@dlongenecker1 Jesus talks about this in His Revelation to John. We must endure. Endure to the end. Victors. Actually, winning in this life is enduring in the pursuit of righteousness, for the Glory of God. Be perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect. High expectations from the Most High.
My favorite insult the left gives me is when they tell me that I look trans. They say trans is beautiful, but then use it as an insult. Very comical. ( because a man can be a woman, but a masculine woman cannot? lol k )
Anyways, being a tomboy is pretty cool.
Being secure in my womanhood is pretty cool.
Being able to grow up and find my style without the pressure of trans ideology was pretty cool.
And I hope every young tomboy out there knows that she can grow up and be cool just the way she is.
That she doesn’t need to chop off body parts and take hormones. That she is allowed to be different, and that doesn’t mean she was born in the wrong body.
Tomboys are cool, and definitely worth saving.
Socialism is the high school group project. You do all the work, as your teammates wank off. Because you are responsible, you pull all-nighters to get it done, then they all get the same grade as you. Now multiply that by a billion and the teacher has a gun. That's socialism.
This is true but it leaves out the puppet masters - the red-green alliance operate as proxy forces for the globalists. They are the blue part of the alliance that directs, funds & orchestrates their proxies. France would not have a mass migration problem without the blue. French farmers would not be struggling without the blue. Europe would not saddled with bureaucrats from the EU telling sovereign nations how to live without the blue. And so on. The “open borders” globalists are using Muslims & marxists as tools.
I stand with the French citizens tonight! Fight like hell to save your country 🇫🇷🙏🏼🇺🇸
To American citizens, let the civil war unfolding in France tonight be a reminder to get to the polls on November 3rd. Vote straight red all the way! 🇺🇸
Since people are reading tea leaves: I support President Trump.
I disagree with Massie on plenty. He reached out, and I answered him like an adult. "Genuine" means he thinks for himself, not that I endorse his views.
Midterms are one month from now. Vote early and vote straight Republican.
After watching people spend the last few days talking about Pike - her childhood, her age, her trauma, her execution, her suffering - I want to talk about Colleen Slemmer.
Because somehow the person who was murdered keeps becoming a footnote in the story of the person who murdered her.
Colleen was 19 years old.
She wasn't a case number. She wasn't simply "Christa Pike's victim."
She was a daughter. A granddaughter. A young woman who loved roller-skating, miniature golf and computers. She could take a computer apart and put it back together again. She even had a shirt that said "Computer Geek."
Her family later had that shirt made into a teddy bear so they could keep a piece of her close. ❤️
Colleen was also the kind of kid who gave up part of her own lunchtime to help children with disabilities - feeding students who needed assistance and helping kids in wheelchairs. She volunteered at Special Olympics events. One summer, she helped paint her school.
She struggled with reading, but she was smart and fascinated by computers. She wanted training that wasn't available at the Job Corps program near her home in Florida, so at 19 years old she left her family and went to Knoxville to learn computers and build a future for herself.
She never got that future.
On January 12, 1995, Colleen was lured to an isolated area near the University of Tennessee agricultural campus.
What happened next wasn't a momentary loss of control.
Colleen was beaten and tortured during a prolonged attack. She was cut repeatedly. Her throat was slashed. A pentagram was carved into her chest. She was struck with a meat cleaver and ultimately suffered devastating blows to her head with a large piece of asphalt. Afterward, Pike took a piece of Colleen's skull from the scene. These details come from the court record - not internet rumor.
Colleen was 19.
Nineteen.
And while the country is now being asked to think about what Christa Pike experienced during a failed execution, I think there's room to remember what Colleen experienced when nobody came to stop it.
There's also room to remember everything that existed before those final horrifying moments.
The girl who loved computers.
The girl who roller-skated.
The girl who helped children with disabilities eat their lunch.
The girl who volunteered at the Special Olympics.
The daughter whose mother has now spent more than three decades trying to make sure the world remembers her name.
Her mother, May Martinez, said something this week that absolutely broke my heart:
"The criminals get so much attention. Why? She has been lost in this."
She's right.
So today, I'm not posting Christa Pike's face.
I'm posting Colleen's name.
COLLEEN ANNE SLEMMER
September 20, 1975 – January 12, 1995
She was here.
She was loved.
She mattered.
And she deserves to be remembered for the life she lived - not only for the horrific way someone chose to end it.
Remember Colleen. 🤍
Pope Leo XIV has just made one of the most interesting distinctions I have heard in the debate about artificial intelligence: a machine may be able to generate an image, but that does not mean it has made art in the human sense. Speaking to artists and cultural figures at the Vatican today, Leo argued that there is an “ontological difference, prior even to the aesthetic, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others.” The use of the word ontological is important here I think.
The Pope is not arguing that AI-generated images must necessarily be ugly, crude or obviously artificial. Quite the opposite problem is rapidly emerging. They can be extraordinarily beautiful. AI can produce an image in seconds which might once have required days of human labour, just as it can produce music, prose and increasingly convincing film. Pope Leo's point is that technical quality does not settle the question because something fundamentally different has taken place.
When Caravaggio painted The Calling of St Matthew, a human being had looked at darkness and light, sin and grace, bodies and faces, and attempted to communicate something he had perceived about reality.
When Bach composed the St Matthew Passion, the music emerged from a particular human consciousness, formed by faith, suffering, intellect, memory, craftsmanship and experience.
A machine experiences none of those things.
It can recognise patterns within an enormous inheritance of human creativity and generate something new from them with astonishing sophistication, but it has never stood before a sunset, buried somebody it loved, experienced shame, fallen in love, prayed, doubted, forgiven an enemy or wondered what happens when we die...and this leads into what I think was the most penetrating part of Leo's address. He warned that in the technological age “the great danger is no longer just censorship, but homogenisation; not merely imposed silence, but the noise that makes listening impossible.” That is very deep and well worth considering carefully.
We have a tendency to imagine the cultural danger of technology as somebody preventing us from speaking. The Pope identifies another possibility: that we become surrounded by such an enormous quantity of instantly generated content, tailored to what algorithms already know we like, that genuinely original human voices become increasingly difficult to hear. The problem would not be silence but saturation, it would be a culture filled with images, words and music which are technically accomplished, immediately consumable and endlessly reproducible, but increasingly detached from the mysterious encounter between one human consciousness and another.
This does not mean that we must become frightened of AI. Leo himself has repeatedly rejected that simplistic conclusion, writing in Magnifica Humanitas that technology is not inherently antagonistic to humanity and can serve genuine human flourishing. Perhaps it does require us to recover a distinction we are in danger of losing. Generating something and creating something may not ultimately mean the same thing & as machines become better at the first, we may finally be forced to think much more seriously about what is uniquely human about the second. https://t.co/zKlHorKSat
I have been thinking about yesterday's fascinating comments from Pope Leo on AI and art. Here are some further thoughts.
Perhaps the most interesting thing he said was not really about artificial intelligence at all. It was about what is happening to us in a world increasingly shaped by algorithms. “We live in the age of search engines that offer us thousands of instantaneous answers,” Leo observed. Yet for all their extraordinary power, they “tend to give us what we already want.” That distinction is worthy of deeper consideration. A search engine can tell me when Chartres Cathedral was built, identify the figures in its stained glass and explain the principles of Gothic architecture. An AI can assemble all of that information in seconds and present it beautifully. BUT I can definitively say that neither experience is remotely the same as walking into Chartres. Standing beneath those vaults as coloured light falls through glass made eight centuries ago confronts us with something we did not necessarily know we were looking for. We are no longer simply retrieving information, we are encountering beauty, proportion, transcendence, human craftsmanship and the accumulated faith of generations.
Pope Leo therefore describes art as another kind of “search engine”, one which “does not proceed by indexing but by inquiry.” I think this gets very close to one of the great questions of the technological age. Our machines are becoming astonishingly good at answering questions. Algorithms are increasingly capable of anticipating what we want to read, watch, hear and buy before we consciously formulate the desire ourselves. Yet precisely because they learn our preferences so effectively, they can also construct a world in which we encounter more and more of what we already know we like.
The Pope identifies the resulting danger not simply as censorship, but as “homogenisation”; not merely imposed silence, but the sheer quantity of noise which eventually makes genuine listening impossible.mGreat art does almost the opposite. It interrupts us. It slows us down. It confronts us with something we did not request and sometimes with something we do not immediately understand. A Bach Passion, a Fra Angelico Annunciation, the west front of Chartres or Michelangelo’s Pietà does not merely answer a question. It can awaken questions we had never thought to ask.
St John Paul II understood this when he wrote in his 1999 Letter to Artists that art possesses the remarkable capacity to make the world of “the invisible, of God” perceptible while preserving its mystery. Perhaps this is one reason beauty matters so much to Christianity. The great challenge of the AI age may not ultimately be whether machines become better at giving us answers.
It may be whether human beings retain the capacity to stop, look, listen and ask the questions that actually matter.
2 hills I will die on:
1) I will never vote for a Democrat. Never. Ever. I don't care if it's a good guy running for dog catcher. The party is demonic.
2) I will not stop fighting to pass the Save America Act.
October is dedicated to Our Lady of the Rosary, a month in which the Church invites the faithful to pray the rosary daily in honor of Mary and in meditation on the life of Jesus. The feast of Our Lady of the Rosary on October 7 recalls the victory at Lepanto in 1571, long attributed to the intercession of Mary through the rosary. In this month, Catholics are encouraged to take up the beads with renewed devotion, asking Our Lady to lead them closer to her Son and to obtain peace for the world.
Democrats are trying to psych Republicans into not voting with bullshit polls and tons of negativity.
I've been telling y'all this all along.
Are you going to let Democrats psych you into sitting out an election we can win?
Don't be stupid.
They are not winning, and no landslide!