Paivi Rasanen spoke to The Federalist about her free speech case that has huge implications for Christians across the West. //

“I was happy to have the possibility to also tell the gospel—the solution to the problem of sin—in front of the court and in front of the media,” she said. Speaking about the first day of her trial, which occurred in January, Rasanen said, “When so many people were praying for the day, God also answered the prayers. It was quite a hard day, but I thought it was a privilege to stand for the freedom of speech and the freedom of religion and stand for the truth of the Bible.” //

“I would characterize the day as a modern-day Inquisition or heresy trial,” Coleman said in a phone interview from Helsinki last month after the trial’s first day. “And the heresy was that Paivi and Bishop Juhana were on trial against the new sexual orthodoxy of the day.” //

The deeply theological nature of this case has been clear throughout, Rasanen said, putting courts in a “very odd situation” of litigating permissible religious views inside a constitutional democracy that claims to guarantee the freedoms of speech and religion. //

The prosecutor also charged Rasanen falsely, she said, with believing that homosexuals are not created by God.

“According to her [the prosecutor], you cannot make a distinction between a person’s identity and his or her actions,” Rasanen said. “So she said if you condemn the act, you also condemn the human being and say they are inferior.”

On the contrary, Christians believe that all humans are sinners and have equally ineffable value to God. They believe humans’ worth can absolutely be separated from their actions. Otherwise, humans stand forever condemned for everything they’ve ever done wrong.

Christianity teaches that God is willing to forgive all sins. All that’s required is to confess those sins. This also means Christians consider homosexuals and transsexuals as they do everyone: equally precious, forgiven, welcomed, and loved by God.

Those supporting the idea that parents should be the primary decision-makers in how their children should be educated seem to have valid cause for concern. There are people – mostly on the left – who seek to limit, or even abolish, parents’ ability to homeschool their children. In 2020, Harvard Magazine published an interview with Elizabeth Bartholet, Wasserstein public interest professor of law and faculty director of the Law School’s Child Advocacy Program, who seeks to ban the practice, arguing that it violates children’s right to a “meaningful education.”

She complained that homeschooling is “an essentially unregulated regime in the area of homeschooling” and that “if you look at the legal regime governing homeschooling, there are very few requirements that parents do anything.”

Bartholet also told the magazine that since only a dozen states have rules regarding the level of education required for homeschooling parents, “people can homeschool who’ve never gone to school themselves, who don’t read or write themselves.”

The professor also argued that public schools are more desirable because teachers are “mandated reporters,” meaning they are required by law to contact the authorities if they see evidence of child abuse. “Teachers and other school personnel constitute the largest percentage of people who report to Child Protective Services,” she said.

But is this a valid reason to prohibit parents from deciding how their children should be educated? For starters, despite teachers being mandated reporters, there are still a disturbing number of children being mistreated, even in schools. However, studies have shown that children who are homeschooled fare much better than those attending public schools. The National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI) noted that homeschooled children “typically score 15 to 30 percentile points above public-school students on standardized academic achievement tests,” and that “78% of peer-reviewed studies on academic achievement show homeschool students perform statistically significantly better than those in institutional schools.” //

The Maryland proposal might be based on good intentions. But one of the main reasons why parents choose homeschooling is precisely because they do not have confidence that the government is the most effective way to educate their children. The establishment of an advisory council opens the door to more government involvement, which, given its track record, would have a disastrous impact on education.

input: digital (1 coax, 1 TOSlink), RCA in
output: digital (1 coax, 1 TOSlink), RCA out, headphones

Search TOSLINK in outputs

Web MiniDisc is an online cross-platform web app based on a port of Linux-Minidisc to TypeScript (netmd-js on GitHub). Requires a Chromium-based browser.

• Click the icon next to the model number of your MD recorder to access
  • “Refresh” to refresh the list of tracks on the MiniDisc
  • “Rename Disc” to assign a title to your MiniDisc
  • “Wipe Disc” to erase the disc
  • “Exit” to exit Web MiniDisc
  • Drag MP3, FLAC, or WAV files to the web browser window to record them on the MiniDisc. When you do this, you'll be prompted to choose between SP, LP2, and LP4 modes for your recording. You'll probably want SP, which is the highest quality; LP2 and LP4 let you record more content at the expense of some audio quality. SP is also compatible with all MD-capable audio equipment.
  • Play, skip tracks, or stop playback of the currently inserted MiniDisc using the transport buttons along the bottom of the window.

Recording takes some time, but it does occur faster than audio to audio or optical to audio dubbing (The MZ-N910 or MZ-N920 seems to have the fastest recording time).

minidisc community portal
Tracking the format since 1995

“Tech Executive-1 tasked these researchers to mine Internet data to establish ‘an inference’ and ‘narrative’ tying then-candidate Trump to Russia,” Durham states. “In doing so, Tech Executive-1 indicated that he was seeking to please certain ‘VIPs,’ referring to individuals at Law Firm-1 and the Clinton campaign.”

Durham also writes that during Sussmann’s trial, the government will establish that among the Internet data Tech Executive-1 and his associates exploited was domain name system (DNS) internet traffic pertaining to “(i) a particular healthcare provider, (ii) Trump Tower, (iii) Donald Trump’s Central Park West apartment building, and (iv) the Executive Office of the President of the United States (EOP).”

Now the sources are telling Fox that former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe met with Durham multiple times and told him there was “enough evidence” in intelligence to support the indictments of “multiple people” in his investigation into the Russia probe. Ratcliffe had provided almost 1000 pages of material to Durham to help his effort.

The sources pointed to one key piece of declassified intelligence, which Fox News first reported in October 2020, revealing that intelligence community officials within the CIA forwarded an investigative referral on Hillary Clinton purportedly approving “a plan concerning U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.”

Sources told Fox News that the CIA memo, also known as a Counterintelligence Operational Lead (CIOL), was properly forwarded to the FBI, and to the attention of then-FBI Director James Comey and then-Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok.

The last fixed-price government contracts offered for offshore wind energy in Britain—hardly the cheapest of renewables—were under 5p per kilowatt hour (kWh). That’s less than a quarter of the typical domestic tariff (what most people pay for electricity at home) that consumers are set to face in 2022. Households are paying for their electricity several times what it now costs to generate and transmit it from the cleanest energy sources at scale.

The design of electricity systems has failed to catch up with the revolution in renewable energy. Competitive electricity markets, established in many countries to try to minimize costs, are actually suffering the greatest price rises. This is not because governments elsewhere use taxes to subsidize electricity (though some do), but because in wholesale electricity markets, the most expensive generator sets the price.

Since renewables and nuclear will always run when they can, it is fossil fuels—and at present, unequivocally gas, plus the cost of taxes on CO₂ pollution—that set the price almost all the time, because some gas plants are needed most of the time, and they won’t operate unless the electricity price is high enough to cover their operating cost. It’s a bit like having to pay the peak-period price for every train journey you take.

Aug 5, 2015

From a Million Miles Away, NASA Camera Shows Moon Crossing Face of Earth
A NASA camera aboard the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite captured a unique view of the moon as it moved in front of the sunlit side of Earth last month. The series of test images shows the fully illuminated “dark side” of the moon that is never visible from Earth.

The images were captured by NASA’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC), a four megapixel CCD camera and telescope on the DSCOVR satellite orbiting 1 million miles from Earth. From its position between the sun and Earth, DSCOVR conducts its primary mission of real-time solar wind monitoring for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

It's probable that the impact object comes from a Chinese rocket launched in 2014. //

It was engineer Jon Giorgini at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who realized this object was not, in fact, the upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket. He wrote to Gray on Saturday morning explaining that the DSCOVR spacecraft's trajectory did not go particularly close to the Moon. The second stage would, therefore, be extremely unlikely to strike the Moon. This prompted Gray to dig back into his data and identify other potential candidates.

He soon found one: the Chinese Chang'e 5-T1 mission launched in October 2014 on a Long March 3C rocket. This lunar mission sent a small spacecraft to the Moon as a precursor test for an eventual lunar-sample return mission. The launch time and lunar trajectory are almost an exact match for the orbit of the object that will hit the Moon in March.

"In a sense, this remains 'circumstantial' evidence," Gray wrote. "But I would regard it as fairly convincing evidence. So I am persuaded that the object about to hit the moon on 2022 Mar 4 at 12:25 UTC is actually the Chang'e 5-T1 rocket stage."

Over the decades, corporations and Madison Avenue have used this event as a significant launching pad for exposure, dropping fortunes on reserving time during the game, spending exorbitant amounts on productions, and hiring top-flight Hollywood directors to helm their 60-second epics. But, this was not always the case with the Super Bowl, and we can trace this advertising furor to a specific moment in history. It was 1984.

That was the year that Apple Computers caused a sensation with a cinematic minute that was jarring, arresting, transformative, and — most important — successful. The company wanted to distinguish itself in a marketplace dominated by a titan, and parlayed the timing of a literary classic to deliver a commercial that delivered the goods. Apple’s “1984” to this day is recognized as an advertising classic, and became the very revolutionary spot that altered the parameters of the Super Bowl.

And it very nearly never happened. //

The commercial has gone on to become regarded as one of the greatest of all time. In a move of cagey self-interest, Chiat/Day ran the commercial themselves weeks earlier, in a solitary local market in Idaho. This was done in order to have the commercial qualify for that year’s advertising awards. “1984” won every award it was nominated for, and it went on later to be declared the best commercial of the decade. To this day, it is regarded as one of the classics to ever run on television.

As perhaps its second-greatest accomplishment (after successfully selling the Apple Macintosh as an important computing breakthrough), the spot launched the elevated importance placed on Super Bowl advertising. It is commonplace today for corporations to invest heavily in their presentations on this day, sometimes spending an entire year gearing up for the event.

Few political operations have been more evil and dirty than the operation to smear President Donald Trump by the Clinton campaign.

As we previously reported, the Durham probe has been unraveling a lot of the dirt. They had indicted Michael Susman who worked for Perkins Coie, the firm that represented both the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. That in and of itself was huge — that the investigators were going after the person who had been the lawyer for the Clinton campaign. Plus, they were alleging he lied about the fact that he was paid by the campaign to push the information about Trump.

But then came an even bigger move regarding Clinton, in a filing regarding the case against Michael Sussman. Durham alleged in the filing that Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign paid an internet company to “infiltrate” servers at Trump Tower and the White House to link Donald Trump to Russia. This is John Durham saying there was not only alleged spying on Trump to smear him, but that it continued after he got into the White House.

I’m not sure there’s ever been an equivalent to how wrong that Russia collusion smear was, and how much they tried to divide the country over it — then kept it up for years.

This is big news. But the media has largely failed to cover it, except for Fox News and conservative media. Instead, they’ve tried to focus on ridiculous stories from a new book claiming they found documents in the toilet in the Presidential residence when Trump was there. From “sources.” What is this now, the billionth ‘story’ of how ‘we’re got him now’?

It’s nonsense but the left is falling for it again. They were all over Special Counsel things when it involved Mueller, even though he had nothing. But here, when they have a big finger pointing right at the Clintons alleging a huge thing, they are completely ignoring it.

Kash Patel, the former chief investigator of the Trump-Russia investigation for the House Intelligence Committee under former Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), told Fox News that the filing “definitively shows that the Hillary Clinton campaign directly funded and ordered its lawyers at Perkins Coie to orchestrate a criminal enterprise to fabricate a connection between President Trump and Russia.”

“Per Durham, this arrangement was put in motion in July of 2016, meaning the Hillary Clinton campaign and her lawyers masterminded the most intricate and coordinated conspiracy against Trump when he was both a candidate and later President of the United States while simultaneously perpetuating the bogus Steele Dossier hoax,” Patel said.

At the time most of the French gold was in Paris, in the largest safe in the world, “La Souterraine” (The Underground). A room 30m (100 ft) underground, an area of 11 000 m² (118,403.01 ft²), supported by 658 pillars, closed by a turret of steel and concret weighing 130 t.

The rest was scattered through the 200 branches of the Banque de France.

In 1932, while most of Europe watched with worry the situation unfold in Germany, France decided to move the gold far from its eastern and southern borders. In the first months of the year, 148 branches of the BdF are emptied and 275 t of gold were moved. //

After the Anglo-French troops got pushed back from Dakar by Vichy’s troops, it was decided to send the 1100 t of gold 900 km inside the continent in Kayes. Because they wanted more than just the ship.

After that, it stayed roughly the same, they had to sacrifice the Belgian gold to satisfy the invader, who promptly smelted it and sent it to Switzerland to pay for its weapons, and also to keep it clean, if you see what I mean. But they had to wait for 2 years before getting all of it, the Banque de France didn’t want to do it, but was forced to act so they took the slowest route possible.

After the War, France used its own reserve to replace the Belgian gold.

And in all that movement, do you know how much gold was lost?

395 kg. Yep that’s kilograms.

Only 0,016% of the 2500 t of gold went missing.

And all that gold helped the reconstruction, in the two years before the Marshall Plan went in action.

It was approximately 1:00 PM when a man called Vernon B. O’Neal of O’Neal’s Funeral Home and asked for the best casket that O’Neal had available. The man on the phone, simultaneously calm and tense, needed the coffin quickly and O’Neal had a slight problem. Of the 18 people who worked at O’Neal’s Funeral Home, 17 of them were out to lunch. After all, it was a beautiful Friday day for November in Texas.
O’Neal picked out a solid-bronze coffin with white satin lining tagged at a sales price of $3,995 from his storeroom and waited for three more of his employees to return from lunch. The bulky Handley Brittania casket from the Elgin Casket Company weighed over 400 pounds when it was empty and O’Neal certainly couldn’t lift it into his Cadillac hearse by himself. Once he had it loaded, he rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital on the most important delivery of his career.
The man who had ordered the casket, Clint Hill, was a Secret Service agent and less than an hour earlier he had climbed on to the back of a moving limousine to try to get to the subject he was charged to protect. He was unsuccessful. The casket was for the President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Why isn't it taught that George Washington was not the first President of the United States, but the first one under the Constitution?

Because George Washington was the First President of the United States.

Prior to the creation of the Constitution, the position was not “The President of the United States.” The position was the “President of the United States in Congress Assembled” or, more commonly, “The President of Congress.”

Given the nature of the Articles of Confederation, the President was not the position we think of now. There was little power in the office, it had a term of only one year, and in many ways was ceremonial, similar to the Constitutional position of President of the Senate held by the Vice President of the United States.

The men who held the position are not considered “President of the United States” for those reasons as well as for the fact that the Articles of Confederation was a failed system that did not create an effective system of governance. These same men realized a new system needed to be created and they did so.

Dr. Amesh Adalja, senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told KHOU 11 that researchers are unsure what immunity the omicron variant gives people.

“It’s unclear, at this point, what level of immunity occurs after an omicron infection. I suspect over time, yes, you probably can get reinfected. But we don’t have that data yet because omicron has only been around since October/November.”
However, the omicron variant might offer immunity for other COVID-19 variants. For example, a study suggests that the omicron variant of the coronavirus can give immunity to the delta variant, which means the delta variant could soon lose its hold on the American people, according to Reuters.

At the same time, recent research — published online in the Journal of the American Medical Association — found that breakthrough infections of the delta variant created “a robust immune response against the delta variant.”

Researchers said this level of immunity “is likely to be highly effective against other variants as the SARS-CoV-2 virus continues to mutate.” Though the data was about the delta variant, it was suggested that this could apply to the omicron variant, too.

One way (maybe the only way) we’re going to get out of this pandemic is to vaccinate a large portion of the global population. To the WHO, this means reaching 70% of the population by mid-2022, which is ~3 billion unvaccinated people with 6-9 billion doses before another variant of concern.

A diverse portfolio of vaccines that utilizes a number of different biotechnologies is of critical importance. While mRNA vaccines are innovative and effective, they pose logistical storage challenges to reach remote communities. The mRNA pharmaceutical companies are also not sharing their vaccine patent, which doesn’t allow others to manufacture. In addition, a diverse portfolio of vaccines frees up supply bottlenecks, provides options for those allergic to vaccines ingredients, and, among vaccines that use more traditional biotechnologies, will reduce vaccine hesitancy.

Two new vaccines have been added to our global repertoire: NVX-CoV2373 and CORBEVAX. These will be nothing short of game changers for the pandemic. Here is their story and how they work:

NVX-CoV2373

NVX-CoV2373 was created by Novavax, a small pharmaceutical company from Maryland. Before the pandemic they almost lost it all, but made a huge comeback after Operation Warp Speed took a chance on them. (I recommend reading their history over coffee; it’s fascinating). This will be their first vaccine to make it to the market.

Novavax is using a different vaccine biotechnology from other COVID19 vaccines. It contains the coronavirus spike protein combined with an immune-boosting compound from the soapbark tree. Once the immune system encounters the spike protein (which is harmless alone), the body produces antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 and thus protect from future infection.//

CORBEVAX

The second game changer vaccine is called CORBEVAX; in fact it’s been dubbed the “The World’s COVID-19 Vaccine.” This work was not led by a big (or small) pharmaceutical company but by two scientists at Texas Children’s Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine: Drs. Maria Elena Bottazzi and Peter Hotez. The two have been working together on coronavirus vaccines for the past two decades, including the development of a SARS vaccine in 2003. So when the pandemic hit, they were able to quickly pivot to COVID19. They were not funded through Operation Warp Speed. In fact, they had a very difficult time receiving funding from the government so they turned to philanthropic support, including from Tito’s Vodka.

The depths of Covid corruption at Gundersen can’t fit on one page, and that hospital is just the tip of the iceberg.

Another brief review of the literature by Kojima and Klausner in The Lancet Infectious Diseases had a different conclusion; “Given the evidence of immunity from previous SARS-CoV-2 infection, however, policy makers should consider recovery from previous SARS-CoV-2 infection equal to immunity from vaccination for purposes related to entry to public events, businesses, and the workplace, or travel requirements.”

Therein lies much of the data and the crux of the debate. Is Prior Covid as good as vaccination and why are people with confirmed Covid getting mandated to be vaccinated? //

Which brings us to hybrid immunity. The vaccine immunity is specific to the spike protein, whereas the immunity from infection is directed to the whole virus, and it is clear they are complementary. Every study, and there are more than 25, that has looked at neutralizing antibodies and memory B and T cells has showed there is additivity of the immune response when a person has both forms of immunity. The Science Magazine succinct review by Shane Crotty is outstanding, with the summary Figure below

Raab, who runs the campaigns for GEICO, agrees that insurance ads need to evolve. “Our competition isn’t just other insurance brands,” he says. “It’s any entertainment brand. To compete, we must be as captivating as Netflix, Marvel, Fortnite and the millions of endlessly inventive content creators on TikTok.”

But Kolt disagrees with this “self-absorbed” approach.

To be successful, he said, advertisers just need to “tell the truth. Advertising on TV works,” he added. “Sometimes even bad advertising.”