Jilly_in_VA
Jilly_in_VA's JournalThe Real Reason These Nativity Displays Bother MAGA Christians So Much
A Massachusetts church is under fire for their holiday display featuring a pro-immigrant take on a classic Christmas decoration: the Nativity.
St. Susanna Parish, a Catholic church in Dedham, reportedly first put up the display shortly after Thanksgiving. In lieu of the standard image of Mary, Joseph, shepherds, farm animals and wise men, the church had two simple signs: One reads “ICE was here” and another letting parishioners know “The Holy Family is safe in The Sanctuary of our Church” and advising them to contact the hotline for LUCE, an immigrant justice network.
While far from their first rodeo making statements of this nature, the latest move from the parish follows clear and pointed statements top-down from Catholic leadership on the “dehumanizing” immigration policies in the U.S., including the Pope calling them “disrespectful” himself.
Per Mass Live, Father Stephen Josoma, the priest at St. Susanna, defended the decision on Monday and said that he would refrain from taking down the signage, as requested by the Boston archdiocese, until he could have a clarifying conversation with leadership
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nativity-immigration-ice-protest_l_69386662e4b0447a52b87ef5?origin=article-related-life
When Christians call something ‘sacrilegious,’ what they usually mean is, ‘This challenges the version of Christianity that benefits me"
Merch commemorating drunk Virginia raccoon raises over $250,000 for animal shelter
Merchandise commemorating the raccoon that gained international fame by barging into a Virginia liquor store, smashing bottled spirits and passing out drunk in a bathroom on Black Friday has raised more than a quarter-million dollars for the local animal shelter where he slept off his bender.
The Hanover county animal protection shelter raised the charitable amount after caring for the inebriated raccoon in question and teaming up with custom apparel maker Bonfire to create and sell items seizing on the internet virality achieved by the creature.
Emblazoned with the words “Trashed Panda”, the shirts, sweatshirts, cups and stickers contain an image of a raccoon spread-eagle next to a spilled booze bottle – unmistakably evoking the compromising position the animal that burgled the Ashland ABC store on 29 November was found and photographed in.
Proceeds from the campaign anchored by those limited edition items “directly support shelter animal care and enrichment”, according to Bonfire’s website.
Figures posted by the company based in Richmond, Virginia, indicated the campaign had raised more than $254,000 as of Tuesday morning. At the time, the campaign was also within 250 sales of its goal of selling 19,000 items.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/16/drunk-virginia-raccoon-merch-fundraiser
On another note, the Virginia ABC stores have posters featuring "Raccoon's Recommendations" which advertise the various brands of booze the raccoon sampled
'You don't have to do it alone': how US cities are helping each other resist ICE
When Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) set its sights on Chicago in September, Chicagoans sprang into action to protect their immigrant neighbors: teaching each other how to recognize and safely document ICE agents, setting up “know your rights” trainings, and distributing whistles en masse so people could loudly alert anyone in the vicinity when ICE was spotted.
In the months since, whistles have become a popular raid alert tool in other cities across the country – New Yorkers wear them around their necks to warn neighbors, the people of New Orleans blast them outside ICE facilities and Charlotte residents used them to ward off Customs and Border Protection officials. While strongly associated with Chicago, the tactic is actually one that city organizers learned in part from groups in Los Angeles. Its spread is illustrative of the many ways cities are helping inspire and equip one another in the face of often unlawful federal activities.
Rain Skau, a co-coordinator of the Fight Fascism campaign of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) Los Angeles, said Angelenos began to use whistles to alert neighbors about ICE presence when agents first started hitting the city in June. Despite the federal government’s claims that these raids were targeting hardened criminals, Skau described one of the first raids at a Home Depot as mostly snatching women vending food in the parking lot, stuffing them into vans as meat sizzled on the grills they left behind.
DSA and other grassroots groups in the city set up patrols of ordinary citizens to create a consistent presence at the Home Depots when day laborers and vendors were most likely to be out and about. (A September report by Rent Brigade found that Home Depot locations became “the most dangerous places in LA for immigrant workers”.) Volunteers passed out “know your rights” information, and when a tip came via a citywide hotline about an ICE sighting, the groups sent out patrols to document what was happening, collect belongings and get in touch with family members if someone had already been detained.
By the time ICE hit the streets of Chicago in the fall, organizers in Los Angeles felt like they had some wisdom to share. Members of DSA in LA began having informal conversations with those in DSA Chicago. “One comment that someone made was, ‘We’ve never done anything like this before,’” Rain remembered. “And what I said to them was: ‘We hadn’t either, before all this happened. We had never operated ICE watch patrols, but we were able to do it. And here’s the great thing: you don’t have to do it alone. You don’t have to figure out all of this from scratch, because we’re here to support you.’”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/16/ice-immigration-raids-cities
Chicago showed us the way!
Ilhan Omar says Trump's repeated attacks fuel climate of political violence
US congresswoman Ilhan Omar has warned that Donald Trump’s repeated personal attacks and dehumanising rhetoric are fuelling a climate of political violence that could have dangerous consequences.
Speaking days after the president called for her to be thrown out of the country, Omar said Trump’s incendiary language reaches “the worst humans possible” and encourages them to act.
“We’ve had people incarcerated for threatening to kill me,” she told the Guardian in an interview at her Washington office. “We have people that are being prosecuted right now for threatening to kill me and so it is something that does stay in the back of our minds. But I also worry about those people finding someone who looks like me in Minneapolis or across the country and thinking it is me and harming them.”
Trump made the remarks at a rally-style event last week in Pennsylvania, where supporters chanted “Send her back!” after the president pushed a baseless conspiracy theory that Somali-born Omar married her own brother to become a US citizen. The Democrat, who arrived in the US as a refugee aged 12 and became a citizen at 17, described Trump’s fixation as “vile” and an “unhealthy and creepy obsession”.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/16/minnesota-congresswoman-ilhan-omar-trump-attacks
He needs to be shut up, FAST
Democrat on ousting Republican in Pennsylvania's 'swingiest' county: 'Partnering with ICE is a losing proposition'
Only 40 miles north of Philadelphia, Bucks county has gained a reputation as the “swingiest” county in the swing state of Pennsylvania and one of the most pivotal political bellwethers in the country.
Party registration in the county is almost evenly split among Democrats and Republicans. Joe Biden won it in 2020, Donald Trump triumphed there in 2024. November’s elections there were local – but a hot race for county sheriff drew much wider attention as a microcosm for America’s contentious debate around immigration policy – and the result signaled a shake-up in how the county approaches enforcement.
In the second Trump administration, incumbent sheriff Frederick Harran, a Republican, had joined many other conservative law enforcement officials across the nation and signed an agreement to work with the federal Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) agency.
(snip)
Danny Ceisler, a 33-year-old army veteran who worked at the Pentagon and for Pennsylvania Democratic governor Josh Shapiro’s administration, stood against Harran as a Democrat for sheriff. In his campaign, he pledged to terminate the partnership with ICE.
And Ceisler won, not even narrowly. His 23,000 extra votes was an 11% victory over Harran, who had been a law enforcement officer for more than three decades.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/15/pennsylvania-bucks-county-sheriff-race
Shows you what the average American thinks of ICE!
Not enough has been said
at least in this country, about the guy who stopped the Bondi Beach massacre in its tracks before it got even worse. His name is Ahmed al Ahmed, and he too is a Muslim, or so it would seem. He hid behind some parked cars. and when he saw an opening, he ran and tackled one of the gunmen. He was shot in the arm and hand by the other, but apparently the police or somebody managed to subdue that guy and end it. Ahmed is being hailed as a hero in Australia, but little is being said here about him. He has a shop near the beach where he sells fruits and vegetables, but it looks like he'll be out of work for a bit.
Ahmed is an Australian citizen of Syrian origin, originally from the city of Idlib. He told his cousin Monday morning that when he say people were dying, "God gave me courage and strength" to do what he did. His parents said he doesn't discriminate between one religion or nationality and "all Autralians are the same." I hope he heals swiftly and well. He is the stuff heroes are made of.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/dec/15/man-who-tackled-alleged-bondi-gunman-couldnt-bear-to-see-people-dying-cousin-says-ntwnfb
'They're selling everything as trauma': how our emotional pain became a product: Katherine Rowland
In March 2023, Dr Gabor Maté, a retired family physician and among the most respected trauma experts in the world, boldly diagnosed Prince Harry with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), during a live interview.
Having read the Duke of Sussex’s ghost-written memoir, Spare, Maté said that he had arrived upon “several diagnoses” that also included depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. These were not evidence of disease per se, Maté went on to elaborate. Rather, he said: “I see it as a normal response to abnormal stress.”
What Maté did is nowhere near customary clinical procedure: a diagnosis requires a structured assessment and adequate time with a patient. And to render a diagnosis publicly raises obvious privacy concerns.
However, the gesture was much in keeping with the rash of diagnostic claims and self-labeling that have swept the internet and mass-market publishing, creating a space where confessional zeal and memeified pseudoscience – sometimes abetted by therapists who should know better – have become almost routine.
Today, an entire industry has spawned around the idea that everything is trauma. Once understood as the psyche’s confrontation with genuine catastrophe, trauma is now treated as a personal possession: something to be owned, narrated and curated by the individual.
This drift marks the entrance point to a broader cultural shift: the commodification of pain.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/dec/14/trauma-mental-health
Emotional pain is not trauma is not emotional pain. One does not equal the other, and nobody should diagnose someone they don't know.
'I'm Muslim but I mark Shabbat': How an Indian man is keeping a Jewish legacy alive
Sarah Cohen's Home.
That's the sign welcoming anyone who walks into Thaha Ibrahim's shop in a narrow cobbled lane in the southern Indian city of Kochi.
The bustling street, where vendors sell everything from antiques to Persian carpets and spices, is called Jew Town - some decades ago, every house on this street had a Jewish family, and the place was known as the Jewish quarter.
Thaha now runs the last Jewish embroidery shop in Kochi.
When some American tourists walked into the shop on a humid afternoon, Thaha, 55, was stitching a kippah, the traditional Jewish skullcap. The tourists gathered around a photograph on the wall which showed the then Prince Charles meeting the residents of Jew Town in 2013.
"That's Sarah aunty," Thaha told them, pointing at a woman with short white hair in the photo.
"This was Sarah Cohen's home and embroidery shop."
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g64e67n7eo
The most heartwarming story for Chanukah
Kim Jong-un admits North Korean troops clearing landmines for Russia
North Korea sent troops to clear mines in Russia’s Kursk region earlier this year, leader Kim Jong-un said in a speech carried on Saturday by state media, a rare acknowledgement by Pyongyang of the deadly tasks assigned to its deployed soldiers.
According to South Korean and western intelligence agencies, North Korea has sent thousands of troops to support Russia’s nearly four-year invasion of Ukraine.
Analysts say Russia is giving North Korea financial aid, military technology, food and energy supplies in return, allowing the diplomatically isolated nation to sidestep tough international sanctions on its nuclear and missile programmes.
Hailing the return of an engineering regiment, Kim noted that they wrote “letters to their hometowns and villages at breaks of the mine-clearing hours”, according to the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).
Nine members of the regiment died during the 120-day deployment that started in August, Kim said in his speech at a welcome ceremony on Friday, KCNA reported.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/13/north-korea-troops-cleared-landmines-russia-kim-jong-un
So in order to curry favor with Putin, he's using his soldiers as minesweepers. Got it.
Two girls, 9 and 11, awarded $31.5m after sister's California torture death
A lawsuit over the death of an 11-year-old California girl who was allegedly tortured and starved by her adoptive family reached a settlement on Friday totaling $31.5m from the city and county of San Diego as well as other groups.
The suit was brought on behalf of the two younger sisters of Arabella McCormack, who died in August 2022. The girls were ages six and seven at the time. Their adoptive mother, Leticia McCormack, and McCormack’s parents, Adella and Stanley Tom, are facing charges of murder, conspiracy, child abuse and torture. They pleaded not guilty to all charges, and their criminal case is ongoing.
The lawsuit alleged a systemic failure across the city and several agencies and organizations to not report Arabella McCormack’s abuse.
The settlement includes $10m from the city of San Diego, $10m from San Diego county, $8.5m from the Pacific Coast Academy and $3m from the Rock church, the sisters’ attorney, Craig McClellan, said. The school oversaw Arabella McCormack’s home schooling, and her adoptive mother was an ordained elder at the church.
“The amount is going to be enough to take care of the girls for the rest of the lives,” McClellan said. But it “isn’t going to be enough and never could be enough … to replace their sister, nor is it going to erase the memories of what they went through”.
The lawsuit said county social workers did not properly investigate abuse claims and two teachers at the Pacific Coast Academy failed to report the girl’s condition. It also said a San Diego police officer, a friend of the girl’s adoptive mother, gave the family a wooden paddle that they could use to hit their children.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/13/adopted-girl-torture-death-california-settlement
DHS is in such a hurry to get kids off their hands that they don't vet prospective adoptive parents properly and look at the wrong things.
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Gender: Do not displayHome country: USA currently
Current location: Virginia
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