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Epoch Times
19-05-2025
- General
- Epoch Times
The Traditional Latin Mass Movement and the Romance of Orthodoxy
Commentary The Traditional Latin Mass recently has been the subject of a surprising number of articles in mainstream publications including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. It is estimated that only 2 percent of Catholics attend this ancient form of the Mass, yet it is attracting much attention. Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) communities in America have seen growth of about 10 percent year over year since 2022, according to one priest who surveyed several TLM parishes across the United States. Many other parishes experience a 3 percent decrease yearly. The story of the diocese of Oakland, Calif., on the one hand, and the parish of St. Vitus in Los Angeles are representative of what is happening in the Catholic Church at large right now, and it would behoove the newly elected Pope Leo XIV to pay attention to the traditionalist movement in the Church, a movement driven by young laypeople and young priests. In 2022, Oakland Bishop Michael Barber commissioned a report to investigate solutions to the collapse of the faith in the diocese. This 73-page document details the lack of priests and lack of funds and discusses the possibility of parish closures, mergers, and clusters. Right now, Oakland is working on clustering parishes together under shared priests. This is happening in other cities, too. In Los Angeles, on the other hand, a single priest has grown the Latin Mass to such an extent that several church upgrades have not been enough. The TLM parish of Related Stories 12/27/2023 1/14/2022 However, because it continued to grow, coexistence became difficult. St. Vitus was soon able to purchase its own church, which its parishioners fixed up and beautified. Yet it quickly outgrew this space and, during COVID, 'expanded' with the use of a large outdoor tent. Last year, the parish purchased a larger property north of the city, and yet even here, on an ordinary Tuesday, the Masses are standing-room only. For the Easter Vigil Mass at 8 p.m., one family arrived at 4:30 pm to get seats inside of the church. This is happening at many traditional Latin Mass parishes around the country. In order to understand why the old Latin Mass is experiencing an incredible revival, it is necessary to look beyond the explanations that most of the mainstream media outlets offer. Contrary to these narratives, the TLM movement is not political, social, or aesthetic. It is liturgical. The The liturgical life of many traditional Latin Mass Catholics encompasses much more than church on Sundays. They honor saints with real feasts; seasonal festivities such as Christmas and Easter take place after an extended fast and last for a whole season, not just one day. Children often do not have cellphones until late high school or college. It is not uncommon for their homes to lack a television, or for it to be relegated to the basement for family movie night. These folks sometimes uproot and move or drive very long distances to celebrate the Latin Mass. They seem to live according to a pre-modern rhythm of life. The very 'weirdness' of this older form of Christianity is part of what makes it attractive to young people, who form its base. A 2022 survey that found that over 80 percent of priests ordained after 2020 identify as 'conservative/orthodox,' while none of the priests described themselves as 'very progressive.' This marks a distinct change from the views of older clergy, Pope Francis having been among them, who embraced the 'modernizing' efforts of the Young people are rebelling against a disenchanted world of materialism, nihilism, and depression. They yearn for re-enchantment, for beauty, and for the ancient form of worship that gives meaning and rest to restless souls. Pope Leo XIV would do well to encourage this blossoming youth movement, and to remove the restrictions on it that his predecessor put in place. Wherever a Traditional Latin Mass is celebrated, a community grows around it. Within a couple of years, formerly dying parishes could be utterly revived. Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Daily Mail
13-05-2025
- Daily Mail
Calls for paedophile who raped 'bullied' girl, 12, to be handed 107-year sentence - after he also offered her to other men on the internet
Spanish prosecutors are seeking to put a paedophile who raped a vulnerable 12-year-old girl and offered her up to other men on the internet behind bars for 107 years. The paedophile, a 45-year-old man who has only been identified as 'TLM', has already been found guilty of attacking the young girl, described as a child in the care system who suffered 'low self-esteem' caused by 'bullying at school and at home.' In 2020, TLM began messaging the victim through the Badoo messaging app, before moving on to Instagram and Google Hangouts. He began raping her at the care home she was in, whose care she was put under due to having a mother too unwell to take care of her, and took several indecent photos and videos of the girl with the intentions of sharing them online. During his sick visits, TLM would show her pornographic films 'so the minor could watch them and loosen her inhibitions' and 'forced her to have sex,' according to the indictment. He also convinced her to be photographed and recorded in her underwear, naked, or submitting to the sexual practices he imposed on her. In November 2020, TLM took his assaults a step further, and began impersonating her on Instagram and European dating app Lovoo 'in order not only to achieve sexual relations with her himself, but also to simultaneously watch other men having sexual relations with the minor in his presence, in order to further satisfy his lustful desire', prosecutors said. As a result of his 'indiscriminate offering' of her to online users, TLM took at least 20 videos of the girl being raped by himself or other men. Following a raid on his home, cops found 232 photographs and nine videos of the child, as well as a further 576 videos and 889 digital photographs downloaded from illicit messaging platforms containing child abuse content on his phone. Similar material was found on TLM's laptop, as well as several hard drives. On top of seeking more than a century of jail time for the sick paedophile, prosecutors are also asking the Barcelona Court of Appeals, based in the High Court of Justice of Catalonia, to place a 25-year ban on him being within the child's home, school or workplace. On top of this, they are seeking for the man to be banned from any profession that requires him to be regular contact with children, as well as €100,000 (£84,000) in compensation for the child.
Business Wire
07-05-2025
- Business
- Business Wire
Fastino Launches TLMs (Task-Specific Language Models) with $17.5M Seed Round Led by Khosla Ventures
PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Fastino AI today unveiled a groundbreaking new AI model architecture, coined 'TLMs' – Task-Specific Language Models. Developed by in-house AI researchers from Google DeepMind, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and Apple Intelligence, TLMs deliver 99X faster inference than traditional LLMs and were trained on less than $100K in low-end gaming GPUs. Fastino is also announcing $17.5M in seed funding led by Khosla Ventures, the first investor in OpenAI – bringing Fastino's total funding to $25M. The round included participation from preseed lead investor Insight Partners as well as Valor Equity Partners, and notable angels including Scott Johnston, the previous CEO of Docker, and Lukas Biewald, the CEO of Weights & Biases. As of today, developers can access the TLM API, which includes a free tier with up to 10,000 requests per month. The API is purpose-built for specific tasks, with the first models including: Summarization: Generate concise, accurate summaries from long-form or noisy text, enabling faster understanding and content distillation. Function Calling: A hyper-efficient model designed for agentic systems, enabling precise, low-latency tool invocation – ideal for integrating LLMs into production workflows. Text to JSON: Convert unstructured text into structured, clean, and production-ready JSON for seamless downstream integration. PII Redaction: Redact sensitive or personally identifiable information on a zero-shot basis, including support for user-defined or industry-specific entity types. Text Classification: A versatile zero-shot model for any labeling task, equipped with enterprise-grade safeguards including spam and toxicity detection, out-of-bounds filtering, jailbreak detection, and intent classification. Profanity Censoring: Identify and redact profane language to ensure content compliance and brand safety. Information Extraction: Extract structured data – such as entities, attributes, and contextual insights – from unstructured text to support use cases like document processing, search query parsing, question answering, and custom data detection. 'We started this company after our last startup went viral and our infrastructure costs went through the roof. At one point, we were spending more on language models than on our entire team. That made it clear: general-purpose LLMs are overkill for most tasks. So we set out to build models that worked for devs,' said Ash Lewis, CEO and co-founder of Fastino. 'Our models are faster, more accurate, and cost a fraction to train while outperforming flagship models on specific tasks.' Trained on NVIDIA gaming GPUs for less than $100,000, Fastino's TLMs can inference on low-end hardware such as CPUs or gaming GPUs. Although significantly smaller than current industry models with trillions of parameters, Fastino's models deliver market-leading accuracy and inference 99.67X faster than existing LLMs. The specialized architecture achieves better accuracy as tasks become more well-defined. 'Large enterprises using frontier models typically only care about performance on a narrow set of tasks,' said Jon Chu, Partner at Khosla Ventures. 'Fastino's tech allows enterprises to create a model with better-than-frontier model performance for just the set of tasks you care about and package it into a small, lightweight model that's portable enough to run on CPUs, all while being orders of magnitude faster with latency guarantees. These tradeoffs open up new use cases for generative models that historically haven't been practical before.' Fastino is breaking from industry standards with a flat monthly subscription that eliminates per-token fees, allowing developers to access the complete TLM suite with predictable usage costs. For enterprise customers, Fastino TLMs can be deployed within a customer's Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), on-premise data center, or at the edge, allowing enterprises to maintain control over sensitive information while leveraging advanced AI capabilities. 'AI developers don't need an LLM trained on trillions of irrelevant data points – they need the right model for their task,' said George Hurn-Maloney, COO and co-founder of Fastino. 'That's why we're making highly accurate, lightweight models with the first-ever flat monthly pricing – and a free tier so devs can integrate the right model into their workflow without compromise.' For more information about Fastino and its specialized models, visit About Fastino Fastino is a developer-first AI company based in Palo Alto, California, building TLMs (Task-Specific Language Models) designed for accuracy, speed, and cost-predictability. Founded by experts from Google DeepMind and Apple, Fastino's purpose-built models outperform general-purpose LLMs on real-world enterprise tasks – while running at a fraction of the compute cost.
Associated Press
19-02-2025
- Business
- Associated Press
Youthful Savings Partners with Community Corporation of Santa Monica to Offer a Custom Learning Program
This custom program will bring the youth mental well-being, economic empowerment, and community-building skills. 'Community Corp. is thrilled to be working with Youthful Savings in several capacities to promote youth empowerment and need more of this in our community!' — Tara Barauskas, Executive Director of Community Corporation of Santa Monica NEW YORK, NY, UNITED STATES, February 19, 2025 / / -- Youthful Savings (YS) is pleased to partner with the Community Corporation of Santa Monica to offer the custom learning program 'Youth Entrepreneurship for a More Inclusive Global Economy.' This program features the award-winning 'My Own Business Challenge' on YS' direct-to-youth EdTech platform, The Learning Marketplace (TLM). This custom program focuses on increasing mental well-being, economic empowerment, and community-building skills while allowing youth to start real businesses. Sponsored by LA Supervisor District 2 Holly Mitchell and Supervisor District 3 Lindsey Horvath, this program is open to the Santa Monica youth residents of Community Corporation properties. Youthful Savings provides education to empower the youth and their communities economically. Participants can increase their mental well-being and community-building skills through this education. Graduates can sell online on the Youthful Savings Marketplace (YSM), a global e-commerce platform designed to host youth businesses. Successful businesses will have the opportunity to be featured at the local Pico Roots Marketplace in Santa Monica and will also receive an inventory grant from the Youthful Savings Foundation (YSF). This foundation aims to reduce bias in initial business investment and maintain business integrity within the community, ensuring all successful businesses have the support they need to thrive. Through this effort, YSF aims to create kind capitalism through bottom-up economics. Following the preparation of this anticipated program, Tara Barauskas, Executive Director of Community Corporation of Santa Monica, expressed her thoughts, 'Community Corp. is thrilled to be working with Youthful Savings in several capacities to promote youth empowerment and entrepreneurship. We believe the youth is our future, and we appreciate the programs that Youthful Savings brings to our youth, so that they can learn how to create their own opportunities and entrepreneurship skills. They are now operating in our Pico Roots marketplace and giving our youth support to create and sell their creations. We need more of this in our community!' The Youth Entrepreneurship for a More Inclusive Global Economy program with the Community Corp. aims to continue educating and uplifting youth both locally in Santa Monica and globally through their combined efforts. The Youth Entrepreneurship for a More Inclusive Global Economy program will be hosted online, supplemented by an in-person information session on March 6, 2025. Alongside the award-winning 'My Own Business Challenge,' participants will access a comprehensive range of self-paced learning exercises covering topics such as Bitcoin, communication skills, conflict resolution, emotional intelligence, financial wellness, vertical farming, and storytelling. These educational experiences will provide youth with the knowledge and resources necessary to economically empower themselves and their communities while supporting their mental well-being. Interested residents of Community Corporation properties can RSVP via About Youthful Savings: YS is a learning ecosystem dedicated to socioeconomic empowerment through mental well-being, economic empowerment, and community development. Youthful Savings provides youth with online education through The Learning Marketplace and a platform to create global online businesses via the Youthful Savings Marketplace. Through Youthful Savings, youth can create a more inclusive global economy. For more information, visit Gabriela Calabretta +1 929-529-5523
