"For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires, and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths." Northwoods is a ministry dedicated to refreshing Christians and challenging them to search for the truth in Christianity, politics, sociology, and science
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Father God, thank you for the love of the truth you have given me. Please bless me with the wisdom, knowledge and discernment needed to always present the truth in an attitude of grace and love. Use this blog and Northwoods Ministries for your glory. Help us all to read and to study Your Word without preconceived notions, but rather, let scripture interpret scripture in the presence of the Holy Spirit. All praise to our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
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Elon Musk just gave a cheeky middle finger to the EU.
The EU fined X €120 million for a lack of transparency on its algorithm.
X is now publishing its algorithm on GitHub, with an update every 4 weeks.
But that's not all:
X will also make public ALL censorship requests from governments, including those from the EU (which clearly seems to be abusing them).
European regulatory pressure may have produced more transparency than expected...
Just not exactly in the way Brussels imagined it.
Elon Musk says all government censorship requests are now publicly visible in the open-source X algorithm.
According to Grok
The post by @LeaBourseFR
highlights Elon Musk's announcement making all government censorship requests publicly visible in X's open-source algorithm on GitHub, updated every four weeks, as a direct response to the EU's €120 million fine for insufficient algorithmic transparency.
It portrays the action as an ironic outcome of European regulatory pressure, increasing overall platform openness while exposing specific government takedown demands, including those from the EU.
The thread contrasts this with pre-Musk Twitter's secret collaborations with agencies like the FBI and DHS on shadowbans and content suppression, as detailed in the 2022 Twitter Files.
The Ceuta invasion by Muslim migrants shocked the world, but the same kind of invasion in slightly slower motion has been happening across Europe. When 70,000 migrants invade a country in a few days, it’s a crisis, but when it’s only 1,000 a day, it’s seen as business as usual.
The UK’s mass invasion has been dismissed as a few migrants coming on ‘small boats’. Well those boats are getting bigger and bigger.
A record 230 migrants in one small boat crossed the English Channel to Britain, France’s lifeboat service and UK media said on Monday, in the latest example of larger numbers of people packing into a single vessel.
The number breaks the previous record for a single boat, set last month when 165 people successfully crossed the busy shipping waterway.
A UK-bound dinghy carrying more than 150 people capsized in the Channel last week after its engine caught fire, prompting a major search-and-rescue operation.
In the latest record-breaking journey, French lifeboats escorted the dinghy up to British waters, before being relieved by the British
“Relieved”.
The government’s official statistics say that there were 258 arrivals on August 8th and 423 arrivals on August 9th. This is an invasion and it’s an invasion being aided by two governments.
UK Home Office minister says barracks will house additional 1,500 illegal migrants
Home Office Minister Anna Turley’s approach is to tell the taxpaying public how fortunate they are that illegals (mostly Muslims from Africa and the Middle East) will be housed in barracks instead of in costly taxpayer-funded hotels, a sickening practice that Labour says it will phase out by by 2029, two and a half years from now.
In Scotland eight months ago, hundreds of illegal migrant men were moved into barracks, despite fears for the safety of British Army families. The British government doesn’t care about its people.
Illegal migrants should be deported. And military and police authorities should be sent out to prevent invasion. Instead, illegals are given better treatment than British citizens.
A prophetic X post from two years ago:
That ship has sailed. British citizens are already paying a form of jizya through their hard-earned tax dollars.
Labour admits tiny fraction of illegal migrants can be kept in barracks amid fury over ‘vindictive’ HMO plans
Only a tiny fraction of illegal migrants can be kept in barracks despite Labour’s push to use the sites to house asylum seekers, a minister has admitted to GB News.
The scheme aims to phase out the reliance on the costly taxpayer-funded hotels by 2029.
Anna Turley, the Home Office minister, told the People’s Channel new sites will provide an additional 1,500 places for asylum seekers.
And then what are they going to do next month?
However, the figure only amounts to around two per cent of the approximately 72,700 people in the UK asylum system who are housed in non-hotel categories.
Ms Turley said: “We’re trying to make sure we’re using accommodation that is secure. That is appropriate. That puts less strain on the communities and reduces the costs that we saw for hotels.
She spoke in the past tense as though it isn't continuing unabated.
“All parts of the country need to work, to play their part.”
Andy Burnham, Scottish Government, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0
In July, the village of Piddington, which has 400 residents, announced it was going to hold a referendum to leave the UK and join the US over a mass invasion of 1,250 migrants.
Residents of a tiny English village furious over plans to house hundreds of people seeking asylum in a nearby disused military barracks are preparing to hold a symbolic referendum calling for their community to declare independence from the U.K. and join the U.S.
Piddington Parish Council chairman Tim McNally, one of the leading voices behind the protest campaign and referendum plans, compared the village’s struggle, and himself, to George Washington battling for independence from Britain.
“Washington brought change. I am going to make the change and then give away the power like he did,” McNally told The Sun newspaper. “If we vote to leave, we are going down to the U.S. Embassy and bring our declaration to them.”
New UK PM Andy Burnham, formerly the mayor of Manchester, a notorious hub for Muslim sex grooming gangs, told Piddington to shut up and take it.
“I have begun to become aware of the campaign from Piddington, and I will listen to what people are saying and respond to the concerns that they are putting forward,” Burnham told GB News. “I do believe all parts of the country need to work, to play their part. It’s a challenging issue. We’re working at it, we understand people’s concerns, and I will look into the issues raised by the good people of Piddington.”
How many migrants are going to No. 10 Downing Street? Or to Andy’s house?
Does he really understand people's concerns? I don't think so. He certainly does not understand the dangers of the Islamic invasion. How many more children have to be gang-raped before he does?
Note: Much of this article was excerpted and adapted from chapter 7 of my 2018 book, Sword and Scimitar.
A little-remembered event that occurred 546 years ago today—the ritual beheading of some 800 Christians who refused to convert to Islam—casts an unexpectedly revealing light on questions still confronting the West today.
The story begins with one of history’s most celebrated conquerors.
When Ottoman Sultan Muhammad II seized Constantinople in 1453, he was only twenty-one years old. The conquest that earned him the title “the Conqueror” was not, however, the culmination of his ambitions. It was just the beginning.
For the next three decades, Muhammad drove Ottoman armies deeper into Christian territory, particularly the Balkans. And beyond the Balkans stood the greatest prize of all: Rome.
Muhammad II
According to a famous Islamic tradition, Constantinople and Rome were both destined for Muslim conquest. Muhammad had already taken the first. In 1480, his armies crossed the Adriatic and landed in southern Italy.
Their target was Otranto.
The city fell after a brutal two-week siege. Of Otranto’s roughly 22,000 inhabitants, thousands were slaughtered and thousands more—men, women, and children—were carried away in chains to be sold into slavery.
Churches were desecrated and the cathedral was converted into a mosque.
But the episode for which Otranto would become famous was yet to come.
Some 800 Christian men (the number 813 is sometimes given) who survived the initial slaughter were taken captive. They were offered a simple bargain: embrace Islam and live.
They all refused.
One of the captives, Antonio Primaldo, a tailor, rallied the others:
My brothers, we have fought to save our city; now it is time to battle for our souls!
He urged them to remain faithful to Christ even at the cost of their lives. The others agreed. The offer of life through conversion was rejected.
And so, on August 14, 1480, the captives were marched outside the city to the nearby Hill of Minerva. There they were systematically beheaded—one after another—for refusing to abandon Christianity. The site would thereafter be remembered as Martyrs’ Hill.
According to the traditional account, Primaldo was the first to be decapitated. His headless body then miraculously remained standing and could not be moved until the last of his companions had been killed. One Muslim executioner, supposedly so shaken by what he witnessed that he professed Christianity on the spot, was himself executed.
Painting in Naples Cathedral depicting the beheaded body of Antonio Primaldo still standing, symbolizing his firmness of faith.
Another icon of the martyrs of Otranto—with Antonio Primaldo’s headless body still standing
Otranto’s elderly archbishop, Stefano Agricolo, had already met an even more gruesome fate. The Turks found him inside his cathedral, still dressed in his episcopal vestments. After refusing to renounce Christianity, he too was slaughtered, by being slowly sawn in half—to triumphant jeers of “Allahu akbar!”
Otranto was not intended to be the end of the Ottoman advance. The invasion established a bridgehead on Italian soil, and Muhammad II intended further campaigning in Italy. Rome itself feared what might follow. Only the sultan’s sudden death in May 1481 and the resulting struggle for the Ottoman throne helped bring the enterprise to an end. Christian forces retook Otranto later that year.
The memory of those who refused conversion, however, survived for more than five centuries.
Their bones remain visible today, behind glass in the Cathedral of Otranto—a physical reminder of what happened there in August 1480.
In 2013, Pope Francis canonized Antonio Primaldo and his companions as the “Martyrs of Otranto.”
More than five centuries later, their deaths raise an uncomfortable question:
How much has really changed?
Consider first the strange ritual that follows almost every modern act of jihadist violence.
A Muslim terrorist invokes Islam. He quotes Islamic scripture. He shouts Allahu Akbar. He identifies his victims as infidels. He announces that he is acting in the name of jihad. He slaughters them—including through beheading.
