Taking questions from reporters aboard his flight back to Rome after a five-day trip to Portugal, the pope was asked how he could reconcile his “todos” message with the fact that LGBTQ+ people are excluded from the sacraments. The pope answered the Church has laws, but is still a place for everyone.
Known as China’s granary, the three northeasternmost provinces – Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning – produce more than one fifth of the country’s grain output, thanks to the region’s fertile black earth. Major crops produced there include soybeans, corn and rice.
Trump needs to be buried deep enough that he’s not a threat as an independent, and so they can win over some “swing” voters, but they don’t want to alienate his supporters. This is going to get really awkward.
Niger has been thrown in to political chaos since late last month, when President Mohamed Bazoum was ousted in a coup d’etat by the presidential guard. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) responded days later by enacting sanctions and issuing an ultimatum to the ruling military junta: stand down within a week or face a potential military intervention.
For further context, this is the new sandbox for world powers to play in. China and Russia have established strong spheres of influence all over Africa, and Niger has more or less been positioned as the linchpin for the US’s regions with good relations. It comes down to access to resources, trade agreements, and tactical positions for military purposes.
No one is objectively the good guys in this sort of thing, but if you live in a NATO nation there are some decidedly “bad guys” that would be overjoyed to see the Junta stabilize as the leadership and kick out the remaining Western countries’ troops and civilian workers
It’s so weird that all these places the global north have been intentionally destabilizing are unstable and sympathetic to (even worse) groups that oppose the west. If only there was an alternative to undermining their democracies and exploiting their people and natural resources.
Let the Niger people and government fail. Often the best teacher is pain. Let them chart their own path for good or evil. Africa can never develop if the West keep treating them like children. Stop all aid, all funds, all trade. Let’s see how well China, Russia and Mali can help them.
Man that’s something scary I hadn’t considered yet… “Glacier-dammed lake”… I bet we’re gonna keep hearing more about Northern flooding like this as the planet keeps warming up. Yikes.
Remember folks, republicans might be able to get rid of trump but they will never get rid of trumpism. Trump merely removed the veil of decency republicans had carefully worn for decades to expose what the party really stands for.
I wonder what William F. Buckley would say about the Trump presidency, what with his doing everything he could to make conservatives sound intellectual…
My genx Brother in Law loves to bring up how he had to pay for college working a pressure washing and catering job. So that’s two part-time jobs. 🙄 Of course the idea of student loan forgiveness is outrageous to him.
I don't understand why they bailed out the banks in '08, it wasn't fair to citizens who were in debt because their houses were underwater, just not fair at all.
tbh 15 years later I wish they let the banks fail. It would have been a pretty terrible 10 years, but I think by now we’d have a functioning world better suited for today’s generations/problems.
Don’t buy into the propaganda. There was never going to be a big crash. They would have taken a small hit and FDIC would have insured every deposit. The big banks had already unloaded the mortgage backed securities into pension funds.
But but what about Lehman Brothers? Yeah what about them? The CEO alone took a +600 million dollar bonus they year it was going “bankrupt”. They can’t stay open but gave him over half a billion? I don’t think so. Bankrupt for normal people means rice for dinner for years, for the big banks it means they just don’t feel like “working” anymore.
What should have happened is jailing the lot of them, a foreclosure freeze across the US for a year, replenishment of Pensions from AIG and Goldman and Lehman executive salaries, and finally a requirement that everyone that is to be evicted be given a court appointed attorney who has the same case load as the bank’s attorney.
I am also Gen X with 2 teenagers. My college tuition was roughly $3-5k per year. For my kids, college tuition will be $9k/year. I have no problem with student loan forgiveness. College tuition has gotten out of control and student loans are holding younger generations back.
I am also genX and my tuition at a shit-tier school out west was 15k/year in 2003. After losing everything in a messy divorce my 45k owed became 70k over night (I lost all my bursaries and scholarships when I left school 2 weeks early).
Student loans do not effect the wealthy. They simply do not have student loans. For them it is a waste of tax money.
And boomers did not need student loans because college was affordable. They believe you can still get s part time job and pay for school. So to them, quit being so lazy.
Then we have the rich boomers that pay politicians to rage for them.
Democrats could rinse and repeat this political strategy to multiple white house victories. Create policy that benefits common people while showing republicans as desperate to a holes that want to stop the help at any cost.
IANAP but nobody goes to hell in Catholicism. Big Catholic doesn’t want you to know but in order to go to hell you need to sin without guilt but there’s a technicality that you cannot sin without your soul feeling some guilt since the holy spirit resides within and will always experience guilt at the sin committed it means you’re good.
There is a hell, i.e. all those who die in personal mortal sin, as enemies of God, and unworthy of eternal life, will be severely punished by God after death.
Now I’m not clear from Google whether or not gay sex is a mortal sin, but it seems like it’s leaning on yes. Just being gay might not send you to Hell in Catholicism, but acting on it? Sounds like maybe.
What a stupid religion, “hey you have free will and I totally gave it to you, BUT I SWEAR TO MYSELF ILL TORTURE YOU FOR LIFE IF YOU DO THINGS I DON’T LIKE ARBITRARILY!”
Also “I’m all powerful and created the entire universe but if you little ants on this one little rock don’t worship me, I’ll condemn you to eternal damnation!”
I think it’s important to remember that not all conservatives are dumb idiots who got super into following a charlatan. A lot of them are, don’t get me wrong.
But a lot of them are selfish, religious bigots who want to violently control others. They’re not valid or dumb, they’re cruel.
Don’t let them get away with anything by cultivating the idea they’re just sheep. There are wolves among them too.
At some point you have to wonder how does this benefit conservatives at all? On the contrary, forgiving student debt would free up the income of several people in their districts to spend money and stimulate the economy. From a church's perspective, any money that isn't being spent on repayment is potentially money being dumped into their collection plates. And for all those conservative people who want liberals/queer people/racial minorities to move away from them, they would certainly have more money to do so. Even to the most die hard conservative, I don't see how this isn't an absolute win?
Nah, they feed their base hate but that’s their playbook and not the point.
Power and money are the point and poor people are easier to exploit. Everything they’re doing, even abortion, is about keeping the cycle of poverty going.
More liberals go to college than conservatives. So while this will hurt some of their base, it will hurt their enemy more. And it’s a culture war victory for their aging boomer base that enjoyed cheap college and never had to struggle with college debt.
If loan forgiveness goes though its a major win for the Democrats and they cant have that. If republicans block it, then the peasants among us can claim that Democrats were never serious about it and both parties are the same.
The overlap of “old people who donate to churches” and “people with student debt” is probably quite low. Debt and hardship breeds low-income, low-educated future generations, and those uneducated bloodlines are easier to convince to go to church.
Keeping middle america poor, uneducated, and struggling is a direct benefit to both religion and the corporate bottom line.
Because their base has the idea that it if doesn’t benefit them personally, we shouldn’t do it. If they don’t get “free money” too, then they missed out. How dare we correct a mistake of outrageously high college loans without just giving money to those who didn’t go to college or were able to pay it off? That’s not fair.
Loan forgiveness helps college educated Americans. The GOP has vilified college education as elitist. So blocking loan forgiveness is like a PR will for the GOP base.
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