Re-opening the closed door

How immigrants and their allies conspired to end the national origins system that made America great in the 20th century.

The demographic consequences of ending the open door cannot be known with certainty, since no one can be sure what immigration would have been in the absence of restriction. Demographer Leon Bouvier has estimated that, assuming no restriction and pre-war levels of one million a year for the rest of the century, the American population would have reached 400 million by the year 2000. This would have meant 120 million more American high-consumption lifestyles piled upon the roughly 280 million reported in the census of 2000, making far worse the dismal figures on species extinction, wetland loss, soil erosion, and the accumulation of climate-changing and health-impairing pollutants that are being tallied up as the new century unfolds.

The chief goals of the national origins system, shrinking the incoming numbers and tilting the sources of the immigration stream back toward northern Europe, were less decisively achieved. Numbers entering legally but outside the quotas (“non-quota immigrants,” mostly relatives of those recently arrived and Europeans entering through Latin American and Caribbean countries) surprised policymakers by matching and in time exceeding those governed by quotas. Yet with overall numbers so low, ethnic composition did not agitate the public.

International economic maladies, war, and the new American system of restriction had thus combined to reduce immigration numbers to levels more in line with the long course of American history, and to some observers seemed to have ended the role of immigration as a major force in American life. Apparently the nation would henceforth grow and develop, as Thomas Jefferson had preferred, from natural increase and the cultural assets of its people.

The curbing of the Great Wave created a forty-year breathing space of relatively low immigration, with effects favorable to assimilation. The pressures toward joining the American mainstream did not have to contend with continual massive replenishment of foreigners.

The new immigration system was widely popular, and the immigration committees of Congress quickly became backwaters of minor tinkering or inactivity. The 1930s arrived with vast and chronic unemployment, and the American people wanted nothing from immigration. War in Europe would bring unprecedented refugee issues, but dealing with these — or avoiding them — did not require any rethinking of the basic system for deciding on the few thousand people who would be given immigration papers.

But American immigration policy in the postwar years attracted a small but growing body of opponents. The political core of a coalition pressing for a new, more “liberalized” policy regime was composed of ethnic lobbyists (“professional immigrant-handlers,” Rep. Francis Walter called them) claiming to speak for nationalities migrating prior to the National Origins Act of 1924, the most effective being Jews from central and eastern Europe who were deeply concerned with the rise of fascism and anti-semitism on the continent and eternally interested in haven. Unable by themselves to interest many politicians or the media in the settled issue of America’s immigration law, these groups hoped for new circumstances in which restrictions could be discredited and the old regime of open doors restored. The arrival of the Civil Rights Movement thrust (racial) “discrimination” into the center of national self-examination. The enemy everywhere at the bottom of virtually every national blemish seemed to be Discrimination, the historic, now intolerable subordinating classification of groups on the basis of inherited characteristics. The nation’s national origins-grounded immigration laws could not escape an assault by these reformist passions, and critics of the national origins system found the liberal wing of the Democratic Party receptive to their demand that immigration reform should be a part of the civil rights agenda.

Who would lead, and formulate what alternatives? Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy cautiously stepped out on the issue in the 1950s, sensing that a liberalization stance would gather vital ethnic voting blocs for his long-planned run for the presidency. His work on a refugee bill caught the attention of officials of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, who convinced Kennedy to become an author of a pamphlet on immigration, with the help of an ADL supplied historian, Arthur Mann, and Kennedy’s staff. The result was A Nation of Immigrants, a 1958 bouquet of praise for the contributions of immigrants and a call for an end to the racist, morally embarrassing national origins system. The little book was initially ignored, but its arguments would dominate the emerging debate. The ADL, part of a Jewish coalition whose agenda included opening wider the American gates so that increasing U.S. ethnic heterogeneity would reduce the chances of a populist mass movement embracing anti-semitism, had made a golden alliance. John F. Kennedy was no crusader on immigration (or anything else), but he was an activist young President by 1961, comfortable with immigration reform as part of his agenda, elected on a party platform that pledged elimination of the national origins system.

What comes next? The USA is again on course to reach 400 million imperial subjects sometime between 2043 and 2051, depending upon which UN report you credit. Its population is unlikely to ever reach that size, of course, but it should be apparent that the forty-year breathing space created by the national origins system is the primary reason the empire has not collapsed already.

Barring a mass repatriation program for all post-1965 immigrants and their descendants, which appears extremely unlikely at the moment, the political breakup should begin by the early 2030s. Every empire is destroyed by immigration of one sort or another in the end, but it is the cultural decadence and lack of confidence that permits such immigration to take place that is the true cause of the collapse.

Had American politicians possessed the wisdom to arrest and deport the seditious ethnic lobbyists who agitated for ending the national origins system, the collapse of the empire would not be rapidly approaching. Now the necessary surgery is even more difficult and considerably less politically palatable. So, we can safely conclude that it will not be performed.

SJWs in SF: Sad Puppy version

Sarah Hoyt laments the ejecting of John Ringo from something called ConCarolinas:

It’s been known for years – as long as I’ve been published in SF/F – that conservatives get invited to be guests of honor at conventions far less often than leftists in SF/F and infinitely less than red-diaper-babies in SF/F, but ConCarolinas seemed like a weird place for a conflagration of snowflakism.

I went over to John Ringo’s page and read about it.  As far as I could tell, a bunch of people on Twitter had been badgering both the con-committee and the other (very leftist) guest about inviting someone who was… what the heck was he?  I don’t know.

In the beginning, the accusation against him was that he was “Puppy Adjacent.”

For those of you wanting to follow this at home, the score card is this: Five years ago, my friend Larry Correia started a movement called Sad Puppies, which was a half joking attempt to get books not of solid leftist bent (not even right wing, just not preachy left) nominated for the Hugo, which used to be one of the most prestigious fan awards in science fiction.

When Larry tired of the game after two years, my friend Brad Torgersen took it over…

It was supposed to be me, but a cancer diagnosis and emergency surgery stopped it.

Brad ran it creditably, suggesting fan-favorites who had never got nominated (over the last decade, the Hugos have become a log-rolling club of leftists.) He got people who’d never before nominated to nominate, increasing the number of people involved by three fold.  And we got practically everyone on our suggestions list on the ballot.  (Ours because I was involved both in planning and defending the guys, as was my friend Kate Paulk and my friend Amanda S. Green.)

Imagine our surprise when we found out that:

  1. We’d promulgated an immutable slate, that had to be voted for in order. We must have managed that by cleverly telling people to read and vote for those they liked, or add others, or whatever, just get involved.
  2. We were against the participation of women, people of color, and people of different gender identification and orientation in science fiction and fantasy. (How we were supposed to divine all that except perhaps women, is beyond me.  And even there, there are gender neutral names.)  The fact that three of us, in the “inner council” were women made no difference.  Since we’re not leftists, we’re obviously not “real women.” Oh, by the way, we also nominated women, people of color, and I think at least one gay person for the Hugo.  That most of those recused themselves had nothing to do with us, and was a function of the attacks by the left, who threatened to destroy careers of those who stayed on the ballot, or promised them they would get nominated by them next.  (On the eve of never, I’ll wager.)
  3. We’d done this to oppress people by being gatekeepers. Note our coalition was one best selling author (Larry Correia), a promising beginner (Brad Torgersen), a midlist author (me), and two indie authors (Kate Paulk and Amanda S. Green).  None of us had or had ever had gatekeeping powers.  In fact, the people who called calumnies against us to Entertainment Weekly (who later retracted) and other national publications were gatekeepers, since everything points to their working for TOR.

Anyway, that was the conflagration called Sad Puppies.  After our nominees were treated horribly at the 2015 Hugos, after leftists bought memberships by the dozen for the express purpose of voting “no award” over people they proudly admitted they’d never read, we thought there was no point.  My friend Kate Paulk, probably the most conciliatory woman in the world, ran it the next year and did everything the left said they wanted done.  They still attacked her.  I and Amanda claimed the right of succession, but never took it, because it was obvious the Hugos were dead, their reputation destroyed and only academics seeking tenure could be interested in them.  The only reason we claimed them was to prevent a few deluded people from trying to ride a movement they had nothing to do with to fame.

So.  This is now three years later.  There have been no Sad Puppies for two years.  And by the way, John Ringo’s extent of involvement in this was to be our friend and to joke about giving Larry and Brad the Don Quixote award.

But he was “puppy adjacent” and the deranged game of post office on the left adduced to him all the things they said we were.  You know the drill: racisss sexisss homophobic.  (They really need to come up with a more sibilant word for that.)

I find this rather fascinating for what it omits. The Baen cum Sad Puppies crowd is in an uncomfortable position not terribly different from that of Never Trump and the cuckservatives. They are accustomed to being the sole opposition to the SJWs in science fiction, and viewing themselves as the proper and respectable opposition, so they really don’t know what to do about the Rabid Puppies or the considerably less accommodating opposition that is now represented by Castalia House, Arkhaven, and Dark Legion. Nor do they understand how various trends favor the growth of our influence, in part at their expense.

So, they push a narrative to the public in which we don’t exist, even though without us, Sad Puppies would have remained what it was prior to our involvement, a minor bump in the road that didn’t even require any suppression outside of the usual routine. This is not to say that what they did was not admirable, and indeed, their construction of the Dragon Awards will likely prove to be more significant in the long run than our demolition of the Hugo Awards. I merely observe that their efforts would have been insufficient in our absence.

But unlike the SJW narrative, the Sad Puppy narrative does not harm us at all. I am content to let them push it in peace; after all, they are not the enemy. Right now, we are marshaling our forces and preparing to engage in offensives on multiple fronts, some of which are known and others which will prove to be unexpected.

Understand that many people are going to become exhausted. Others are going to fall away for one reason or another. Friends will become allies, and allies will become neutrals. All of that is fine. None of that gives us any cause for concern nor should any such transitions be discouraged or criticized. The core remains stronger than ever, and our focus and our efforts remains relentlessly targeted at the enemy.

Let the others trail in our wake at their own pace. As long as they refrain from either attacking us or getting in our way, they are not part of the problem. They are trying to be part of the solution, even if they go about it in different and suboptimal ways.

Speaking of the SJW narrative, the crazy never ends.

I liked The Hobbit. A lot. But while Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books are influential as exercises in world building, as novels they are barely readable. It never seemed to me that Tolkien cared about his story as much as he cared about rendering, in minute detail, the world he built. Why not instead read Ursula K. Le Guin’s magnificent (and as beautifully rendered) stories and novels surrounding Earthsea? Le Guin captures the world of Earthsea through a powerful, dark, gorgeous kind of storytelling that is irresistible. Perhaps Le Guin’s work—along with an entire universe of fantasy fiction—wouldn’t have been possible without Tolkien’s influence behind it, but in its time, Le Guin’s books are more influential and make for better reading.
—”21 Books You Don’t Have to Read”, GQ

Only on Planet SJW are Ursula Le Guin’s tedious and tedentious books deemed more influential and better reading than Tolkien’s.

The 11 percent metric

Modern science is actually less reliable than flipping a coin. The Wall Street Journal reports on scientific efforts to address the reproducibility crisis:

Half the results published in peer-reviewed scientific journals are probably wrong. John Ioannidis, now a professor of medicine at Stanford, made headlines with that claim in 2005. Since then, researchers have confirmed his skepticism by trying—and often failing—to reproduce many influential journal articles. Slowly, scientists are internalizing the lessons of this irreproducibility crisis. But what about government, which has been making policy for generations without confirming that the science behind it is valid?

The biggest newsmakers in the crisis have involved psychology. Consider three findings: Striking a “power pose” can improve a person’s hormone balance and increase tolerance for risk. Invoking a negative stereotype, such as by telling black test-takers that an exam measures intelligence, can measurably degrade performance. Playing a sorting game that involves quickly pairing faces (black or white) with bad and good words (“happy” or “death”) can reveal “implicit bias” and predict discrimination.

All three of these results received massive media attention, but independent researchers haven’t been able to reproduce any of them properly. It seems as if there’s no end of “scientific truths” that just aren’t so. For a 2015 article in Science, independent researchers tried to replicate 100 prominent psychology studies and succeeded with only 39{9777635cfa82a0aab621d7111c7b7154d6356e0eedfaecd5a3ca30be59699a9a} of them.

Further from the spotlight is a lot of equally flawed research that is often more consequential. In 2012 the biotechnology firm Amgen tried to reproduce 53 “landmark” studies in hematology and oncology. The company could only replicate six. Are doctors basing serious decisions about medical treatment on the rest? Consider the financial costs, too. A 2015 study estimated that American researchers spend $28 billion a year on irreproducible preclinical research.

The chief cause of irreproducibility may be that scientists, whether wittingly or not, are fishing fake statistical significance out of noisy data. If a researcher looks long enough, he can turn any fluke correlation into a seemingly positive result. But other factors compound the problem: Scientists can make arbitrary decisions about research techniques, even changing procedures partway through an experiment. They are susceptible to groupthink and aren’t as skeptical of results that fit their biases. Negative results typically go into the file drawer. Exciting new findings are a route to tenure and fame, and there’s little reward for replication studies.

It’s always ironic how the IFLS crowd isn’t even remotely up to speed on current science while simultaneously pointing and shrieking about how everyone with substantive and valid criticism of scientistry simply “doesn’t understand science”. You can see this in the comments of the most recent Voxiversity on Christianity and Western Civilization. Richard Dawkins has repeatedly argued that eyewitness testimony should not be used in the courtroom because it is insufficiently reliable, but by his own metric, the expert testimony of a scientist should barred from the courtroom as well because science is considerably less statistically reliable.

As for the idea that science can even theoretically serve as a basis for moral guidance, the grand windmill at which Sam Harris has been jousting in futility for the last 10 years, that has become even more obviously ridiculous than even his most brutal critics believed at the start. One would do nearly four times better to simply flip a coin; indeed, statistically speaking, one’s optimal strategy is to listen to what scientists advise, then do precisely the opposite.

Of course, in retrospect, this should have always been obvious. Look at the average scientist. Do you think following his advice on women or doing the precise opposite is more likely to lead to a desirable outcome? Do you trust his philosophy on fitness, or on any other aspect of life? These are individuals whose entire perspectives on life, the universe, and everything are constructed on an illusion of a nonexistent solidity.

And the great irony is that scientistry now stands condemned by its beloved scientodific metric. The New Atheists reasoned that religious faith must be false on the basis of presuming the eyewitness testimony and documentary evidence to the contrary being false, but now we actually know, we do not merely reason, that it is faith in science that is false due to irreproducibility.

The nonexistent principles of Never Trump

Kurt Schlichter tears into the pious frauds who, despite their proclamations of high principle, have proven to be every bit as unprincipled as we always figured they were:

Where are your principles in the face of the gross injustices of the last few days? A federal judge who was nearly appointed Bill Clinton’s attorney general and who officiated at Soros’s wedding ordered Hannity’s information disclosed, but that was cool with you. After all, Sean Hannity is so…oh well, I never!

Principles that depend on who is asserting them aren’t principles. They are poses.

If you actually adhered to them, your principles would have you shrieking, not cheering. A bunch of Hillary-donating feds should not be allowed to randomly pillage through privileged materials looking for a crime. No, the crime-fraud exception does not mean that the feds can just take all your stuff, read through it, and decide if some happens to fall into that narrow exception and leak the rest. But hey, why let some principles get in the way of a good laugh at the expense of one of those Trump people?

Gosh, it’s almost like your talk of principles was just…talk.

Schlichter is correct. There are no Never Trump principles. As a matter of fact, there are no conservative principles, because conservatism is not, and has never been, a coherent ideology. It is, ultimately, a reactive, defensive pose.

That’s the strategic problem with conservatism. It literally can’t win. It can’t go on the offense, because it has no objectives. And Never Trump is conservatism with cancer.

UPDATE: They were always frauds from the start.

Former presidential candidate Evan McMullin owes his former campaign staff members tens of thousands of dollars and most believe he has no intention of ever paying them, a former campaign worker tells The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Right before McMullin’s failed bid for president in 2016 as the conservative alternative to President Donald Trump, the campaign was inundated with debt. The disastrous fiscal situation was a combination of frivolous spending by McMullin and his campaign manager Joel Searby, according to the former staffer.

McMullin received news weeks before Election Day 2016 about how dire the campaign’s finances were, and he had “no remorse” and said “I have qualms about this thing ending badly in debt,” the former staffer claimed. McMullin’s cavalier attitude towards the campaign’s spending struck many as a surprise, particularly because he billed himself as a fiscal conservative, he added.

It is simply delicious to think of all the harrumphing bow-ties shedding furious tears over the way they were stiffed by their fine, principled fiscally conservative candidate who was only running out of his deep sense of outraged honor.

A win-win

More jobs for the working class supporters, fewer jobs for the chattering class enemy:

The Tampa Bay Times announced that it would cut about 50 jobs after new tariffs imposed by the Trump administration dramatically increased the cost of newsprint. A spokeswoman for the Times confirmed the layoffs to the Tampa Bay Business Journal, saying they are directly in response to the tariffs imposed on newsprint imported from Canada. The Times spokeswoman declined to say how many of the layoffs would be within the paper’s newsroom, but said that the “cuts are taking place throughout the organization.”

That’s how you do it. The God-Emperor would do well to aggressively seek more of these heads my people win, tails yours lose actions.

A reliable evil-detector

FN postulates an explanation for legalistic religious sophistry:

I think these crazy-seeming reinterpretations of the plain meaning of the Old Testament are partly motivated by a desire to seem clever. “Look how smart I am, I can understand it better than anyone else! No, it doesn’t really mean what the words say, it means this subtle thing that nobody but I can see!”

I have no doubt that is partly true, but mostly it comes down to wanting to have sex with children. Evil always comes up with some way to rationalize that. Here is a reliable heuristic for evil: does it justify, rationalize, excuse, defend, encourage, advocate, or require sex with children in any way, openly or covertly, directly or indirectly? Then it is evil, topped by an evil sauce, with a side of evil.

Mailvox: Googlers exit Google

I was aware that more people are leaving Google because they don’t want to deal with the lunatic SJWs that are running the asylum any longer. The hapless Sundar Pikachu simply cannot control them, despite them being a very small, very vocal, very crazy minority of the employees. This email from a reader confirms what I’d already been hearing.

I had an interesting encounter with an ex-Googler this afternoon. A man overheard me and a colleague talking about Fortran at a coffee shop, and he started chatting with us about computer programming. Turns out, he’s an ex-Google developer.

My colleague asked him what he thought of the James Damore situation, and he surprised us a little by responding that that was the main reason he’d quit Google. He said he didn’t want to be part of an environment where people were not free to express reasonable opinions. When I asked him if there were others at Google who felt the same way, he said, yes, most of them. Most of them. It may look like all of Google has gone insane, but it’s really a minority of loud, obnoxious SJWs ruling things there.

It sounds crazy that a few mentally ill tyrants could dominate a place like Google, but this dovetails with something Jordan Peterson points out in a recent interview with Australian ex-deputy PM John Anderson. Peterson says that tyrants, whether petty or large, are not psychologically equipped to deal with resistance. I believe you’ve said something to this effect in your SJW books. If anyone needs more convincing, well, we have a man whose expertise is human behavior and who has extensively studied the great tyrannies of the 20th century telling us that tyrants will cave most of the time when they are resisted. But most people don’t resist, because they figure it will cost them too much. Peterson counters that resistance costs comparatively little when you consider what will happen if you don’t do anything.

This was underscored by my ex-Google acquaintance’s parting comment, that if even 10{a538f03b5e5ee5fdc03407ba0ca231ac78bf6d75a4715bce2458722af48b01e9} of people in the tech world actively resisted the SJWs, that nonsense would come to an end very quickly.

Of course, this is true of SJWs and the larger culture as well. Look at how the Alt-Right’s resistance has made significant inroads into the SJWs’ ability to intimidate and destroy their targets. The conservative strategy of retreat, complain, condemn, and cry does not and will never work; it is intrinsically and inevitably defeatist.

As with most bullies, a metaphorical punch or two in the mouth is sufficient to dissuade the average SJW. As evidence, I offer the observation that SJWs have tended to steer well clear of me ever since I published SJWAL.

Speaking of punching bullies in the mouth, three more men have joined the lawsuit against Google:

Three new plaintiffs have joined former Google employee James Damore’s lawsuit against the company, alleging gender, racial, and political discrimination. Manuel Amador, Stephen McPherson, and Michael Burns, who were all job applicants turned down by Google, have joined the lawsuit.

Given what we know about Microsoft and Pikachu’s background, the lawyers for the plaintiffs should dig deep for any potential unlawful favoritism being shown to applicants with Indian backgrounds.

Disavowing the blank slate

It’s obviously over for the Left’s Blank Slate theory of Man. The media is already starting to lay the foundation for denying that anyone on the Left could possibly have believed in such obviously unscientific nonsense, let alone considered it to be infallible scientific fact:

The appointment – followed, eight days later, by the resignation – of Toby Young to the board of the government’s new Office for Students in January was only the latest in a series of controversial interventions in education for the self-styled Toadmeister (Young’s Twitter handle). Having established his media profile on a platform of comments guaranteed to rile the “politically correct” (sexism, homophobia, that sort of thing), he began to reinvent himself as an educationalist through his initiatives on free schools – and he has been raising hackles in that sphere too. Things came to a head late last year when an article that Young wrote for the charity Teach First on intelligence and genetics was withdrawn from the organisation’s website on the grounds that it was “against what we believe is true and against our values and vision”. Young’s article summarised – rather accurately – the current view on how genes affect children’s IQ and academic attainment, and concluded that there is really not much that schools can do at present to alter these seemingly innate differences.

That affair is now coloured by the disclosure that Young had advocated “progressive eugenics” as a way to boost intelligence in a 2015 article in the Australian magazine Quadrant. The flames were fanned by Private Eye’s account of how Young attended what was widely labelled a “secret eugenics conference” at University College London that featured speakers with extremist views.

All this is viewed with dismay by scientists who are researching the role of genes in intelligence and considering the implications for education. They are already labouring under a cloud of suspicion, if not outright contempt, from some educationalists, and interventions by grandstanders such as Young will do nothing to soften the tenor of the debate. Such polarisation and conflict should trouble us all, though. Because, like it or not, genetics is going to enter the educational arena, and we need to have a sober, informed discussion about it.

Researchers are now becoming confident enough to claim that the information available from sequencing a person’s genome – the instructions encoded in our DNA that influence our physical and behavioural traits – can be used to make predictions about their potential to achieve academic success. “The speed of this research has surprised me,” says the psychologist Kathryn Asbury of the University of York, “and I think that it is probable that pretty soon someone – probably a commercial company – will start to try to sell it in some way.” Asbury believes “it is vital that we have regulations in place for the use of genetic information in education and that we prepare legal, social and ethical cases for how it could and should be used.”

This is an interesting behavioral pattern of the Left that is a useful way of tracking what they currently believe, which is the memory-holing of their previous dogma. Most Leftists still strongly believe in Blank Slate theory, but it is apparent that their intellectual school of fish is about to make one of its sudden right turns.

No one is happier than the satan

This is a usefully informative theological lesson for Christians from a rabbi.

Why Don’t Jews Believe in Original Sin? This is a delicate question, as it exposes one of the fundamental differences between the Christian outlook and the Jewish one…. So what, in fact, do Jews believe?

Consider the terms tov and ra, conventionally translated, as I wrote before, as “good” and “evil.” At every stage of the world’s creation, G-d pronounced it tov before proceeding to the next stage. On the creation of mankind, He pronounced it tov me’od (“very good”), and there is no indication thereafter that He changed his mind.

Ra does not actually mean “evil” in the English sense of the word. Some glimmering of its actual meaning can be ascertained from some of the other ways that the root is used. For instance, in Psalms II, 9 King David beseeches G-d to deal with his enemies: Tero‘em beshevet barzel (“You should smash them with an iron rod”), or in Isaiah XXIV, 19 the prophet begins his description of an earthquake: Ra’o hithro‘a‘a ha’aretz (“the Earth is completely shaken”). From these, we can see that it means something like “unstable, broken, dysfunctional” and therefore “bad.”

Human beings come into this world innocent of anything, but possessed of a capacity for good (commonly termed the yetzer hatov) as well as a destructive capacity, commonly termed the yetzer hara. The yetzer hara presents all the physical urges, the needs and wants, of the physical body which, like everything else in the physical realm, is subject to entropy — that is, it wears out and falls apart. But he is also provided with a soul, whose highest purpose is to control those urges and channel them into positive actions.

To this end, children are provided with parents and other mentors, whose job it is to teach them right from wrong and self-control, so that his soul is capable of taking charge and leading a proper, sanctified life. Until that moment when he is capable of taking over, any “sins” that the child commits are the responsibility of the parent.

So when does a Jewish individual begin to sin? At the age of bar or bath mitzva. These terms mean “son or daughter of the commandments” because on reaching that age, they become subject to the 613 commandments in the Torah, and their parents are no longer responsible for their actions. This landmark occurs when a boy is 13 years old and a girl is 12. One of the most emotional moments of the bar mitzva ceremony comes when the boy’s father pronounces the blessing, baruch sheptarani me‘onsho shel ze (“Blessed is He who has exempted me from this one’s punishment”).

What is the Jewish concept of the satan? Well, we agree with the Christians that he is a mal’ach, conventionally translated “angel,” but there’s nothing “fallen” about him. He works for the same Divine Boss as all the other mal’achim. Think of the satan (the word means “adversary”) as the proctor of an exam. The proctor isn’t actively rooting for you to fail the test; to the contrary, he wants you to pass. But he administers a tough test, to be certain that it tests all your capabilities and that you’ve mastered the material, i.e. the life lessons available from one’s parents and other mentors. If you manage to pass the test, no one is happier than the satan.

Now, my dear Christian reader, combine this doctrine of a very good, unfallen world that has been harmed by the destructive capacity of Man with the mandate of healing the world under the guidance of the angelic proctor with the ultimate aim of bringing it together, and perhaps you will begin to understand what Jesus was talking about and why the concept of Judeo-Christianity is not merely a contradiction in terms, but offensive to Jews and Christians alike.

An AD who can catch

I was watching these Saquon Barkley highlights, and they really reminded me of Adrian Peterson, except for the fact that Barkley also catches the ball very well.

Definitely impressive, although the important thing to remember is that AD was doing those sorts of things against NFL-calibre talent, not Big 10-level talent. Then again, they have the same 4.4 40 speed, and Barkley is an inch shorter and 16 pounds heavier.