Germany is rearming, and last month the German government announced plans to become the strongest conventional army in Europe by 2039. This is a goal that the Trump administration broadly supports, because they want our European NATO allies to become less dependent upon the U.S. for security.
Simultaneously, the Trump administration has become a surprisingly outspoken defender of the German far-right party, Alternative für Deutschland, known by its initials AfD. In February 2025, JD Vance met with Alice Weidel, the AfD co-leader and the party’s candidate for chancellor. In September 2025, Weidel came to Washington and met with officials from the U.S. National Security Council, the State Department, and Vance’s office. In February, an AfD member of the German Bundestag met with Pentagon officials.
The AfD is not so enthusiastic about NATO membership and has argued that NATO isn’t considering Russia’s interests. Weidel spent six years living in the People’s Republic of China and worked for the state-owned Bank of China. The AfD remain vehement opponents of the U.S. military campaign against Iran.
Today I was reading Exodus 15 about the song of Moses and this strike my mind ..that you can use SCRIPTURES to worship God ..
Can we get deeper into this topic !
Check the comment section
When many people hear the word “worship,” they immediately think about music, instruments, choirs, and worship songs.
But true worship is deeper than music.
Worship is the posture of the heart before God.
You can sing every worship song and still not truly know God.
John 4:24 says: “God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.”
True worship is spiritual and rooted in truth — the Word of God.
Important context re: Malliotakis' bill for a National Women's History Museum.
This *was* a longtime bipartisan effort that went down largely on partisan lines yesterday.
But worth mentioning that it became politically charged by two Republican actions: 1. Rep. Mary Miller proposed and got passed amendments limiting the museum to "biological" women, i.e. banning recognition of transgender women and 2. The bill had language giving President Trump power over the museum location.
(There was also concern over his ability to direct the board's overseeing it regarding content.)
Shujaiyya (Gaza) at the top and Nahal Oz (Israel) at the bottom.
Hamas and its allies invaded southern Israel on 10/7, destroying much in their paths. Now, much of Gaza lies in ruins, while Israel has steadily worked to recover from the attack. Hamas made a major strategic miscalculation, and the outcome is evident for all to see.
Right before giving my seat on the Board of Governors to Chairman Warsh, I published a note with Federal Reserve colleagues, Alessandro Barbarino and Anthony Diercks.
We dive into software price trends, which have been a substantial driver of PCE inflation recently: (link next)
Software inflation accounts for over half of core goods inflation in the last four months. (We study four months because that's when software clearly inflected upward, the appropriate period will lengthen as time goes on)
What's driving this? For sure there are some genuine price increases in the category. And those are substantially upweighted in PCE relative to CPI; PCE places over 30x the weight on the category that CPI does. federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/…
Lemme explain. Bush got Israel to freeze settlement growth outside of the core "blocs" and cut subsidies for the Blocs in exchange for US commitment to back Israel on keeping the Blocs.
J Street and co. didn't like this, because it was USA taking a side before negotiations.
But the taking a side was the carrot that got Israel to do something to the Palestinians' benefit (constraining settlement growth).
Anyways, Obama comes in and acts as though this deal never happened. But in so doing, he took away the Israeli incentive to restrict settlement growth.
So Obama just demanded a settlement freeze from Israel in order to prove to the Palestinians the US was serious. Netanyahu did do this for many months. But now there was suddenly a pressure on Mahmoud Abbas to demand even more than a settlement freeze, because the Israelis already did a settlement freeze. So the settlement freeze didn't have desired effect anyway.
All the while, in scrapping the Bush-Sharon framework, Obama told the Israelis that US Presidential deals with them don't last past a particular President. That gave the Israelis less reason to trust promises made to them by Obama.
And the Palestinians also looked at this like "well if this is how Obama treats his friends, how are we supposed to find the Americans credible if we aren't even as tight with them as the Israelis are?" On top of this, Obama backing the ouster of Mubarak terrified Mahmoud Abbas, but that's a different subject.
Meanwhile, making demands of the Israelis costs the US political and diplomatic capital. It's not like we can just pressure them without limit. They're only going to listen to us so much.
And because the Obama Admin wasn't differentiating between settlement blocs and others, they wasted a lot of diplomatic capital on bugging the Israelis about the settlement blocs everybody already kind of assumed would go to Israel in any peace deal anyway, when they could have focused it on complaining about other settlements. And the failure of any US policy to differentiate meant that the Israelis didn't have much incentive to differentiate either. So you got more settlements overall and a lot of wasted American energy.
By 2014 or 2015, the Obama Admin kind of realized their whole policy on this was dumb and wasted a lot of energy and diplomatic capital.
Mahmoud Abbas was even bemoaning that he missed George W Bush, because Bush was actually better at getting commitments out of the Israelis.
But J Street learned nothing.
Because they're dumb and tone deaf.
And don't know what they're talking about.
If you think you have read everything about Mike Johnson think again. 🧵 1/ Mike Johnson has filed federal disclosures for 8 yrs & reports no bank acct, no savings, no retirement fund, no investments.
His office later admitted he does have a bank acct, but earns 0 interest so
2/ he does not have to report it.
His wife Kelly runs a nonprofit where most of the money goes to her salary (prob all of the money in general) funded by anonymous donors.
An ethics complaint said Johnson left about thirteen thousand dollars of her income off his own forms.
3/Before Congress, Johnson worked w Exodus International, a group behind pray the gay away programs aimed at LGBTQ teens.
Exodus wasn't a controversy. It was systemic sexual abuse.
This week, former pres. of Exodus was arrested in a sting for trying to meet a 14 yr old boy.
🧵 1/5 The NY Times reports FBI agents determined the Bexar voter file anomalies were most likely caused by a drag-and-drop error when county officials exported data from poll pad devices into Excel. I just published four mathematical proofs that no drag-and-drop error — at any stage, on any computer — could have produced this file.
@WestonMartinez @ZoomWalter @Lorionafarm @PeterBernegger
2/5 New finding: the first fake voter ID — 1,253,115,467.79993 — is no longer mysterious. Run a linear regression on the first 735 records of the original source file. The line at position 736 predicts that number exactly. Zero difference. Five decimal places. Reproducible by anyone in Excel in under a minute.
3/5 The 735 anchor voters were copied either 5 or 6 times each — 300 got five copies, 435 got six — while a single gap of 22,084.82189 runs unbroken across all 4,110 records. One drag produces one slope. Two drags produce two slopes. There is no drag operation that produces one slope and an unequal copy distribution simultaneously. These are mutually exclusive.
Ein ausgesprochen problematisches Interview ist in der Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung erschienen. Alexander #Armbruster lässt den umstrittenen Sinologen Thomas #Heberer seine fragwürdigen Thesen ausbreiten, ohne mal kritisch nachzuhaken. Ein kurzer 🧵/1 faz.net/aktuell/wirtsc…
Besonders schlimm ist der Titel des Interviews: „China ist kein Feind“. Freund/Feind-Kategorieren sind uns im demokratischen Diskurs fremd. Wenn überhaupt wird die Kommunistische Partei Chinas im deutschen Diskurs als Bedrohung bezeichnet /2
Sehr problematisch finde ich an diesem Framing auch, dass hier keinerlei Unterscheidung zwischen dem politischen Regime und der chinesischen Bevölkerung vorgenommen wird. Letztere hat aber keinen Einfluss darauf, wie das Land regiert wird /3
After 2008, there could have been a massive policy response designed to offset job losses, retain & retrain the skills base and create good, lasting jobs in a Green Transition, energy jobs, housing jobs, retrofitting, construction. New Labour could have done that. And they didn't
In the same way that in the late 70s they shafted the Lucas Workers and trashed the Lucas Plan. Two Labour Right led governments that capitulated to Market logic, let Skills go to waste, let regions decline, failed to shore up people, places and direct Skilled Work.
No lectures, reports, soft soap interviews with Labour Ghouls who accepted the Thatcherite Settlement - laying waste to Productive Work, selling off plant, assets and the all the ideas and solutions embedded in workforces, so that The City could make hay laundering dirty money.
Looking at the average distance traveled by Roman letters in the Latin West over time, we can see how the fall of the Western Empire led to a breakdown of movement, trade, and communication across the Classical World.
In the 380s, the avg letter traveled more than 1,500 km from sender to recipient. In subsequent decades after the collapse of the Rhine front, the loss of Britain, and North Africa, the avg distance traveled by letters shrank by half.
The letters themselves tell of the difficulties faced by the writers in sending them.🧵
Sidonius Apollinaris, writing in the 450s, tells of the difficulties of sending letters across what was once a unified empire but is now separate kingdoms:
"Divided as we are between different kingdoms, we are held back from more frequent exchange of correspondence"
In another letter, around 470 AD, just before the fall of the empire he writes:
"The roads are blocked, the seas are shut, the provinces are cut off from each other by the movements of peoples hostile and unknown."