Ironhold

Here's a ration from 2004 that had what was likely some of the last Taster's Choice coffee in service. It also had a full-sized bag of M&Ms, as at one point the US military had a contract with M&M Mars to provide them with chocolate products as a morale-builder.

Suffice to say that if you could view my X-rays you'd understand why I'm no longer keen on three-hour road trips in each direction.

The standard United States military ration, the MRE, includes a single-serve packet of coffee and a packet of non-dairy creamer within each ration. It used to be that the packet was Taster's Choice, a national brand with a good reputation. But for a while, they used the generic "Coffee, Instant, Type 2" that didn't exactly go over well. Some rations still use this generic coffee, but others have switched to an off-brand known as Bill's Brew. This has also gotten mixed results, but it's better than the generic stuff. Trying to remember if this is one of the rations that had it or one of the generic "mocha" drink mix pouches: (edit - rewatching the video now, and it's a brand called Genial. I'd forgotten that this was one of the varieties offered.) Many other military rations from around the world include coffee or tea as one of the components, with Lipton and Ty-Phoo being the most common brands of tea that I have seen. Members of the church who are in the armed forces have long since realized the value that these coffee and tea packets have as currency, and can do brisk business off of them.

We have a large Samoan population in my congregation, so it's perfectly normal for men and women alike to wear open-toed sandals provided that they wear socks as well. I myself wore sandals one Sunday right after I had a minor procedure on one foot, and have begun wearing athletic shoes with Velcro due to some medical issues that leave me needing a little extra support.

My parents did prison ministry until COVID shut that down. One thing you need to be aware of is that the guards can and will be mercurial at times. They have all sorts of ways to frustrate ministers and other individuals they don't like, and losing your temper can retroactively "justify" their decision to not want to let you in. You'll need to have patience no matter who you're dealing with.

As I explained elsewhere, I have a deformity in my skeletal structure. One effect of this is that it makes certain hygiene tasks a touch more difficult than normal for me to accomplish, and so I do go through undergarments at a faster than normal pace. The nearest temple is a six-hour round trip, a very difficult journey due to the deformity and my spinal injuries; I have to periodically stop to stretch or else I end up in pain. Ordering garments is also dicey, as we've had porch pirates in my neighborhood, and the Amazon drivers who service this area rarely ring the doorbell or otherwise let people know that packages have arrived. In contrast, there are at least six national chain retailers within about 20 minutes of me that sell regular ol' skivvies in my size. One retailer is so close I could actually walk there if the weather was agreeable. While I do have garments (at least, I think I do; they might have gone into the storage facility when we had to strip and clean the house last year due to ants in our food storage...), I thus save those for very special occasions because of how hard they are for me to replace.

I physically can't fast anymore. I bleed from my sinuses due to a lifetime of injury and illness, and I also burn extra calories to compensate for lack of sleep (I can have as little as 4 hours' sleep Saturday night into Sunday morning due to how early I get up). So if I try to fast, it doesn't go very well. But I do still kick in a token amount as my fast offering alongside my tithing.

Amber, Silver, and Blue alerts are sent out state-wide because we live in an era where people can travel considerable distances in short order if they're so motivated.

3. If the e-mails and whatnot allegedly recovered from that laptop are anything to go by, Hunter Biden is so entrenched in Ukraine - what with Burisma and all - that someone, somewhere, is not happy with how long it took Biden to act and is compelling him to be more aggressive.

I've spoken with several people over the last few years, and we're all in agreement that the trilogy would have been better had it been focused around *Finn* and him discovering his Force sensitivity. The Force Awakens... a Stormtrooper's conscience. He becomes... The Last Jedi... to be personally trained by Luke before Luke is forced to make a sacrifice to protect everyone else. However, Luke's sacrifice was not in vain, as Finn will help ensure The Rise of Skywalker's legacy by using his training to help protect the Jedi training facility and Luke's progeny.

How I, personally, would have done an Indy 5? Mutt (who has been recast) has been tapped for a "Monuments Men" type of organization and tasked with helping to recover the large sums of gold and treasures still missing after WWII. This leads to him discovering that one of the German scientists who is working on the Apollo program is in fact somehow still dealing in these items, and may be seeking something specific. Cue him calling the one person he can trust - his dad - to help him sort the matter.

You have a bank or credit union that you do business with, right? Most such facilities make it *mandatory* that every employee takes a week off at least twice a year. While the employee is gone, auditors spend that week looking over those transactions the employee was a part of, as many as they can review while that person is gone. The goal is to determine if the person had their hand in the till or was otherwise irresponsible with the bank's assets. Because the employee is not present, they are not in a position to interfere with the audit. The employee just spends their week doing whatever, knowing that when they return they'll be given a debriefing. So how does it affect Disney? Some time back Kathleen Kennedy announced that there would be an upcoming Star Wars TV series known as "The Acolyte" and that Leslie Hedland (sp?) would be the showrunner. Allegedly, Kennedy had taken it upon herself to order the project into existence, as the higher-ups at Disney, including the current Bob, were taken by surprise. Not only were the higher-ups demanding to know by what authority she had initiated the project, they were also demanding to know how she was financing it since part of that approval process would have been her getting the budget. So for her to be forced out of her office for two weeks, with no access to her corporate e-mail, strongly suggests that she's being locked out of Disney while her records - including her corporate e-mails - are audited. This way, as with the scenario above, she is in no position to directly interfere. The most recent rumor is that Kennedy may have been syphoning money off of actually approved projects to try and finance The Acolyte, which if true would be serious trouble for Disney as a company as it's the kind of "cooking the books" that gets the IRS and SEC breathing down a company's neck. Disney is already being investigated due to a whistleblower allegation that the theme parks have been shifting numbers around to make their books look better, so if it's determined that Kennedy was indeed cooking everything so she could get her way it's grounds for Disney to fire her on the spot.

When it was alleged that Disney was buying up bulk tickets to juice Captain Marvel, I noted that what everyone was describing seemed to be far more in keeping with the activities of ticket scalpers and saw nothing to tie it to anything Disney itself was doing. Rather, it was far more likely that the social media smear campaigns being unleashed against Battle Angel Alita were Disney's doing as they were very obviously manufactured and overseen by a third party. That being said, two weeks ago Kamran Pashak was contacted by his source "Sparrow", who claimed that Kathleen Kennedy was put on two weeks' paid vacation, that her corporate e-mail account was locked, and that five executives that Lucasfilm employees are calling the "Horsemen" have set up shop at the company. This is pretty consistent with some sort of internal investigation, with Overlord DVD saying that his sources suspect Kathleen Kennedy stands accused of syphoning money from approved projects (like Indy and Mandalorian) to finance The Acolyte given the project's bizarre financial trail.

A lot of people are past the point of "cultural ignorance" and well into the territory of "cultural arrogance". They believe that their culture is superior, and anything that isn't their culture is inferior by default.

There was a time when ESPN was most known for showing sporting events that were often not broadcast on local-level television for some reason or another. Then they diversified their content into programs like Sportscenter, which people enjoyed. Then they diversified their content into sports documentaries and movies about sports, which had a mixed reception. Then they gave us ESPN 2 for more sports content, ESPN Radio for people who wanted their sports on the go, and ESPN Classic as an outlet for content from bygone eras, like AWA wrestling and classic football games. Then the corporate types took over. ESPN Classic went from basic cable to premium-tier cable, dooming it. ESPN slowly drifted away from covering sports to being spectacle in its own right. ESPN 2 was lost in the shuffle, while ESPN Radio found itself on AM frequencies in many markets despite AM falling so far out of favor that some car companies are now wanting to remove AM tuners from their vehicles to save on money. Then other sports channels emerged, including Sinclair Broadcasting's Stadium, which airs as a digital side band channel in many markets and so is available in those markets as a free over-the-air broadcast station. The issue is that ESPN lost its way and is now quite literally paying for it.

Meanwhile, people who aren't from America often feel fully entitled to talk all the smack they want, as if they know better despite having never set foot here.

Yeah, it's getting far too hard to deny that there's something wrong with Biden. The issue is that Kamala Harris is likewise unfit for office, and so if anything happens to Biden she would be next in line. That's the only thing preventing him from being removed right now.

Rumors are that 1. Kathleen Kennedy has been put on two weeks' paid vacation 2. Her internal company e-mail account has been locked 3. Five Disney executives are taking up residence at Lucasfilm This, to me, seems like Disney is conducting an audit of the division, with an eye to Kennedy's actions.

There's actually a small-scale religious awakening going on right now, with denominations that actually hold their members to a higher standard seeing growth to various degrees as people look for something authentic to counter-act what's happening in society.

Well, my personal pet hypothesis is that Disney is looking at a liquidity situation. There have been rumblings for years which pointed in this direction, like the whistleblower who claimed that the parks were juggling numbers to appear more profitable and the claims that Disney maxed out one or more lines of credit to make the Fox purchase. So long as everything was, in general, making bank, however, Disney could pretend like there wasn't an issue. When the lockdowns happened, however, Disney saw everything but their TV channels and Disney+ shut down. What's happened since? Several high-profile flops, combined with Bob Iger being ousted under suspicious circumstances right after FTX collapsed, a number of controversies over different movies and TV shows, the flap with Florida, and several other issues. All of the rumors, reports, allegations, whistleblowers, and speculations all have money somewhere at the heart of it. I suspect that Disney was leaning too hard on credit to actually get the day-to-day done in the hopes that each of their big-budget blockbusters would print money. They'd gather the cash from these movies, then use it to subsidize the flops before paying off their lines of credit. Whatever was left was profit. This is how Cannon Films used to do it before they deviated from their formula, and that deviation led to their demise. In this case, they haven't made the money they need. They're in trouble because they don't have enough liquid cash to handle various expenses and payments, and they know it. That's why the CFO - a position where we usually talk about "golden coffins" instead of "golden parachutes", suddenly decided to spend more time with family; as CFO, she should have sounded the alarm a lot sooner. And let's face it: the chief diversity officer is gone because her little "agenda" joke got several movies destroyed at the box office, movies Disney needed to be successful. It also explains the situation at Lucas Film, with Leslye Hedland and others having their projects cancelled and then being paid a pittance in compensation.

Disney relies far too heavily on money from China and the Middle East to go all-out with LGBT characters. So what they generally do instead is have one-off side characters who they claim are LGBT but who they can easily censor for when their films release in those regions. It's utter cowardice, and shows the company's greed.

Considering how much I've had to explain to my 65-year-old mother...

What we're saying is "This isn't new; it's been going on for some time now, with the media only just now feeling bold enough to make it all public." Remember, we've been fighting wars that the larger world is ignorant of. What you're seeing is what we've spent years, if not decades, trying to stand against.

It's been going on for a while now (at least a decade, if not more), but the larger LGBT movement has been hijacked to forcibly incorporate these individuals.

There's also the fact that critics of the church have been on their back foot since the late 1980s, with their own declaration that "the messenger is as fair to go after as the message" (et al) backfiring spectacularly and bringing down several then-leading members of the Christian Counter-Cult. Things were ugly online in the late 1990s and early to mid 2000s, but even then my generation (myself included) helped battle them back. Well, the situation is... pretty calm now. Critics are regurgitating old arguments, and new arguments like the whole "$32 Billion" bit are ripped apart by the facts in relatively short order. So there's not as much need for people to bone up on their apologetics.