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So, in the process of re-doing our VA Mortgage, we need some repairs done as well as doing some consolidation. But got a really odd request from the Processor. They looked at where my office is, relative to my house. . and asked me to write a statement 'justifying my lengthy commute'. Is this some sort of ESG thing? Are they afraid of Al Gore or Greta Thunberg saying 'No mortgage for you!". We were going to close late next week, so wondering where this last-minute request came from...

Zwischgold was used to gild sacred figures. It is not actually gold leaf, which was quite expensive, but a special double-sided foil of gold and silver where the gold can be ultra-thin because it is supported by the silver base. Other microscopy techniques had been used previously to examine zwischgold, however, they only provided a 2D cross-section of the material. In other words, it was only possible to view the surface of the cut segment, rather than looking inside the material. The scientists were also worried that cutting through it may have changed the structure of the sample. But an...

Russian losses in the eight-month-old Ukraine War could be wildly higher than anything Moscow will admit to — or anything I dared report might be possible. “Irrevocable losses,” Russian-language news site iStories claims, “may amount to more than 90 thousand people.” That’s according to iStories’ inside sources, reportedly “a former officer of the Russian special services, the second is an active FSB officer.” iStories was founded in neighboring Latvia two years ago by Russian journalists in response to the Kremlin’s growing crackdown on independent news. An irrecoverable loss, as detailed by the report, is a soldier “who died, went missing,...

The Treasury Department inspector general confirmed in a letter to Democratic lawmakers that the agency is planning to audit whether spending by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on migrant flights was improper. The lawmakers asked the Treasury Department to look into whether Florida improperly used American Rescue Plan funds for the migrant flights to Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts, which drew widespread media attention. Florida lawmakers authorized a $12 million migrant program funded with interest earnings from the federal Coronavirus State Fiscal Recovery Fund, according to documents.

Wed, October 12, 2022 at 2:50 PM·1 min read Cruise stocks soar to pace the S&P 500, as Norwegian is upgraded to buy In this article: ^GSPC -0.33% CUK +10.05% RCL +11.48% NCLH +11.61% Shares of cruise operators were the top-3 gainers in the S&P 500 (SPX) in afternoon trading Wednesday, with Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Ltd. (NCLH) getting bullish backing from UBS on the back of upbeat bookings data. UBS analyst Robin Farley raised Norwegian’s rating to buy, after being at neutral since before the pandemic. Farley said the company’s “significant improvement” in bookings in the company’s third-quarter preview...

The researchers injected the human tissue into the rats’ somatosensory cortexes — regions that receive and process sensory information like touch or pain. After about two weeks of training, the rats began to lick a spout in search of water whenever the researchers stimulated the human neurons (they did this using blue light lasers). The researchers also used a puff of air to prod the rats’ whiskers, then observed how the human neurons responded. After the transplants, he said, the human neurons grew to six times their original size over about eight months, making up roughly one-third of a single...

https://twitter.com/w_terrence/status/1579622146824970243

PLANO, Texas - A manager of a Hooters restaurant was brutally attacked last week all over some chocolate bars. The fight happened on Oct. 6 at the Hooters off Central Expressway near Southwestern Avenue in Plano. Plano Police said the fight broke out after the manager asked two young boys to leave after they were trying to sell chocolate bars to their customers inside the restaurant. "They were being escorted out and causing issues according to the detectives. Turning over chairs, throwing things," Detective Jerry Minton of the Plano Police Department told KDFW. Once the boys were outside, three men...

This link includes stories covering all 32 teams. In fact, it has several links discussing the status of each team, stories of each team's needs, links discussing rookies this year and a general, all-around heavy dose of all thing's hockey.

You can watch a recording of a John Solomon interview of Mastriano when they post it. The interview ended as I put this post together. Major gist: Mastriano says mail-in voting in PA is down by about 40% with Democrats requesting fewer ballots and Republicans requesting more when compared to 2020.

Democratic nominee for Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports” that she won’t debate her opponent, Republican nominee Kari Lake because she spews lies.Mitchell said, “You have refused to take part in the lone debate with Kari Lake, giving her 30 minutes to present her ideas without any pushback. You said you don’t want to participate in a spectacle. How is it productive to give her a platform where she will not be challenged?”Hobbs said, “I think you said it yourself in the intro that all three top Republicans are election deniers. How do you debate...

[Catholic Caucus] A Snapshot of the Church before Vatican II: How Today’s Crisis Cures the Pre-Conciliar IllsAlthough Francis has tried his best to make it clear, some faithful Catholics still do not accept the reality that certain parts of Vatican II itself are opposed to what the Church has always taught. This is the case despite the fact that we have admissions from the Council’s progressive architects that they intentionally included ambiguities and previously condemned ideas into the Council documents. These architects and their followers have spent the past sixty years exploiting those heterodox passages to advance their anti-Catholic initiatives.As...

NBC News journalist Dasha Burns’s Tuesday report on Democrat Senate candidate John Fetterman’s use of closed captioning that aided his interview with Burns was immediately counteracted and framed as speculative by the network following the report’s debut on NBC News’s nightly evening news. The scathing report by Burns, an employee of NBC News for over six years, went unsupported by her network after she conducted an interview with the Pennsylvania Democrat which highlighted Fetterman’s need for closed captioning to understand the questions Burns asked. Fetterman had a stroke in May and has not fully recovered. He appears to still struggle...

[Catholic Caucus] Padre Pio and the Seminarian’s Guardian Angel Padre Pio with Father Jean DerobertThe French writer, Yves Chiron, in his biography, cites the case of an American soldier, upon landing in Italy [during the Second World War]. This Catholic man was black and hailed from New York. In terms of English he only spoke the Harlem slang-dialect, incomprehensible to anyone who had not grown up up in that black neighborhood. As soon as the soldier knelt before Padre Pio, the Friar began speaking this slang as if he had done so all his life. But Padre Pio possessed...

College students organized a protest in response to their university’s nomination of a sole finalist for president of the school. The University of Florida announced on October 6 that Senator Ben Sasse, R-Neb, was unanimously nominated to be the only contender to serve as the 13th president of the public institution.

VIDEOThe internal polling of the Katie Hobbs gubernatorial campaign in Arizona must show her numbers CRASHING because she went on MSNBC and along with Andrea Mitchell acting as her adviser came up with an incredibly lame excuse why she cowardly refuses to debate Kari Lake. And that LAME excuse is "election denialism." The liberals have decided that "election denialism" is such a heinous thought crime that you are completely justified in not engaging such thought criminals in debate.

To put it simply, in the current standoff over Ukraine’s territory, Putin has the advantage as far as nuclear threats go. The ongoing brinkmanship there has revealed a serious misunderstanding on the part of some analysts and most of the media attempting to define the threats made by Biden and Putin, by relating it to the Cold War environment. The problem is that in the realm of deterrence, the U.S. no longer has a robust nuclear response at the very low end of the weapons spectrum whereas Russia does (if their maintenance is up to par). The U.S.’s ground-based tactical...

This is a public service announcement! Check your drawers for any Samsung (or different brand) phones that aren't in use, as they are a potential fire hazard! In case you follow the smartphone industry, particularly on YouTube and Twitter, you'd know that there have been recent reports of Samsung phones that are … "blowing up", or at least about to. Despite trying, in the end Samsung wasn't able to handle the Note 7 battery crisis. The company recalled the defective phones and released a fresh batch of Note 7s (after having changed its battery supplier). The issues persisted, and the...

Our thousands of nuclear weapons were designed, tested and built in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s to win the Cold War. None of these weapons has been tested since 1992, over a quarter century ago. Nor has a single new weapon been designed, tested or built during this same period. The tens of thousands of active nuclear weapons scientists in our three nuclear weapons labs have never designed, tested and built a nuclear weapon. Nuclear weapons are the most complex systems ever created by man. The detonation of a nuclear weapon is so complex that there are many activities and...

A 15-year-old student who's reportedly been diagnosed with several disorders was charged with raping a teacher in a Pittsburgh school late last month and later said, "I’m sorry officer, but I have urges," according to a police report WPXI-TV said it exclusively obtained. In addition, the student earlier this year was accused of attacking a staff member at a behavioral health center — slamming her against a wall and trying to take her clothes off, the station said in a separate story. An internal evaluation of the student that WPXI obtained indicates the student last year was diagnosed with bipolar...