Stalinism coming to transform America 148

See and hear the most dangerous person in the world – next to the senile crook who has nominated her for a position of power to ruin us all.

Listen, if you can bear it, to the unintelligible language in which Stalinists talk  – or grunt – to each other. The woman in specs who keeps saying “Right?” is “President” Biden’s pick for chief organizer of your financial ruin:

 

Breitbart reports:

Saule Omarova, President Joe Biden’s [Stalinist] nominee for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), called during a March 2021 virtual conference TO ELIMINATE ALL PRIVATE BANK ACCOUNTS AND DEPOSITS. 

Omarova spoke at the Law and Political Economy (LPE) Project’s “Law & Political Economy: Democracy Beyond Neoliberalism” conference in March.

Omarova discussed one of her papers, “The People’s Ledger How to Democratize Money and Finance the Economy,” which would help “redesign” the financial system and make the economy “more equitable for everyone.”

She said it would change the “private-public power balance” and democratize finance to a more systemic level.

During her explanation of her paper, she said that the Federal Reserve, the nation’s central bank, can only use “indirect levers” to “induce private banks to increase their lending”.

Her paper calls for eliminating all banks and transferring all bank deposits to “FedAccounts” at the Federal Reserve.

During her conference speech, she said, “There will be no more private bank accounts, and all of the deposit accounts will be held directly at the Fed”.

Only the thugs in power will have control of their own enormous fortunes acquired by robbing the people.

A former senior government official told Breitbart News that if the Senate were to confirm Omarova, she would have the “most powerful, least accountable” position over America’s banking system.

When talking about FedAccounts, the former senior government official said, “The Democratic Party over the last couple of administrations, they want the government to essentially take over a lot of financial functions from banks.”

Here’s the typical Lefty gobbledygook that “explains” their intention:

The LPE serves as a platform to discuss the role of law and legal discourse in the creation and maintenance of capitalism and in mediating tensions between capitalist order and democratic self-rule. Scholars in our network work to understand the relationship between market supremacy and  racial, gender, and economic injustice; to articulate the relationship between capitalism and devaluation of social and ecological reproduction; and to explore the distinctive ways that law gives shape to and legitimates neoliberal capitalism, ranging from dynamics of financialization to the relation between the carceral state and capitalism. We also seek to offer concrete legal reforms designed to move beyond neoliberalism and toward a genuinely responsive, egalitarian democracy, with critical attention to the need for power and movement-building as part of any such transformation. 

At least there is this:

Omarova’s radical views led to 21 state financial officers calling for Biden to withdraw Omarova’s nomination for the U.S. comptroller. 

[Some] Republicans have already moved to oppose Omarova’s nomination.

Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) said Omarova’s support of Communist ideals” disqualifies her for the position.

“Republicans will overwhelmingly oppose this self-described radical,” Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) told Axios.

Why did this Russian hellcat come to live in America? Not to be free but to work to make America unfree.

The time has come for total dedicated single-minded opposition.

To pay any price now for freedom.

*

Update December 7, 2021: Good news. Saule Omarova is no longer an imminent danger to the human race. The “Biden” administration has withdrawn her nomination.

Posted under communism, Economics, Soviet Union, United States by Jillian Becker on Saturday, November 13, 2021

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Covid rules 81

Paul Joseph Watson notices a few facts about Covid infection that most governments obstinately ignore:

Posted under Health, tyranny by Jillian Becker on Saturday, November 13, 2021

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Tell us what you think 80

Join in the intelligent and exciting discussions on our Forum.

Here are some of the topics raised between November 1 and 7, 2021):

Herds of RINOs in the House and the Senate

US $1 trillion infrastructure bill passed

Anniversary of 2020 election, 56% of voters now believe there was cheating

Yes, Trump Won – and Let’s Go Brandon

Climate Alarmism is a Snooze

The real COVID death count

Durham Investigation: All Collusion Roads Lead To Hillary

Letter from Jan 6 protester

Donald Trump message at Kari Lake election integrity rally

Macron Loses British Boat Row

Get your money out of these 7 big banks

Energy costs won’t go down

Texas border wall will be complete within 2 months

ISIS Rises from the Dead

Biden State Department ‘Unable’ to Help U.S. Citizens Escape War-Stricken Ethiopia

A Lethal Shot of CRT in the Arm of the Navy

The Transhumanist Revolution

Biden delays release of secret JFK assassination files

The Islamization of Europe

The Sovietization of America

Boris Helps Iran Steal £100k Of British Taxpayers Money

Iran Tests the US and Finds It Weak

Robot “Artists” Muddy The Meaning Of Art

Toyota CEO Explains Supply Chain Shortages

Russia, NATO, and Building Serbia-Kosovo Peace

The Mass Surveillance of Cell Phone Data: Geofence Warrants

China’s nuclear threat and food shortages

The Man behind the sales of Dominion voting machines

More Chaos, Bloodshed, Death and Despair in Africa

Soaring prices fuel anti-ECB sentiment in Germany

Information War: Wokeness Has Already Lost The Culture War

The Riddle of Epicurus on the Problem of Evil

The Politics of The Crown

UK court rules music as a form of protest as illegal

Worker Rebellion Over Vaccine Mandates Claimed

Protest and Paranoia

That Intricate Evil Clinton Plot against President Trump and the American People

A sample of an interchange:

On

The Politics of The Crown

The great Margaret Thatcher said that the (constitutional) difference between Britain and America is that Britain is a product of history while America is the product of philosophy. Which then is the more firmly grounded, considering that philosophy can be changed but history cannot? Is Britain more likely to be stable, to maintain what has proved to work, to conserve what the nation has achieved, and to remain a sturdy guardian of the people’s freedom within the impregnable walls of its laws and institutions? In theory, yes; in practice, no. Britain is sick with the same political diseases as America: irrational shame, foreign occupation, hardening tyranny. If either is the more likely to recover, it is America. Because philosophy is changeable.

Good insight! I never thought about it, but you are probably right. Our philosophy is being influenced to change for the worse, but there is always the chance that it can be changed again for the better.

That is a possibility. And there are signs that it may be beginning to happen.

Another sample:

On

The Riddle of Epicurus on the Problem of Evil 

“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”

The wonderful Epicureans were truly atheists. They placated their polytheist critics by covering their atheism with a verbal fig leaf: declaring that there were some gods somewhere far off, but they didn’t do anything.

Further more, David Hume two millennia later relied on Epicurus and he reminds theists that: “Epicurus’s old questions are yet unanswered. Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?” (David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion). An excellent example of the dependence of so much Enlightenment thought on the ancient Greeks.

And another

On

Dr. Fauci Animal Torturer

Taxpayer funds were used by Dr. Fauci for research that included infecting dozens of puppies with parasites. They suffered extremely cruel treatment. His “white coats” injected and force-fed the puppies an experimental drug for several weeks, before killing and dissecting them. The dogs developed agonizing infectious lesions. In addition they were subjected to a procedure called a “cordectomy”, sometimes called “de-barking”: the puppies’ vocal cords were slashed so the experimenters would not hear the dogs whimpering in pain and distress.

A liar, a fraud, and a monster.

What is you opinion?

Please tell us on our Forum.

Posted under Miscellaneous by Jillian Becker on Sunday, November 7, 2021

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Suicide of the West? 8

In a New Criterion article titled Meditations at the crossroads, Allen C. Guelzo and James Hankins write:

[W]e have often had occasion to quote the observation by the political philosopher James Burnham that “Suicide is probably more frequent than murder as the end phase of a civilization.” … [I]t is part of the pathology that Burnham describes that … objections to the West are “most often made most hotly by Westerners who hate their own civilization, readily excuse or even praise blows struck against it, and themselves lend a willing hand, frequently enough, to pulling it down.

Almost everywhere one looks, standards of taste, intelligence, and moral discrimination trace a course of perilous decline.

Education? Study after study shows that our public schools are a disaster. A shocking number of high school students are unable to read, write, or calculate effectively. They are furthermore impoverished by a breathtaking lack of general historical knowledge. … [M]ost of our colleges and universities have become repugnant scenes of political grievance-mongering, polysyllabic posturing, and tenured irresponsibility.

It is the same with popular culture. Every season, movies, television, pop music, and other forms of mass entertainment get a little cruder, a little dumber, a little more mindless. The occasional bright spots only illuminate the depressing morass that surrounds us.

The arts? Wedded to a bankrupt conception of the avant-garde, many of our most conspicuous arts institutions seem to have given up on aesthetic excellence in order to pursue the inanities of “progressive” gestures.

Public manners and morals? Forget it. Even to ask the question is to answer it

Add to all this the widespread ignorance of our own political traditions and institutions—even of the fundamental tenets of our constitutional democracy—and one arrives at a recipe for cultural catastrophe.

Do you agree?

If so, do you see any way the “perilous decline” can be arrested, or even reversed?

Posted under Culture by Jillian Becker on Thursday, November 4, 2021

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Letter from a political prisoner in the USA 164

We found this profoundly shocking letter through a link brought to us at our Forum.

We reproduce it in full. (The writer is religious, and regardless of what we think of his God, we hope he derives comfort from his belief.)

It shows that America under the rule of the Socialist Democrats has begun to be a tyranny like the Third Reich, Stalin’s Russia, and Mao’s China. 

Dear fellow Americans:

I never thought I’d write a letter like this, but we’re living in very different times. This is my cry for help.

My name is Nathan DeGrave, and as a non violent participant at the Jan 6th rally, I’ve spent the last 9 months detained as a political prisoner in pod C2B at the DC Department of Corrections (DOC) otherwise known as DC’s Gitmo.

The conditions here for Jan 6ers have been inhumane. In fact, some inmates are even begging to be transferred to GUANTANAMO BAY, where even THEY have more acceptable standards.

Class action LAWSUITS are being filed against this prison; and even the ACLU has gotten involved. Senators Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene have since attempted to gain access to this facility and inspect the conditions of the jail, only to be denied.  The vile filth of what has become our daily life is being illegally HIDDEN from the members of OUR OWN CONGRESS.

So let me tell you about what me and many of the other Jan 6ers have been experiencing in DC’s Gitmo. It is my hope that with MEDIA EXPOSURE and the awareness of the American public, that SOMETHING may be done and this never happens to anyone ever again.

 OUR CONDITIONS – For the first 120 days in DC’s Gitmo, Jan 6ers experienced DAILY LOCKDOWNS for 23-24 HOURS before being allowed to leave our small 120 sq. ft cell. The PHYSICAL and MENTAL ANGUISH that results from this kind of SEVERE ISOLATION has caused many people to go on a RAPID mental decline.

As a result, a large percentage of us are HEAVILY MEDICATED with anti-anxiety and anti-depressant drugs, which helps to cope with the psychological and mental ABUSE we endure.

Many times, the little rec we DO receive is STRIPPED AWAY if our cell isn’t up to the standards of the guard on duty. This changes from day to day. Jan 6ers have lost rec time and out of cell activity ANY TIME news interviews about the jail are aired on TV, people speak up about our conditions, or rallies are held in our name. We’ll probably have a lockdown upon the publishing of this letter. So I have already warned those I know in advance.

Masks are WEAPONIZED and used against us, even though we NEVER leave the facility. Officers have walked in with the SOLE INTENTION of needing to write 20-30 disciplinary reports against Jan 6ers, which adversely effects our chances of release and causes loss of privileges, phone time and commissary. Masks need to be covering both the nose and mouth AT ALL TIMES or we are threatened and locked down in our cells. Jan 6ers are always respectful to the employees around us, but CO’s maintain the need to invent reasons for discipline.

PRIVILEGED LEGAL DOCUMENTS have been CONFISCATED and gone missing from various cells, and HIGHLY SENSITIVE discovery (video evidence under attorney/client privilege) is watched by employees during our legal calls.

Jordan Mink, for example, had all discovery TAKEN by ERT officers on August 23rd despite the objection of his attorney. They handcuffed him, searched his room, and then proceeded to take all video evidence in his possession. Additionally, legal visits take 2-3 WEEKS or more to be scheduled, leaving little time to discuss our defense and prepare for trial.

The EXTREME medical neglect in this facility has caused a variety of adverse illnesses and disease. Some show signs of scurvy. And some even have Covid like symptoms, but medical personnel have refused to treat it.

Christopher Worrell, for example, is an inmate with Cancer, who also broke his hand in prison and requires surgery. Both have been completely ignored. Federal judge Royce Lamberth got to the point where on October 12th, he filed contempt of court charges against the warden of the DC DOC, claiming that Worrell’s civil rights have been violated, and demanding the U.S attorney general inquire further about his and other possible violations.

Another inmate, Peter Stager, WAITED FOUR MONTHS to receive his CPAP breathing machine, and has needed an MRI since spring, which has also been ignored by staff.

The harsh, unlivable conditions of our unit has caused health hazards that defy Department of Health regulations. And on at least five occasions, RAW SEWAGE has overflowed our unit, causing human fecal matter to flood the floors and rooms. That’s also in addition to the MOLD on cell walls, as well as the rusty pipes, and DIRTY WATER that flows from these sinks. White rags TURN BROWN when exposed to the water from our faucets.

We are undergoing SEVERE NUTRITIONAL DEFICIENCIES and STARVATION. For breakfast this morning, I received a tray of flavorless paste, two slices of bread, and a slice of bologna. Lunches usually consist of rice and beans, but we’ll get cold chicken/beef patties if we are lucky. For dinner, we are sometimes fed a diet of cheese sandwiches, and bologna and cheese 4 to 5 times per week.

Without commissary, people like myself are FORCED TO STARVE. I suffer from HEADACHES and NAUSEA on an almost REGULAR BASIS from the malnutrition and constant hunger I am subjected to. I have lost ALMOST 15 POUNDS since I’ve been detained.

Our rights to personal hygiene are also totally neglected. Razors are PROHIBITED, and inmates are forced to either go unshaved and grow long beards, or use a razor free cream that BURNS and IRRITATES the skin. But many other jails have allowed the use of razors without incident. Haircuts are also PROHIBITED from unvaccinated inmates.

For me, it’s been nearly 9 months. I look VIRTUALLY UNRECOGNIZABLE in the condition I’m in. I fear even my family would not recognize me.

Contact with the outside world, from legal visits to seeing loved ones is HIGHLY RESTRICTED. After in-person visits, legal or otherwise, we are forced to undergo humiliating STRIP SEARCHES, despite ALL visitors being thoroughly checked for contraband. If it’s a legal visit, we are placed in a 14 day quarantine, with no out of cell time; EVEN IF your attorney is VACCINATED and tests NEGATIVE for Covid. Visits with friends or family members, for unvaccinated inmates, are NEVER ALLOWED.

As a result, many people have skipped critical meetings with their council, and NEVER get an opportunity to see friends or family. VIDEO VISITATION, while available to the rest of the jail, is RESTRICTED in the Jan 6 pod. Mail is delayed for MONTHS, and phone calls are limited to a MAXIMUM of pre approved 12 numbers. If there’s anyone else in our extended family or otherwise we’d like to call, we’re pretty much out of luck.

RELIGIOUS SERVICES, protected by the 1st amendment, are NOT provided to Jan 6ers. Neither are in person classes or other activities available to the rest of the jail. An inmate named Ryan Samsel, instead attempted to organize his own bible study inside the pod, until he was viciously BEATEN and LEFT FOR DEAD by correctional officers. He suffered a broken eye socket and brain damage as a result of the vicious attack. He’s now permanently blind in one eye. On another occasion, Scott Fairlamb was confronted by an officer in the middle of the night, and his life was threatened, once the officer’s body cam was disabled. Many, like myself, are afraid they could be the next victim.

And last but not least, we experience racism from many guards on a daily basis, being the ONLY WHITE REPUBLICANS in the entire jail. The false narrative is has been passed around the jail and to corrections officers that we are “white supremacists” (we are NOT). The inmate population is predominantly black, so we are at risk being here because of this false narrative. The guards are mostly liberal migrants from Africa who have been conditioned to hate us, and hate America.

Jan 6ers have been mocked, beaten and ridiculed by guards for singing the National Anthem. The Corrections Officers despise our politics and the love we have for this country. At one point, an officer even yelled “FUCK AMERICA!”, and threatened to lock us down FOR A WEEK if we attempted to sing the National Anthem again.

THE TRUTH ABOUT MY STORY – Finally, I feel like I should touch briefly on the government and prosecutor’s portrayal of who I am as a person.

No, I am not a terrorist, extremist or any of the other names I’ve been called by the government. More than anything, I am a red blooded patriot and I love this country more than anything.

I am being unfairly prosecuted and definitely overcharged. I never assaulted anyone, destroyed property, or stolen anything. I walked through wide open doors to enter the Capitol, along with my camera crew hoping to get the rally on video. I was never even armed at any point inside the Capitol.

Our goal was to make a documentary, and get likes and shares on social media. Yes I wore a costume (that the prosecutor refers to as paramilitary gear and body armor) but it was for the movie and was nothing of the sort. And yet, 9 months later here I sit, with 10 years worth of charges and no hope for a future. The surveillance footage shows absolutely no signs of assault, and despite attempts by media companies to get it released to the public, the government has denied it.

I think that’s because they are fully aware that this footage is questionable at worst, and exonerates me at best. Please don’t be fooled by the media. I am a loving and peaceful person with no history of violence.

This weaponized DOJ and their blatant resentment of my respect for President Donald Trump is putting me in a situation that makes me feel helpless in my current situation.

HOW YOU CAN HELP – Despite me and other Jan 6ers experiencing these unthinkable conditions, all of us remain POSITIVE and HOPEFUL that, in the end, JUSTICE WILL PREVAIL. We maintain a LOVE for this country and the Constitution like no other. The only thing keeping us going is our undying patriotism, the camaraderie between one another and our faith in God.

Please…SHARE THIS LETTER with EVERYONE you know: friends and family, senators, representatives, political organizers, civil rights groups and media outlets. The truth HAS to get out. And the jail MUST PAY for what they are doing to this country’s citizens.

As a result of this unlawful detainment the last 9 months, I have lost everything. The successful business I spent 13 years of my life working on, my apartment in Las Vegas, social media accounts with a lifetime of memories… you name it.

The government has essentially CANCELLED ME. Not only that, but following the arrest, my best friend of 12 years robbed my apartment, stole my cat, and hacked my personal Instagram with 100,000+ followers. Since then, I often go between feelings of hopefulness and moments of depression. I wonder if I can ever recover from this, but I have to remind myself to never give up.

There are major medical complications I now struggle with as a result of the jail’s neglect of my health since being here. If there is any way I hope to recover, my only hope are the ones who are reading this. I was on top of the world once upon a time, and that life seems now only like a distant memory.

If there’s anything you can do to help, I would appreciate anything at all. Inmates here are being extorted with lack of nutrition, forcing me to spend most of what’s left on commissary which I can no longer afford.

I need desperate help with my legal expenses and just help staying alive in here with commissary and all the expenses I still have on the outside as my livelihood and life has been stripped away from me. Thank you for any her you can afford, even if it is a few dollars it goes a long way in here.

Sincerely and with love,

Nathaniel DeGrave

Indispensable gas and coal 23

Good sense spoken in Congress!

Republican Congressman Byron Donalds reminds a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing on “the climate crisis” that the electricity to fuel electric cars comes from gas and coal:

Posted under Energy by Jillian Becker on Friday, October 29, 2021

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The superhero God is unjust, untrustworthy, unintelligent 141

But Dennis Prager, like billions of others, think he’s nice, smart, fair, and honest.

Dennis Prager is a perceptive conservative writer, but unfortunately he’s afflicted with religion.

He writes at Townhall:

If no one goes to prison for actor Alec Baldwin’s accidental killing of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, our society will have failed a crucial moral test.

We will be saying human life is not sacred; that it, in effect, is of little or no consequence.

The killing was, we presume, unintentional (though we do not know for sure, as the possibility remains that someone had motive to load the gun with real ammunition). But that does not mean that no one should be held culpable and punished. Society must regard the taking of human life — even when unintentional — as something terrible.

So if you accidentally fall from a height on top of someone and kill that person, you must be punished? How just is that?

If Alec Baldwin did something wrong, but only if he did something wrong, may he be punished. We don’t like him, but that’s irrelevant, and it is not the Alec Baldwin shooting that we are concerned with here. It is Prager’s and God’s morality.

Prager goes on:

I get this principle from the Bible …

Ah, from the Bible! No surprise then.

… which was, until the last century, the source of America’s and the Western world’s moral values.

To the extent that it was, much injustice resulted. Fortunately there were also laws which in many codes, some much older than the Books of Moses, distinguished crime from accident.

This principle is repeated over and over in the Bible’s first five books (the Torah), the source of all biblical laws. This repetition strongly indicates how seriously the Bible takes this issue.

The five books of Moses are full of God’s capricious and often cruel decisions and actions. One of them, Exodus, has its chief hero, God, fiddling with the mind of the Pharaoh of Egypt so that one moment he’s prepared to let Moses lead the Hebrew slaves out of bondage, and the next moment he isn’t. And this happens over and over again. It’s a tease. Promise given, promise broken. It’s only when God has all the Egyptian boy children in Pharaoh’s city killed  – the Angel of Death enabled to distinguish which household with a boy in it must suffer the loss because God gets the Hebrews to mark a sign with animal blood on their front doors so his messenger passes over their dwellings (which were well away and apart form the Egyptians’ anyway) – that Pharaoh lets Moses lead the slaves away. And even then God “hardens his heart” yet again, so he sends enforcers after them to bring them back.

Now don’t say that’s not dishonorable of God! And how about unjust and cruel to the Egyptian parents? On the whole, not great examples of moral behavior, wouldn’t you say? 

And after the Pharaoh chapters, this supreme moral guide, the Torah, gets even sillier.

We could offer many examples of its silliness, but we’ll stick to Dennis Prager’s text for precepts he considers supremely admirable. They are silly enough:

He writes: 

Example one:

Exodus 21:28: “When an ox gores a man or a woman to death, the ox shall be stoned …”

The obvious question is: Why would the ox be put to death? It is surely not guilty of murder; oxen have no free will. The reason it is put to death is that the killing of a human being cannot go unpunished.

The Jewish Bible scholar, professor Nahum Sarna, wrote:

The execution of the ox was carried out in the presence, and with the participation, of the entire community (the animal was stoned, not merely killed) — implying the killing of a human being is a source of mass pollution and the proceedings had an expiatory function. The killing of a homicidal beast is ordained in Genesis 9:5-6: “For your own life-blood I will require a reckoning: I will require it of every beast … Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for in His image did God make man.” The sanctity of human life is such as to make bloodshed the consummate offense, one viewed with unspeakable horror. Both man and beast that destroy human life are thereafter tainted by bloodguilt.

You see? Man is made “in God’s image” therefore the ox must be stoned to death. Okay?

Example Two:

Deuteronomy 19:5: “(If) a man goes with his neighbor into a grove to cut wood; and as his hand swings the ax to cut down a tree, the ax-head flies off the handle and strikes the other so that he dies, that man shall flee to one of these cities and live.”

Again, the Bible describes a homicide that is entirely accidental. But the person who accidentally committed the homicide is not free to live a normal life. He cannot go on with life as if nothing happened. While he is not to be executed, he must flee to one of three “cities of refuge” in ancient Israel. There he may not be killed or otherwise hurt by a member of the killed man’s family. But he is not a completely free man.

So there were sanctuary cities even in those days! To be a punishment, they were probably derelict, crime ridden, filthy, with many living on the streets.

Prager continues:

In my Bible commentary, The Rational Bible, I quote Leeor Gottlieb, a professor of Bible at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University: “The Torah is morally ahead of some modern societies, in which people’s lives go on nearly uninterrupted if they killed unintentionally.”

As the Bible explains five verses later:

Thus blood of the innocent will not be shed, bringing bloodguilt upon you in the land that the Lord your God is allotting to you.

Human bloodshed brings bloodguilt upon the land.

A tremendous lot of human blood, the innocent sort included, is shed on that land in the five books. At least as much as anywhere else in the inhabited world. And much has been shed on it in the three thousand years and more that has passed since Moses died. So bloodguilt is upon it. What is God or man going to do about it?  Rationally now: what?

Ah, there is something that can be done to cure bloodguilt when the cause is not a particular known person. A prayer can be said. An incantation. Apparently it does the trick:

Example three:

Deuteronomy 21:1-4 and 7: “If, in the land that the Lord your God is assigning you to possess, someone slain is found lying in the open, the identity of the slayer not being known, your elders and magistrates shall go out and measure the distances from the corpse to the nearby towns … And they shall make this declaration: ‘Our hands did not shed this blood, nor did our eyes see it done. Absolve, O Lord, Your people Israel whom You redeemed, and do not let guilt for the blood of the innocent remain among Your people Israel.’ And they will be absolved of bloodguilt.”

Unlike the previous instance, in which the (unintentional) killer is known, the killer of the slain man found “in the open” is not known. Nevertheless, the community is still held accountable and must ask for forgiveness for not preventing a homicide.

The message is, they should have known the murder was going to be committed. It was immoral of them not to know.

Prager’s last example is not from the five books. But his attitude to what happens is set by the biblical rules.

Example four:

The final example is not biblical but from my radio show. Many years ago, a woman called to tell me about an ostrich raised on her family’s ostrich farm. One day, this ostrich kicked her father to death.

 I asked the woman what was done to the ostrich. “Nothing,” she replied.

Given my biblical background, I was taken aback.

“So you tell people who visit your farm, ‘This is the ostrich that killed my father’?”

“Yes,” she responded.

In my view, that cheapened her father’s life and death.

So Prager would have had the ostrich killed, not because it was a danger to other people which would be rational, but as condign punishment. Because? Because man is made in God’s image. Because human bloodshed brings blood upon the land. Because of mass pollution, and expiation is required to cleanse it. Ideally, the woman should have summoned her neighbors to help stone the ostrich to death.

And this code of behavior, this ancient prescription for the provision of justice, is, according to the sage Gottlieb and to Prager himself, morally advanced!

The Bible has lots of dramatic, exciting, shocking, amusing, puzzling, frustrating, and satisfying stories in it. (We like the one about God refusing Cain’s offer of vegetables, preferring Abel’s meat.) It also has – at least the so-called “Old Testament” has in the King James translation – lots of very beautiful poetry in Isaiah, Job, Psalms, Daniel, Ecclesiastes … Parts of it are a good read,  and it is essential to a proper education.

But it is not a moral guide.

Posted under Ethics, Judaism, Law by Jillian Becker on Tuesday, October 26, 2021

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The sudden decline and fall of America 314

… from triumph to abasement.

So, the Left won its Pyrrhic victory,” Victor Davis Hanson writes at American Greatness.

Having control of the White House and both Houses  of Congress, what have the Democrats accomplished with all that power?

Their priority was to undo what President Trump had done.

What followed was a concerted effort to destroy the Trump record.

What had Trump achieved? Most importantly –

The greatest level of combined annual natural gas and oil production in any nation’s history, record low minority unemployment and near record peacetime, general unemployment, a border secure and illegal immigration finally under control, and a New Middle East in which Israel and its Arab enemies concluded neutrality pacts. China was put on notice for its past mockery of global norms. Inflation was low, growth was good. “Stagflation” was still a rarely remembered word from the past. …

Then came the rule of the Left and –

Within eight months the following was finalized [by the Democrats]:

Joe Biden utterly destroyed the idea of a border. Some 2 million were scheduled to cross illegally in the current fiscal year. The sheer inhumanity of deplorable conditions at the border surpassed any notion of the “cages” Donald Trump, in fact, had inherited from the humanitarian Barack Obama.

A war almost immediately broke out in the Middle East, once Biden distanced the United States from Israel and rebooted the radical Palestinian cause.

The Taliban defeated the 20-year effort of the United States in Afghanistan, in the most humiliating withdrawal of the American military in over 45 years. Tens of billions of dollars of abandoned military equipment now arm the Taliban and have turned Afghanistan into a world arms mart for terrorists.

Whereupon –

Iran is emboldened and speeds up its nuclear proliferation efforts.

China brags that the United States has been Afghanistanized and will not defend its allies, Taiwan in particular.

At home, gas prices have soared.

Prior trillion-dollar deficits now seem financially prudent in comparison to multitrillion-dollar red ink.

The nation is more racially polarized than at any time in the last half-century.

A bleak and venomous woke creed has outdone the hate and fear of the McCarthyism of the 1950s, as it wages war on half the nation for various thought crimes

With Biden came not just woke polarization, stagflation, a subsidized ennui that erodes the work ethic, and selective non-enforcement of existing laws: wors, still, we got a bankrupt ideological defense of these insanities. Critical legal theory, critical race theory, and a new monetary theory were all dreamed up by parlor academics to justify the nihilism.

And among the shocks administered to Americans as their country fails and falls, acts of treachery and deeds of corruption:

Did America ever believe that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff would trash his commander in chief as Hitlerian to journalist hitmen, or allegedly denounce news organizations as “terrorists”, or interrupt the chain of command on a prompt by the Speaker of the House, or warn the Chinese military that he believed there was enough instability in the White House to justify a promise to warn of any impending U.S. military action against Beijing deemed offensive?

With Biden, China is now omnipresent in the halls of power. A task of our chief COVID advisor, Anthony Fauci, seems to be to deny repeatedly that his stealthy funding of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan virology lab in China had anything to do with the likely accidental release of a likely human engineered and energized coronavirus. Americans still cannot even imagine that their government might have helped subsidize the plague germ that has wrought such havoc upon them.

Meanwhile the president’s son still owns a 10 percent cut in a communist Chinese government-affiliated financial venture, apparently due to his prior drug-addled record of financial mismanagement. The media still insists Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation”, while his paint-by-numbers art is auctioned off to foreign lobbyists expecting a return of the old days when Hunter and Joe grandly arrived on Air Force Two to do their bidding.

All who voted for Trump are declared to be “white-supremacists’ and “terrorists”. Peaceful protestors are labeled “insurrectionists” and locked up without charge as political prisoners, while  violent protestors are called “peaceful”. The “peaceful” rioters, arsonists, and killers are alone exempted from having to wear masks in obedience to the absurd restrictions imposed on the rest of the nation in the time of pestilence, on the grounds that their ideological correctness sanitizes and immunizes them.

Our esteemed retired military and civil libertarians who had damned the mere thought of using federal troops to quell the prior four summer months of continuous rioting were suddenly happy to see 25,000 federal soldiers patrol Washington to hound out fantasy second-wave insurrectionists. …. There were now to be good federal troops deterring mythical violent domestic extremists, but bad federal troops who should never stop real, ongoing mayhem in the streets.

When there were –

120 days of continuous rioting, looting, and arson. In the election-year summer 2020, federal courthouses and iconic buildings were torched. Nearly $2 billion worth of property was destroyed and 28 were killed. Yet Vice President Kamala Harris rallied the public to help bail out the arrested. … The weeks of “spontaneous” mayhem magically vanished after November 3, 2020 [when Biden “won” the election]. Note that esteemed medical professionals argued that BLM protestors who flooded the streets were exempt from quarantine, social distancing, and mask requirements, given their higher morality.

Convicted criminals have been let out of prison by the thousands. The innocent are punished. The guilty go free – and are rewarded.

America’s undoing has taken less than a year.

Standstill 118

Two pictures to illustrate the economic doldrums the “Biden” administration has navigated us into.

Rep. Devin Nunes discusses issues in the global supply chain on 'Kudlow'

Goods stuck at ports. No one to unload the ships, no one to load the trucks, no one to drive the trucks.

Evolution VC Partners founder Gregg Smith discusses the economic issues facing America under the Biden administration. 

The result: empty shelves in the stores.

It will be a cold and lean holiday season this year.

Posted under Economics by Jillian Becker on Thursday, October 21, 2021

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Invitation to our visitors 12

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Posted under Miscellaneous by Jillian Becker on Sunday, October 17, 2021

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