not until one side’s gifts are so egregious the other side will actually do something about it. And Thomas has set a fairly high bar of acceptance.
