Olivia
Online
MrCroftsClass🟧☮️
@MrCroftsClass
Special Educ. Teacher / Lesson Learner/ I have a vision of school that I have yet to achieve.
Oak Ridge, TN
Joined July 2015
395 Following
173 Followers
1.4K Posts
Ooooh, are we sharing fables? I got one for you.
So, there's this frog that enters public service, presumably for the right reasons. He spends years as a district judge, then gets elected to the state supreme court, then attorney general of that state.
Wouldn't you know it, that frog makes his way up to the U.S. Senate and gets reelected a few times. He seems to have a great path ahead.
Well, along comes this scorpion who's running for president and saying outright: if you don't support me, I'm gonna sting you.
The supposedly wise frog warns everyone else about the scorpion, tells them this scorpion is bad news, tells them this scorpion is gonna sting them with no regard for their support.
Alas, the scorpion is elected anyway, and the frog, despite knowing the scorpion is going to sting, keeps supporting the scorpion.
The frog, once wise, spends a decade defending the scorpion stinging others even though the frog knows there's a damn good chance he's gonna get stung himself because the scorpion doesn't do loyalty.
The frog, you see, is too chickenshit to speak out against the scorpion and decides to just wait out the scorpion's time. He's okay with others getting stung, though. He figures if he can appeal to the scorpion's ego and support him, he'll evade the eventual sting.
So, he spends years pandering to the scorpion and looking the other way while others get stung. And after a while, he figures he's gonna make it out okay.
Well, along comes this other frog who panders even harder. A truly corrupt and nasty frog. No integrity at all. Seems to have no soul.
And the frog thinks: there ain't no way the scorpion is gonna favor this other frog. I've bent over backwards for the scorpion. I've been loyal. This other frog is ugly as sin. No one likes the other frog. The scorpion ain't gonna choose him over me, right?
The frog is now neck-deep in delusion. He thinks the way to get out of this pickle is to pander to the scorpion even harder. He even tries to get a highway named after the scorpion.
Well... it didn't work. One day, the scorpion thanked the frog for his loyalty and then repeatedly stung him into oblivion. Stung him over and over. Seemed to enjoy it, honestly.
I think I read that in Aesop's or somewhere.
Vote democrat in the midterms. Destroy MAGA.
This has to be the end. Mid-terms cannot get here soon enough. I don’t care what gridlock may happen but the country needs a course correction. We have lost our way.
Yes, he really said that.
Yesterday Vice President JD Vance criticized Pope Leo XIV for not knowing enough theology: "I think it's very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology ... If you’re going to opine on matters of theology, you’ve got to be careful, you’ve got to make sure it’s anchored in the truth," he said, at a Turning Point conference.
One of the many, many, ironies about that statement is that it came in response to Pope Leo's comments about war and peace and, specifically, the concept of "just war," which originated with St. Augustine. As many have already noted, when the Vice President was making his comments, Pope Leo XIV, a member of the Augustinian Order, and twice Prior General of the Augustinians before his election as Pope, was visiting the hometown of St. Augustine, then called "Hippo," now in Annaba, a town in modern-day Algeria. For good measure, Pope Leo XIV, the man critiqued for insufficient theological education, earned not only a master's degree in divinity, but also licentiate and a doctorate in canon law from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome.
JD Vance's recent conversion to Catholicism is beside the point, because many converts are of course not only highly intelligent (and learned in theology) but faithful and energetic Catholics. We rejoice over everyone entering the church.
What most of us do not rejoice over, however, is a deadly combination of inaccuracy and hubris. Pace, Vice President Vance, but the current war in Iran is not a just war under Catholic doctrine. You can hear that from church leaders from across the theological spectrum, from Archbishop Timothy Broglio, the head of the military vicariate and former head of the @USCCB, to Cardinal Robert McElroy, Archbishop of Washington who holds doctorates in both theology and political science. You can look all that up online. Suffice to say, the Vice President doesn't seem to understand the tenets of just war.
Nor does he seem to understand the fundamental position of the church, which is for peace. "War is always a defeat for humanity," as St. John Paul II said. If that authority isn't enough, then turn to Jesus who said, "Blessed are the peacemakers," not "Blessed are the warmongers." And after the Resurrection, the Risen Christ says to the frightened disciples not "Vengeance is mine" but "Peace be with you."
Incidentally, the day before, the Vice President said that the Pope (and the Vatican) should stick to teaching about morality, also seeming to forget that war and peace are profoundly moral issues.
For his part, Pope Leo was focused yesterday on his spiritual father, St. Augustine. After what seemed like an emotional visit to Hippo, he celebrated Mass at the Basilica of St. Augustine in Annaba. During his homily he said, "The primary task of pastors as ministers of the Gospel is therefore to bear witness to God before the world with one heart and one soul, not permitting our concerns to lead us astray through fear, nor trends to undermine us through compromise."
Amen. Let's all continue to pray for the Holy Father as he works for peace.
(Image: Pope Leo XIV prays at the archeological ruins of Hippo, home of St. Augustine, in current-day Algeria. CNS photo).
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Yes, he really said that.
Yesterday Vice President JD Vance criticized Pope Leo XIV for not knowing enough theology: "I think it's very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology ... If you’re going to opine on matters of theology, you’ve got to be careful, you’ve got to make sure it’s anchored in the truth," he said, at a Turning Point conference.
One of the many, many, ironies about that statement is that it came in response to Pope Leo's comments about war and peace and, specifically, the concept of "just war," which originated with St. Augustine. As many have already noted, when the Vice President was making his comments, Pope Leo XIV, a member of the Augustinian Order, and twice Prior General of the Augustinians before his election as Pope, was visiting the hometown of St. Augustine, then called "Hippo," now in Annaba, a town in modern-day Algeria. For good measure, Pope Leo XIV, the man critiqued for insufficient theological education, earned not only a master's degree in divinity, but also licentiate and a doctorate in canon law from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome.
JD Vance's recent conversion to Catholicism is beside the point, because many converts are of course not only highly intelligent (and learned in theology) but faithful and energetic Catholics. We rejoice over everyone entering the church.
What most of us do not rejoice over, however, is a deadly combination of inaccuracy and hubris. Pace, Vice President Vance, but the current war in Iran is not a just war under Catholic doctrine. You can hear that from church leaders from across the theological spectrum, from Archbishop Timothy Broglio, the head of the military vicariate and former head of the @USCCB, to Cardinal Robert McElroy, Archbishop of Washington who holds doctorates in both theology and political science. You can look all that up online. Suffice to say, the Vice President doesn't seem to understand the tenets of just war.
Nor does he seem to understand the fundamental position of the church, which is for peace. "War is always a defeat for humanity," as St. John Paul II said. If that authority isn't enough, then turn to Jesus who said, "Blessed are the peacemakers," not "Blessed are the warmongers." And after the Resurrection, the Risen Christ says to the frightened disciples not "Vengeance is mine" but "Peace be with you."
Incidentally, the day before, the Vice President said that the Pope (and the Vatican) should stick to teaching about morality, also seeming to forget that war and peace are profoundly moral issues.
For his part, Pope Leo was focused yesterday on his spiritual father, St. Augustine. After what seemed like an emotional visit to Hippo, he celebrated Mass at the Basilica of St. Augustine in Annaba. During his homily he said, "The primary task of pastors as ministers of the Gospel is therefore to bear witness to God before the world with one heart and one soul, not permitting our concerns to lead us astray through fear, nor trends to undermine us through compromise."
Amen. Let's all continue to pray for the Holy Father as he works for peace.
(Image: Pope Leo XIV prays at the archeological ruins of Hippo, home of St. Augustine, in current-day Algeria. CNS photo).
Get Memphis out your mouth, you embarrassing us caping for Geno’s privileged ass. He’s the loser here 💯
@SportsCenter I'm sure they were not friendly words, but you have Geno handling it professionally while staley is yelling like she's in a waffle house.
A cowardly attack on a civilian target. Hit once and first responders come and another strike while they are rendering aid. A country of 93 million people we are attacking now indiscriminately. Shameful
This photo will be Pam Bondi's legacy.
No accountability. No justice. No concern for victims.
Utter disgrace.
Robert Mueller died last night.
He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam. He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving.
He had integrity.
And tonight the President of the United States said good!
I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good.
I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word.
Good.
This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather.
That is what is happening. That is what has happened.
The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming.
America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner.
And the church said nothing.
Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary.
Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him.
Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart.
JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn.
These men are something more painful than monsters.
They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again.
Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing.
Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less.
That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him.
And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbours. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it.
When Trump is gone, they will still be here.
Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous.
That morning is coming.
Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honour. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say.
He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true.
He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad.
The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it.
That is all it needed to be.
A man died. His family is broken open with grief.
That is all it needed to be.
Instead the President said good.
And the country that once stood for something looked away 🇺🇸
Gandalv / @Microinteracti1
Somebody give that monkey a multiple choice standardized test quick need to give the man in the yellow hat an effectiveness score (bike riding not essential curriculum)
Not to be a killjoy but that monkey's not gonna learn how to read
Please follow this link to read the full statement from the National Center for Learning Disabilities:
https://t.co/XQOFyOQukZ
“Christ beside me.
Christ before me.
Christ behind me.
Christ in me.
Christ beneath me.
Christ above me.”
- St. Patrick
This man, daily, continues his assault on basic common decency and is the most odious and offensive narcissist that has ever ascended to the executive office. I am incredulous at the amount of people that still cape up for this loser
President Trump: "Gavin Newscum has admitted that he is a—that he has learning disabilities. Honestly, I'm all for people with learning disabilities, but not for my president. I think a president should not have learning disabilities."
Leonardo da Vinci had dyslexia.
Albert Einstein had dyslexia.
Richard Branson has dyslexia.
Steve Jobs had dyslexia.
Mr. President — with respect — dyslexia has absolutely nothing to do with intelligence.
We don’t do politics. But we do this.
@MadeByDyslexia
@reading_league
@NationalParents
@DyslexiaIDA
@wvlt Bassmaster classic is this weekend and Jimmy Houston is the grand marshal of the St Patrick’s Day Parade-would love to see that reported for Knoxville!
@wbir Bassmaster classic is this weekend and Jimmy Houston is the grand marshal of the St Patrick’s Day Parade-would love to see that reported!
Now do Stephen Miller.
Awful awful news, prayers for this family, I can hardly believe this
Absolutely devastated to hear the news of the passing of my friend Wes Rucker in a car wreck in Knoxville. Wes was the heart of Tennessee sports coverage in my mind and a wonderful man. He loved his family, friends and the Vols
What an awful tragedy. God Bless his family
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