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FOURTH WEEK OF ADVENT LUKE 1:39-45 Friends, today’s Gospel again tells of Mary’s visit to Elizabeth. I’ve always been fascinated by Mary’s “haste” in this story of the Visitation. Upon hearing the message of Gabriel concerning her own pregnancy and that of her cousin, Mary proceeded “in haste” into the hill country of Judah to see Elizabeth. Why did she go with such speed and purpose? Because she had found her mission, her role in the theo-drama. We are dominated today by the ego-drama in all of its ramifications and implications. The ego-drama is the play that I’m writing, I’m...

Whilst doing some Spring cleaning back in 2013, a man threw his old PC hard drive into the trash, which quickly joined the mountain of rubbish at his local landfill site in Newport, Wales, UK. Little did he know at the time, that same hard drive contained a wallet filled with 7,500 Bitcoin, worth a cool £500,000 ($665,000) in the early crypto days. Now? That wallet is worth $357 million. Once he realized, the man began a desperate search for the hard drive and has been searching ever since. Over the past eight years, James Howells has been crawling through...

The boys who cried wolf... https://rumble.com/vr4zqj-o-m-i-c-r-o-n.html

Omicron has no recent ancestor. Its most recent ancestor existed in the beginning of year 2020 and went extinct. The weirdness of this is similar to a young man who is alive today and is proven genetically to be a biological son of George Washington: you know that something very special is going on. However, having come to a conclusion that Omicron is a result of intentional development (though possibly released accidentally), we need to think it through. Omicron could be released as An intentional release of this specific variant along the lines of Bill Gates’ suggestion that “we need...

Center for Vaccine Development director Dr. Peter Hotez said Tuesday on MSNBC’s “MTP Daily” that he believes, especially for health care workers, people will need coronavirus booster shots every three months. Hotez said, “Now we have an added problem, and that is specific to the Omicron variant, that third booster was holding up so well for Delta, Alpha and other variants, for Omicron, it is waning really quickly.” Anchor Chuck Todd said, “So we know that Moderna is apparently working on a booster that would tackle Omicron. Are we going to be in this sort of gap, it sounds like?...

Most people are familiar with Swedish cinnamon buns or the Danish “danish” (they’re called weinerbrød in Denmark). But unless you’ve been to Finland, you’ve probably never heard of pullapitko. Pullapitko, or pulla bread, is a cardamom-spiced sweet loaf that can be found from the north to the south of Finland. It’s like if a buttery brioche and a challah had a love-child; it’s mixed with loads of milk and butter (courtesy of a brioche father) and woven like challah (thanks, Mom!). For the record, there does not seem to be a relationship between the three breads but isn’t this the...

The ruler of Dubai was ordered to pay his princess ex-wife and their children more than $730 million in the most expensive divorce settlement in British history. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum, 72, was ordered in London’s High Court on Tuesday to pay Princess Haya Bint Al Hussein, a half-sister of Jordan’s King Abdullah II, a lump sum of around $333 million within the next three months. He also has to immediately pay several million more for the education of their children — Al Jalila, 14, and Zayed, 9 — and then guarantee $385 million to cover future payments.

The zealous and often illogical promotion of vaccines by the government appears to have officially turned a majority of Americans into anti-vaxxers. Not metaphorically, but apparently, literally as a matter of basic English.The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “anti-vaxxer” as “a person who opposes … regulations mandating vaccination.”So, if you oppose a vaccine requirement, you are an anti-vaxxer. Well, an official NBC News Survey by Hart Research found that 50% of American adults opposed “requiring that everyone who is now eligible must get a COVID-19 vaccine.” It appears half of Americans are now officially anti-vaxxers.In reality, based on the more common, colloquial...

A new bill filed by Senator Joe Gruters (Tampa) aims to require all school board meetings in Florida to be recorded and streamed live on a publicly available website as well as granting members of the public more freedom to participate in discussion. Senate Bill 1300 (SB 1300) would mandate that a minimum of 30 minutes at the start of every school board meeting be allocated for individual members of the public and representatives of groups to freely speak on any topic relating to the meeting and its proceedings. Each speaker would be given at least 3 minutes to touch...

SAN JOSE, Calif. - In what could be an unprecedented move in California, San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo on Tuesday announced his idea to make all city employees, as a condition of employment, and residents or visitors who enter city-owned facilities, to have a booster shot or third round of vaccinations.

TALLAHASSEE — A legal showdown over a controversial state elections law is set to take place next month, after a federal judge rejected efforts to short-circuit a trial in constitutional challenges by voting-rights groups. The League of Women Voters of Florida, the Florida Conference of the NAACP, Disability Rights Florida and a number of other groups filed a series of lawsuits challenging the measure (SB 90), passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature this spring as part of GOP leaders’ nationwide attempts to make it more difficult for people to vote by mail. Lawyers for the plaintiffs allege that the changes are...

President Joe Biden greets the Washington Nationals’ Racing Presidents at the Congressional Baseball Game, Wednesday, September 29, 2021, at Nationals Park in Washington.

The last two years of parenting young children in a pandemic have felt like an extended, unyielding version of that moment. Every day we measure the threats and perform intricate cost-benefit analyses. What’s more damaging, for example: unrelenting isolation or the possibility of a child contracting the virus from a return to daycare? The stress of playing Russian roulette with our children’s lives—or refusing to, keeping them home as much as possible—is crushing. I think of that old carnival ride, the Gravitron, which spins so quickly that riders are lifted from the floor, held against padded walls by forces three...

Just yesterday I came across a twitter site called They Say Its Rare. This site collates harrowing stories of vaccine-caused death and injury from across the world. Twitter is normally a bad, bad vehicle for shared grieving and loss - mainly because the world is full of souless wangrods, and many of those wangrods have twitter accounts. But in this case it seems to work. Maybe it's because literally every post is a separate vignette of loss and appalled anger. There's no room for incredulity or doubt. No space for cretinous tweets such as 'how do you know it was...

The article by her hometown paper had seven paragraphs about Harris's choice of artworks and family photographs but nothing about policy positions. Kamala Harris was slammed on Monday, December 13, after her interview was published by the San Francisco Chronicle. Most readers considered it a pointless puff piece in which she explained the meaning behind the decorations in her office. The outlet, which is based in her hometown of San Francisco, shared the article on Twitter on Sunday, December 12, with the caption, "Kamala Harris has redecorated the VP’s office. Here’s the meaning behind her choices." The interview was published...

A teenage Minnesota McDonald's employee is being hailed a hero after she leapt from a drive-thru window to save a woman choking on a chicken McNugget. Sydney Raley, 15, from Edina, Minnesota, said she was working a 'mostly normal' shift at the Eden Prairie McDonalds Saturday when she popped her head out a window to inform a customer that the rest of her food would be ready shortly. That's when she realized the unidentified woman was in trouble.

CHICAGO (WLS) -- Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced new COVID mitigations Tuesday, including a vaccine requirement for indoor dining at restaurants for patrons and workers. People going out to eat will have to bring in more than just their masks and wallets starting January 3. The city of Chicago will start requiring customers and restaurant workers to also provide proof of vaccination or proof of a negative COVID test. This new mitigation effort is aimed at stemming the spread of the omicron variant, which the CDC now says is responsible for 73% of all new COVID cases. "I think it'll make...

There has been a lot of activity in the world of cultured meat since we reported on a US$330,000 lab-grown burger back in 2013, as scientists and startups work to bring the price down to something resembling the real deal. Making inroads in this space is Israeli startup Future Meats, which has just received the largest investment ever in the cultured meat industry and is rapidly reducing the production costs of its lab-grown chicken. Future Meats is one of a number of cultured meat companies working to reach cost parity with traditional meat products, with Impossible Foods, Eat Just and...

Of the eight approved or authorized antibodies, all but sotrovimab completely or almost completely lost their neutralizing activity against the Omicron pseudovirus. A cocktail of cilgavimab and tixagevimab had a reduced potency of 200-fold. Sotrovimab, conversely, shows a drop of 3-fold drop in neutralization potency.

The United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), which represents West Virginia coal miners as well, said that the bill contained important measures that would benefit coal miners — like an extension of funding to aid victims of black lung disease, tax incentives to urge manufacturers to build new factories and employ ex-miners and protect union workers. Cecil Roberts, the union’s president said in a statement: “We are disappointed that the bill will not pass. We urge Senator Manchin to revisit his opposition to this legislation and work with his colleagues to pass something that will help keep coal miners working,...