What Does the 2024 Bible ‘Verse of the Year’ Reveal About Our Culture?

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As the presidential election, economic instability, and foreign wars dominated headlines this year, a significant number of people appear to have turned to the Bible to comfort their anxiety.

YouVersion — the most popular Bible app in the world — named Philippians 4:6 the Bible “verse of the year” after users highlighted, bookmarked, and shared it more than any other verse in the Bible.

“Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God,” the verse, written by the apostle Paul, says.

The words “prayer” and “peace” were the most searched terms in the app this year, reflecting the themes in the app’s top 10 most popular Bible verses. At Bible Gateway — a popular Bible website — the most popular New Testament chapter of 2024 was Philippians 4, yet more evidence that people are searching for comfort in a chaotic and disordered world. . .

Through October 2024, Bible sales had increased 22% compared to the same period in 2023. In the first 10 months of the year, Americans had purchased 13.7 million Bibles. At that pace, total sales for the entire year will far surpass 2023, when Americans purchased 14.2 million Bibles. . .

It’s easy to explain away the Bible sales boom as Americans looking to the word of God for hope and answers to their anxiety. I believe, however, that it reflects a growing realization that postmodern liberalism is a failed cultural experiment. (Read more from “What Does the 2024 Bible ‘Verse of the Year’ Reveal About Our Culture?” HERE)

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Drug Cartels Now Mexico’s 5th-Largest Employer

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Some 175,000 people now actively work for Mexico’s smuggling cartels, according to a shocking estimate that would make cartels the country’s fifth-largest private employer.

Rafael Prieto-Curiel, who led the research, said the cartels’ secret is their viciously efficient recruitment ability. He said the cartels hire more than 350 people weekly.

That helps them counter massive losses through arrests, killings and dropouts.

“Cartels, they need to have roughly 175,000 members. They cannot be much smaller because they would have collapsed. They cannot be much bigger because they would have grown so fast,” Mr. Prieto-Curiel said. “So they have to be roughly 175,000 members, which means roughly, just to put it into context, the fifth-largest employer in the country.”

He and his fellow researchers used computer models to peer into the country’s notoriously secretive cartels. They ran millions of permutations on the 150 cartels and evaluated their recruiting and losses to arrests, killings and dropouts. (Read more from “Drug Cartels Now Mexico’s 5th-Largest Employer” HERE)

WATCH: Trump Trolls Democrats and News Media on Biggest Cover-up of 2024

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President-elect Donald Trump is trolling Democrats and the legacy news media as 2024 comes to a close, posting a video compilation of network coverage of perhaps the biggest cover-up of the year: Joe Biden’s failing mental health.

Trump is apparently responding to comments by Jan Crawford of CBS News, who said this week on “Face the Nation” that Biden’s “obvious cognitive decline” was the most “under-covered and under-reported” story of 2024.

“It’s starting to emerge now that his advisers kind of managed his limitations, which has been reported in the Wall Street Journal, for four years, and yet he insisted that he could still run for president,” Crawford indicated.

“We should have much more forcefully questioned whether he was fit for office for another four years, which could have led to a primary for the Democrats.

“It could have changed the scope of the entire election.”

(Read more from “WATCH: Trump Trolls Democrats and News Media on Biggest Cover-up of 2024” HERE)

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Airline Reveals Pre-Flight Inspection of South Korea Plane Before Deadly Crash

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The site of Sunday’s South Korean budget airline Jeju Air’s plane crash is being combed through by U.S. investigators, with some from the aircraft’s manufacturer.

All but two of the 181 people aboard the Boeing 737-800 died, making it South Korea’s most fatal plane crash in decades. Investigators are hoping evidence collected from the scene will help them figure out why the pilot attempted the landing after declaring an emergency.

A pre-flight inspection found “no issues,” the airline said, according to the BBC.

Flight data like speed, altitude, fuel levels and voice recordings from the cockpit will be examined from the plane’s two separately located flight recording devices, most commonly referred to as black boxes, The Guardian reported.

Air safety experts on Tuesday questioned the placement of an airport embankment into which the passenger jet slammed after skidding past the end of the runway, as video showed. (Read more from “Airline Reveals Pre-Flight Inspection of South Korea Plane Before Deadly Crash” HERE)

State to Require Home Insurance Coverage Be Offered to High-Risk Areas

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California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara introduced a new regulation Monday aimed at expanding coverage to areas at high risk of wildfires after insurers have limited options for those areas in recent years.

In recent years, wildfires have been costly, which has pushed several insurance companies to pull coverage out of the state, especially in areas at high risk for wildfires. The regulation introduced by Lara would require insurers to increase their coverage to these high-risk areas by making policies that account for 85% of their state market share. The new requirement would allow insurers to ease into the 85% by increasing their percentage by 5% every two years.

“Californians deserve a reliable insurance market that doesn’t retreat from communities most vulnerable to wildfires and climate change,” Lara said in a statement. “This is a historic moment for California.”

“My Sustainable Insurance Strategy is focused on addressing the challenges we face today and building a resilient insurance market for the future. With input from thousands of residents throughout California, this reform balances protecting consumers with the need to strengthen our market against climate risks,” he added.

The state Office of Administrative Law will review the new regulation before it takes effect. (Read more from “State to Require Home Insurance Coverage Be Offered to High-Risk Areas” HERE)

Chief Justice Roberts Warns of Four Areas of Concern in End of Year Report

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Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts on Tuesday addressed four areas of “illegitimate activity” that he said threaten the independence of judges: violence, intimidation, disinformation and threats to defy lawfully entered judgments.

The conservative justice expressed his concerns in the Supreme Court’s annual report.

The report was released following a tumultuous year in which the nation’s courts were unusually entangled in a tightly contested presidential race. During this time, then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who faced a host of criminal charges that he denied, repeatedly attacked the integrity of the judicial system. . .

Roberts wrote in the end of year report: “Attempts to intimidate judges for their rulings in cases are inappropriate and should be vigorously opposed.” He added that while public officials have the right to criticize rulings, they should also be aware that their statements can “prompt dangerous reactions by others.”

“Of course, the courts are no more infallible than any other branch,” Roberts wrote. “In hindsight, some judicial decisions were wrong, sometimes egregiously wrong. And it was right of critics to say so. In a democracy—especially in one like ours, with robust First Amendment protections—criticism comes with the territory. It can be healthy.” (Read more from “Chief Justice Roberts Warns of Four Areas of Concern in End of Year Report” HERE)

2024’s Biggest Loser Was Barack Obama

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As desperate, phony, and even dangerous of a campaign Democrats ran this year, and as embarrassing as the outcome was for all of them, nobody came out looking more pathetic than Barack Obama. From 2024’s vantage point, is there any way to look at his legacy but as a tragic blight on American history?

In the final months of the campaign, Obama seemed to know the outcome of the election would say just as much about him as it would about Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, or Donald Trump. And, like all realistic Democrats, he knew that the nominee he supported was on track to lose. His behavior in those days was nothing short of appalling.

Obama first stood by and said nothing when George Clooney, who I had no idea was Democrat royalty, announced in The New York Times that Biden should give up his reelection campaign, as if there was some obvious plan as to what the party would do in that event. Obama did nothing and said nothing as his former vice president was squeezed out, and then he offered what should go down in Democrat history as the most uncomfortable, underwhelming endorsement a former president has ever offered a subsequent nominee. Obama participated in a highly staged phone call with Harris and, with all the enthusiasm of a mortician, told her, “It appears that people feel very strongly that you need to be our nominee.”

It never got any better, and it climaxed in the shocking display of Obama belittling black men. Because he shared in their race (somewhat), Obama felt they should do as he said. “You’re coming up with all kinds of reasons and excuses,” he told them to their faces with his arms crossed and brow furrowed. “I’ve got a problem with that because part of it makes me think — and I’m speaking to men directly now — part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president.” Obama literally wagged his finger to tell these grown men, “That’s not acceptable. This shouldn’t even be a question.”

If that weren’t crazed enough, he then trotted out wife Michelle to further nag male voters. “So fellas,” she said at a rally in Michigan, “before you cast your votes ask yourselves what side of history do you want to be on.” She said male “rage” is what could cost Democrats the election. “If we don’t get this election right,” she nagged, “your wife, your daughter, your mother — we as women will become collateral damage to your rage. So are you men prepared to look into the eyes of the women and children you love and tell them that you supported this assault on our safety?” (Can we get one of those overpaid consultants to advise women in politics that there’s nothing frank or authentic about referring to men as “fellas?”) (Read more from “2024’s Biggest Loser Was Barack Obama” HERE)

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Demons Must Be Delighted At How Badly Americans Have Butchered Marriage

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Screwtape knew his business. C.S. Lewis’ fictional devil knew a multitude of ways to ensnare and immiserate people, and poisoning relations between men and women was an essential weapon in his diabolic arsenal. As he put it to his protégé Wormwood, “The aim is to guide each sex away from those members of the other with whom spiritually helpful, happy, and fertile marriages are most likely.” He wanted men and women to be looking for the wrong person and also to be the wrong person.

Were he around, the wily old devil would undoubtedly gloat over current relations between men and women, which are in many ways worse even than he anticipated. There are, of course, still unhappy marriages, but whereas Screwtape took marriage as a cultural given, about half of American adults are now unmarried. The decline in marriage and childbearing has alarmed everyone from politicians to cultural commentators to Elon Musk, but observing the problem isn’t enough to fix it — people will not get married and have children just because it will be good for GDP in a few decades.

And though some people deliberately reject marriage and children, many men and women would like to get married and have kids but are struggling to pair off. Our culture does not teach men and women how to find, let alone how to be, good husbands and wives. Rather, it sometimes seems that, as Lutheran pastor Hans Fiene put it, “[O]ur culture teaches young men to be losers and young women to be narcissists.” Harsh, but perhaps fair.

Because men and women are different, the current cultural and relational wasteland will play out differently for each, often in ways that make men and women even less suited for each other, thereby establishing a relational doom loop in which cultural corruption encourages individual dysfunction that damages and destroys relationships — thereby further entrenching both the cultural and individual problems.

Pornography is an obvious example. It may be especially appealing to men who have not, as a nature documentary might put it, been able to find a mate, but it encourages habits that make it harder for them to establish and sustain a relationship with a woman. For example, porn has taught a generation of young men to be aroused by degrading and dangerous kinks, such as sexual strangulation. The result is further alienation and enmity between the sexes. (Read more from “Demons Must Be Delighted At How Badly Americans Have Butchered Marriage” HERE)

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Chinese Government Claims it Didn’t Hack US Treasury Department, but There’s a Problem

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China-backed hackers reportedly breached several U.S. Treasury Department workstations, according to the agency, which notified lawmakers about the hack.

This development comes after Chinese hackers targeted a number of major corporations as part of a broader cyberespionage effort. CNN reviewed the memo the agency sent to lawmakers.

In a letter reviewed by CNN, a Treasury official said it was informed by a third-party software service provider on December 8 that a threat actor used a stolen key to remotely access certain Treasury workstations and unclassified documents.

“Based on available indicators, the incident has been attributed to a Chinese state-sponsored Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) actor,” Aditi Hardikar, assistant secretary for management at the US Treasury, wrote in the letter.

A Treasury spokesperson said in a statement to CNN that the compromised service has been taken offline and officials are working with law enforcement and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

“There is no evidence indicating the threat actor has continued access to Treasury systems or information,” the Treasury spokesperson said.

According to the letter to Senate Banking Committee leadership, the third-party software service provider, BeyondTrust, said hackers gained access to a key used by the vendor to secure a cloud-based service that Treasury uses for technical support.

(Read more from “Chinese Government Claims it Didn’t Hack US Treasury Department, but There’s a Problem” HERE)

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An Infamous COVID Doctor Is Now Fearmongering About Bird Flu

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Doctor Leana Wen, the woman who advocated for the imprisonment of individuals who refused the COVID-19 vaccine, is back with her fear mongering, communistic and iron first prescriptions. . .

During an interview with CBS News this week, Wen urged the Biden administration to rush distribute Bird Flu vaccines and testing.

Wen’s advice may feel benign, but her record shows heavy advocacy for government force — not to keep people healthy, but to exact a desired behavioral result.

Meanwhile, here’s what the CDC has to say about the situation:

(Read more from “An Infamous COVID Doctor Is Now Fearmongering About Bird Flu” HERE)