There is a thing, I think, called the deference doctrine where courts give deference that the government is operating in good faith.
Judges have wised up.
The Trump DOJ is burning that bridge.
Judges are now either providing or requesting grand jury testimony because the Trump DOJ just can't be trusted.

Desk trauma said:

Alright, it's mid June. Surely preparations are underway to head north and rescue the Greenland from the horrors of the Denmark socialized medical system?

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Maybe.

That's awesome to hear! You're doing great.

Prayers and God bless you and be with you!

The Juno spacecraft captured two volcanic plumes rising above the horizon of Jupiter's moon Io (inner most of the Galilean moons).

Knight in Shining Armor

Could be spiritual warfare. You digging deeper into the Bible, that doesn't go unnoticed. Where-ever the saints are, trials are sure to follow. When you get involved in Christianity to go from Sunday-only to living it the way it teaches, you're signing up for a host of anxities. The kind of peace the Bible teaches about only makes sense in light of those. We're not on cruise-control, but we know the Captain

Aussie52 said:

First resurrection of the 'saved' at the second Coming of Christ and second at the Great White Throne Judgement of the 'unsaved'. That would be 2!

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And I am not sure if there are 3 or 4 and there is another in. Gal 1:4 called to delver. //. EXAIREO. means to

PLUCK US OUT to deliver us from this evil age !!

dan p

If you sign the organ donor card on your license, your loved ones have virtually no say what happens to you. The doctors make the decision. We’ve too often seen doctors a little too eager to bring death for the greater good to others.

Years ago, my father suffered a heart attack and the moment the doctor heard my dad had a touch of emphysema he decided this was end stage. We told him that he’d been working on the house the day before and the doctor ignored us. We said he’d walked two miles home from the car mechanic because he didn’t want to ask for help just the past week. He ignored us, saying we didn’t understand. He said my dad had been hiding how bad his illness was.

Interestingly, the doctors and nurses called the time of death. They know this because they were upping the pain meds until they knew it would kill him. So we demanded he be taken off all medications. The doctors balked. The nurses gave us attitude. Serious attitude. One nurse even lectured us that she thought we were cruel to our father. So that night we all prayed. And guess what? While we all went to the chapel, a nurse snuck in to the room to deliver morphine without our consent. WITHOUT CONSENT. So committed were they to death. She said it was a mix up but we knew. So then, the family had to sit watch. Someone stayed with my dad constantly just to make sure the medical staff wouldn’t kill him.

Two days later my father woke up. We arranged an ambulance to bring my father to another hospital. Nurses and doctors literally barred the way, refusing to let him out. It was insane. The ambulance driver said he’d seen this before and he announced, “I don’t work for you.” He then rammed my father’s bed through the blockade. And my father lived five more years. He walked three miles every day and ate healthy. He got to play with his grandchildren.

Continued below.

Apparently, we're back at war with FISA again?

WilliamLhk said:

Everybody knows it who studies eschatology: ἁρπαγέντα / ἁρπάζω / harpazō.

2 Cor.12:2, 4; 1 Thes.4:17; Rev. 12:5

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And in 1 Thess 3:13 it is the word COMING //. PAROUSIA

AND the same Greek word in 2 Thess 2:1 COMING

And in Gal 1:4 the Greek word EXAIREO. and also in. ACTS 21:21

AND DEPARTURE //. APOSTASIA. in 2 Thess 2:3

dan p

You see, the administration has a new new theory on why Trump’s name has to stay on the building, one that was, apparently, not revealed to the lower court, but popped up in the DOJ’s last-minute filing.

Here’s a little taste: “The District Court is not allowing us to close in order to properly fix up and repair the Building, including potentially life threatening structural damage like beams and parking garage ceilings that are rusted, and in serious danger of falling onto people below — Indeed, total collapse!”

That is, you will likely note, not actually a legal argument in favor of keeping Trump’s name on a building whose name can only be changed by an act of Congress. The legal argument, such as it is, is the reveal that they secretly changed the Center’s bylaws...

More @ link.

Say it aint so said:

To understand how concerned they were with defusing Trump's Epstein problem, they literally met in the situation room, aka, the war room.
Yet, Trump officials were literally leaking what was unfolding in the war room with reporters.

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O Lordy, there might be tapes.

Scoop: Trump aides fear Haberman and Swan obtained Situation Room tapes for "Regime Change"​

link2

[Axios] reported White House officials believe New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan obtained tapes of Situation Room discussions for their book "Regime Change," due out June 23. Independent recording devices are forbidden in the room, which Axios noted would make such a leak "a shocking breach" of one of the world's most protected settings.

[In the Trump era, not that shocking.]

White House officials have not disputed the accuracy of the quoted dialogue

Haberman and Swan declined to comment.

essentialsaltes said:

Talarico leads Cornyn, Paxton in Texas Senate race, new poll shows​

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Talarico leads Paxton by 3 points in Texas Senate race post-runoff poll​

Forty-seven percent of likely general election voters in the state backed state Rep. James Talarico (D) in the poll from Texas Public Opinion Research, compared with 44 percent for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R).

The survey was conducted after the Republican primary runoff contest Tuesday, in which incumbent Sen. John Cornyn lost to Paxton, who had been endorsed by President Trump.

Nearly a third of the respondents who voted for Cornyn in the runoff indicated in the poll that they will support the Democratic nominee in the November election.

Second, in regard to Scripture, a new ressourcement should frankly and unapologetically adopt a patristic style of exegesis, one drawn more from the Alexandrian school than from the Antiochene. I’m obviously borrowing here from Newman, but I think his insight is particularly helpful in our context. The Antiochene approach, when it devolves into its modern historical-critical guise, had become almost completely dominant in exegesis, but it was not feeding personal spirituality, preaching, or the evangelical mission of the Church. When I speak of the Alexandrian approach, I mean one marked by a typological interpretation sensitive to the various layers of meaning within the scriptural texts; to the coherent and mutually illuminating relationship between the Old and New Testaments, which was so central to de Lubac, Daniélou, and company; and to the real divine authorship of the Bible—the singular voice that speaks through the entirety of the Scriptures.

Joseph Ratzinger’s famous 1988 Erasmus lecture in New York is of decisive importance here. Before the cream of the crop of Catholic biblical scholarship—including Brown and company—Ratzinger gave a seminal talk in which he praised the historical-critical method while also noticing its inherent limitations and questioning its dominance. Though Ratzinger was dismissed by the academic establishment, the paper had a profound impact on the theological landscape. One might think also in this context of N.T. Wright, whose own recovery of the stunning metanarrative of the entire Bible has been decisive in contemporary explorations of the Scriptures, including my own.

These are the reasons not hire Republicans. They seem to get rid of of funds for for Americans.

I used to love horror; I didn’t always walk with the Lord. Hollywood is not, never has been, nor ever will be concerned about revering God. I believe we should give Hollywood up to their own ends; give them what they insist on. As a Christian, you should ask yourself, do you want to be apart of that?

““All things are lawful for me,” but not all things are helpful. “All things are lawful for me,” but I will not be dominated by anything.”
‭‭1 Corinthians‬ ‭6‬:‭12‬ ‭ESV‬‬

In Galatians Paul makes it clear that the churches of Galatia were in imminent danger of adding Judaism to Christianity in such a way as to destroy the nature of Christianity itself. Nor was theirs the only age in which liability to do so has existed, and has had to be watched against.

The law is a testing of human nature, to reveal whether or not it can produce righteousness for God, and it must be is a perfect rule of righteousness for that nature in all it owes to God and to a man’s neighbor. So that it claims subjection, and that man should fulfill its requirements under penalty moreover of judgment. The authority of God, the subjection of man in his present state as a child of Adam are all involved in this legal system.

But man, conscious he ought to fulfill it, his own conscience telling him it is right, and not suspecting his own weakness and the depth of his ruin, and seeing that keeping it would be righteousness to him before God, readily takes it up as the way of having that righteousness, and enjoying divine favor, of being right when judgment comes. When awakened, observance of its outward claims satisfies the natural conscience; if understood spiritually, it leads to the discovery of that law of sin in our members which hinders all success in the endeavor and struggle.

But God having established the law, it was a very difficult and delicate thing to show that, as a system, it was passed away (Heb 8:7;10:9), not because it was not in its right place, and useful for its own intended purpose, but to make way for the principle of grace purposed and promised long before the law was established (Gal 3:17); and that by the discovery that it was death and condemnation to be under it, the mind of the flesh (the nature the law dealt with) was not subject to it, and could not be (Rom 8:7), and that we escape its curse as under it, not by the destruction of its authority, but by dying as so under it, and that by the body of Christ in Whom we then found ourselves in a new life beyond its condemnation.

The Cross makes all things clear. But the credit of the flesh (that is, of himself) is dear to the natural man, until he had discovered that in him (that is, in his flesh) there was no good thing, he was to give up a rule he knew to be right, in the humbling confession that he was such a sinner that it could be only his condemnation, the law of sin so strong in his members, himself so disposed to evil, that the law, weak through the flesh, could only condemn him.

Judaising teachers, proud of their own conceit, zealous of the law as the credit of their nation, could not bear to have a set aside as necessary for the way of righteousness and life with God; And the ministry which judged the flesh in Jew and gentile alike and freed the latter from all subjection to the Jewish system, was intolerable to them. Man always clings to the law, specially alleging God’s claims and holiness, till he experientially finds (in the discovery of the true character of the flesh) his true condition, that “as many as are of the works of the law are under the curse” (Gal 3:10).

—J N Darby





MJS excerpt

“Great will be the day when you come to realize that the sole reason for the existence of your Bible, your soul and your spirit is to glorify—and share—the Lord Jesus Christ.

“The moment we begin to rest our peace on anything in ourselves, we lose it. And this is why so many saints have not settled peace. Nothing can be lasting that is not built on God alone. How can you have settled peace? Only by having it in God’s way. By not resting on anything, even the Spirit’s work within, but on what the Lord Jesus has done entirely outside you. Then you will know peace—conscious unworthiness, but yet peace.

“In the Lord Jesus alone, God finds that in which He can rest concerning us, and so it is with His saints. The more you see the extent and nature of the evil that is within, as well as without, the more you will find that what the Lord Jesus is and did, is the only ground at all on which you can rest.

“Alas! The freedom which the Gospel brings may be used to take things easy, and, more or less, retain or gain in the world; but where this is the case, it is seldom a soul possesses any large measure of spiritual enjoyment, and it is never accompanied by solid peace. The soul becomes thus unsettled and uncertain. These oscillations may go on for a certain time, until God carries on the work more deeply in the heart.”
None But The Hungry Heart

-Unknown

Pommer said:

The energy-sector in the U.S. isn’t a socialistic endeavor though, it’s almost thoroughly “free-market”; over-capacity isn’t a hallmark of a free-market system.

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For profit, sure, but "free-market", not so much. There is a bulk electricity market which has its own problems (see Enron), but to my understanding much of the capacity for generation and production is deeply regulated. I saw something recently about imbalances in the incentives for capilal improvements. As I recall, US utilities effectively get guaranteed returns (from us ratepayers) for certain additions to their infrastructure if approved by the supervising boards. And apparently, some things that would reduce costs for ratepayers are disincentivized. I wish I could remember where I saw this.

Popular Christian artist Forrest Frank invited a New York City pastor to join him at one of the NBA Finals games last week, prompting both to agree that “God is good all the time.”

In an Instagram reel Wednesday, Frank said he was supposed to perform at Madison Square Garden in New York City that evening only to be bumped by the NBA Finals.

“I was thinking, man, it would be so fun to invite someone who is deserving and could maybe use an encouragement,” he said. As Frank spoke, a caption reading “Help me give away a ticket to the NBA Finals game” appeared on screen along with a basketball emoji.

Frank invited his followers to leave a comment about "someone who should be there."

“It could be someone who’s just a superfan who couldn’t afford a ticket or someone who just needs that boost of encouragement," he said.

Continued below.

Daemons of the Shadow Realm

I always thought the idea that nothing existed and then it blew up to become everything which then organized itself into us to be unlikely. Here is an interesting article as a logic exercise to consider what it would be like to be God.

If You Were God

It has been an interesting thought experiment throughout the ages to ask oneself,”If I were king”,or “If I were president”... These thoughts are often a response to some egregious policy or law that one has to endure. These thoughts do not often go far as speculations as to how things might be made to work better are often abandoned in favor of more interesting thoughts. However, if one considers the broader scope of existence, one might gain a perspective that can shed some light on how we look at the universe in which we live

Speculation about what it would be like to be God does not even require one to believe in God at all. To consider the dynamics and mechanics of such a proposition is more an exercise in logic. However, it may also open the mind to possibilities not previously considered. Going beyond the idea that “I could get whatever I wanted”, one discovers possibilities and even limitations that can be intriguing.

If one had the ability to create an entire universe simply by speaking it into existence, one might discover there is a danger with such power. Those inclined to consumptive self-indulgence might soon discover that the desire to consume is a hunger that is never satisfied and that in chasing after such lusts, one tends to consume themselves. The bible can be a useful resource to shed some light on processes both celestial and terrestial.

Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts.- James 4:3

In a way this admonition resonates with parents who recognize the wisdom in restricting the appetites of their children (wanting 100 ice cream cones is different than actually eating them). One would hope that upon reaching adulthood, one would see the benefit of self-restriction. It should therefore be also evident that upon godhood, consumptive lusts would be even that much more destructive.

We can get an additional insight into the nature of God from John;

This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. - 1 John 1:5

If we consider “light” we observe something that flows outward, shows truth, gives and sustains life. There is no consumptive element at all. With all the power of God the first limitation one encounters is that it cannot be used for self. To do so would start a process of self consumption.

Another restrictive element would be truth. Just as self-indulgence would be destructive, deception including self-deception would inflict blindness and tend towards self-destruction as the foundation reality gives to existence would be lost.

One might see Godhood as other or outward orientation and limited to truth. Faced with these limitations one might ask what sort of activity options would be available. The ability to create would be an obvious choice. However, creating what and why are natural questions one would ask. One might create a world with creatures whose actions were predetermined and predictable. Like having an aquarium, the actions of such creatures can be distracting, but in the end one has to question the ultimate value of entertainment.

The ability to create worlds and creatures poses an interesting quandary. One could create creatures programmed to do exactly what was expected. Creatures could also be created to interact with their environment such that they were free to make choices, but acted on instincts. A third alternative would be to create thinking creatures who had the free will to act independently from the creator. The risk here would be that the creatures would follow the self-destructive path of self-indulgent consumption or disassociation from reality that deceptions create.

In addition to choosing whether to make creatures with free will or not, one would also have to chose whether to make the creatures self-replicating or with initial functionality. The angelic realm might be an example of creatures made with knowledge and powers as well as given free will. For such creatures the test would be if they could exercise their free will to choose to remain faithful and resist the attraction that rebellion might offer.

For self replicating creatures one would expect at some point their ignorance would cause them to be cut off from their creator and their descendants would each start life helpless, ignorant, and selfish. Here the test would be if any could find their way out of rebellion.

An additional complicating factor would exist if a rebelling angel came to have control or influence over the human realm such that in addition to trying to escape ignorance, one also had to fight through deceptions.

The fate of rebelling angles would be pretty clear, those who rebell will be destroyed. The fate of humans born in ignorance is a different matter. There would be two ways eternal life could be imparted to those who never had it. The first would be to select an individual from whom a nation would come and through that nation all the peoples of earth could be provided the knowledge of the creator and faith in him demonstrated by following his laws could lead to being raised from the dead unto eternal life. A second way would be to offer eternal life to those who had faith in an action by the creator to recover them.

If you are a creator and your creation is stuck in sin, the question arises as to how do you resolve this dilemma. The bible describes the creator entering his own creation and being put to death by his own creatures by which a payment was made that could allow some to be given eternal life.

For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive. - 1 Corinthians 15:22

Which none of the princes of this world knew: for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. - 1 Corinthians 2:8

It is not exactly clear how this “payment” was made and to whom, but the result was the possibility that recovery of some could be made. The phrase “in Christ” suggests that in some way humans through faith are able to receive eternal life from the life of their creator.

A creator thus through his creation is able to produce “children” that could come out of creation and join him in a sort of familial relationship.

Carl Emerson said:

Why did Jesus not mention baptism when talking to Nicodemus ?

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Jesus taught many things by his example, but only a few were written down. He commissioned his apostles and his 72 disciples to teach his gospel in person.

John 21:25
And there are also many other things that Jesus did, which if they were written one by one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that would be written. Amen.

Jesus literally showed his disciples how they should baptize people so that they would be "born of water and the spirit" and thereby become his disciples.

John 3:22-23a
After these things Jesus and His disciples came into the land of Judea, and there He remained with them and baptized. 23 Now John also was baptizing in Aenon near Salim, because there was much water there.

tall73 said:

It sounds like John in the gospels is saying we don't have complete comprehension of God's full being, or direct access to him, but Jesus declares Him:

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This is also correct. And it is further expounded upon with the theological principle of the Essence / Energies distinction, wherein God is unknowable according to His essence, but His uncreated energies such as grace (we Orthodox maintain the Patristic view that divine grace is not a creature but an energy of God), love and mercy are knowable and can be interacted with, and we can also know Him through His incarnation, since the Logos put on our human nature and restored and glorified it, so that in Him we see the Father - the principle of communicatio idiomatum applies here in particular (this Christological principle, generally agreed upon by most mainstream and traditional Christians but of particular importance in Lutheran, Oriental Orthodox and Eastern Orthodox Christology (after the latter was influenced by the Theopaschitism of the Oriental Orthodox theologian St. Severus of Antioch, whose hymn Ho Monogenes was added to the Eastern Orthodox Divine Liturgy (Holy Communion service) and Typika service (service celebrated instead of the liturgy on some occasions such as when there is a Vesperal Divine Liturgy or when a presbyter is unavailable) by Emperor Justinian. At a later date, Justinian apparently renounced Theopaschitism and embraced the odd alternative known as “apthartodocetism” (which to be clear is not the heresy known as Docetism, but it is complicated, inelegant and makes my head hurt) and turned on the Oriental Orthodox community with violence, apparently, thus his wife St. Theodora acted to ensure that the Syriac Orthodox bishop St. Jacob bar Addai escaped arrest, and St. Jacob subsequently ordained around a hundred bishops, acting solus (by himself; normally bishops are ordained by three other bishops, but in emergencies this is not required, and this was very much an emergency), for which reason the Syriac Orthodox under the Patriarch of Antioch in India are called “Jacobites” (this term was also historically used as a perjorative along with the very much inaccurate label “monophysite” to refer to the Syriac Orthodox.

The beauty of the hymn Ho Monogenes is that it perfectly excludes Nestorianism and Eutychianism and all other major Christological errors, particularly those which try to claim compliance with the Creed such as Monothelitism:

O Only-begotten Son and Word of God, who art immortal, yet didst deign for our salvation to be incarnate of the Theotokos and ever-virgin Mary; and without change wast made man; and wast crucified also, O Christ our God, and by thy death didst Death subdue; who art one of the Holy Trinity, glorified together with the Father and the Holy Spirit: save us.