(source: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article...-maps.html)
 The US army has many bases around the world, but the locations of some of these bases are classified for national security reasons.  There's a number of famous ones that almost everyone has heard of -- Area 51, Dugway, Kirtland, Cheyenne Mountain, Dulce...

Inspired by a book about "blank spots on the map" (which is where these bases are hiding), Josh Begley decided to look up those areas on Google Earth (and satellite data) and published a book and website about those mysterious military bases.

I'm not into this kind of thing, but I have to admit that I was surprised that there are so darn many of them!

Here's the website:  http://empire.is/

The Google Earth overlay doesn't work but you can scroll down to look at the bases and their names.

Oh...and Popular Mechanics has a neat article on the strangest military bases: https://www.popularmechanics.com/technol...s-gallery/

Now there's an interesting name, eh?  Not one that you usually see connected with prophecy, yet he made a series of prophecies (in the Ladies Home Journal Magazine, of all places) in 1900 that have in large part come true.

He was an engineer, and the prophecies he made were technology.  And he's better at prophecy than almost all the religious prophets are... and he's a lot more specific.  No more "the metal thingy will collapse and launch mankind to the unknown" vague handwavium.  He got pretty darn specific. (https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16444966)

Here's one: "Photographs will be telegraphed from any distance. If there be a battle in China a hundred years hence, snapshots of its most striking events will be published in the newspapers an hour later.... photographs will reproduce all of nature's colours."

So... color photography and although he couldn't predict the Internet, Instant Uploaded Cat Pictures are everywhere.

"Americans will be taller by from one to two inches."

Kind of mundane, but really very interesting and indeed true.

"Wireless telephone and telegraph circuits will span the world. A husband in the middle of the Atlantic will be able to converse with his wife sitting in her boudoir in Chicago. We will be able to telephone to China quite as readily as we now talk from New York to Brooklyn."

So -- mobile phones.  There was no such thing as wireless telephone and wireless telegraph back then.

Check the (short) article for other prophecies that he got right.

He did get two of them wrong, though:  "There will be no C, X or Q in our everyday alphabet. They will be abandoned because unnecessary."  and " Everybody will walk 10 miles a day"

Yah, that didn't age well.

And one that sadly didn't come true: "Mosquitoes, house-flies and roaches will have been exterminated."

But we can hope, eh?

I think that non-religious prophecies do a lot better than the religious ones.

The "covid gap in education" refers to the learning loss and widening achievement gaps that students experienced because of the disruption caused by the pandemic. According to some studies, students are on average four to five months behind in math and reading, and students of color and low-income students are the most affected

(article on conservative website The Hill: https://thehill.com/homenews/education/4...hool-year/)

While I see concerns on the national basis, I'm not seeing a lot of conversation about it here in Dallas.  In fact, what I see is "well, they're catching up" and I'm not entirely sure I believe that since Texas has a habit of "teaching to the test" rather than actually focusing on the issue. https://texas2036.org/posts/tracking-cov...ning-loss/

There's some interesting talk on Reddit, though, including one about the pandemic even having an impact on college students: https://www.reddit.com/r/Professors/comm...ing_worse/

So is it a concern where you live?  Is anyone doing anything other than hand-wringing about it?

I thought I'd share this book with you all.  (this book is one that a lot of conservative/traditional Catholics have in their homes).  Please feel free to add Christian deliverance prayers to this thread as you wish.

In the Catholic Church there are deliverance prayers that can be prayed against the demonic.  Some prayers are restricted only to exorcist priests and it is forbidden for laity and parish priests to use them.  Apparently there can be spiritual backlash if the wrong people use them.  Some prayers can only be prayed by priests.  Again, if prayed by the laity there can be spiritual backlash.  However, there are some that can be prayed by the laity. 

Father Chad Ripperger is a well known Catholic priest.  He is an exorcist and works in deliverance ministries.  He wrote two books with deliverance prayers.  One for the laity.  One for the priests.  I'm sharing from his book 'Deliverance Prayers' *for use by the laity.  These are deliverance prayers that the laity can use to take command, break curses, break hexes, cut links, close portals, bind, make acts of rejection, break occult ties, remove generational spirits, set up perimeter protections, be reconciled to God, etc etc.

We have used these prayers when we have felt evil or suspected demonic or negative spiritual activity.  I can't see the spiritual realm so I don't know what the prayers did or didn't do.  But these are the go-to prayers for conservative/traditional Catholics so I'm sharing.

Never actually thought about this one, but it came up on a Discord channel and I was really unsatisfied with the answers -- which were:

* seeds of the plant Silphium, so popular with the Romans that they drove the plant to extinction
* stylized (female) breasts
* stylized buttocks (gender of your choice)
* testes (this after a look at the Pink Reese's Candy) https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GEnbENkXYAAU...ame=medium  (yes, that's safe for work but ... maybe you should make sure you're not observed anyway)
* various plant leaves (ivy, for example)
* eye of a wild boar (this is Japanese, for reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_symbol)

The actual human heart looks nothing like the heart emoji... so how come we use it to symbolize a heart and love?  It's an interesting little mystery.

The first actual depiction of a "heart shape" as a heart/love symbol is actually pretty recent -- one site traces it to around 1250 AD: https://www.artandobject.com/news/history-heart-shape 

And that angle ties it into the idea of courtly love (something that was invented around that time.)

So there's a little history-mystery.  Given its appearance so early, I'm going to go with "ivy leaf", myself... for no real reason except that I like the idea.

https://www.wwiidogtags.com/ww2-history/...y-soldier/

“Look, you chaps only have to do this once. But I’ll have to do it all over again in Hollywood with Errol Flynn!” 

So today I learned that David Niven has a pretty wild history.  He was always cool and suave in his roles, so I would have suspected that he came from minor aristocracy.  As it turns out, he was from an upper class family and his father and grandfather died as war heroes... but that's not the end of the tale by any means.

The "Dogtags" website has some interesting tidbits, including the bit where he was arrested for mouthing off and then shared some whiskey in jail with his guard, leading to his doing a jailbreak.  He left for America and resigned his commission enroute.

In spite of this mark, when WWII came around, he went back to England to serve, got commando training, and ended up in a Special Forces unit called "Phantom."  He was awarded the Legion of Merit.

Wikipedia also has some juicy tidbits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Niven

A number of fairly famous people were in Phantom: https://www.phantomghq.co.uk/famous-phantom

https://www.wwiidogtags.com/ww2-history/...y-soldier/

“Look, you chaps only have to do this once. But I’ll have to do it all over again in Hollywood with Errol Flynn!” 

So today I learned that David Niven has a pretty wild history.  He was always cool and suave in his roles, so I would have suspected that he came from minor aristocracy.  As it turns out, he was from an upper class family and his father and grandfather died as war heroes... but that's not the end of the tale by any means.

The "Dogtags" website has some interesting tidbits, including the bit where he was arrested for mouthing off and then shared some whiskey in jail with his guard, leading to his doing a jailbreak: https://www.wwiidogtags.com/ww2-history/...y-soldier/  He left for America and resigned his commission enroute.

In spite of this mark, when WWII came around, he went back to England to serve, got commando training, and ended up in a Special Forces unit called "Phantom."  He was awarded the Legion of Merit.

Wikipedia also has some juicy tidbits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Niven

Joe Biden is expected to make one of the most Important Decisions of his Presidency tonight, thats not something anybody wants to hear. Of course, they could just be propping him up and making him look like a decisive President. 

NGL Ive got so many reservations there needs to be a heavy response here. Also not going to lie, it bothered me that it seemed this eventuality and what to do once it happens, wasn't exactly planned for. How do you not be able to track your drones and distinguish them from enemy drones? Could they have transponders and once they get within a certain range of the base have them turn on so they could be identified on radar? 

But beyond that here we are on the brink, Blinken saying the Middle East is in worse shape since 73, and it just seems like we are being drugged into this, whereas most times in my lifetime atleast America has been cautious AF and overly prepared when we finally do commit. I suspect Biden will have a small measured response, upon small measured response till our troops get hit again. Which is likely worse than no response at all


https://x.com/sentdefender/status/175209...24739?s=20

Quote:The President of the United States, Joe Biden is expected to make one of the most Important Decisions of his Presidency tonight, as he Orders a Response for the One-Way “Suicide” Drone Attack by Iranian-Backed Forces against the Tower 22 Patrol Base in Northeastern Jordan this weekend which resulted in the Death of 3 American Soldiers; the Response will likely come in upwards of 3 Stages which will Target the Capabilities of Iranian-Backed Militias in Syria and Iraq with Kinetic Strikes, alongside Cyberattacks on Facilities used by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Iran followed by Kinetic Strikes against Strategic Locations in Iran related to their Nuclear, Ballistic Missile, and Drone Capabilities. The Strikes will more than likely come from U.S. Air Force Combat Aircraft across the Middle East as well as Tomahawk Land-Attack Cruise Missiles launched by U.S. Navy Vessels in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.

My wife and I currenty live among a neigborhood of one percenters. We didnt pick the nighborhood to move here as back in 2017 we didnt have many choices in lieu of my wifes job. We left the Atlanta region to move here. Our 1st choice was to move to Greenville, SC  but we had to settle on the Columbia region. The neighborhood is lilly white and is a blend of native born South Carolina and the rest are out of state born in the USA citizens. 

We are also done with living here and will sell the home this year and move 17 miles towards the center of the state before the 2024 election. That location will be 100's of miles away from the larger cities including Charlotte, Columbia, Greenville and others. The lot is on a dead end cul de sac and is surrounded by water, Lake Murray. The neighbors are friendly and watch each others back. Assumming a civil war begins in this country that neighborhood would be my choice for protection and distance from large population centers. We own over an acre so we can grow food and have water access for irrigation and fishing. We arent what I would consider as preppers but we do make our moves based on strategic surroundings. In this neighborhood all are either hunters or fisherman. They also work hard and many are former US military. All own boats. 

Our current neighboorhood isnt like the above. IMO many traffic Fentanyl and much worse. The HOA is useless and scared. Assumming all hell breaks loose I would not feel comfortable living among them as I can see them turning on and eating each other as social elites are social elites. Plus they have kids in the twenty year old age group. 

So in brief I am not sayng all is well as all I am trying to do is the best for our safety without total disruption of our lives. We are closer to her employer, the people are nicer and many raise their own food. We will enjoy our life better. Many of our contractors are in the area and I have a source for range fed chickens and beef as a result. We have hunting and fishing gear, boom booms, bikes, a canoe and other non electric equipment. Toilets can be filled with buckets of water by hand if the city water ever shuts off. We can also boil water. We do have several solar panels and a portable Inverter with battery for a small chest frezzer. The home will have two fireplaces, one wood burning the other wood with a natural gas insert. Outside we have two grills. One gas and the other is a Belson Park Grill for charcoal or wood. Like our current home the new one will have a walk out ground floor. The temperature in the current home never drops below 60 degrees nor above 75 on the ground floor so if no power we can live there with minimal disruption.  We have never turned the HVAC on for that entire floor since 2017. Dirt is an  excellent insulator. 

I consider ourselves as lucky to the extreme as I can only pray for those in the cities as a resultbof the administrations policies. 

Were just bidening our time

So I just walked into a restaurant for a carryout! I noticed a girl wearing Moon Boots!

I think 40 years ago when I was 10 my mom bought me Moon Boots. They were my best friends until they got wet.

I am sure now they are waterproof!

Does anyone remember Moon Boots?

Are they back?

I've never been on a subway.  There just aren't any in my area.  
And when I took buses, there just weren't as many unique riders as there are today.

Ravens, peacocks, costumes, tattoo artists at work, people doing workouts, nappers, Darth Vader and Batman......
Even better theatre than the shoppers of Walmart.....
40 Hilarious Subway Fails That Are Impossible To Ignore

Ok so I didn't want to toss my opinion in on this YouTube issue, but now I think it's showing something more than is being realized. 
First the story:
Chinese tourists hit back at London St Pancras pianist as they accuse musician of hogging the piano then trying to provoke the group before they asked him to stop filming them | Daily Mail Online

Quote: A group of flag-waving Chinese tourists at the centre of a row with a boogie-woogie pianist have hit back today.
Brendan Kavanagh, who goes by the name Dr K, sparked a row after he shared video showing the moment the Chinese tourists told him to stop filming them during a livestream from London St Pancras station.
After the musician was accused of touching one of the women - an allegation he strongly denies - British Transport Police officers trundled over to the bust-up and told Dr K not to upload the clip to YouTube.

Disclosure has happed. Period. 

It’s real.  

Adjust your worldview. 

We do not know what they are. 

We do not know it if is one thing, or many things. If they are breakaway human, alien, other intelligences from future, past, or under the oceans… or something else we can’t even understand.  

We do know it’s real.

First off domt order a pizza. Dietary laws mean their pizza is some of the worlds worst pizza.

But thats nowhere near the worst.

My half sister grew up there and had to do national service. IDF indoctrination is real, my half sister would be seen as someone with a compassionate approach to the world. Not until you ask her about Palestinians, and then IDF indoctrination comes out. 

She is not a Zionist tho, just someone "programmed" to their perspective. The zionists dont joun the army, because they are the ones EXEMPT from national service. Hassidics and other orthodox jews dont even pay tax!. And they are the ones calling for genocide.

We were taken in an IDF vehicle to a Palestinian "bakery" in the west bank, it was an open fire wit a hotplate and some tents around, and by custom they serve us first, before their own people who only had a short lunchbreak before they had to go to work. Kids collected stones. That lunch was deliberately planned unbeknownst to us before it happened. and that kind of antagonization has been still happening 30 years later.

Those kids collectind stones, mow many do you think might be still alive?.

The genocide is real.

Also dont drive in the bus lanes.

I sometimes watch these types of videos, it's becoming popular for some big railway stations to have a piano in the public spaces. There was even a show on Channel 4 with poeple playing and getting to peform in a concert.
This guy Brendan Kavanagh has a Youtube Channel of him playing a lot of Boogie Woogie and recently has gone viral for another reason.



(OK, couldn't get the original vid to work, I think because it was a live stream? So I found this instead)

I'm glad he stood his ground and wasn't bullied away, this kind of behaviour by the Chinese communist party and it's goons is becoming very common around the world.
With evidence of secret police stations and bullying of ex-pats becoming more common. China seems to be asserting itself and is being more open about it's it treats other countries.

Just for some general background details, let's look at WIKI
Whitey Bulger - Wikipedia

Quote: James Joseph "Whitey" Bulger Jr. (/ˈbʌldʒər/; September 3, 1929 – October 30, 2018) was an American organized crime boss who led the Winter Hill Gang in the Winter Hill neighborhood of Somerville, Massachusetts, a city directly northwest of Boston. On December 23, 1994, Bulger fled the Boston area and went into hiding after his former FBI handler, John Connolly, tipped him off about a pending RICO indictment against him. Bulger remained at large for sixteen years. After his 2011 arrest, federal prosecutors tried Bulger for nineteen murders based on grand jury testimony from Kevin Weeks and other former criminal associates.

Quote:Bulger was transferred to several facilities in October 2018; first to the Federal Transfer Center in Oklahoma and then to the United States Penitentiary, Hazelton, near Bruceton Mills, West Virginia. Bulger, who was in a wheelchair, was beaten to death by inmates on October 30, 2018, within hours of his arrival at Hazelton. In 2022, Fotios Geas, Paul DeCologero and Sean McKinnon were charged with conspiracy to commit first-degree murder in Bulger's death.

Quote: The namesake nephew of bloodthirsty Boston mobster James “Whitey” Bulger worked closely with Hunter Biden in his Chinese business ventures, according to emails reviewed by The Post.
Jim Bulger, chairman and co-founder of the Boston-based Thornton Group financial advisory firm, forwarded an email in January 2014 from associate Mike Leonard proposing a meeting among Hunter Biden — whose father, Joe Biden, at the time was vice president of the United States — Bulger, and Rosemont Seneca co-founder Devon Archer.

Quote: 
The CIA considered prisoners especially good subjects, as they were willing to give consent in exchange for extra recreation time or commuted sentences.
 
Whitey Bulger, a former organized crime boss, wrote of his experience as an inmate test subject in MK-Ultra. “Eight convicts in a panic and paranoid state,” Bulger said of the 1957 tests at the Atlanta penitentiary where he was serving time. “Total loss of appetite. Hallucinating. The room would change shape. Hours of paranoia and feeling violent. We experienced horrible periods of living nightmares and even blood coming out of the walls. Guys turning to skeletons in front of me. I saw a camera change into the head of a dog. I felt like I was going insane.”

Bulger claimed he had been injected with LSD. Lysergic acid diethylamide, or acid, had become one of the CIA’s key interests for its “brain warfare” program, as the agency theorized it could be useful in interrogations.

This is awful.  The illegals come to the US, bringing their dogs with them, only to abandon them at the border.  The illegals enter the USA.  The poor dogs are left behind, not understanding what has happened, and left without food or water or human companionship, and no medical care.  They were a part of a family and now ... poof ... they are abandoned.  Thousands of them.  And they are breeding.

Videos at the link.

Story Here - The Other Border Crisis

Quote:In addition to the waves of human beings crossing America’s southern border every day, another crisis is unfolding. Thousands of dogs are being abandoned by the illegal border crossers who bring their pets only to learn that the dogs can’t come in.

These dogs that are left behind are then breeding which only makes the problem worse.

I had two times allready problems with accessing ATS now morning during my coffee drinking.


Because the recents events  of past year, i wonder is it breaking again now ?


Saved this :  my antivirus ( Avast ) give this alert :   HTML:Script-in [Susp]       That was labeled as threat

And firefox  give this :  PR_CONNECT_RESET_ERROR


Edit:  now some minuts later i can connect again . Anyone else notice issues ?

Time Traveling Shape Shifting Reptile's are a distraction? 
for entertainment puroses only and no one really thinks the royals are octopi or reptiles 
I know the videos, etc. David Ickes work etc.
Wasn't he an injured sports guy?
The first 2/3d's of his books typically are a rehash of his prior books
If you tell a lie long enough Some good data here conclusion seems too easy
Now every lie has to have some truth so let's take a look the octopus a known intelligent shapeshifter that has been around for a long time, & is uber smart.
FTR I kinda posted this before somewhere else but not in thread format
Diving in Octopus Camouflage Ability Transferred To Human Skin Cells 

Quote:

Squids and octopuses are masters of camouflage, blending into their environment to evade predators or surprise prey. Some aspects of how these cephalopods become reversibly transparent are still “unclear,” largely because researchers can’t culture cephalopod skin cells in the lab.

---

The researchers acknowledge funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

Quote:The discovery and description of the elegant RNA editing of the octopus provides a compelling example of the fallacy of the widely-held idea of “scientific proof.” The beauty of science, to me, is that new evidence continually alters what we thought we knew.

Quote:Octopuses are like aliens living among us — they do a lot of things differently from land animals, or even other sea creatures. Their flexible tentacles taste what they touch and have minds of their own. Octopuses’ eyes are color-blind, but their skin can detect light on its own (SN: 6/27/15, p. 10). They are masters of disguise, changing color and skin textures to blend into their surroundings or scare off rivals. And to a greater extent than most creatures, octopuses squirt the molecular equivalent of red ink over their genetic instructions with astounding abandon, like a copy editor run amok.

Quote:The blood of octopuses and squids is blue because they use a different protein for oxygen transport than human beings do. This protein, hemocyanin, relies on copper to bind with oxygen, which causes the blood’s discoloration. Squids and octopuses have adapted to their environment by changing the hemocyanin concentration in their blood.

---

Lil Further Down
More primitive species (like the octopus, squid, and a number of other invertebrates) use a different protein, called hemocyanin, which relies on copper, rather than iron, as the binding mineral of choice. When copper binds with oxygen, the discoloration is different, resulting in the blue color of their blood.

Quote:Blue people of KentuckyThe Fugate family, or the “blue people of Kentucky” are a good example of those affected by genetic variants leading to methaemoglobinaemia.
The tale of the blue people began when Martin Fugate, a French orphan, moved to Troublesome Creek in Kentucky. Years later, he married Elizabeth Smith, an American woman, and began a family. Both Martin and Elizabeth carried a rare recessive gene that causes high levels of methaemoglobin. It takes two people with the same recessive gene to produce a blue child. Four out of Martin and Elizabeth’s seven children had the recessive gene from both parents, causing them to have high levels of methaemoglobin in their blood. As a result, they had blue skin and lips.

---

lil down
In animals such as crabs, the blue colour of blood is caused by a respiratory pigment containing copper as a key element instead of iron. If we look further into the animal kingdom, we can find examples of green blood in earthworms and skinks, purple blood in lamp shells, and even clear blood in ice fish, all due to the variation in haemoglobin and respiratory pigments. A small molecular change, with a rainbow of outcomes

Quote: Two genetic blood diseases plagued the European Royals. The porphyrias are a group of inherited disorders associated with the production of heme, an iron-containing compound used to make hemoglobin in red blood cells. In each type of porphyria, one of the enzymes that controls heme biosynthesis is lacking, leading to a buildup of porphyrins in the body and causing symptoms such as abdominal pain, nervous system manifestations, mental health issues, and skin eruptions.

---

lil later 
Hemophilia A, labeled the “royal disease,” is inherited as an X-linked recessive, with an incidence of 1 in 5,000 male live births. It is due to a deficiency of factor VIII, a protein coagulant that plays a vital role in the blood clotting pathway.[sup]11,12[/sup] About one-third of affected males are new mutations, meaning the alteration in the gene occurs for the first time in them; hence there is no antecedent family history of the disorder. Hemophilia A is characterized by easy bruising, prolonged bleeding, and hemorrhaging into joints, muscles, and other tissues including the brain. The gene for hemophilia A has been mapped and cloned to Xq28. Carrier detection is possible and replacement therapy with factor VIII is effective.[sup]1[/sup]

Quote:BACKGROUND: OCTOPUSES HAVE STRANGE POWERSThe octopus has long been one of the ocean’s most intelligent and adaptive phylum with camouflage/color-changing abilities and limb regeneration. They pass intelligence tests, perform tasks like opening containers, and can physically communicate with other octopuses. Their brains are large; 500 million neurons (brain cells), and by comparison, humans have 86 billion brain cells. They evolve slowly. In 300 million years, just 300 species have existed, which could be attributed to their ability to alter their genetic instructions via RNA editing. This has given the species an evolutionary advantage. They can increase the variation in the proteins they produce, thus allowing them to adapt to evolving environments, such as polar waters.

Quote:“They have big eyes, connected with the big brain, which means they work in the same kind of world that we do,” he adds. “They’re large eyes, they’re very complex eyes, and they work much like ours.” You read it here first: Cephalopods have the perfect eyes for world domination.

Quote:One surprising star of the coronavirus pandemic response has been the molecule called mRNA. It’s the key ingredient in the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines. But mRNA itself is not a new invention from the lab. It evolved billions of years ago and is naturally found in every cell in your body. Scientists think RNA originated in the earliest life forms, even before DNA existed.

Quote:Under patent law, an inventor may obtain a patent on “any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof.”  Section 101 is subject, however, to an important implicit exception: “laws of nature, natural phenomena, and abstract ideas are not patentable.” (Mayo Collaborative Servs. v. Prometheus Labs., Inc., 132 S. Ct. 1289, 1293 (2012)). Such “manifestations of a nature are free to all men and reserved exclusively to none.” (Funk Bros. Seed Co. v. Kalo Inoculant Co., 333 U.S. 127, 130 (1948)).

Quote:At that point, Benjy’s father, Alva Stacy, explained to the doctors, “My grandmother Luna on my dad’s side was a blue Fugate. It was real bad in her.”
Benjy Stacy was the latest child born in a long line of Blue Fugates – the blue people of Kentucky – who had lived in the Appalachian mountains of Kentucky for the past 197 years.

Quote:Then again, a 2021 study on octopus brains found some revealing similarities to human brains. Among many other things, they determined that octopus brains have a lot of folds — a physical trait that brains acquire through a process known as gyrification — even though this trait is usually associated with mammals and other complex organisms that need to retain large quantities of information.
Exposed to cold water, octopuses will change the genes in their brain, study reveals

Crazy/Crazier fox is here.
 
Not to much else to say except thanks fo the invite, time to dig

This is old news, but it's new to me. Just hearing about it.

NFL legend Tom Brady ... who is Catholic ... was 'helped' by witchcraft to win games.  He and his supermodel ex-wife are/were Catholic and married in a Catholic Church.  She turned to Wicca and got him involved in the rituals.  She got him to set up a Wicca altar before games and make intentions on it, and she got him to carry different stones that supposedly have different powers, etc etc.

So .... did Tom Brady win all those games and Super Bowls because he was a good player?  Because those players around him were good and carried him?  Because he cheated?  OR ... because of witchcraft?

Google Tom Brady Witchcraft.  Lots of mainline news stories on it.  It's not a made up thing.

Tom Brady and Witchcraft - CBS Sports

Quote:According to the 41-year-old quarterback, the other equally important part of the equation is the pregame rituals that his wife, Gisele Bundchen, has him go through. In the days after the Patriots' 13-3 Super Bowl win over the Rams, Brady described some of those rituals.  
 
First, Brady noted that Gisele makes an 'altar' for him at every game. "I've learned a lot from my wife over the years," Brady said. "She's so about the power of intention, and believing things that are really going to happen and she always makes a little altar for me at the game, because she just wills it so much. So she put together a little altar for me that I could bring with pictures of my kids."

"I have these little special stones and healing stones and protection stones and she has me wear a necklace and take these drops she makes and say all these mantras," Brady said.

TDDA was a really wonderful woman.   She was a member here on DI briefly, and many will remember her on ATS.

I wish I had gotten to know her better.  I enjoyed talking with here about her life in Germany and her many interests.
I didn't know she was interested in cars and racing.

I knew she had health problems and sadly, those problems led to her being taken from this world far too soon.

There is an ATS thread about her passing:
Silent Moments --In Memory of Beloved Member TDDA
She was having trouble with the defib that was installed in Nov 2022.
zosimov said: "She went in on Dec 27th to have it replaced, and the replacement surgery didn't work, so spent several weeks under 24/7 watch, during which she was communicating with me and others on Discord (even after a heart attack!)."
"She had another procedure on Jan 15, this time was hoping to have a smaller and less intrusive device placed, but there were complications during the surgery and she did not make it."

I encountered Temple OS from a fellow dev a couple of years back. The catchcry was that this OS could talk to god... no really.

Quote:"The system was characterized as a modern x86-64 Commodore 64, using an interface similar to a mixture of DOS and Turbo C. Davis proclaimed that the system's features, such as its 640x480 resolution, 16-color display, and single-voice audio, were designed according to explicit instructions from God.[sup][1]"[/sup]

Quote:In mid-2013, his website announced: "God's temple is finished. Now, God kills CIA until it spreads [sic]."[sup][6][/sup] Davis died after being hit by a train on August 11, 2018.[sup][7][/sup]

A lot of times, selective breeding is used to illustrate some of the process of evolution, but selective breeding actually punches a giant hole in the natural selection process of evolution theory.

Think about this:  Natural selection depends on random mutations that favor some survival in certain environments, and this, supposedly after gobs of very random mutations and time, makes for new species.

But selective breeding by humans is done with very careful selection of mutations specifically to create certain traits or exaggerate others.  It can cause change in a much shorter timeline. In fact we have some creatures used for genetic research like Drosophila melanogaster that have been bred for countless generations to drive change and show how natural selection "works".

But guess what?  NOT ONE creature, even with countless generations of very specific selection, has been made into a NEW and distinct genus.  No amount of selective breeding can make a cat into a dog. There are countless weird dogs, but every one is still a dog and inherently dog in nature. It doesn't start to become a bear or cat, or raccoon no matter how much it might kind of resemble something superficially.  No amount of selective breeding will make a mouse into a rabbit. They even start out extremely similar. There are tons of examples where centuries of breeding weird variants and they all still fall into the same genera.  Guppies are still guppies, goldfish with giant pop-eyes are still genetically goldfish, tomatoes are still tomatoes -- can't even squeak out an artificial eggplant. No amount of selective breeding can even make a fruit fly into a house fly. 

These things aren't even big leaps, just the simplest tiniest changes and we can't even make bacteria, with millions of generations of selection, become a new genus of bacteria. It's still the same type of bacteria with some different traits.  It's not now a multi-celled creature. Not once have we been able to even turn a single-celled rapidly reproducing genus into a multi-celled creature.

Given all of the very very focused efforts put into selective breeding and not one single micro-leap into a new genus and you want to believe that random mutations created all of this stuff, countless genera that exist from some single-celled bacteria.  What can't even be duplicated in the smallest increment in a lab with focused effort is expected to happen randomly over and over and over to where there are all these unique genera. 

It sounds like a joke to try and believe that.

A topic that people strongly take sides over - Israel vs Hamas/Palestinians.  Controversial for discussion.

The freed hostages report how 'civilian Palestinians' kidnapped Israelies and held them hostage, and how Palestinian children and 'civilian wives' mistreated the hostages etc etc.  Some examples are given in the article.  You can not separate Hamas from the Palestinians.  They are one in the same.  Hamas is a way of life for the 'Palestinians'.

Some will say it's understandable on the part of the 'Palestinians'.  Some will say that this proves there are no innocent 'Palestinians' and that peace isn't possible.  

Gazan "Civilians" Involved in Every Stage of Hamas Hostage Scheme Released Israelis Reveal

Quote:Gazan 'Civilians' Involved in Every Stage of Hamas Hostage Scheme, Freed Israelis Say.

In primetime Hebrew TV interviews, the released hostages have confirmed that ordinary Gazans were deeply complicit in every stage of the hostage scheme. Unarmed teens helped to abduct Jews from their homes on Oct. 7, while Gazan women and children held some of the Israelis captive. In other cases, Gazan doctors collaborated with Hamas terrorists to covertly treat kidnapped Israelis and imprison them in hospitals. When the Israelis encountered Gazans on the streets, the results were often terrifying.

"The main issue is that the organization is very much melted into the social structure of Gaza," Michael Milshtein, a former senior Israeli military intelligence officer and a leading expert on Hamas, told the Washington Free Beacon. "There is no way you can really know who is Hamas. Someone might have a grocery store where he sells tomatoes and water, but he might also have storehouse of weapons and give religious lessons there.  And his wife and kids might be keeping an Israeli hostage at home.  "Hamas is not only a political matter in Gaza. It's a way of life," 

"I experienced hell. Everyone there are terrorists," Schem said in a separate interview on Israel's Channel 13. "There are no innocent civilians, not one."