Teen Rescued at Sea After 49 Days Adrift

Fascinating! Rescues in impossible situations are always a good read.  

Indonesian teen survives 49 days adrift without paddle, but with Bible

FOX NEWS   An Indonesian teenager, who worked on a floating fish trap 80 miles off the country's coast, survived 49 days adrift in the Pacific Ocean with only a Bible, limited rations and a small radio, reports said Monday.

Strong winds during a July storm reportedly snapped the lines keeping Aldi Novel Adilang, a 19-year-old lamp keeper, moored in place. He was helpless and floated off without even a paddle.

“Aldi said he had been scared and often cried when adrift. Every time he saw a large ship, he said he was hopeful, but more than 10 ships had passed him, none of them stopped,” Fajar Firdaus, a diplomat, said, according to reports.

Aldi managed to catch fish and drink sea water through clothing in order to filter out some of the salt, The Telegraph reported.

He said through a diplomat that it was frustrating seeing ships in the distance and being unable to get their crews’ attention. He said in an interview that he thought he was going to die, and considered suicide. The Guardian reported that in his darkest times, he consulted the Bible.

He was rescued in late August near Guam, after managing to send a radio frequency to a tanker named Arpeggio on Aug. 31. A friend reportedly once gave him the small frequency radio in the event he gets lost at sea.

But The Telegraph reported that even his rescue was a challenge due to rough waves. Adilang was reportedly forced to jump into the water to reach a line from the ship.

He was taken to Japan for treatment, and reunited with family earlier this month, reports said.

pc: INDONESIAN CONSULATE GENERAL, OSAKA

Read the Fox News article --->> H E R E

Last night I read in Exodus 14  of the LORD parting the Red Sea for the Israelites in order to get away from vast, mighty, angry Egyptian army which was in hot pursuit. The Israelites were told to move forward -- not to be paralyzed with fear or longing for a previous life of hopeless bondage/cruelty.  I can see this situation as a picture/example of the Lord Jesus Christ's rescue of Sinners from sin and trespasses (the old, futile way of life) -- impossible by mere human effort and good works. 

Indonesian teen survives 49 days adrift without paddle, but with Bible

Exodus 14

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America Gold Toilet : Where Art Thou?

Any news-worthy stories/headlines about GOLD remind me of my late cousin.  He passed away on this day in Year 2011 and is sorely missed by his wife, children, relatives.

He & wife purchased 23-kt gold jewelry on my behalf while in Asia. My beautiful items are safely tucked-away in the bank safe and hopefully will not be stolen.  Daring thieves took this one-of-a-kind 18k precious, functional "throne" (sculpture named AMERICA) which was on loan from  the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Worth $6 million!!  So far, there are no solid leads on who dunnit. 

Leon Neal/ Getty Images

Two People Arrested for Stealing $6 Million Golden Toilet Named 'America' - via Western Journal

Two people have been arrested in connection with the theft of a golden toilet from Blenheim Palace, the birthplace of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

The theft occurred Saturday (September 14th), according to The Associated Press. A 36-year-old man was held on suspicion of conspiracy before being released, and police earlier arrested a 66-year-old man. Neither suspect is currently in jail.

The toilet, which is a working model and could be used by visitors to Blenheim, was created as a work of art and was at the palace for a short-term art display. It has a value estimated near $6 million, according to The Guardian.

The toilet, titled “America,” was created by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan.

Because the toilet was connected to the palace’s plumbing, significant water damage took place after it was stolen. The toilet had been installed in a room next to the one in which Churchill was born.

Blenheim Palace

“We are continuing to investigate this incident and have made a second arrest in connection with it. Our priority is to locate the stolen item,” Detective Inspector Steven Jones of the Thames Valley Police said.

Blenheim chief executive Dominic Hare said the incident reminded him of a “heist movie.” He said the theft was the “first theft of this type in living memory” from the estate, according to the BBC.

The palace has “a sophisticated security system,” he said, but its security staff is “now challenged to look hard at ourselves and improve again.”

Hare said the artwork was a “comment on the American dream.”

“At first, when they woke me up this morning with the news,” Cattelan told The New York Times. “I thought it was a prank: Who’s so stupid to steal a toilet? I had forgotten for a second that it was made out of gold.”

“‘America’ was the one percent for the 99 percent, and I hope it still is. I want to be positive and think the robbery is a kind of Robin Hood-inspired action,” he said, adding that the theft was not a prank to call attention to the work.

 “I wish it was a prank,” he said, adding that the incident “is deadly serious if even a little bit surreal since the subject of the robbery was a toilet.”

Cattelan also had a request for the thieves: “Dear thieves, please, if you are reading this, let me know how much you like the piece and how it feels to pee on gold.”

“It is deeply ironic that a work of art portraying the American dream and the idea of an elite object made available to all should be almost instantly snatched away and hidden from view,” Hare said.

pc: wikipedia

The toilet had previously been exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, where in 2017 its curator estimated more than 100,000 people had used it.

After its time at the Guggenheim, the golden toilet was offered to President Donald Trump for use at the White House, but Trump declined the offer, according to Fox Business.

by Jack Davis

Thou shalt not steal.

Exodus 20:15

Two People Arrested

America (Maurizio Cattelan)

Blenheim Palace

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Dismantling the Obama Legacy: Defeat of ISIS in Raqqa

Trump Defeats ISIS In Months — After Years Of Excuses From Obama

pc: CBS News

Terrorism: Nine months after President Trump promised to defeat ISIS "quickly and effectively," U.S.-backed forces captured Raqqa, which until Tuesday had served as the ISIS capital. The battle now is over who deserves credit: Trump or President Obama.

Trump, not surprisingly, claims it for himself: "It had to do with the people I put in and it had to do with rules of engagement," Trump said in a radio interview

Before dismissing this as typical Trump self-aggrandizement, consider that for several years Obama insisted that a quick and decisive victory against ISIS was all but impossible.

After belittling ISIS as a "JV" team and then being surprised by its advances, Obama finally got around to announcing a strategy to "degrade and ultimately destroy" the militant Islamic group.

As his strategy dragged on and seemed to go nowhere, Obama kept telling the country that this was just the nature of the beast.

"It will take time to eradicate a cancer like (ISIS). It will take time to root them out."

"This is a long-term and extremely complex challenge."

"This will not be quick."

"There will be setbacks and there will be successes."

"We must be patient and flexible in our efforts; this is a multiyear fight and there will be challenges along the way."

And he kept insisting that winning the war against ISIS has as much to do with public relations as it did weapons. "This broader challenge of countering extremism is not simply a military effort. Ideologies are not defeated with guns, they are defeated by better ideas."

What Obama didn't say is that reason defeating ISIS was taking so long was of how he was fighting it.

A former senior military commander in the region told the Washington Examiner that the Obama White House was micromanaging the war "to the degree that it was just as bad, if not worse, than during the Johnson administration." Johnson, you will recall, once bragged that "they can't bomb an outhouse in Vietnam without my permission."

Contrast this with Trump. Rather than talk endlessly about how long and hard the fight would be, Trump said during his campaign that, if elected, he would convene his "top generals and give them a simple instruction. They will have 30 days to submit to the Oval Office a plan for soundly and quickly defeating ISIS."

Once in office, Trump made several changes in the way the war was fought, the most important of which were to loosen the rules of engagement and give more decision-making authority to battlefield commanders.

Joshua Keating, writing in the liberal commentary site Slate, noted that Trump had "instructed the Pentagon to loosen the rules of engagement for airstrikes to the minimum required by international law, eliminated White House oversight procedures meant to protect civilians, and ordered the CIA to resume covert targeted killing missions." (He meant it as a criticism).

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who can hardly be called a Trump lap dog, praised what he said was "a dramatic shift in a very positive way — away from the political micromanaging of the Obama years to freeing up generals and troops to destroy ISIS."

The result of this shift seems pretty obvious. In July, ISIS was booted from Mosul, and this week Raqqa was liberated. For all intents and purposes, ISIS has been defeated. Trump did in nine months what Obama couldn't in the previous three years.

pc: zerohedge.com

Trump's critics will insist that victory was inevitable, given that Obama had severely degraded ISIS over the previous years, and that all Trump did was continue Obama's strategy.

But the bottom line is that while Obama preached patience, Trump promised a swift end to ISIS, and then delivered on it.

-- Investor Business Daily, Editorials
After Years of Excuses from Obama

link:

Raqqa Victory

http://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/raqqa-victory-means-trump-defeated-isis-in-months-after-years-of-excuses-from-obama/

Trouble with Pinterest

My account shows that I've posted the picture below (twice!) on one of my Pinterest boards, yet there's no public picture as of a couple of days ago. Guess their computer flags it. Their reason could not possibly be because it is untrue.  

pc: unknown