My own feeling is that time travel is rather less likely than a secret elite making use of advanced technology. Although apparently less advanced phone-wise than we are now; that mobile phone looks bigger than my Android device. Of course, this raises the question: if they had phones in 1928, what do they have now?
Author: VD
Mailvox: Jesus and war
LJ has his doubts:
Read your bit on Jesus and war. It is hard to believe Jesus would support all the death that War brings to innocent children. What would he say about our inability to put money into education for the poor. You are fooling yourself.
I’m always a little taken aback when people begin with a reasonable, if mistaken, point, and then go on to make asses of themselves by making baseless declarative statements about me. How am I fooling myself? And with regards to what? While everyone is certainly welcome to disagree with me, you have to either know nothing about me or be almost completely unfamiliar with this blog to believe that my opinions are formed on the same basis of that amorphous collection of vaguely remembered elementary school classes, parental biases, college lectures, personal insecurities, peer pressures, and emotional reactions that go into forming most people’s opinions.
Now, as to the subject in question, Jesus doesn’t speak much on war, but it is clear that he doesn’t regard it as the be-all and end-all of evil that most people today seem to consider it, except when the media and the White House have whipped them up into a frenzy of support for another round of long-distance bombing.
First, God Himself wages war against men. “You fear the sword, and the sword is what I will bring against you, declares the Sovereign LORD.” – Ezekiel 11:8.
Second, Jesus did not come to bring peace. “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.” – Matthew 10:33
Third, Jesus intends to make serious war upon mankind in the future. “I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and makes war. His eyes are like blazing fire, and on his head are many crowns. He has a name written on him that no one knows but he himself. He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood, and his name is the Word of God. The armies of heaven were following him, riding on white horses and dressed in fine linen, white and clean. Out of his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations. “He will rule them with an iron scepter.” He treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty. On his robe and on his thigh he has this name written: KING OF KINGS AND LORD OF LORDS.” – Revelation 19:11
Fourth, I’ve never seen any evidence that Jesus cares particularly about education, either for the poor or anyone else, to say nothing of any moral duty to pay for the education of poor children.
In conclusion, it would appear that LJ doesn’t know the Bible nor the first thing about what Jesus would say about anything. The efforts of the New Atheists notwithstanding, spouting an opinion in complete ignorance is unlikely to convince anyone of anything.
Wells Fargo in the crosshairs
Here is an example of the difference between the State perspective on the fraud committed by the mortgage banks and the federal one. Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray is clearly not buying the “technical error” line of defense:
“The big mortgage servicers and financial firms continue to demonstrate their belief that they do not need to play by the same rules as everyone else who uses our court system. The suggestion by Wells Fargo and its colleagues at several other national firms that they can cure fraudulent testimony by simply refiling new affidavits and continuing to proceed toward foreclosures shows they do not recognize the seriousness of the problem they have created. There is no simple ‘do-over’ for false testimony that will be likely to avoid sanctions and penalties imposed by the courts. Their brazen efforts to minimize their financial exposure by sweeping these problems under the rug are an insult to the justice system in this country. These disclosures by Wells Fargo will now become the focus for a new prong of our on-going investigation.”
That giant crack in the wall keeps growing….
UPDATE: I’m not generally a fan of politicians, but I find that I LIKE this guy. A lot. He appears to be about as focused as The Terminator. Here’s hoping he isn’t merely angling for a revenue-enhancing settlement, but actually intends to pursue the fraud to its core.
Women oppose freedom
There is no way to avoid this obvious conclusion. The vast majority of women are absolutely and diametrically opposed to every form of freedom unless it happens to align with what she happens to want to do at the moment. One of the latest feminist calls to arms is this direct assault on the freedom of speech:
Whistles, catcalls and lewd come-ons from strangers are all too familiar to New York City women, who say they are harassed multiple times a day as they walk down the street. Now lawmakers are examining whether to do something to discourage it. A City Council committee heard testimony Thursday from women who said men regularly follow them, yell at them and make them feel unsafe and uncomfortable. Advocates told stories of preteens and teenagers being hounded by adult men outside city schools and pleaded for government to address the problem.
Problem? What problem? A man is merely exercising his Constitutional right to free speech in a public place that happens to make a woman feel unsafe and uncomfortable is a problem that the state must solve? I feel a lot more than a little unsafe and uncomfortable when a man is exercising his Constitutional right to free speech in a public place in order to advocate higher taxes, more bank bailouts, more gun laws, and more government intervention. If we’re going to throw out the freedom of speech and ban the dangerous sort, let’s ban that kind of talk first and then we can worry about whistles and catcalls.
Men who value human freedom must staunchly oppose all forms of equality, particularly sexual equality, for three reasons:
1. Equality does not exist in any material, legal, or spiritual form.
2. Equalitarianism is the primary reason for the material decline of the quasi-democratic West as well as its decreasing freedom.
3. Most women do not believe in equality themselves and have historically used the concept as a stalking horse for imposing statism in order to ensure privileged female status through government force. For example, consider the female opposition to DNA-based paternity testing:
“DNA tests are an anti-feminist appliance of science, a change in the balance of power between the sexes that we’ve hardly come to terms with. And that holds true even though many women have the economic potential to provide for their children themselves…Uncertainty allows mothers to select for their children the father who would be best for them. The point is that paternity was ambiguous and it was effectively up to the mother to name her child’s father, or not… Many men have, of course, ended up raising children who were not genetically their own, but really, does it matter…in making paternity conditional on a test rather than the say-so of the mother, it has removed from women a powerful instrument of choice.”
I should be very interested in seeing anyone attempt to make a rational case for how human freedom can be expanded by ensuring that a sizable portion of the electorate is vehemently opposed to nearly every aspect of it.
Republicans will fix nothing
There is the evidence. It also proves MPAI, needless to say, as 92% of Republicans believe Congress or Obama are to blame for the current economic slump, (wait, aren’t we in a recovery?), and only around six percent understand that the bankers are to blame. The worst thing is that about 50% of them genuinely think Obama is to blame, when there is no possible way he can be held responsible for it. While he has most definitely exacerbated the situation by his Hooverian response to it, the die was not only cast, but the results were known before he even took office! We already know that the Republican elite has zero desire to force the banks to take responsibility for their criminal and economically destructive actions; this poll indicates that there will be very little grass roots pressure on them to do what they don’t want to do because the voter anger has been successfully redirected to date.
Remarkably, the Democrats are somewhat better in assigning the blame where it belongs. Nearly 25 percent of them hold the bankers responsible, although they clearly don’t recognize that their hero Obama is completely owned by Goldman Sachs. (When the guy is appointing ex-Goldmanites to administration positions outside the Treasury, you know it’s completely out of control.) And at least Bush was in office when the meltdown began, although if he can be blamed for pushing TARP, he can’t reasonably be blamed for the Fed keeping interest rates low and blowing multiple financial bubbles.
Anyhow, it is quite clear that the electoral devastation about to be wreaked upon Democrats by Republicans (which, you may recall, I was one of the first to predict), is not going to have a salutary effect upon the situation because the Republican Party and the greater part of the Tea Party insist on believing that the perpetrators of the primary causal factor were among the victims. They will surely dig in a different part of the hole than did the Democrats, but we can be confident that they will continue making it deeper. The battle between Republicans and Democrats is an internecine battle between the Keynesians known as Neo-Keynesians and the Keynesians known as Monetarists. Both sides subscribe to a false economic theory and both are beholden to the banks, and as both the names and the polls indicate, the Republicans are more strongly beholden to them than are the Democrats.
This means that Obama and the new Republican majorities, (or if I am only half-correct, House majority) will be eager to announce bipartisan cooperation in finding a means of saddling the taxpayer with TARP II, in which the cost of the fraudulent mortgage-backed security put-backs is shifted from the banks that committed the fraud to the taxpayer while their myriad of proven crimes are swept under the carpet. And the passage of that heroic, bipartisan, and much-publicized “reform” will mark the effective end of the Tea Party, even if its zombie corpse remains an animated political identity for decades to come.
Proving MPAI
Most certainly including the neocon portion of the Tea Party:
The need to reinvest in the military is not an ideological sentiment but rather a baseline statement about urgent national-security needs. But don’t take my word for it. A recent blue-ribbon commission chaired by President Clinton’s secretary of defense Bill Perry and former Bush administration National Security Advisor Steve Hadley, released a report this summer that “represents a striking bipartisan consensus that the United States must do more when it comes to national defense if we are to continue to play the international role we have and pursue the interests that have animated American grand strategy since the end of World War II.”
American strength comes at a price, to be sure. But there is a price to weakness as well, one that the commission notes “in the long run would be much greater.” Thankfully, Americans are telling pollsters of all stripes they agree — cutting defense is not an option.
You’re bankrupt, you morons. Lofty and ambitious words about a historically illiterate grand strategery that has not only failed, but has actually weakened the American military position, aren’t going to pay many soldiers’ salaries or buy many guns. Talking about “national security” is absolutely and utterly ridiculous as long as millions of immigrants are permitted to invade the country at will, and no amount of bases in Afghaniraqistan are going to make the nation any more secure.
It’s pretty simple. More money != better. Conservatives seem to understand this when it comes to welfare, so why don’t they understand that government spending isn’t any more effective when it comes to defense?
Training in action
This is an interesting little clip of four clueless guys attempting to take on a guy who appears to possess a moderate amount of boxing experience. Notice how he keeps moving sideways and backward into open space, only occasionally stepping forward when the opportunity, or in one case, the need, presents itself. The most important thing is that he limits himself to short, quick jabs and crosses; by doing so he avoids committing completely to a strike and thereby leaving himself open. He stays focused on defense throughout and does an excellent job of throwing his opponents down to the ground in order to buy himself more time and clear space whenever he can.
Now, imagine if the guy’s training had incorporated some jujitsu and he’d been throwing some elbows and the occasional low kick of his own instead of only punches… more than the one guy in the white would have been down. Of course, the four guys should have surrounded him from the start, but they had no way of knowing he was a boxer and in the heat of the moment, it’s almost impossible for more than two people to coordinate their actions anyway.
For me, the best moment is when he steps into the white-shirted guy’s second attempt to kick him, catches him off balance on one leg, and puts him down. It reminded me of how one fights a Tae Kwan Do kicker; the minute they plant and start to move their rear leg, step in hard. It’s harder to do than it sounds, because the instinctive reaction is to step back. And Mr. White Shirt is a perfect example of how not to fight. He’s aggressive, but hapless, consistently leading with his face and telegraphing his moves so badly that not a single one of his five attacks even lands, let alone does any harm.
Compare that guy with this man defending his girlfriend. He also shows obvious signs of training, but demonstrates less situational awareness and fighting experience as well as inferior technique. Part of this is because he is taking a more aggressive approach, but he makes the mistake of repeatedly extending himself and twice leaves himself open to an attack by the unengaged opponent, at one point even turning his back on the first guy he attacked. He also leads with his rear hand twice; although he gets away with it here thanks to his opponents’ lack of training, trying that against the first guy would have almost surely met with the rude interruption of a jab to the face.
I was also surprised at his lack of finishing, as I was completely expecting him to kick the first guy in the face when he turned around at the end. But then, the guy had gestured at him, so perhaps he was taught to go to submission rather than incapacitation.
The honest atheist
And there goes Richard Dawkins’s argument, presented in The God Delusion, that atheists are more moral than theists. Clearly he is an exceptional judge of human character and well-suited to pronounce judgment on morality, given his superior personnel skills demonstrated in selecting people to run his web site and now his charity.
Josh Timonen was one of a small coterie of young protégés around Richard Dawkins, sharing his boss’s zealous atheism. But now he and the evolutionary theorist have fallen out spectacularly. Professor Dawkins’s charity has accused Mr Timonen of embezzling hundreds of thousands of pounds. The two atheists had become close in recent years, with Dawkins, the best-selling author and Emeritus Professor of Biology at Oxford University, even dedicating his latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth, to him. But Mr Timonen and the Dawkins foundation are now preparing for a legal wrangle.
The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, has filed four lawsuits in a Californian court alleging that Mr Timonen, who ran its online operation in America, stole $375,000 (£239,000) over three years. It is claiming $950,000 in damages, while Mr Dawkins is suing him for $14,000 owed to him personally.
With the exception of the hapless Sam Harris, atheists repeatedly insist that despite having no externally imposed morality, there is no reason for them to behave worse than those who do possess a morality imposed upon them by their gods. And yet, again and again, we see that their moral behavior, (as measured by the theistic systems in which they do not believe), is completely dependent upon the circumstances in which they find themselves and the temptations they face.
In the same way that an atheist leader with sufficient power is more likely than not to murder at least 20,000 people, we now know that atheist charities, (if I recall Dawkins’s claims correctly, the foundation for Reason and Science was the first explicitly atheist charity in Britain), are one for one in corruption. But I suppose that’s what happens when you turn yourself into the godless version of a big-haired televangelist.
On the art of the “technical mistake”
It’s amazing how quickly these little “mistakes” and “errors” are popping up now that the lawyers for the fraudulent securities are on the hunt. And so many too!
Wells Fargo admitted Wednesday it made mistakes in the paperwork for thousands of foreclosure cases and promised to fix them. The San Francisco-based bank said it plans to refile documents in 55,000 of the cases by mid-November. The company said not all those cases included errors and didn’t say how many did. Wells Fargo described the mistakes as technical and said it has no plans to halt the foreclosure process.
Oh, well, so long as it’s only 54,999 technical mistakes… meanwhile, the bankers’ little game of ex post facto minimal admission doesn’t appear to be playing well with anyone but the media.
“Mortgage servicers have been reworking investor-owned loans while not seeking amendments on debts they hold themselves, a misstep investors can use to bypass trustees or force them to act, Bill Frey, the head of Greenwich Financial, said at the conference. The four largest U.S. banks, which service a majority of U.S. mortgages, own more than $400 billion of home- equity debt, Goodman said. “We found servicer defaults in 100 percent of the trusts,” Frey said.”
100 percent servicer defaults? Probably just a technical mistake, I’m sure. It will be interesting, of course, to see the attempts to explain away the magic rotating vice-presidency of MERS as yet another technical mistake.
“In the instant action, Ms. Johnson-Seck claims to be: a Vice President of MERS in the March 16, 2009 MERS to INDYMAC assignment; a Vice President of INDYMAC in the May 14, 2009 INDYMAC to ONEWEST assignment; and, a Vice President of ONEWEST in her June 30, 2009-affidavit of merit. Ms. Johnson-Seck must explain to the Court, in her affidavit: her employment history for the past three years; and, why a conflict of interest does not exist in the instant action with her acting as a Vice President of assignor MERS, a Vice President of assignee/assignor INDYMAC, and a Vice President of assignee/plaintiff ONEWEST. Further, Ms. Johnson-Seck must explain: why she was a Vice President of both assignor MERS and assignee DEUTSCHE BANK in a second case before me, Deutsche Bank v Maraj, 18 Misc 3d 1123 (A) (Sup Ct, Kings County 2008); why she was a Vice President of both assignor MERS and assignee INDYMAC in a third case before me, Indymac Bank, FSB, v Bethley, 22 Misc 3d 1119 (A) (Sup Ct, Kings County 2009); and, why she executed an affidavit of merit as a Vice President of DEUTSCHE BANK in a fourth case before me, Deutsche Bank v Harris (Sup Ct, Kings County, Feb. 5, 2008, Index No. 35549/07).”
Now here’s the punchline: “Johnson-Seck admitted she was not employed by MERS and didn’t know who its president was or the location of its headquarters.”
Brothel or burqah: the reality
You can’t say I didn’t warn you about the choice an increasing number of Western women are presently making:
Tony Blair’s sister-in-law announced her conversion to Islam last weekend. Journalist Lauren Booth embraced the faith after what she describes as a ‘holy experience’ in Iran. She is just one of a growing number of modern British career women to do so…. According to Kevin Brice from Swansea University, who has specialised in studying white conversion to Islam, these women are part of an intriguing trend. He explains: ‘They seek spirituality, a higher meaning, and tend to be deep thinkers. The other type of women who turn to Islam are what I call “converts of convenience”. They’ll assume the trappings of the religion to please their Muslim husband and his family, but won’t necessarily attend mosque, pray or fast.’…
For a significant amount of women, their first contact with Islam comes from dating a Muslim boyfriend.
Although this may be shocking to the typical half-sapient and maleducated secular mind, numbed as it is from between 12 and 27 years of unmitigated feminist and multicultural propaganda, it was entirely predictable. And was, in fact, predicted by numerous parties. The primary reason neither the Greeks nor America’s Founding Fathers permitted women to vote is because they are much more intellectually malleable than men. Even the most fervent feminist will enthusiastically embrace the submission of Islam if a man is able to inspire her rationalization hamster to spin in that direction.
Osama bin Laden was correct in stating that Islam is the strong horse in comparison with secular post-Christian America. Secular post-Christianity is both rootless and pointless; it has neither raison d’etre nor does it provide anyone with objectives beyond the momentary and the material. While the abstract thinkers of the cognitive elite can come up with higher purposes of their own, (most of which involve placing themselves in control of other people and wind up getting a lot of people killed), such self-serving intellectual ephemeralities are incapable of satisfying the spiritual hunger of the masses.
In turning away from its historical identity as Christendom, the West has created a vast spiritual void and already the weaker souls are drifting into the pagan madness that Chesterton, Lewis, and other Christian savants predicted in the previous century. There will never be an atheist society, because human society can no more abide a spiritual vaccuum than nature can abide a material one.