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A Black Friday Treasure Hunt

Today is the infamous Black Friday for 2023. It is alleged that on this day many businesses achieve profitability for the year as the Christmas season starts. Yet this year, just as the secular Christmas shopping season replaced Advent, it seems “Black Friday” began, with a multitude of sales, just after Halloween. What is this telling us? Perhaps one answer is found in the Gospel according to Luke (12:34) where Jesus tells his friends “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also”. It seems that as individuals and a nation, we essentially treasure things and ...

In Death, This Cancer Patient Helped To Erase Millions In Medical Debt

By TOM MURPHY AP Health Writer A New York City woman who died Nov. 12 from cancer has raised enough money to erase millions of dollars in medical debt with a posthumous plea for help. Casey McIntyre told followers in a social media message posted by her husband that she had arranged to buy the medical debt of others as a way of celebrating her life. McIntyre wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, that “if you’re reading this I have passed away.” “I loved each and every one of you with my whole heart and I promise you, I knew how deeply I was loved,” the 38-year-old ...

A Supreme Dereliction of Duty

Punishment that causes durable impairments of the punished person’s brain surely violates the Constitution’s Eight Amendment proscription of “cruel and unusual punishments.” So, the Supreme Court’s three “liberal” justices rightly dissented against the six “conservative” justices’ decision not to hear a case concerning the all-too-common prison practice of protracted solitary confinement. Michael Johnson, imprisoned in Illinois’ Pontiac Correctional Center for home invasion and assault, was a mental wreck before prison policy made him more so. The state’s ...

A Solution to Debt? Cut Spending

Congress just passed — and President Biden just signed — the latest short-term government funding bill to keep the government running. The bill, which essentially kicks the can down the road, ensures that taxpayers will continue to pay for a bloated government until January, Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Patty Murray, D-Wash., said: “... avoiding a (government) shutdown is so very far from mission accomplished. We have a lot of work to do after the dust settles and before the next shutdown deadline comes up.” In the past, this fake scenario of a government shutdown ...

Will New York Politicians Tax Wall Street Out of Existence?

Let’s face it. Anyone who works in, or just visits, the Wall Street area of Manhattan can’t deny the aura of power and money isn’t what it was 20, 30 or 50 years ago. The vibrancy, the financial dominance, the gusto seems to have gone missing — so have many of the Gordon Gekko high rollers. Today, Wall Street is less crowded. It’s sleepier. There aren’t exactly tumbleweeds blowing down Broad Street past the New York Stock Exchange, but it’s not the bustling place where the financial titans and the world’s money changers hang out anymore. To borrow a line from ...

‘Super Pigs’ In Canada Are Threatening To Invade U.S.

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — An exploding population of hard-to-eradicate “super pigs” in Canada is threatening to spill south of the border, and northern states like Minnesota, North Dakota and Montana are taking steps to stop the invasion. In Canada, the wild pigs roaming Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba pose a new threat. They are often crossbreeds that combine the survival skills of wild Eurasian boar with the size and high fertility of domestic swine to create a “super pig” that’s spreading out of control. Ryan Brook, a professor at the University of Saskatchewan and one of ...