Artifice of Eternity

The day after President Trump announced the federal takeover of law enforcement in Washington, the White House invited the podcaster Benny Johnson to sit in what is called the new media seat at the administration’s press briefing. The privilege includes being called on first by the press secretary, Karoline Leavitt. Mr. Johnson took the opportunity at the briefing to recount what he claimed was his own experience with crime in the nation’s capital in recent years. He said that he had recorded murders on a camera outside his home, and that his “house was set ablaze in an arson.” Any claims that Washington wasn’t dangerous, he said, were “lies.” “Thank you for making this city safe, because no parent should have to go through what my family went through,” Mr. Johnson told Ms. Leavitt. In fact, police records show, nobody has been murdered since at least 2017 on the block where Mr. Johnson lived in Washington. And his home was not burned, though his next-door neighbor’s house was...

 

Donald Trump’s Big Gay White House Mr. Moran, 44, is the pasha of a new power tribe in the capital: the gay men of the Trump administration. These are the A-Gays. They’re (mostly) out, they’re proud (to work for President Trump) and they have big jobs inside (or alongside) this administration. They wield influence all over town, from the Pentagon to the State Department to the White House to the Kennedy Center. “We’re like Visa,” Mr. Moran said. “Everywhere you want to be.” He sipped a dirty vodka martini and surveyed the room. Two Republican men waved at him from across the club. “Both gay,” he explained. This was also true of the middle-aged Trump appointee who ambled over a moment later to catch up. But apparently not so of the young-looking White House aide who approached a few minutes after that. “Straight as an arrow,” Mr. Moran said as the aide walked away. He laughed and added, “I hang out with my straights just as easily as I hang out with my gays.” https://www.nytimes.com/202...

 

 

 

These five states have the highest homicide rates: Mississippi Louisiana Alabama New Mexico Missouri But Trump doesn’t really care about crime. Like all our local Thugs, he just wants to use brutalizing power to get some shallow semblance of White Supremacy back.

Slow-bleeding, tariff-driven ‘sneakflation’:   US consumers are only just beginning to pay the cost of tariffs. “Amore granular look at import price data indicates that there’s a slight dip in import prices from China; however, for the vast majority of countries, it’s basically been flat, Olu Sonola, head of US economic research at Fitch Ratings, told CNN in an interview. “So that’s telling you that all of that is paid by importers,” he said. “It’s now a question of, is it the manufacturer, is it the retailers, or is it the small business that’s bringing it in? They now have to figure out, ‘How much of this can I take on, and how much of this will I pass on?” “It’s very likely they will pass the bulk of it on,” he added. To this point, consumers have been mostly shielded from starkly higher prices. Through June, US consumers had absorbed 22% of tariff costs, but that share was expected to rise to 67% by October, according to an August 10 estimation from Goldman Sachs economists. Th...

As President Trump posed triumphantly for photos with police officers, government agents and members of the National Guard in Southeast Washington last week, lawyers across town in federal court grappled with his new brand of justice. The stream of defendants who shuffled through a federal courtroom on Thursday afternoon illustrated the new ways in which laws are being enforced in the nation’s capital after the president’s takeover of the city’s police. They were appearing before a magistrate judge on charges that would typically be handled at the local court level, if they were filed at all. One man had been arrested over an open container of alcohol. Another had been charged with threatening the president after delivering a drunken outburst following his arrest on vandalism. And one defendant’s gun case so alarmed prosecutors that they intend to drop the case. Mr. Trump has cast his crackdown on crime as a success, and suggested on Friday that it was a blueprint he would seek to appl...

 

 

Figures from a classified Israeli military intelligence database indicate five out of six Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in Gaza have been civilians, an extreme rate of slaughter rarely matched in recent decades of warfare. As of May,   19 months into the war, Israeli intelligence officials listed 8,900 named fighters from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad as dead or “probably dead”, a joint investigation by the Guardian, the Israeli-Palestinian publication  +972 Magazine  and the Hebrew-language outlet  Local Call  has found. At that time 53,000 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli attacks, according to health authorities in  Gaza , a toll that included combatants and civilians. Fighters named in the Israeli military intelligence database accounted for just 17% of the total, which indicates that 83% of the dead were civilians.

 

 

 

 

the congregation recites this pledge as a closing rite: As a Christian and a child of God ... •I support the dignity and worth of every human being as the Gospel demands and will work every day to treat each person as I want to be treated. • I strive to dismantle white privilege and white supremacy and to understand the injustice and suffering caused by them. • I commit myself to eliminating prejudice from my thoughts and actions so that I can promote the racial justice needed in our church, our nation, and our world.

“In the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, nearly an hour from the closest city, a small group of homesteaders is building an exclusive community from scratch. Applicants to the community are screened with an in-person interview, a criminal-background check, a questionnaire about ancestral heritage and sometimes even photographs of their relatives. The community’s two architects — a classically trained French horn player who has livestreamed his own sex videos, and a former jazz pianist arrested but not charged for attempted murder in Ecuador — say they must personally confirm that applicants are white before they can be welcomed in.”

 

 

Costs were sharply on the rise for producers and manufacturers in July, a sign that higher prices could soon filter down to American consumers. US inflation on the wholesale level picked up steam last month, with prices rising by the fastest monthly pace since June 2022, new data showed Thursday. The latest Producer Price Index, which measures the average change in prices paid to producers, jumped 0.9% from June, lifting the annual rate to 3.3%, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. PPI serves as a potential bellwether for the prices consumers may see in the months ahead.

 

 

  https://www.ucf.edu/pegasus/harris-rosen/

But crimes in DC are at a 30 year low. And in the last 15? Violent crimes in Washington, D.C. 4,000 3,000 2,000 1,584 violent crimes in 2

Trump Delayed a Medicare Change After Health Company Donations The president posted talking points provided by one firm that donated millions, and his administration delayed a change on coverage of pricey bandages that could have hurt the company and others like it.

 

 

 

Why do evangelicals think the Bible is more alive than the Holy Spirit? They act like the book is the third person of the Trinity. “But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything…” Not a book.  Scriptures are holy by faithfully witnessing and pointing us to the living God. They cannot contain God or stop God from acting in history. Or do evangelicals think the Spirit is done and sitting on her ass? What a gutter theology.

 

Weather Service is now hiring back hundreds of positions that got cut in the DOGE chaos The National Weather Service has  received permission to hire  450 meteorologists, hydrologists and radar technicians just months after being hit hard by  Department of Government Efficiency-related cuts  and early retirement incentives. The new hiring number  includes 126 new positions  that were previously approved and will apply to “front-line mission critical” personnel, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration official told CNN. The NWS cuts have spurred concerns over how well-prepared the country is to withstand hurricane season, which is just  starting to heat up  in the Atlantic. The staff reductions also have been scrutinized in the wake of the deadly Texas floods in July, with  vacancies at weather service forecast offices there .

  Judges Openly Doubt Government as Justice Dept. Misleads and Dodges Orders Legal experts say such concern from the bench could have a more systemic effect, eroding the healthy functioning of the courts. Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui recently pushed back against Justice Department prosecutors for trying to convince him that he needed to be “highly deferential” to their request to keep a search warrant sealed. Credit... Craig Hudson for The Washington Post, via Getty Images By  Alan Feuer Aug. 4, 2025,  3:36 p.m. ET Justice Department lawyers have long enjoyed a professional benefit when they appear in court. As a general rule, judges tend to take them at their word and assume they are telling the truth. But in the past several months, as members of President Trump’s Justice Department have repeatedly misled the courts, violated their orders and demonized judges who have ruled against them, some jurists have started to show an angry loss of faith in the people and the i...