Rev. Ben Johnson
@TheRightsWriter
In 1878, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, warned that ministers had become apostles of Marxist doctrine.
“German rationalism, which has ripened into socialism, may yet pollute the mass of mankind,” he said. “Deadly principles are abroad, and certain ministers are spreading them.”

“I would not have you exchange the gold of individual Christianity for the base metal of Christian socialism,” Spurgeon exhorted his congregation 11 years later.

Any efforts to build a utopian kingdom on earth, overseen by fallen men, would prove futile. “To attempt national regeneration without personal regeneration is to dream of erecting a house without separate bricks,” he said.

https://acton.org/publications/transatlantic/2018/07/10/video-rush-limbaugh-clergy-who-accept-socialism
10:50 PM · Jul 26, 2024

On Tuesday, journalist Julie Kelly posted court documents on X showing Special Counsel Jack Smith “admitted the FBI added cover sheets to alleged classified documents found at MAL and took photos for evidence.”

“This confirms my report from last month that the FBI doctored evidence to produce stunt photos of classified documents at [Mar-a-Lago],” Kelly said. //

The FBI purchased glossy cover sheets to use in photos of authorities’ unprecedented raid of former President Donald Trump. //

Prosecutors admitted to mishandling the evidence triggering the delay demanded by the judge which now threatens the possibility for Smith’s team to go to trial before the November election.

According to Kelly on Tuesday, the FBI’s colored cover sheets were included in “classified discovery” implicating prosecutors’ desire to keep the details of the added documents concealed from the public.

“The FBI brought colored classified cover sheets to the raid under the guise of using them to substitute classified documents found within Trump’s boxes,” Kelly wrote on X. “Instead, FBI agents attached the scary looking sheets to various files and took photos.”

The images published by prosecutors became emblematic of the former president’s apparent irresponsibility illustrated from the raid.

Cannon ruled Smith’s appointment violates the Appointments Clause and granted the motion to dismiss the indictment against Trump. //

Judge Aileen Cannon on Monday threw out the lawfare prosecution against former President Donald Trump for allegedly mishandling classified documents after finding the Biden administration unconstitutionally appointed Special Counsel Jack Smith. //

“None of the statutes cited as legal authority for the appointment … gives the Attorney General broad inferior-officer appointing power or bestows upon him the right to appoint a federal officer with the kind of prosecutorial power wielded by Special Counsel Smith,” the ruling states.

Cannon ruled Congress is granted via the Constitution a “role in determining the propriety of vesting appointment power for inferior officers.”

“The Special Counsel’s position effectively usurps that important legislative authority, transferring it to a Head of Department, and in the process threatening the structural liberty inherent in the separation of powers,” Cannon ruled. “If the political branches wish to grant the Attorney General power to appoint Special Counsel Smith to investigate and prosecute this action with the full powers of a United States Attorney, there is a valid means by which to do so.” //

“If there is no law establishing the office that the Special Counsel occupies, then he cannot proceed with this prosecution. A private citizen cannot criminally prosecute anyone, let alone a former President,” Thomas opined.

Argentina's Javier Milei is setting a great example for all world leaders. It's too bad most of them aren't paying attention. //

Times have been hard in Argentina, and the economically-minded libertarian Javier Milei ran for president of that South American nation on a platform of reducing regulations, reducing taxation, and shrinking government to make things better. And it's starting to work.

A stack of one trillion one-dollar bills would reach the Moon and back four times. Janet Yellen is proposing to spend a stack, not a fistful, of dollars that would reach to the Moon and back twelve times. That's the scale of spending she's talking about - it is, literally, astronomical. And she wants to spend this money on the nebulous idea of anthropogenic climate change.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on Saturday that the global transition to a low-carbon economy requires $3 trillion in new capital each year through 2050, far above current annual financing, but that filling the gap is the biggest economic opportunity of the 21st century.

Shortly after 7 a.m. on Aug. 7, 1974, French performance artist Philippe Petit stepped out from the roof of the World Trade Center’s South Tower and onto a one-inch thick cable, stretching 140 feet across to the North Tower.

With no safety net or harness, all he had was a balancing pole for company – and a drop of 1,360-feet and certain death below him should he make one wrong step.

Philippe Petit, a young Frenchman artist tight rope walker, gave the most spectacular high-wire performance of all time.
6
Petit performed the act shortly after 7 a.m. on Aug. 7, 1974.
Polaris

“I was a little anxious on that first crossing because we never checked how strong the anchor point was on the other side,” Petit tells The Post. “It wasn’t great, to be honest, but it was good enough.”

Audacious, dangerous and entirely illegal, Petit’s wire walk was called the ‘artistic crime of the century’ and was years in the planning. Using covert surveillance and endless subterfuge, Petit managed to smuggle a huge amount of equipment up the 110 floors of the South Tower before his friend and collaborator, Jean-Louis Blondeau, fired a cable across to the North Tower using a bow and arrow.

He even chartered a helicopter so he could take aerial photographs of the rooftops of the Twin Towers.

He was released without charge on the condition he perform a free show for children in Central Park. //

He also found himself in the Guinness Book of World Records, much to his annoyance.

“My art cannot be defined by numbers or records but the irony is I unwittingly found myself in it whether I liked it or not,” he said. “I never I wanted to be in it alongside people who can eat 10 pizzas in a minute.” //

“Here in America I am called a daredevil or a stuntman, like I’m Evel Knievel on a motorbike or Harry Houdini, but nothing could be further from the truth. My art is not death-defying, it is life-affirming.

“I want to inspire people and to believe they can move mountains. I want them to look up without fear.

“I am a poet in the sky.”

As America prepares for November’s presidential election, the fight for votes will inevitably intensify.

But as conservative commentator Megan Basham explains in her new book, “Shepherds For Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded The Truth For A Leftist Agenda” (Broadside) — and in an interview with The Post — nowhere will the campaign be more fiercely fought than in the battle for the one of the most powerful voting blocs in the country: evangelicals.

A culture reporter for the Daily Wire and former editor at Evangelical publication World Magazine, Basham reveals in “Shepherds For Sale” how “progressive power brokers” are targeting not just churches but Christian media, universities and even entire denominations in a bid to force their hands when it comes to dealing with culture war flash-points like abortion, LGBTQ rights and climate change. //

“Look at nearly any issue that represents a key priority for progressives, and you will find that even when all other major demographics have signed on, Christians, and evangelicals in particular, represent the most formidable roadblock,” she says. //

Basham maintains that in return for toeing a more left-wing line on key issues — as well as reinterpreting or even eschewing scripture — many church leaders have received everything from praise to prestige, career progression to significant amounts of cash, selling out Christianity in the process.

“Evangelicals don’t always win at the ballot box, but in most regions of the country, they always present a massive hurdle to leftist power grabs,” writes Basham. //

A significant aspect of the left’s ability to infiltrate the Church is the existence of what Basham calls the “Eleventh Commandment,” namely: Thou shalt not criticize church leaders.

“What the Eleventh Commandment has meant in practice is that even as prominent pastors and theologians have spent the last few years accommodating every sort of secular, progressive influence, critical or even cautioning voices have been slow to respond [to the challenge],” she says.

Democrats pulled a switcheroo with Joe Biden, knowing they were going to go down to defeat with him, after his disastrous debate made it impossible to hide his cognitive decline anymore.

Democrats are trying to whip up excitement over Kamala Harris. But are they going to be in any better position with Harris?

Do you want to update WordPress but don’t know where to start? Often, beginners are afraid that an update may break their website.

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In this beginner’s guide, we will show you how to safely update WordPress like a pro without breaking your website.

Re: Yes and no
OK, here's the situation.

you fork an upstream repo, your fork is private

you commit something there that should not see daylight (keys to the Lamborghini or whatever)

you delete that commit to hide your sins

and now that commit is apparently still easily accessible from upstream. //

Re: Yes and no

Also - as far as I can see it's not actually possible to create private native GitHub forks of public repos in GitHub

The example they cite is when you have a private repo that will eventually become public, fork it to make permanently-private fork and then later make the original repo public. Anything commited to the still-private repo up until the point the first repo is made public, can be accessed from the now-public repo. (As long as you know the commit hashes, that is - but unfortunately they're easily discoverable.) //

The issue is that people are mentally modelling forks as "that's my copy of the repo, completely separate from the original" whereas in reality the fork is just a different interface to the same pool of blobs. Furthermore, while you wouldn't be able to access commits from another fork in the same pool of blobs unless you know the commit hash, github makes those commit hashes discoverable. //

Re: Yes and no
For the people downvoting me - you are aware how quickly AWS credentials accidentally exposed on GitHub are found and abused by attackers? Honeypot tests suggest 1 minute.

https://www.comparitech.com/blog/information-security/github-honeypot/

Note that at no point in the "what to do if you've exposed credentials" section does it say "delete the public repo in the hope that this will alter the past". Magical thinking.

Having played around with this on GitHub, I will say that the message on trying to delete a repo isn't explicit enough about the unexpected (if documented) behaviour. It really ought to have a disclaimer that says "If you're trying to delete commits you wish you hadn't pushed everywhere, this won't achieve it", and a link to a page describing what will actually help. //

What happens in Repo Stays In Repo
"It's reasonable to expect that deleting a commit tree that nobody else has yet accessed will prevent it from being accessed in future."

No it isn't. It's supposed to be a history. In a code repo, the ability to permanently delete past changeset data should be considered a bug or design flaw. The inability to lose history is the whole point.

Source code has no right to be forgotten, when it's in an SCM, because the point of the SCM is to remember.

The bishop of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, who is one of the most Catholic media voices, called out the theatrical opening of the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris for mocking Christianity and the Last Supper, and asked if the Olympic organizers would consider insulting the Muslim faith.

“A question I would pose--we all know the answer to it: ‘Would they ever have dared mock Islam in a similar way?’” asked Bishop Robert E. Barron, who is also the founder of the “Word on Fire” ministry, in an X-post.

Barron said the enemies of Christianity are putting Christians on notice that the struggle is being fought right now: //

Throughout the city, the French erected statues honoring the 10 golden heroines of French history: Olympe de Gouges, Alice Milliat, Gisèle Halimi, Simone de Beauvoir, Paulette Nardal, Jeanne Barret, Louise Michel, Christine de Pizan, Alice Guy and Simone Veil.

Somehow, St. Joan of Arc, did not make the cut. //

“France felt, evidently, as it's trying to put its best cultural foot forward, the right thing to do is to mock this very central moment in Christianity where Jesus and his Last Supper gives his body and blood in anticipation of the Cross,” he said.

A Betrayed Maroon
@MBEmpower
·
Follow
Black Men this is your reminder that in 2010 Kamala Harris extended the sentence of Caramad Conley for a murder he didn't commit. Nearly 20 yrs of his life gone.

In 2007, she also sent Jamal Trulove to prison for six years for a murder he didn't commit.

Kamala hates Black Men
CJ G
@cjgproduxions
Replying to @TorraineWalker
Black Men for Harris 2024!!!
1:20 PM · Jul 22, 2024

Kei
@kybaby79Dsgg
·
Follow
I am a True Black American woman whose family have been here for centuries. I WILL NOT BE VOTING FOR @VP Kamala Harris, she’s Indian who cosplay Black culture. Stop playing in our faces. #notangiblesnovote #stopillegalimmigration #CloseTheBorder #ReparationsNow #saveourkids 🚫
1:06 PM · Jul 25, 2024

Don Salmon
@dijoni
·
Follow
Did you know when Kamala Harris was Attorney General of California? She force Nina Simone family to give up control of the estate. And let a white men take it over and running it the families not benefiting from it anymore.#BlackTwitter.#BlackHistoryMonth.
1:48 AM · Feb 9, 2023

She has no policy, no record to stand on. One of the biggest thing she did in her career is lock up more black men than ever before, but we sit here and vote her in office on identity politics… We did that during the Obama Administration and he didn’t do anything for black people…" //

Kamala Harris does not have the Black vote locked up, and this anointing and lack of examination of who she is and her record is going to have the opposite effect of pushing Black voters away.

The spot is "narrated" by Harris, but it’s clear that it’s done by either using an AI voice generator or by splicing together audio clips to make it sound like she said things she obviously didn’t. Mr Reagan intersperses those sections with real footage of Kamala making a fool out of herself without the aid of advanced technology. //

I, Kamala Harris, am your Democrat candidate for president because Joe Biden finally exposed his senility at the debate. Thanks Joe...

I may not know the first thing about running the country, but remember: that's a good thing if you're a deep state puppet. I had four years under the tutelage of the ultimate deep state puppet, a wonderful mentor, Joe Biden. //

Joe taught me rule number one: carefully hide your total incompetence.

I take insignificant things and I discuss them as if they're significant. And I believe that exploring the significance of the insignificant is in itself significant. [Cut to actual footage from an event:] Talking about the significance of the passage of time, right? The significance of the passage of time. So when you think about it, there is great significance to the passage of time. [Cuts to a different portion of those remarks:] And there is such great significance to the passage of time. //

Jim Stewart CatsAliveInHim
4 hours ago
Rush was the master of parody commercials. I have many of his stashed; John McCain for Bank of Amigo; the Club Gitmo campaign; the Hillary Clinton Testicle Lockbox. These last 3½ years would have more bearable if Rush had been with us.

Pardon me now, I need a tissue. //

anon-pabn 4 hours ago

One cannot escape the awesomeness of awesome. To be awesome, one must first recognize and acknowledge awesome in their lives; which in itself is awesome and encompasses the very awesomeness everyone must have to be more awesomer.

That parody was AWESOME! Oh, and God help us.

RedDog_FLA
7 hours ago
The man in the arena is returning to the arena - honorably.

Chris A
6 hours ago
“What struck former President Trump in the ear was a bullet, whether whole or fragmented into smaller pieces, fired from the deceased subject’s rifle.”

They're getting you to focus on the wrong things.
Misdirection has always been the name of the Deep State's game.

Of Captain Teach Alias Blackbeard

Edward Teach was a Bristol man born, but had sailed some time out of Jamaica in privateers, in the late French war; yet though he had often distinguished himself for his uncommon boldness and personal courage, he was never raised to any command, till he went a-pirating, which I think was at the latter end of the year 1716, ... //

Being asked the meaning of this, he only answered, by damning them, that if he did not now and then kill one of them, they would forget who he was.

Josh Brooks @F530Josh
·
Big Army deciding their Soldiers from 130 years ago don't deserve the MOH because history is inconvenient and doesn't work with the modern narrative is a pretty good look.

10:58 AM · Jul 25, 2024 //

Congress started down this road by apologizing in 1990. The 2023 National Defense Authorization Act required the Department of Defense to examine the medals. //

No matter what this Potemkin board organized by Austin finds, the facts remain that the 7th Cavalry was operating under legal orders, and the men awarded the Medal of Honor met the criteria of the time. There is no wrong to be righted here. This is simply a political act by the losers to count coup on the winners. Austin's order to “consider the context of the overall engagement" is just a way to open the door to relitigating the Indian Wars by the "stolen land" nutters.

Don't think this is the end of it. //

DaleS 2 hours ago

Wikipedia has a list of the 20 medal winners for Wounded Knee, though they claim the award to Marvin Hillock was for fighting at White Clay Creek, and he was listed for Wounded Knee "due to a later error in War Department lists."

I believe that the battle at Wounded Knee was certainly mishandled and probably avoidable. I'm sympathetic in general to the U.S. Army during the western Indian Wars; they were forced to do a difficult job (often made much worse by the behavior of local settlers and government bureacrats), and most of the time I think they did a pretty good job. But this wasn't one of those times. I care nothing for Austin's conclusions, but Miles at the time was appalled by the battle, and he was actually the superior to the commander at the battle (Forsyth) and relieved him of command. He was in a better position to make that judgment than anyone in the DoD today, and certainly had more experience in Indian fighting than the folks in Washington who reinstated Forsyth. Miles was a fine general, but hard-hearted enough to exile his own apache scouts after Geromino's capture, so for him to call for compensation to Wounded Knee survivors demonstrated that this wasn't the usual brand of Indian fighting. It was a battle, but also ended up as a massacre. I'm willing to trust Miles' assessment of the battle.

With that said, even if what we would now consider war crimes happened at Wounded Knee, this wasn't an unprovoked slaughter like Sand Creek. There was actual combat and likely actual heroism. To take an example from the list:

"Musician John Clancy, artillery, twice voluntarily rescued wounded comrades under fire of the enemy."

I don't know what the late-19th century criteria for assigning Medal of Honor was, but that sounds pretty darn heroic to me, and has nothing to do with killing Sioux, justly or not. After all these years, how could you possibly determine that John Clancy not only didn't deserve his medal, but that he and his fellow honorees should be singled out for "cruelty".

It seems to me if you want to virtue signal by dishonoring the dead, the place to start should be with Forsyth, who was the responsible for the force there. It was his job to see his soldiers acted properly, and to take measures against any of his soldiers who targetted non-combatants. //

Sojourner 2 hours ago edited

The Medal of Honor, at that time, was the only decoration for valor, and the criteria were very different from those today.

^^^This^^^

The whole Wounded Knee episode was a mess. Mistakes committed by both sides. A messy almost-ending to the Indian Wars. But make no mistake, it was a war.

These social justice warriors are wrong here, just as they are wrong in opposing dropping the A-bombs on Japan in August 1945 or, as Streiff notes, our recent base renaming and statue removal mania. They are sermonizing with the luxury of hindsight in a way that is wrong in terms of historiography/hermeneutics.

Just as in mid-July 1945 (when it was clear Japan was going to fight until no one was left alive on the Home Islands; a view, btw, which the Japanese didn't change until AFTER the second bomb dropped), at the time of the Ghost Dance no one knew what was going to happen. But there were enough Indians who felt the pull to cause the Army to be legitimately concerned. On one hand, sorry for the dead Indians. On the other, they paid (perhaps unjustly) the price for the style of warfare their tribe and other tribes had historically waged. Whatever the injustices of Wounded Knee might there have been, it clearly signaled the end of our first War on Terror (which we won, unlike Round 2). The question no one on the social justice side of things wants to answer (b/c they can't) is to name a better outcome (and path to that outcome) than what happened. I'll repeat what I've written here before: the tribes were lucky how the Indian Wars ended. It could have been much worse.

Full disclosure, I was previously more inclined to review the actions at Wounded Knee. But we no longer live in that better universe. Streiff is 100% correct: this isn't going to be a review conducted in good conscience. Instead, it's 100% political warfare waged by those who hate America on those of us who love America. It's yet another play in a series of plays to destroy the fabric of our military and of our country under the guise of "righting wrongs." Base renamings, land acknowledgments, etc. IT'S ALL BS. And it's also utterly ironic; they're doing to us what they criticize America for doing to the Indians. They believe we should have left the Indians alone to live in peace, so to make their point they won't let us live in peace.

Want to be even more revolted, see this:
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2022/07/20/medals-of-honor-for-soldiers-who-perpetrated-wounded-knee-massacre-may-be-rescinded/

This is what we're up against. When even our supposed allies in the press lead off their articles with titles like this.

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The catastrophe is yet another reminder of how brittle global internet infrastructure is. It’s complex, deeply interconnected, and filled with single points of failure. As we experienced last week, a single problem in a small piece of software can take large swaths of the internet and global economy offline.

The brittleness of modern society isn’t confined to tech. We can see it in many parts of our infrastructure, from food to electricity, from finance to transportation. This is often a result of globalization and consolidation, but not always. In information technology, brittleness also results from the fact that hundreds of companies, none of which you;ve heard of, each perform a small but essential role in keeping the internet running. CrowdStrike is one of those companies.

This brittleness is a result of market incentives. In enterprise computing—as opposed to personal computing—a company that provides computing infrastructure to enterprise networks is incentivized to be as integral as possible, to have as deep access into their customers’ networks as possible, and to run as leanly as possible.

Redundancies are unprofitable. Being slow and careful is unprofitable. Being less embedded in and less essential and having less access to the customers’ networks and machines is unprofitable—at least in the short term, by which these companies are measured. This is true for companies like CrowdStrike. It’s also true for CrowdStrike’s customers, who also didn’t have resilience, redundancy, or backup systems in place for failures such as this because they are also an expense that affects short-term profitability.

But brittleness is profitable only when everything is working. When a brittle system fails, it fails badly. The cost of failure to a company like CrowdStrike is a fraction of the cost to the global economy. And there will be a next CrowdStrike, and one after that. The market rewards short-term profit-maximizing systems, and doesn’t sufficiently penalize such companies for the impact their mistakes can have. (Stock prices depress only temporarily. Regulatory penalties are minor. Class-action lawsuits settle. Insurance blunts financial losses.) It’s not even clear that the information technology industry could exist in its current form if it had to take into account all the risks such brittleness causes. //

Imagine a house where the drywall, flooring, fireplace, and light fixtures are all made by companies that need continuous access and whose failures would cause the house to collapse. You’d never set foot in such a structure, yet that’s how software systems are built. It’s not that 100 percent of the system relies on each company all the time, but 100 percent of the system can fail if any one of them fails. But doing better is expensive and doesn’t immediately contribute to a company’s bottom line. //

This is not something we can dismantle overnight. We have built a society based on complex technology that we’re utterly dependent on, with no reliable way to manage that technology. Compare the internet with ecological systems. Both are complex, but ecological systems have deep complexity rather than just surface complexity. In ecological systems, there are fewer single points of failure: If any one thing fails in a healthy natural ecosystem, there are other things that will take over. That gives them a resilience that our tech systems lack.

We need deep complexity in our technological systems, and that will require changes in the market. Right now, the market incentives in tech are to focus on how things succeed: A company like CrowdStrike provides a key service that checks off required functionality on a compliance checklist, which makes it all about the features that they will deliver when everything is working. That;s exactly backward. We want our technological infrastructure to mimic nature in the way things fail. That will give us deep complexity rather than just surface complexity, and resilience rather than brittleness.

How do we accomplish this? There are examples in the technology world, but they are piecemeal. Netflix is famous for its Chaos Monkey tool, which intentionally causes failures to force the systems (and, really, the engineers) to be more resilient. The incentives don’t line up in the short term: It makes it harder for Netflix engineers to do their jobs and more expensive for them to run their systems. Over years, this kind of testing generates more stable systems. But it requires corporate leadership with foresight and a willingness to spend in the short term for possible long-term benefits.

Last week’s update wouldn’t have been a major failure if CrowdStrike had rolled out this change incrementally: first 1 percent of their users, then 10 percent, then everyone. But that’s much more expensive, because it requires a commitment of engineer time for monitoring, debugging, and iterating. And can take months to do correctly for complex and mission-critical software. An executive today will look at the market incentives and correctly conclude that it’s better for them to take the chance than to “waste” the time and money.

A left-wing nonprofit that interfered in the 2020 election to Democrats’ benefit is coaching election offices on how to address concerns about leftist oligarchs’ silent coup to replace Joe Biden as the party’s presidential nominee.

On Tuesday, the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) sent an email to its newsletter subscribers highlighting Biden’s Sunday exit from the 2024 race and informing election officials that “voters and media outlets will be looking to you for guidance in the coming weeks, and you will play a powerful role in shaping this emerging story.”