Trent Steele

Texas bill could require gun owners to turn over firearms within 24 hours kvue.com/article/news/local/…

India-Pakistan border. Every single day.

President Trump is determined to bring an end to this horrible war, which has caused enormous loss of life, destruction, and suffering. We are working hard to find a negotiated solution that can deliver lasting peace and create the conditions for a sovereign, secure, and prosperous Ukraine within a more stable European security environment. Before beginning the two days of trilateral talks with Ukraine and Russia in Abu Dhabi, @SEPeaceMissions and I will meet with our partners from Ukraine, the EU, NATO, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and Italy to continue the close consultation and coordination we have undertaken on European security and Ukraine’s postwar future over the past several weeks. These will be the first trilateral talks since February. Building on our separate consultations with both sides, our objective is to bring Ukraine and Russia together to discuss directly their postwar security concerns, proposals, and potential solutions. We hope these discussions will identify areas of common ground, advance practical solutions, and build momentum toward the next phase of negotiations. Ultimately, achieving a comprehensive and lasting settlement will also require direct engagement between Russia and our European partners on the broader security arrangements that affect them. We hope the discussions in Abu Dhabi will create the conditions for that engagement to begin in the near future, as part of a broader multilateral process. Our work has focused on four interconnected priorities: ending the fighting, developing credible postwar security guarantees and arrangements that reduce the risk of renewed conflict, preparing a comprehensive economic and prosperity plan for Ukraine, and advancing humanitarian measures to alleviate suffering and address the human consequences of this war. Together with Ukraine, the EU, and other European partners, we are working to address Ukraine’s substantial postwar fiscal and reconstruction needs, support critical infrastructure, attract private investment, and create the conditions for long-term economic growth and self-sufficiency. We are also working with the parties on important humanitarian issues, including the return of prisoners and civilians, and practical measures to alleviate suffering and reduce the human cost of this conflict. An important part of this process is encouraging all parties to begin thinking seriously about what comes after the war. By discussing postwar security, economic recovery, and the mechanisms needed to prevent future conflict, we hope to shift the focus from managing the war toward building the foundations for a durable peace. The existing European security agreements and institutions provide an important foundation for this work. We want to build upon what has worked, identify where existing mechanisms have fallen short, and what practical improvements are needed to make them more effective in the future. Our discussions will focus on stronger consultation, reliable crisis communications, greater military transparency, and reciprocal measures to reduce escalation risks, while fully respecting the sovereignty and independent decision-making of every nation. This is an extraordinarily difficult and complicated conflict. We recognize the difficult decisions ahead and are approaching these discussions with determination and realism. Our hope is to make meaningful progress, establish a practical pathway forward, and help create the conditions for a lasting peace.

I read JD Vance's post on this site yesterday and at first I was shocked. The Vice President all but admitted that his own administration made a mistake going to war with Iran. I can't think of a sitting VP breaking with his President this publicly in my lifetime. And at first glance his analysis seems spot on. His first prescription is to end the war. A war that he and the President, until this week, refused to even call a war. It's hard to disagree with him. But like everything MAGA, the thread of truth is there to hide the larger truth. And the larger truth is this. Tuesday was the greatest repudiation of a sitting President by voters in the history of this country. Not a repudiation of a policy. A repudiation of a man. The message was not only about Iran or Israel or slogans or even the price at the pump. The message was simple. WE ARE DONE WITH DONALD TRUMP. We are done with his lies. We are done with the corruption and the gaslighting. We are done with the insanity. We are done with the cruelty. The message from Mississippi to Iowa, from Kansas to Maine, from North Carolina to Texas, young and old, North and South, East and West, was the same. Fuck Donald Trump. This country desperately needs a healthy Republican Party. A party with room for Mitt Romney and Thomas Massie, for Chris Christie and (I can't believe I'm saying this) Marjorie Taylor Greene. A party that puts this constitutional republic above the interests of one man. A party that knows the difference between a Ken Paxton and a John Cornyn, between a Vivek Ramaswamy and a Mike DeWine. That is the message voters sent on Tuesday, with more ballots cast than in any midterm in American history. WE ARE DONE WITH DONALD TRUMP. The sooner the brave members of whatever remains of the Republican Party understand that, the sooner we can begin to heal. I hope Democrats in Congress heard it too. Voters sent the same message in 2020, and we failed to make it stick. I for one don't think this country can afford 26 more months of this madness before we do the one thing voters just demanded in historic numbers. Trump needs to leave, and he needs to leave now. All it would take this January is eleven Republican senators willing to acknowledge the existential threat this lawless President poses to the country and the world. Eleven brave Republicans need to stand up and end this madness. Save their party. Save the country. It's up to all of us to give them the courage to do what's right.

My 90 year old dad cranking out an old Hank Williams song at this week’s senior center jam. 🧡

It’s time for the Dallas media to hold feet to the fire. Risk getting credentials pulled. Call it like you see it. Ask Jerry if he’s competent. Ask him if any GM would still have his job with any other franchise on earth. Ask him if torturing fans for three decades is acceptable

A new analysis argues that Jewish historian Josephus’ 1st century account of Jesus is authentic and may draw on firsthand sources connected to his trial, possibly high priest Ananus II. The findings could strengthen evidence of his historical existence. - Oxford University Press

I am a husband, father, and lifelong Texan. I’ve been a Christian since I was 5 and a pastor since I was 19. And I just proudly voted for James Talarico, Gina Hinojosa, Jon Rosenthal, and Vikki Goodwin. While it’s true that Ken Paxton is as corrupt and morally bankrupt as they come, Greg Abbott has decimated our public schools, Dan Patrick is bought and paid for by right-wing billionaires, and Bo French wears his racism on his sleeve, I didn’t just vote AGAINST candidates I know will do a bad job. I had the privilege of voting FOR candidates who will do a great job! I originally connected with Jimmy Talarico many years ago (long before he got famous) and we became friends shortly after. He’s the exact same guy in private as he is in public—kindhearted, whip smart, hardworking, and very serious about following Jesus’ call to care for all people, especially the most vulnerable. That’s who he’s been in ministry, in the Texas Legislature, and I have no doubt that’s who he’ll be as a United States Senator too. I’ve also gotten to speak with Gina Hinojosa, Jon Rosenthal, and Vikki Goodwin this year. I believe they will fight for two things that are very important to my family and so many people in our church community: 1. An economy where every Texan can afford to have their basic needs met. 2. Fully funded public schools where all children can thrive. I’m not telling you who to vote for; I’m just telling you who I chose to vote for and why. We are in a critical moment in both the United States and Texas, so I hope you vote. And if you are a follower of Jesus, I hope you see your vote as a way to prioritize the way of Jesus—sacrificial love of neighbor and justice for those who have been marginalized.

Le monde entier doit voir ce que fait la police française aux manifestants

Charles Goodnight invented the chuckwagon, blazed one of the great cattle trails, hauled his dead partner hundreds of miles home in a coffin because he had promised he would, and helped save the American bison from extinction because his wife asked him to. He died in 1929. He was born March 5, 1836, in Illinois, and the family moved to Texas in 1846 when he was ten. He grew up on the frontier and spent his early adulthood as a scout and Ranger out on the Texas plains. In 1866 he teamed up with an older cattleman named Oliver Loving, put together a herd, and drove it out of Fort Belknap, Texas toward Fort Sumner, New Mexico, where the Army needed beef. That route became the Goodnight-Loving Trail, and it opened the whole Southwest to Texas cattle. The drive included about ninety miles of waterless country before they reached the Pecos. Cattle died on it. They went anyway. On that same drive, Goodnight invented the chuckwagon. He bought a surplus Army wagon, rebuilt it with iron axles, and bolted a hinged box onto the back fitted with drawers and shelves and a lid that folded down into a work surface, with a water barrel underneath. A cook could run an entire kitchen out of the back of it a hundred miles from anything. Every trail outfit in the West copied it within a few years, and the rigs people still build for chuckwagon cooking competitions today are essentially the same design. He solved the biggest logistics problem in the cattle industry with a piece of carpentry. On the second drive in 1867, Loving rode ahead and was ambushed and wounded by Comanches along the Pecos. He made it to Fort Sumner, but the wound went gangrenous and he died there. Goodnight had promised him he would not be left in New Mexico. So after the burial, Goodnight came back, had the body taken out of the ground, and hauled it in a coffin across hundreds of miles of plains to Weatherford, Texas, so Loving could be buried at home. If that sounds familiar, it is because Larry McMurtry built Lonesome Dove on these two men. In 1876 Goodnight moved into the Palo Duro Canyon in the Texas Panhandle and founded the JA Ranch with an Irish investor named John Adair. By 1885 it covered 1,325,000 acres and ran 100,000 head of cattle. Six years earlier he had married Mary Ann Dyer, a schoolteacher from Weatherford that everyone called Molly. She went out to the Panhandle with him, where for long stretches she was effectively the only woman for a hundred miles in any direction. And in the late 1870s she looked hard at what was happening on the plains around her. The southern bison herd was being wiped out. Millions of animals killed in a handful of years for their hides, the bodies left where they dropped. Molly kept coming across orphaned calves standing next to their dead mothers. She asked her husband to save some of them. So Goodnight went out into the canyon and roped a few bison calves and brought them home, and Molly set aside six hundred acres of the ranch as a buffalo park. From that handful: thirteen animals by 1888, around forty five by 1903, over a hundred and sixty by 1914. And then they went out into the world. Bison from the Goodnight herd went to Yellowstone in 1902, to the National Bison Range, to parks in Montana, to Canada, to the New York Zoological Park, to zoos all over the country, and to Buffalo Bill Cody. Along with four other private herds and the protected animals at Yellowstone, that is the reason the species still exists. Nearly every plains bison alive today descends from that small group of founding herds. Descendants of the Goodnight animals are standing in Caprock Canyons State Park in Texas right now. Molly died in 1926. Goodnight died on December 12, 1929, at ninety three. He was born before Texas was a state and lived to see automobiles, airplanes and talking pictures. One more thing happened in 1929. In January of that year a man named Bose Ikard died. He had been born into slavery in Mississippi in 1843 and brought to Texas as a boy. After the war he went up the trail. He rode for Oliver Loving, and then he rode four years for Goodnight. Goodnight said he trusted Bose Ikard farther than any living man, and that out in Colorado and New Mexico, Ikard was his detective, his banker, and everything else. When Ikard died, Goodnight, then ninety two years old, paid for a granite marker over his grave in Weatherford and wrote the words himself. "Bose Ikard served with me four years on the Goodnight-Loving Trail, never shirked a duty or disobeyed an order, rode with me in many stampedes, participated in three engagements with Comanches, splendid behavior." He signed it with his own name, and died eleven months later.

In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity.

🤔Look at Trump's Hand Symbolism after shaking Zelensky's Hand.

A new era of warfare has arrived and running from it only buys you five extra seconds… Absolutely terrifying. Writer: Bri

AI says it is a 0.0000000000000005% chance that Charlie’s security team all wore brown/cognac low-cut shoes on 9/10 by sheer coincidence. 😳😳😳