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"There are three things in my life which I really love: God, my family, and baseball. The only problem - once baseball season starts, I change the order around a bit." Al Gallagher, ( retired major leaguer, quoted in 1971)

For Judges to judge, there must be a standard against which all actions are judged. The Book of Judges is preceded by Moses’ reiteration of the Torah just before the nation of Israel proceeds into the Promised Land. The law, the standard of righteousness by which Israel is to govern themselves as a people, is repeated and amplified one last time before the death of Moses. It is in this final instruction of Moses that we find the context to the Book of The Judges, which is a prophetic shadow picture of the day and hour in which we live.

Can you imagine the devastation that would be caused if a massive wall of water several hundred feet high slammed into Florida at more than 100 miles an hour? To many people such a scenario is impossible, but that is what people living along the Indian Ocean thought before the 2004 tsunami and that is what people living in Japan thought before the 2011 tsunami. Throughout history, giant tsunamis have been relatively rare events, but they do happen. Scientists tell us that a mega-tsunami can race across the open ocean at up to 500 miles an hour, and when they...

The Western institutionalization of sharia norms. A Swedish art professor has applauded Apple’s promise to diversify its emoticon options, including figures wearing religious headgear such as the hijab. “It’s great, we need people with different skin colours among the emojis, and people with different clothes, from the hijab to the kippa,” illustration professor Joanna Rubin Dranger at Stockholm’s Konstfack academy told the TT news wire on Thursday. The website DoSomething.org first let the battle cry sound, asking Apple to take a closer look at its 800 emojis. “The only two resembling people of colour are a guy who looks vaguely...

Miss Orsi is 6'-0" tall...         More at Reaganite Republican...   (prolly NSFW this week)        

A New York Times columnist has expressed substantially more negative sentiments about FiveThirtyEight since it left The New York Times, according to a FiveThirtyEight analysis. The columnist, Paul Krugman, who writes about economics and politics for The Times, has referred to FiveThirtyEight or editor-in-chief Nate Silver 33 times on his blog. FiveThirtyEight classified each reference based on whether it expressed a favorable, unfavorable or neutral sentiment toward FiveThirtyEight. …

Bicycles offer us a quick way to move around, and if you know what you're doing and where you are going, they can be very stealthy. They give us options for carrying gear on racks and saddle bags, or even in trailers. A good bike will carry you over a variety of terrain, whether paved or not. They are easy to maintain, can be stored in a number of locations, and can be hidden fairly easily, when need be. Most importantly, with a little skill, their maneuverability will help you dodge even the stickiest of situations. Let's suppose I have...

The word got around that cat didn’t taste that bad and in a matter of weeks you just couldn’t find any more stray cats when just a few months earlier they were all over the city. In the country, kids with slingshots and air rifles would go bird hunting so as to bring something home to throw in the pot.

This story was co-published with The Daily Beast For more than 50 years, Army PFC Lawrence S. Gordon was mistakenly interred as a German soldier in a cemetery in France. Then European officials did what the U.S. military would not, exhumed and identified him with DNA. U.S. Army Private First Class Lawrence S. Gordon — killed in Normandy in 1944, then mistakenly buried as a German soldier — will soon be going home to his family. But don’t thank the American military for this belated return. The Pentagon declined to act on his case, despite exhaustive research by civilian investigators...

Same pageant that once launched the career of Sophia Loren...   photo:  Miss Italia    More at Reaganite Republican...

This article is about identifying, stocking, and using the post collapse equivalent of a pocket full of dollar bills. It should be enough that if someone is trading eggs or socks you can buy a pair without having to run back to the house, but not so much that if someone robs you at gunpoint, you've lost a major part of your savings. That's barter. I define trading being qualitatively different, because it involves much higher-value items. Trading involves some psychology on both sides, similar to buying a car or a house, as opposed to daily shopping. Also, it is...

Buy Three Months Of Food Stock Buy A Water Filter Buy A Small Solar Kit Store A Fuel Source Find Alternative Shelter Buy One Semi-Automatic Rifle Buy 1,000 Rounds Of Ammunition Approach One Friend Or Neighbor Learn One Barter Skill Grow A Garden Prepare Your Mind For Calamity

Please send prayers for a young woman with a burst aneurysm!

When people talk about "The End Of The World As We Know It” (TEOTWAWKI), it is almost always in ways of how we might prepare for the end, what equipment to have, how much food to store, and what skills we must learn. These are all valid points. Most people can agree on common standards in these areas, but what if the act of preparing for the end can cause danger to yourself and your family? I'm not mocking prepping; I'm a prepper myself. I'm simply stating that a prepper must be in the correct mindset to make choices they...

Periods of industry-redefining regulatory change are hardly new. What is unprecedented is the volume and relentless pace of regulation. Organizations have to ensure they can implement the system code changes and update operating processes to comply with the welter of new legislation, regulatory initiatives and rule amendments. And they have less time in which to react to those changes. To further complicate matters, the regulations are coming from multiple sources, with no consideration of whether the objectives are complementary or conflicting, and what the cumulative impact will be. Two primary objectives are driving the extensive regulatory agenda: a desire for...

Full Title - It ain't half daft for the BBC to ban my show for being racist: Dad's Army creator JIMMY PERRY on the BBC's refusal to show repeats of his other greatest hit" Here’s a funny thing, though it might not make you laugh. Dad’s Army, the show I created and co-wrote with David Croft, is repeated every Saturday and gets audiences of 2.2 million. But my favourite sitcom of all, the one that recaptures the most extraordinary era of my life, will never be screened again. It Ain’t Half Hot Mum has been deemed by the BBC too politically...

Are you ready for a crazy statistic? Pope Francis, who just completed his first year as pope, had a favorability rating of 79 percent midway through his reign. Surprisingly, Pope Benedict XVl about halfway through his reign in April 2008 had a favorability rating of 83 percent. It’s shocking that the pope demonized and held to be unpopular by almost everyone in the media had a higher approval rating at one point than the pope celebrated daily in the news. Least, I seem dishonest. Benedict’s average for his entire reign was around 74 percent and Francis’s average over the entire...



Sweden: Parliament official orders bare-breasted painting removed … for Muslims STOCKHOLM, Sweden, – A painting of a bare-breasted woman has been removed from the Swedish Riksdag’s guest dining room on orders from the legislature’s deputy speaker. Deputy Speaker Susanne Eberstein of the Social Democrat party ordered the painting, “Juno” by baroque artist G.E. Schroder, to be removed from the guest dining room, where it had hung since 1983, TheLocal.se reported Thursday. “We routinely change paintings from time to time,” a Riksdag representative said in response to an inquiry from news agency TT. A parliamentary source who asked to remain anonymous...