For some time now, there has been a controversy in Christiandom as regards the authenticity of the book of Enoch.
A lot of people are of the view that if the book really mattered, it would have been meant for the people that existed before Christ because the book was more than 300 years old when Jesus Christ was on earth.
Jesus Quotes Book of Enoch
So notice what it is that Eliphaz says about the flood in Job 22:15-18:
Will you keep to the old path that the wicked have trod?
They were carried off before their time, their foundations washed away by a flood.
They said to God, “Leave us alone! What can the Almighty do to us?”
Yet it was he who filled their houses with good things… (Job 22:15-18a, NIV) [3]
According to Eliphaz, God’s role in the flood was to give good things to the people who lived prior to the flood (Job 22:18a), but in response, all they wanted was for God to leave them alone. They told God to depart from them!
Think about that for a moment. A federal judge presiding over an ACLU lawsuit has ordered the Attorney General of the State of Florida to cease enforcement of the Florida law that is the source of the suit. The AG, citing his opinion that the judge has no jurisdiction, is defying the order, refusing to order Florida law enforcement to stand down.
And here's the interesting bit: It seems that if the Florida AG is to be brought in to face contempt charges, the person likely to be tasked with bringing him in would be U.S. Marshal Greg Leljedal of the Northern District of Florida. Now, look at this:
...
They seem to be on remarkably good terms.
The Windows Time service (W32Time) synchronizes the date and time for all computers managed by Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS). This article covers the different tools and settings used to manage the Windows Time service.
Apple runs a fleet of stratum 1 NTP servers at time.apple.com. In my experience, ntpd/chronyd are very happy with them.
It looks like, instead of doing anycast, they maybe use DNS to steer you to the closest one.
time.apple.com is a CNAME for time-osx.g.aaplimg.com.
It's worth noting that this list changes over time, and you're generally probably best off using pool time.apple.com rather than trying to rely on this maybe-outdated list.
Strange Behavior of 0.debian.pool.ntp.org (84.255.251.205:123) - Server operators - NTP Pool Project
The big internet corporations (like Google, Meta, Amazon) have independently developed their own smearing behavior, some even iterated over multiple smearing patterns. If you search for <corporation> leap smear with an internet search engine of your choice, you will find blog posts and documentation where they explain their respective approach. I suggest you research this for any upstream server you intend to use. A quick summary of the ones I came up with spontaneously:
- Google, Amazon: Smeared from noon to noon around the leap with 1/86400 of a second added to each second
- Meta: Smeared from the leap until 17 hours later in a non-linear curve
- Cloudflare: Standard-compliant insertion/deletion of a leap second and propagation of the leap indicator (that’s why they are allowed in the pool)
- Microsoft: No idea what software their time servers are running, but the Windows Time Service included in Windows machines does not handle leap seconds and just resyncs after one happens
All of this is best practice information and much less relevant since the decision was made to do away with leap seconds in the foreseeable future. //
Apple also offers good collection of stratum 1 servers that doesn’t use leap second smearing. Someone compiled a (non-definitive) list of them so you can see if they are worth using for your location:
pool time.apple.comThis python program:
print(‘’.join([f’{xint:0{5}b}’ for xint in range(32)]))
will output this string :
0000000001000100001100100001010011000111010000100101010010110110001101011100111110000100011001010011101001010110110101111100011001110101101111100111011111011111
Ask any purported “AGI” this simple IQ test question:
“What is the shortest python program you can come up with that outputs that string?”
Scientific induction is all about such algorithmic simplification under Algorithmic Information Theory:
The rigorous formalization of Occam’s Razor.
If an “AGI” can’t do scientific induction on even so trivial a scale, why attribute “general intelligence” to it?
This isn’t to say such an AI isn’t in the offing in the foreseeable future, but let’s be realistic about how we go about measuring the general intelligence of such systems.
Once again, we have a wonderful argument for taking the federal government, or indeed any level of government, out of the financing of education altogether. Our higher education systems have become far too casual about accepting federal largesse while working at cross purposes to the American public, and we are expected to pay for it.
For decades, the federal government has been backing long lines of dump trucks full of taxpayer cash up to the Ivy League universities and dumping them out, and those universities responded by looking the other way as antisemitic agitators took over their campuses, as the curricula swelled with idiotic Ethnic Underwater Dog-Polishing Studies courses and even degree programs, and the faculty spent more time inculcating young skulls full of mush with Marxist claptrap than with instilling in those skulls knowledge and marketable skills.
Cutting that cash-green string is the right idea - in fact, it's the right idea regardless of the university's DEI policies or lack thereof, regardless of the school's curricula, regardless of the political affiliations of their faculty. Let the parents pay for their kids' education, or let the kids get part-time jobs or find some other way to pay. If they need to borrow money, let them present themselves to a private lending institution and make their case based on their academic record to date and their prospects for employment. Do all this, and the ridiculous classes and programs would disappear in a trice - as would a lot of the Marxist professors.
Child Protective Services (CPS) investigations are supposed to be about safeguarding children from harm. In every state, the standard CPS protocol for an investigation is, among other things, to conduct a home visit and to interview each child by themselves. However, these tactics can themselves inflict significant trauma upon the very children they aim to protect.¹ These harms are increasingly recognized by legal analysts,² child welfare caseworkers and supervisors, tribal workers and supervisors, police officers and detectives, foster parents, birthparents, teachers and school counselors, medical examiners, mental health providers, juvenile court staff, child welfare trainers, and foster youth.³
While in situations of real abuse the cost of the harm created should be offset by the benefit of the harm prevented, this is not at all the case when the investigation is based on false or overblown allegations. In such situations, the effect of the standard CPS investigation means that the child, not to mention their family, ends up more harmed, not less.
Investigations cause immediate shock, confusion, and fear.
The very nature of a CPS investigation, especially in the home, can surprise, shock, and traumatize children.⁴ Investigations are unexpected and can be quite sudden.⁵ According to research from Portland State University's Center for Improvement of Child and Family Services, children frequently report feelings of “surprise, shock, and chaos” during investigations.⁶ Many develop a sense of “powerlessness, helplessness,” and even “guilt or failure.”⁷ This is increased when the investigations commence in the middle of the night.⁸
Many parents recount their children crying and sobbing after interviews, demonstrating the immediate emotional impact of these investigations.⁹ Children do not understand what is going on or what is going to happen.¹⁰ This leads to fear that their parents will be arrested¹¹ or even that the children will be taken away.¹²
Children are afraid of being intruded upon by strangers. //
The standard CPS investigatory approach causes significant harm to the children involved. When investigations stem from false or overblown allegations, this harm is completely unjustifiable and adverse to the aim of protecting children.
Instead, CPS workers who seek to protect children should not rush to enter a home or conduct child interviews without first weighing the harms to determine whether interviews are really necessary. Very often, there are other methods available of determining children are safe without employing these more harmful tactics. When trauma to children can be avoided, it should be.
The family has held a federal grazing permit through the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) for nearly 60 years and are permittees in good standing. The permit allows them to graze their cattle on the Buffalo Gap National Grassland and is managed by the U.S. Forest Service, which reviews the map every time the permit is renewed. There has never been a problem before.
In March 2024, the USDA notified the Maudes that a hunter complained about a fence blocking access to Buffalo Gap National Grassland, according to a letter Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., sent to then-Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, seeking help for the family.
On May 1, 2024, the Maudes met with the Forest Service and everyone in the meeting agreed to do a land survey to figure out exactly where the fence belonged.
On May 6, 2024, a U.S. Forest Service special agent escorted a survey crew onto the Maudes’ property.
Then, with no warning, on June 24, 2024 the Maudes received a visit from Forest Service special agents with indictments for each of them. Charles and Heather Maude were charged separately — they had to get separate attorneys. The charge was “Theft of national grasslands managed by the United States Department of Agriculture, namely, approximately 25 acres of National Grasslands for cultivation and approximately 25 acres of National Grasslands for grazing cattle,” the indictment said. All for a fence that was placed before either of them was born. //
The Maudes tried to work out a solution, but the Biden Administration immediately dragged them into court on a charges that come with 10 years of prison and a $250,000 fine, one for each of them — totaling a half million dollars for the family. The spouses were instructed not to speak to each other about the case.
Charles C. W. Cooke @charlescwcooke
·
The fact that this piece got through the Times's editorial process without anyone saying, "um . . . guys?" shows exactly why the press always seems so clueless about the country it is supposed to cover. https://x.com/mkhammer/status/1917386705264312688
Mary Katharine Ham @mkhammer
This is real. People wear crosses and the NYT is ON IT.
Last edited
9:49 AM · Apr 30, 2025 //
Tom Bevan, co-founder and CEO of RealClearPolitics, made an excellent point:
The author probably doesn't know a single person who wears one, which is why it's treated as a novelty.
Exactly. Why else would not only the author, but New York Times editors as well, think that the absurd article fell into the "all the news that's fit to print" category?
Finally, Charles C. Camosy, an associate professor of theological and social ethics at Fordham University, put the cherry atop the laughable sundae.
In certain bizarrely isolated contexts, public displays of religiosity (even something as common as cross necklaces) are so uncommon that they become successful pitches for New York Times stories.
In other words, as the user effectively causes the AI to speak a certain way to them or behave in a certain manner, the user is also programming themselves to desire certain things. It creates a dependency that only an AI can fill.
Now ask yourself how that would work when you introduce sex. Ask yourself how that work for someone if the sex they want comes from a perversion no one should have. //
redstateuser
2 hours ago
Her prediction is unrealistic and fanciful. I think AI pedophilia (AIP, for short) would not eliminate real-world pedophilia (RWP) but that both would survive and in fact flourish. Legalizing marijuana did not eliminate black-market pot as claimed by pro-pot folks. In many instances, black market pot has increased and can be sold more cheaply, not having taxes applied to it. Allowing AIP will eventually inure us and groom in us an increased compassion for those who seek RWP. And try to think down the road, how creative lawmakers and liberals will be in pushing the boundaries of AIP into related areas.
Don't fall for this again, that legalizing something currently illegal will make all users cooperatively think, "Oh, ok, let's do it only that way." //
Sarcastic Frog
2 hours ago
Not mentioned is what happens when someone wrapped up in this has to interact with Real people in Real life.
Real people won't behave the way the person is now "programmed" to expect, or say what the person wants to hear. No human being will ever match up to this Artificial representation.
And what happens next? Murder, because the Real isn't as perfect as the Artificial?
SourcePacT provides a way to streamline and maximize the value of any BESS deployment with its simplified design and increases sustainability by prioritizing cleaner energy.
Isolation & Interconnect Switches provide the necessary controls, metering, and switching needed to connect a local power island (critical loads & DER) to larger power infrastructure. This allows the DER (Distributed Energy Resource) to operate as a grid interactive device when connected to the larger electrical system but switch to grid forming by isolating the island during a power anomaly.
The first available Interconnect Source Isolation Switch designed to UL 3008.
Which is more plausible: the lying media has suddenly discovered accurate polling data? Or Trump supporters are not being polled?
President Trump: "For America to be a great nation, we must always be One Nation Under God, a phrase that they would like to get rid of—the radical left, but I don't think we're going to let them get rid of that."
Despite a state ban on sectarian charter schools, the Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board approved St. Isidore’s request to participate in the state’s charter school program. The ban is rooted in the anti-Catholic Blaine Amendment added to Oklahoma's constitution in 1907.
This set up an interesting conflict where the governor, a Republican, and the Republican state superintendent of public instruction supported the applications, but the Republican attorney general brought the case that the Supreme Court heard Wednesday. He sued in 2023 to block the charter because it would violate state law and the US Constitution. In June 2024, the Oklahoma Supreme Court agreed with Attorney General Gentner Drummond that St. Isidore's Catholic character, despite being open to everyone and requiring attendance of no one, would violate the Constitution's establishment clause.
The crux of the questioning centered on religious neutrality versus hostility to religion. Justice Kavanaugh hit this theme hard. “You can’t treat religious people, and religious institutions, and religious speech as second-class in the United States,” Kavanaugh said to Gregory Garre, a former Bush administration solicitor general who represented Oklahoma's Attorney General Gentner Drummond. (As an aside, it is interesting to note how many prominent "conservatives" are lining up to oppose what I consider to be conservative positions once those positions have the high likelihood of becoming law. Funny, that.) “And when you have a program that’s open to all comers except religion...that seems like rank discrimination against religion,” Kavanaugh added. “They’re not asking for special treatment, they’re not asking for favoritism. They’re just saying, ‘Don’t treat us worse because we’re religious.’” //
If the Court rules the way it appears headed, it will shake up the charter school programs everywhere. First off, it will mean the thirty-eight Blaine Amendment states can no longer use that to block religious schools from applying for charter school status. The attorney for Oklahoma painted a picture of this, opening the door for the state to make personnel and curriculum decisions. "And if religious schools can qualify as public charter schools, it will raise questions about who can be admitted to such schools, whom the schools can hire as teachers, and what the curricula at those schools will be."
In reality, Oklahoma's lawyer is out of his tree. The Supreme Court has already ruled that the government has to stay out of the hiring and firing decisions of people filling "ministerial" functions in religious organizations (Supreme Court Tells Ninth Circuit to Stay Out of Personnel Decisions of Religious Organizations – RedState). And there is no controversy over admission (anyone who wishes to participate may), and St. Isidore agreed to follow the state educational standards when it applied for the charter.
Some online comments have warned that this opens the door to "Satanist" schools or Alphabet-people schools. News flash, we already have those. The real fear by the establishment, Democrat and Republican, is that religious charter schools will proliferate (they will) and that many parents will opt for them because they can be sure their kids will not be introduced to gay porn or secretly "transitioned" without their knowledge or consent. The same people invariably raise the question of Islamic madrassas as though I give a rip about how someone else educates their child. As the charter lays out specific testing and achievement goals, the fear of Middle East-style schools is simply a straw man argument designed to appeal to the worst sort of bigotry. //
The only real question is whether the Court will follow the direction of Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh and issue a full-throated defense of religion as a critical component of American history and society, or will it just nibble around the edges, causing decades of future controversy. //
Ready2Squeeze
3 hours ago
The real opposition to this is by the Teacher Unions ... if religious schools take off, union membership will likely drop off - and with it union dues payments. //
anon-tf71 Ready2Squeeze
3 hours ago
I'd say the States are even more opposed. When this happens they lose some control of education, maybe even all of it.
Not that this diminishes the (religious?) ferver with which teachers unions oppose it. //
eburke
3 hours ago edited
"it is interesting to note how many prominent "conservatives" are lining up to oppose what I consider to be conservative positions once those positions have the high likelihood of becoming law."
Of all the things Trump has accomplished (and the list is lengthy) his exposure of the faux conservative wing of the GOP is at the very top of the list. He has caused these UniParty hacks to expose themselves for whom they really are...and they hate him for it. //
PubliusCryptus
2 hours ago edited
How about the Federal and State governments stay out of schooling altogether? Make schools competitive, profit-driven organizations; that means antitrust actions against teachers(and other) unions. It also means shining a spot light on tax collections and requiring that those collections be justified by value delivered to the taxpayers. It has become very clear(Thank you DOGE) that government is, almost always, a terrible waste of resources. I would point to Medicare as corollary evidence of that claim. Governments should be the parties of last resort when solving problems.
If you want to talk about due process, what about the state's attorney and the victims in the courtroom waiting for the case to be heard, who were left high and dry because of what Dugan did? They didn't find out until later that the case had been adjourned after the state's attorney wondered why the case hadn't been called.
Now, Chief Judge Carl Ashley is blowing up the notion that you can't arrest someone in the public hallway where the agents were waiting, and that the warrant the federal agents had was sufficient.
Milwaukee County Chief Judge Carl Ashley said federal agents have leeway to operate in the hallways of the Milwaukee County Courthouse, even if they only have what's known as an administrative warrant.
Asked to comment on the April 25 arrest of Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan, Ashley said a formal policy for access to the courthouse is still being drafted but the county faces "limitations on what we can do."
"The reality is, for my colleagues, we don't have control in the public hallways," Ashley said.
He said that an administrative warrant, despite lacking a judge's signature, can be used to make arrests in a public hallway.
Dieter Schultz
4 hours ago edited
Milwaukee County Chief Judge Carl Ashley said federal agents have leeway to operate in the hallways of the Milwaukee County Courthouse, even if they only have what's known as an administrative warrant.
I recently read a comment on another site that noted a Catch 22 situation with these 'administrative warrants'.
But what I want to make note of is that the "sanctuary" entities always say they will not accept anything but a "judicial warrant". However, there is no mechanism under the law to issue a "judicial warrant" for violations of 8 USC 1182 or 8 USC 1227 (which all administrative violations of the Immigration and Nationality Act fall under).
They know this, that is why the make a requirement for something that does not exist.
I did a little checking and that seems about right.
The constant repeating of the term 'due process' plays to the public's discomfort with thinking deeply on subjects like the law and what it means to this country.
It's a cute trick if INS can only issue 'administrative' warrants and the left keeps insisting on 'judicial' warrants and the left knows that few people will call them on it and, if someone does call them on it, all the left has to do is ignore the event and wait a few hours until the people move on and forget the previous reveal.
Townhall.com
@townhallcom
·
Follow
🚨This is NUTS: Secretary Rubio just announced that he found DOZENS of files kept by Joe Biden's State Department that classified American citizens as "vectors of disinformation" — with the intention of censoring them.
That's not all.
Marco Rubio says that there's someone in President Trump's cabinet meeting RIGHT NOW that was being monitored.
"There's at least one person at THIS TABLE TODAY who had a dossier in that building..."
Joe Biden's administration was corrupt ALL THE WAY THROUGH!
1:21 PM · Apr 30, 2025. //
Well, we are going to turn over these dossiers to the individuals and they'll decide whether they want to disclose it or not.
But just think about, the Department of State of the United States had set up an office to monitor the social media posts and commentary of American citizens to identify them as "vectors of disinformation."
When we know that the best way to combat disinformation is freedom of speech and transparency, and so that's what we're going to be in the business of doing—we're not going to have an office that does that.
The media and the Democrats whine on about Trump being a dictator, a Hitler devotee, and a fascist. In reality, it was Joe Biden who showed much more of an authoritarian streak, and his use of the federal government to go after his perceived enemies was deeply sinister. He used the Department of Justice and its henchmen to go after Donald Trump and used the Department of State and other agencies to spy on and censor the people.
Let me tell you something you already know.
The MSM/Democrats are trying to BS you at the 100-day mark of President Trump’s second term. They are desperate to show that the new Trump administration is sinking fast in the polls, and that the American people are waking up to his (supposed) authoritarianism and overreach.
Here is how they are doing it. //
The polls are inevitably from ABC News, or NBC News, or CBS News, or CNN, or NPR, or the NYTs, or even FOX. What all these sources have in common is that these polling organizations largely did not get the 2024 election correct. Many underestimated the Trump vote, sometimes substantially, and many produced Harris leads that, in the words of her political advisor, “showed us with leads we never saw" in Harris internal polls. //
These websites almost never have a news article detailing the new polls from the polling firms that got the 2024 presidential election mostly right, such as Atlas, Rasmussen, Quantus, RMG, etc.
Some people on the right are getting very angry about this. Others are getting distraught or dispirited. Some are demanding that the MSM curb their bias.
But the MSM are Democrats, and they won’t change their spots. They have a vested interest in doing what they are doing. They want to undermine the Trump administration and cause Republicans to lose hope and cave in substantial ways to the Democrats. //
This family, targeted solely over what should have been a civil dispute over grazing rights over 25 acres of government land, was prosecuted, credibly threatened with jail sentences, so extreme that they were told to find alternatives to raise their young children. Charles and Maude live on a 5th-generation family farm in Pennington County, South Dakota, close to Mount Rushmore. There, they farm 400 acres. They raise about 250 head of cattle, and about 40 sows. //
The Biden administration criminally charged the Maude family for theft of government property. And for too long, for years now, they have endured a torturous legal process and suffered as victims of the Biden regime's reckless lawfare. Just imagine, a government that would be willing to de facto orphan American children over a mere dispute over 25 acres of land. The men of Lexington and Concord knew what (this) sort of government was like, and they knew what to do about it. The Maude family too, faced with destruction at the hand of the state, made their appeal to heaven, and providence answered. Thanks to the leadership and the unequivocal, bold leadership of President Trump and his directive to put Americans first, we now have the pleasure to announce that the criminal prosecution of the Maudes is now over. They will not be driven from their home. They will not be jailed. They will not be fined. And their children will grow up with a mother and a father who they love and who love them. //
This dispute - and there was, legitimately, some confusion over the status of the 25 acres and the exact boundaries between that acreage and the Maude family land - should never have come to this in the first place. In a sane world, this would have been resolved by having one or two Department of Agriculture officials come out, sit down with the Maudes, make sure everybody understood and agreed to a solution to the dispute, and arrive at a mutually agreed-upon survey of the property boundaries.
Instead, the Biden administration threatened the Maudes with jail time. The Biden administration threatened to break up the Maude family, to effectively orphan the Maude children. And all of this is over a dispute over 25 acres of grazing land. This is the same administration, mind you, that allowed millions of unscreened, unvetted, illegal immigrants to flood into the United States. //
DarthCY
an hour ago
You should go deeper into the story. The Government was even more heavy handed than you present. They were cooperating and were waiting for a survey to come back to discuss when they raided their house, arrested them and tried them separately. They also barred them from communicating with each other on their defense. This is pure evil. //
anon-259e
an hour ago
Every Federal employee involved with this abomination needs to be fired and the Maude family must be reimbursed for all legal expenses + an extra 100% as damages.