Do Not Let Logic Become a Buzzkill

I wish I had the number for Al Gore’s compost-powered personal cell phone, because I want to call him and thank him for this delightful weather. It’s about 60 degrees outside, bright and sunny, at almost 11:00 a.m., in Miami, in mid-April. For this city, that is COLD. I’m sure this somehow proves global warming exists, because everything proves global warming exists. Global warming exists, therefore anything that happens is evidence that it exists. That is the position of leftists everywhere, and it seems totally logical to me.

Here’s something that may make you laugh. One of the things I pray for every day is a collapse of the global warming fraud. Partly because it’s destructive and expensive and dishonest, but also because I want God to remind us that He controls the weather.

It used to be that when natural events made human beings suffer, people examined themselves to see if they had sinned or in some way fallen short. Even heathens worried that they had upset their false gods. Academics claim early religions were motivated largely by a desire to assure good weather and good harvests.

Now we begin by blaming George Bush, regardless of the nature of the misfortune, and then we blame capitalism and the United States and, if at all possible, the Jews. The answer to our problems is to cripple industry and commerce, so we can be just as happy and healthy as people in primitive cultures, who die at 30, in the dirt, infested with parasites. The truth is, the ultimate source of health and prosperity and peace and so on is God. And you can only cheat Him for so long before he cuts off your allowance.

Wealth is a tremendous gift. But now leftists call it a curse, claiming it’s “killing the planet.” On the one hand, we’re supposed to believe living things have the capacity to evolve and adapt to anything. On the other, we are told that a two-degree change in the average temperature will turn the world into a lifeless rock. And we’re positive the change is caused by the things that make us prosperous. The things that bring us money to buy medicine and food and books. The things that enable us to give our surplus to the needy. The leftist position is, we should kill our prosperity just to be on the safe side.

Okay. Good plan.

Some leftists say we can save the planet if we kill the economy right now. But the leftists I truly love are the ones who say it’s already too late. The world is definitely going to die because of the stuff we’ve already done! The first type of leftist, I understand. They want to use ecology as a weapon to inflict socialism and totalitarianism and atheism on us. A weapon to make us dependent on the state. The second kind…they’re just FUN. They’ve completely lost sight of traditional leftist goals. They’ve forgotten that they’re supposed to be manipulating us to change. They just want us to feel bad and die. For some reason, that cracks me up. They’re like a yellow light at a traffic intersection. They don’t inspire you to stop what you’re doing. They inspire you to FLOOR IT BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE. Get out there and burn some gasoline while you still can! Eat, drink, and drive a big tasteless Humvee, because tomorrow we will fry like earthworms on a hot sidewalk. Like computer-generated polar bears in a lying documentary.

I still can’t believe Al Gore says polar bears, which are semi-aquatic, are drowning. What next? Maybe we should go put little life jackets on otters! Parachutes for pigeons! I am too busy. I volunteer Heidi Cullen for these jobs. The otters will probably resist, because they’re bitter and religious, but that problem can be solved with a tranquilizer gun. When the pain of the bites and scratches gets to be too much, they can shoot Heidi Cullen. That will make her feel better.

April has been really nice so far. Sometimes April is hot and miserable here, but this year, I’ve been able to sit outside and relax without sticking to the patio furniture. Thanks, Al. Keep the good weather coming, my man. You probably won’t feel the weather, because you’re always inside a climate-controlled mega-mansion or an SUV the size of an aircraft carrier, but the rest of us–the bitter, religious, gun-loving haters of immigrants–enjoy it a lot.

The unseasonable cold is doing good things for my plants. Supposedly, it helps tomato blossoms set, and I suddenly have a bunch of them on my previously pathetic Brandywine vine, so I have newfound hope that I may one day grow a full-size red tomato. The biggish yellow tomato on my Kentucky beefsteak vine will be ready to pick in a day or two. I’m hoping the city-fied squirrels here are too stupid to know what a tomato is. Otherwise, it may be time to risk arrest by shooting them from inside the house. There’s a cool type of ammunition made for this purpose. It’s called a colibri round. It’s a .22 cartridge with no powder. The primer drives the slug at air rifle speeds. Very quiet. I guess if I were to go on a squirrel murder spree, I’d use a regular air gun, in order to avoid becoming famous as the nut who fired a gun in Coral Gables. Still, they’re neat. I almost wish I still had rats.

Funny thing about tomatoes…the vines seem to grow from the ground out. If you drive a nail into a tree when it’s a year old, the nail will be the same distance from the ground in a hundred years. Trees grow from their tops; the wood doesn’t rise as the tree grows. But it seems like my tomatoes keep getting higher and higher, as if the vines are growing from the bottoms, not the tops. Is that possible?

I have a new batch of Tobago seasoning peppers, which are supposed to be mild but otherwise similar to habaneros. I grabbed a few and put them on takeout Mexican the other day. First, I tried a piece of one to see how hot it was. It seemed very hot for a mild pepper. Then I realized it wasn’t hot at all, because I wasn’t crying or drinking from a quart glass of ice water. My truly hot peppers are insufferable. Still, even though the Tobago peppers were good, I have to say I prefer my Home Depot cayennes, which have tons of cherry flavor and just enough heat.

My Trinidad Scorpion bush is a monster. Huge leaves the color of spinach. Lots of blossoms. And I think the bugs are afraid of it. I don’t know what I’m going to do with the peppers. They are supposed to be hot enough to etch glass.

The peppers I’m most excited about are the habanero golds I planted from a store-pepper seed. The bush is beautiful, and it’s loaded with huge peppers. They’re nearly as big as Clementines, and they’re still green! The pepper I used for seed was gigantic. Maybe three inches long. And the flavor was stupendous. If these are as good as that one, you might be smart to ask me for seeds.

I hammered the yard and, as collateral damage, myself with bifenthrin spray yesterday. “Orange dog” caterpillars are constantly attacking the citrus. And I will not have it. For some reason, the Persian lime is immune to everything. It’s a beast. The other stuff, I have to keep an eye on.

Seems like I have no problem growing sour things and things that burn, but it’s hard to grow sweet things. Perhaps this is a reflection of my personality. Maybe I should put Marv in charge of the tomatoes and fruit. He won’t even bite the veterinarian.

Hmm…I spend a lot of time sitting. Maybe that means I could grow potatoes. That will be a useful skill in the full bloom of the Ethanol Famine.

We Can’t All Worship St. Obama

Been busy with boring tasks today.

Yesterday’s sabbath observation went well. I feel strange calling Sunday the sabbath, but I don’t know what else to call it. I read a lot and relaxed and spent a fair amount of time in prayer, and oddly when I woke up today, I was still not perfect.

Maybe it will take two consecutive Sundays.

I am still confused about prayer in tongues. I reviewed some NT teaching on it, and the scriptural support is there. I guess what I question is whether I have ever done it, because when I do, it always sounds unconvincing. It’s a tough issue for a sincere person. You want to do it, so you try, but how do you know you’re not making it up? What if you’re so good at making it up, you think you have it when you don’t, and you quit trying to get the real thing, and it passes you by? And then you feel truly stupid in the afterlife, because everyone else got it and you didn’t.

People being what they are, I can say with certainty that not all people who do it are really doing it.

I read more of the book of Enoch, and I tried to find information on why it was rejected by the Jews and by most Christians. The bit about angels reproducing is problematic for Jews, but it has also been suggested that they bailed on Enoch after Christianity appeared, because so much of the book seems to be about Christ.

I cannot buy into some of it. I do not believe there is a place where lightning is kept, ready to throw, like cigars in a box. But it seems like the facially weird bits can be pared away from the plausible parts that ring true.

I found out about it while I was researching Mt. Hermon. On my own, years ago, I got the idea that the Jordan Valley seems to be set up in a way that symbolizes the progress of human lives. I don’t think God’s symbolism is confined to the Bible. The water originates above, falls on Hermon, goes into several springs including one by an ancient shrine to Pan (the model for modern depictions of Satan), moves on to the lake where the disciples symbolically harvested fish, and then passes through the desert to the Dead Sea, which contains Sodom and Gomorrah. Not the new town, Sdom, which is on the banks. The actual cities. And we all know what they represent. From there, the only escape is evaporation.

If this idea pans out, it came from God. If not, it was all me.

The Enoch story lends a little credence to it. It says evil angels alit on Hermon and went from there to procreate with women, creating a race of superhuman beings which did all sorts of horrible things, leading God to flood the earth. The parable of the wheat and the tares seems to comport with this idea.

I don’t have it all worked out, but anyway, I haven’t yet accepted the notion that Enoch is garbage. Jesus’s brother quoted it, so surely it’s worth something.

I may sound silly talking about angels, but I know they exist, so I don’t care. Some day we’ll be dead, and you’ll have to admit I was right. If you’re a Christian and you don’t believe in angels, you must be watching too much Oprah. You have to believe Jehovah and Jesus are two real beings, and that they are observing us at this very moment, and that Satan is real, and that there are legions of angels and demons. If those things sound ridiculous to you, what exactly is it that makes you think you’re a Christian?

The shrine to Pan is located at a thing called the Banias. It would be called the Panias, or something similar, but Arabs don’t have the letter P. Pagans used to worship false gods there and throw sacrifices into the spring. You would think that would defile the Jordan all the way to the Dead Sea, but I haven’t read anything suggesting that the Jews cared about this.

I went to the Banias once while I was a kibbutz volunteer, on a weekend tour sponsored by the kibbutz. I didn’t realize at the time that it was adjacent to the location of Caesarea Philippi, an evil city and the site of Jesus’s declaration that he was the Messiah. Remember “Get thee behind me, Satan”? He said that near the Banias. Which may have some prophetic significance. He said it to Peter. But are we sure he was only addressing Peter, given the peculiar location?

The Banias is truly creepy. There’s a giant hole in a red rock face, which the kibbutz volunteer supervisor told us was believed to be the birthplace of Pan. And there’s a stagnant pool there, which used to be a bubbling spring. That’s where they threw the sacrifices. Not sure if they were all animals.

I’m dying to go back to Israel. I should just get up and go. Spend a week. I wonder if I can still go to all the places I went last time. Jericho is out, I suppose.

A recommendation: for some reason I no longer recall, I had a copy of The Spirit-Filled Bible, and it seems very good. Maybe the reason I used to read the Bible too little is that the versions I had lacked useful annotations and so on. This book is packed with them. Background on each author, historical information, insight on the actual words used, and it was written by people who believe in the baptism of the Holy Spirit.

Sunday was very nice. There is more to it than I’m telling, but it was a very good day. Peculiar thing; my tomatoes and peppers seem to be doing much better, suddenly. I don’t claim a causal connecition, but it’s true.

I Rest

This week I was very affected by some DVD lectures on the Jewish sabbath. Before watching them, and even with my considerable acquaintance with Jews and Judaism, I didn’t grasp the importance of the Sabbath. That the Jews believe it somehow preserves them. You might think of it as tillage and fertilizer and pesticide for the soul.

A long time ago, I was taught that Christians are not subject to the Jewish law, including the Sabbath commandment. I believe that’s true. I eat all the pork I want, and I don’t keep the Jewish holidays, and so on. The New Testament makes it very clear that I’m not a Jew, and that I don’t have to do all the things Jews do. Nonetheless, I think that one of the weaknesses of the more faith-filled and vibrant churches–the ones with which I have the most in common–is a tendency to mindlessly discard rules and ritual, simply because it’s permitted. The fact that you are not commanded to do something doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. There is no commandment to brush your teeth. I still do it every few weeks.

Joke.

Anyway, I’m making an effort to clean up my Sundays. No work. Just rest and study and prayer and so on. I still have a Nowlive show scheduled for Sundays, but even though I like the free exposure, when you boil it down, it’s just a hobby. Not worth messing up the day. I’m going to ask about moving it, and if I can’t move it and stay on list of shows that are fed listeners, I’ll move anyway and talk to three people. Or quit altogether.

I don’t plan to be a fanatic who won’t take out the trash or run an errand or two. I’m no Walter Sobchak. But I think I can cut back a lot without noticeable strain.

Today I’m reading up on a few things that interest me. For one thing, I’m trying to get a handle on the Book of Enoch. It’s an apocryphal book, bits of which were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Jews don’t consider it part of the Bible. One of their problems with it is that it contains references to angels reproducing with human women. They believe angels can’t reproduce. I think most Christians believe that, too, but I’m not totally sure. The Bible says angels can appear as human beings, and if that’s true…

I read the Book of Enoch the other day, online, and while some parts were impossible to swallow, other parts were remarkably consistent with New Testament thought. Some people believe the New Testament book Jude quotes the Book of Enoch, which lends it legitimacy. You never know. It may be that something real has been contaminated by attachment to a work of forgery, and that they are worth separating.

In case you don’t know who Enoch was, he was a figure in Genesis. So righteous that God removed him from the earth at the tender age of 365. Aaron says the Jews believe Enoch never sinned, and that God took him because there was a possibility of sin in his future.

Enoch tells a story of rebellious angels who came down from Mt. Hermon and mated with women and taught men things like metallurgy and witchcraft. I came across it while reading about Mt. Hermon, a place which I find interesting for reasons I may go into some day.

I’ll be reading about other stuff, too.

I don’t plan to do any blogging until right before the Nowlive show. I am hoping that in the future, I’ll have enough character to keep Sunday blogging to a bare minimum. So whether or not you believe in what I’m doing, at least I have spared you that.

If you are a Christian or Jew and feel like leaving a comment regarding your beliefs on observation of the Sabbath, please do.

Say another prayer for Leah Friedman. She is out of the ICU and managed to say the word “home.”

Love Thy Neighbor as Thy Doormat

Miami is unbelievable. Sometimes the rudeness is like something you would expect to experience in a federal prison.

I just went to Best Buy. They had a waiting area cordoned off. It was very obvious. You stand in the area, and the cashiers call you as they become available.

I arrived right after a lady with a big cart. She had her kids with her. Immediately, a man pushed his cart into the area in front of her, studiously avoided looking at both of us, and waited for a register. I was trying to be a Christian and not get into fights over trivia, and I guess she was, too, because we both let it go. Then someone with him–his son, I suppose–joined him with another cart. Still doing his best to pretend we didn’t exist, looking in one direction while he acted in another, as if looking in our direction would turn him to stone, he moved things from the other person’s cart to his and pushed the other cart directly in front of this lady, so she couldn’t get out of the waiting area unless she moved it.

“Nice manners,” I could not resist saying, very clearly and loudly. And she agreed wholeheartedly as she pushed the cart out of the way. Then another man and boy appeared, and they were headed for the register, when she flagged them and pointed out the big, conspicuous waiting area. They came and stood behind us, babbling with irritation, pretending to believe the waiting area was somehow irrelevant and that the proper thing to do was to barge ahead of other people. I could tell she was exasperated. Trying to get out of the store with her kids and her stuff, without killing anyone. “Miami manners,” I said. “Only in Miami,” she agreed.

She got a register, and the man behind me came and stood beside me, staring at the registers. I wondered if I was going to have to have a discussion with him. Imagine, acting like that in front of your kids. Teaching them to be trash. That other people are props in the grand dramas of their lives, to be used as needed. But he thought better of it and backed up.

I lived in New York, and while the people were nothing to brag on, you could generally count on them to wait in line at stores. In Texas, in a line dispute, the problem would be trying to convince the other person he was ahead of you.

I miss Texas so much. The people were wonderful. But I could say the same thing about other places I’ve lived. If you’ve lived in Miami and you’ve lived anywhere else in America, you know what I mean. Two kinds of people defend Miami manners. People who have never lived here, and people who have never lived in any other part of America.

Aren’t we human beings? Aren’t we better than rats and bugs, who think only of themselves? You have two choices in Miami. Live in constant conflict, or be treated like garbage.

I really want to move upstate. I’m going to visit another county and see what’s available. And when I’ve made the move, I want to have a shirt printed, reading, “Pardon my manners. I’m from Miami.” I guarantee you, it will be a hit everywhere I go. This town’s reputation has permeated the whole state.

His Rich Pastor Taught him Well

I see people are making hay regarding Barack Obama’s comments on small-town blue-collar people. I almost said “working people,” but that would tend to perpetuate the bigoted leftist canard that white-collar work isn’t work. It’s peculiar, how that myth is disseminated successfully by soft-handed liberals–politicians and journalists and academics–who sit behind desks and wouldn’t know which end of a shovel to hold.

People seem to hope Obama’s comments will kill his campaign. They say it proves he’s an elitist who looks down his nose at “flyover country.” I don’t see it happening.

Everyone already knows that liberals are elitists, largely concentrated in the northeast and on the west coast, who look down on flyover people. They are ignorant and provincial, and they believe their idiosyncratic ways should be imposed on the rest of us by the government. The knowledge that the rest of us can live in ways of which they have not approved eats at them like acid. No Democrat who is even dimly aware of what happens in this country will be surprised by what Obama said.

It kills these people to know that there are places where people drive pickups with gun racks in the windows. It infuriates them to know that far away, someone may be legally spanking a child. It enrages them to contemplate the fact that homeschooling is going on, pulling children out of their reach and destroying the left’s well-known plan to steal emerging generations and program them to do their bidding. It drives them crazy, not that other people are allowed to do things that affect them, but that other people are allowed to live their own lives, far away, as they see fit. The way refusing to submit to Islam in Nebraska infuriates an Islamist in Saudi Arabia.

Barack Obama sees religion and firearms and bigotry as refuges to which the simple run irrationally when life frightens them. So what? That’s not news. Hillary Clinton feels the same way. So do most people in Manhattan. Not the ones who’ve been mugged or burglarized or raped. I mean the ones who are still asleep, with visions of taxpayer-financed sugarplums dancing in their heads.

I don’t think this will hurt him. Most of the votes in Pennsylvania are in the cities, and the people who live there probably think Obama is absolutely right. “We really ARE better. This guy sees it!”

Obama was appealing to bigotry, pure and simple. Just like Jeremiah Wright. I think he knew what he was doing. I think he was saying, “We have to neutralize those crazy white Christians out in the boondocks, before they come to Philadelphia and hold lynchings.” The message will sell, among the people to whom he directed it. Not just white liberals, but also blacks raised on a destructive diet of victimhood. The folks who think Church’s Fried Chicken is a Klan operation that puts drugs in the food to sterilize black men (funny how they don’t go after those ubiquitous Planned Parenthood abortion abattoirs). The wackjobs who think AIDS was developed intentionally by the government/Jews/Bill O’Reilly/the Easter Bunny (take your choice) to kill blacks. The people who seriously believe the ancient Egyptians were black geniuses who flew around in helicopters, or that white people are a race of devils created in a laboratory by a mad scientist named Mr. Yakub.

Alicia Keys is an example of one kind of person I’m talking about. She says the government created gangster rap to drive blacks to kill each other. How do you counter that kind of willful stupidity and close-mindedness? “I’m hitting myself in the face with a hammer. It’s obviously the result of a government conspiracy.” If you’re prejudiced enough to believe a thing like that, what hope is there that you will ever believe the truth about anything? It’s not enough to treat black people well. In order not to be accused of genocide, you have to proactively prevent them from killing each other on their own initiative.

Please don’t take my word for any of this; take five minutes and check the web. I could not make this crap up if I tried.

Geez, I’m sorry. I’m sorry about all the drive-bys I caused by voting for Republicans. I’m sorry about that poisoned fried chicken. I’m so sorry I made people run around and have unprotected, sinful sex and get AIDS. I apologize for belonging to a race of devils created by a vicious lunatic; I take full responsibility for his actions. I am really, really sorry for destroying all evidence of those Egyptian helicopters.

I created crack. I admit it. I made the first batch on my very own stove. I’m the guy. I feel so bad about it now. I couldn’t help it. I’m a devil, after all. This is what I do. Because like all white Republicans, I have nothing better to do than make life miserable for black people I don’t even know.

How does a people improve and overcome and live in victory, when it cannot identify its mistakes and accept responsibility for them? Maybe Alicia Keys can tell me.

On the other hand, being continually accused of wrongs you didn’t commit eventually destroys your desire to help the accusers. Something to think about when you fraudulently cry “victim” for the five-millionth time.

It’s so frustrating, seeing American blacks, as a bloc, make the worst possible decision, time after time. Almost all Americans want to help. But how do you help someone who is willing to take extraordinary measures–willing to swallow any story, no matter how ludicrous–in order to believe the worst about you?

Anyway, to get back to the point, Obama was appealing to bigotry, both white and black, and I’ll bet it ends up helping him. I can’t think of a single example, in the recent history of blacks in America, where this strategy has not succeeded wildly.

Improvement!

I had a very satisfying day at the range. I got my rimfire scope on the paper, corrected some rifle-shooting problems, and made real progress with the .38 Super. And now you have to suffer with all of it.

I stuck the scope on the Nylon 66 at 25 yards and managed to find the paper.

I was never able to completely sight the scope in. One of the pamphlets for my scopes says you can get shims. I had this problem with the K31, too. These .22 shots are aimed at the top of the bullseye, which is 5″ in diameter. You can see they’re all low. I think I used 25 yards for all of the .22 shots, but I’m not sure.

I guess people were right about the Nylon 66 being too wobbly for a scope. I’m not positive, for reasons I’ll explain later. But I should have shot better than this at 25 yards. As I recall, I shot this well at 50 with the open sights. The pattern was about twice this big.

I got out the K31 and went back to 50 yards. I made a change. The other day, someone sent me a link to something called the Appleseed Project, and it had information on rifle shooting. One thing it emphasized was finding a comfortable position. This is very hard to do at Trail Glades, because the cutout where you sit is about eight inches wide and maybe a foot and a half long. It’s nearly impossible to get behind the gun, so you end up pulling on it to hold yourself in position. I decided to improve things by moving the rest as far to the left as I could, and it helped a lot. The first five shots literally went through a hole the size of a nickel. The Caldwell rest kept moving around with the recoil, and it was hard to be consistent, but things went very well. I believe this is a dozen shots.

Next bunch, at 100 yards. If I figure out a position, I think I can do a lot better.

Final round at 100 yards. Two flyers, but it looks like I’m starting to get a clue.

The K31 was really starting to hurt my shoulder. Something about the new position. So I went to the pistol side and got out the .38 Super. Thank God, the blonde lady who shoots tiny patterns at 75 feet had left by then.

I decided to try to maximize my concentration by gathering brass after every 5 shots. It gave me a nice rest. First 25:

Those made me very happy. The reason is that, even though I lost concentration once or twice, the vast majority went into a very small hole. Nearly where I aimed them. I feel like I’m getting close to the point where I should start thinking about the quality of the ammunition and the state of the gun.

Second 25:

While I was shooting those, I realized that sometimes the trigger has a catch in the action. It stops and then continues back, driving the gun off the point of aim before it fires. That explains some of the vertical variation. So I’m going to get a trigger job. I think most of the horizontal movement is just laziness. But look how much better things are getting. I’m finally getting to where I can shoot about like I used to.

I think I’ll give the .22 one more chance, with the rest moved to the left, before I give up on scoping it. But my performance suggests to me that the scope is not working. Even if my position is bad, I should shoot better with a scope, off a rest, than I did with open sights and no rest.

I wore my “My President is Charlton Heston” shirt while I shot. I hope somewhere he’s smiling.

I am All About Green

Today Aaron forwarded an interesting mass email from Ruth Matar of Women in Green. This is a pro-Israel women’s organization. I know little about it, but I like what I see so far.

I was going to email Ms. Matar and ask for permission to reprint the email, but it turns out I won’t have to. Women in Green has a blog, and the current post is the contents of the email. You can find it here. If you would like to know when the blog is updated, send a blank email to list4-subscribe at the domain womeningreen.org. They also have a Paypal link. I like the way they’re taking “Green” back from the idolaters and communists and flakes.

Here’s a digression for you. The International Federation of Christians and Jews has a blog called Stand for Israel, and you can subscribe to updates by using the form on the blog’s front page.

Ms. Matar’s blog entry (I don’t know whether she’s Miss or Mrs. Matar) is titled “ISRAEL, AN EVANGELIST PASTOR, AND A REFORM RABBI.” In it you will get a taste of the frustration religious, clear-thinking Jews feel when they deal with the press and secular and reformed Jews. She points out that John Hagee, a bona fide Bible-thumping American Southerner, gets the picture better than Eric Yoffie, the appeasement-minded leader of Reform Jews in the US. Better than Yuli Tamir, Israel’s Education Minister, who is actively opposing religious education. How odd this must seem to a Jew. Millions of Christians–those pogrom-loving, unwashed, proselytizing ignoramuses who wear scary crosses around their necks–are supporting Eretz Israel, and many Jews are actively opposing it.

You shouldn’t get the impression that Christians are generally more positively disposed toward Israel. I’m sure that’s untrue. But there are about 14 million Jews, and there are over a billion Christians, and even if the supportive fraction of Christians is tiny as a percentage, they may still outnumber pro-Israel Jews by a wide margin. I’ll bet they do. There have to be ten or twenty million in the US alone. In all likelihood, if you could count Israel’s true friends, you would find that most of them are not Jewish.

The bad news is that not all Jews have come around yet. The good news is that the people who have come around are probably richer and more powerful than the Jews, and impossible for the terrorists to reach, and their numbers will probably increase.

Think how wonderful this will be, if it continues. Will it be an end to anti-Semitism? No, that will never happen. But an Israel with its power multiplied manyfold, by the assistance of foreign Gentiles…a Jewry with true non-Jewish friends in the modern era, in large numbers…that would be a major shift and a tremendous blessing. And a fulfillment of prophecy. And a satisfying blow to Israel’s enemies.

While I’m on the subject of Israel, let’s check in on Leah Friedman, the young Haifa blogger who suffered respiratory arrest last week. Her family has been requesting prayer, and they continue to do so. Today a look at her blog reveals good news. She isn’t walking yet, but she has finally spoken. And what did she ask for? A Coke. The national beverage of the United States. She’s also using her hands. Things are getting better; keep her in your prayers. God heals in response to prayer. I’m a witness to it. So pray for Leah today. With a glass of Passover Coke in your hand.

In less important news, I’m headed for the range. I’m going to try my new rimfire scope, with the Nylon 66 and my giant box of bulk .22 bullets! I can’t wait. I love shooting this gun. My dad bought it for me when I was 12, and while I truly enjoy my other guns, this one and the two my grandfather owned are special. If you have a kid, and you haven’t bought your kid a gun and taken him or her to the range or on a hunt, you are missing a great opportunity that will not come around again. When you’re gone, that gun will be a priceless reminder of special childhood moments.

I’m going to tighten the screws on the receiver and see if I can get decent accuracy. If not, my next move will be to get a Savage. People are recommending Marlins, and I’m sure they’re great, but Savage has a reputation for flawless barrels, and they’re really cheap, so that’s what I want. Does anyone know if it’s possible to put a scope on a Mark II-FVT? I love peep sights, but they’re pretty big.

I’ll also take the K31 today. I need to do some grinding on the PSL’s trigger assembly to make it work, and I don’t think I have time before the range opens. Otherwise, I’d take it, too. And I plan to inquire about the shotgun range.

It occurs to me that you can’t be confident in your ability to defend your home unless you know how to hit a moving target. And using a shotgun will give you that skill. Something to think about.

Blog Post From the Heaven-Rescued Land

A longtime reader and MSM mole has informed me that Kathy Shaidle is being sued for libel. I don’t know Kathy. She has linked to me a few times.

Kathy lives in Canada. As the mole points out, CANADIANS HAVE NO CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO FREE SPEECH. I capitalized that. If you take nothing else away from this post, remember the big letters. Especially if you live in Canada.

A Canadian activist named Richard Warman appears to have created a profitable business, suing Canadian bloggers for libel. When he’s not suing libraries for offering books he doesn’t like. And Kathy just made his list. This business has been going on for quite some time up there. I’m sure you know about the Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant stories. It is evidently extremely easy to prove libel up there. Things that wouldn’t begin to meet the American standard satisfy Canadian judges, and the verdicts are big.

Kathy has a link to a defense fund. You’ll see it if you click the link above. She has pledged to fight this character to the end.

How very precious the Bill of Rights is. Look how crazy other countries are. This story really drives it home. Here in the US, liberals have worked very hard to outlaw conservatism and free speech, creating tyrannical “speech codes” and filing frivolous indictments against prominent conservative politicians. Think what they could do if we didn’t have the first amendment, and our laws were as left-leaning as Canada’s. The game would be over. What a beautiful sanctuary is America.

A reminder to any American who supports Kathy and her colleagues from within the US: sooner or later, this guy’s verdicts may generate a big enough war chest to fund lawsuits within the United States, against Americans. And he will clearly be willing to use it. So think before you mention him on your blog. Don’t say anything you wouldn’t say about your next-door neighbor. The facts more than suffice to condemn him. And if you plan on visiting Canada, don’t announce it on your blog.

It’s odd how our enemies are developing more and more power to reach inside the USA and shut us up. First the standard Islamist death threats. Now litigation-happy foreigners might pose a risk. According to Kathy, even if Warman hasn’t sued any Americans yet, he has tried to prevent our websites from being seen in Canada.

Maybe it’s time for Canadians who aren’t completely insane to move to America. I can’t imagine a better addition to our workforce than Mark Steyn. In some small way, he might make up for Keanu Reeves.

And now that I think about it, Canada appears to be a great permanent destination for liberals.

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Canadian commenter Paul C. says the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects freedom of speech. I am getting incredibly forgetful, and I failed to check the emailed assertion that Canadians had no constitutional right to free speech; sorry about that.

But while what I said was somewhat misleading in letter, the spirit appears to have been right on.

Via blogger Larry Borsato, here’s a bit from the Boston Globe’s Alex Beam:

How do you like your free speech — well chilled? Canada has no First Amendment and adheres to primitive British-style libel laws.

Here is a hilarious definition of defamation la Canadienne, from the Media Libel website: ”A defamatory statement exists if the publication tends to lower the plaintiff’s reputation in the estimation of those who are commonly referred to as ‘right thinking’ members of society.” Allow me to reiterate my widely known position: Celine Dion is the greatest singer who ever lived.

Just this year, the Canadian Parliament passed what the religious right has branded a ”Chill Bill,” or ”The Bible as Hate Speech Bill,” effectively preventing churches from using the Bible to preach against homosexuality. ”With the passage of Bill C-250, Canada has now embarked upon a course of criminalization of dissent,” according to a statement released this spring by the Catholic Civil Rights League.

Good Lord. Is it okay to say “good Lord” in Canada? If anything, it appears that I was too kind to Canada’s laws. If Beam is right, it is completely fair to state that freedom of religion does not exist in Canada. The right to criticize sinful behavior isn’t just an expression issue. It impinges on your right to worship as you will, by making it impossible to instruct other believers by teaching doctrine.

This is the direction in which the left wants to take America. If it doesn’t scare you, there is something wrong with you. Or maybe you’re just a right-thinking person.

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David Bernstein, at the National Review’s site:

In another incident, after Toronto print-shop owner Scott Brockie refused on religious grounds to print letterhead for a gay-activist group, the local human-rights commission ordered him to pay the group $5,000, print the requested material, and apologize to the group’s leaders. Brockie, who always accepted print jobs from individual gay customers, and even did pro-bono work for a local AIDS group, is fighting the decision on religious-freedom grounds.

Any gains the gay-rights movement has received from the crackdown on speech in Canada have been pyrrhic because as part of the Canadian government’s suppression of obscene material, Canadian customs frequently target books with homosexual content. Police raids searching for obscene materials have disproportionately targeted gay organizations and bookstores.

Moreover, left-wing academics are beginning to learn firsthand what it’s like to have their own censorship vehicles used against them. For example, University of British Columbia Prof. Sunera Thobani, a native of Tanzania, faced a hate-crimes investigation after she launched into a vicious diatribe against American foreign policy. Thobani, a Marxist feminist and multiculturalism activist, had remarked that Americans are “bloodthirsty, vengeful and calling for blood.” The Canadian hate-crimes law was created to protect minority groups from hate speech. But in this case, it was invoked to protect Americans.

Support the Troops With Fattening Grub

A reader asked about a link I once posted, to an organization that allows Americans to buy pizza for IDF soldiers. Rather than put it in an email, I’ll post it here.

PizzaIDF.org

You can have a pizza delivered, and you can include a personal message. I don’t know much about the organization, but you might like it.

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Prefer to buy pizza for American soldiers in Iraq? Here’s a link to GIPizza.org.

Caveat: for some reason you have to buy GI Pizza by the slice, which makes it obscenely expensive.

So Let’s Kill the Supply With History’s Greatest Boondoggle

When are we going to give up the ethanol insanity?

We’ve known for a long time that ethanol doesn’t work. We don’t have enough land to grow enough corn to replace oil. Unlike gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel, ethanol is a highly temperamental fuel which causes problems because it absorbs water from the air. And even Time Magazine–the famous right-wing rag–tells us ethanol causes more pollution than oil. Ethanol gave the left a stick with which to beat the right, and it depressed our economy, which is good for Democrats in the upcoming election, and it generated profitable contracts for fat cats who could not care less about their country or the food supply. We know all this, yet we continue to grow excessive amounts of corn for ethanol, driving up the price of other grains, meat, and oddly, corn.

Some scientists are now telling us that ethanol threatens to exacerbate famine in deprived areas of the world. Isn’t that wonderful? At least we get a warm, fuzzy feeling. Too bad if people starve.

Here’s a story from Worldnetdaily. Dairy prices rose 80 percent last year. Farmers in Thailand are sleeping in their fields to prevent their rice from being stolen. In six of the last seven years, the human race has used more grain than it produced. Even warm, fuzzy environmentalists are starting to get upset.

I am thinking about this today because I just read an article in The Jewish Week News, which I found via the blog of the International Federation of Christians and Jews, about the cost of Passover food. Observant Jews have always paid more for food, and Passover food is even more expensive, and this year, it’s worse than ever because of ethanol. Matzoh costs twenty dollars per pound now. Crackers cost more than prime beef! Because they’re made from wheat, and corn is growing on land where wheat used to grow.

We have lots of oil; we just won’t drill for it or refine it in the US. We have gigantic reserves of nuclear power, but ignorant and misguided people shut down that magnificent industry–which was a gift straight from God–years ago. We have a tremendous amount of coal, which can be burned more cleanly than ever, but just try building a plant. And what was the sop they threw us to offset all this? Wind farms, or as I like to call them, “bird-grinding low-output generators.”

It seems to me that the consequences are not hard to guess. The US grows a huge percentage of the grain, so we’ll decide what happens to it. We’ll export less. We’ll pay more for food, but we won’t have shortages. Other countries will have to grow more or do without. Charities will suffer. People will starve. But it’s okay, as long as you have a “Flex Fuel” sticker on your car when you drive to Obama rallies.

Somehow, the left will find a way to blame the famine on America and the right. They’re already working on it, I promise you. “We created this situation by refusing to live in huts and walk to work, like sane people.” “Ethanol, like socialism, will work. If we just spend another hundred years fine-tuning it.”

There is a word that describes the truly green lifestyle. Here it is. “Poverty.”

You can’t have prosperity and good food and good shelter and fine medical care without consumption. If we live in huts and eat what we grow in our yards and stop buying and driving and consuming, industry will shrivel, the economy will tank, and in twenty years, we’ll be living in huts because there is no choice, not because it’s cute and trendy. Consumption pays bills. For everyone, not just Dick Cheney and Halliburton. Who builds SUVs? Unskilled union workers with no education. Who delivers big-screen TVs? Unskilled union workers with no education. You can’t stop spending without causing someone else to stop earning. Historically, the green people in huts have been kept alive by donations from the earth-exploiting people who drive big gas-guzzling cars. Doesn’t that tell you something? Who is on the right track here? Isn’t it obvious?

We need more domestic refining capacity. We need more domestic drilling. We need more nuclear reactors. We need to put serious money into developing realistic new power sources, and I’m not referring to fantasies like solar panels. Retreating and cutting consumption and production will screw up our economy, and what hurts the US a little hurts the rest of the world a lot. The answer isn’t to go backward. The answer is to make realistic choices while going forward.

Efficiency is wonderful. Doing more with less is great. Doing less with less is bad.

Ethanol, to get back to the original subject, would be a fine idea. If it did not wreak havoc on the balance of the grain market and every market the grain market affects. If we could create ethanol in big vats in urban settings, from readily available raw materials, it would be a wonderful fuel for some purposes. But right now, we have to get it from corn. And corn is just too important to use for fuel.

Another Jewish Week News article discusses the growing acceptance Pastor John Hagee is getting in Israel. It’s a crazy read. Hagee’s chief problem, it seems, is that in addition to wanting Israel to prosper financially, he wants Israel’s territory to grow to include the nation’s historic possessions. In other words, he’s in trouble because he’s advancing the cause of Israel, more than many Jews can stand. And failing to advance the interests of their enemies.

Do we live in a nutty world, or what?

Hagee has other troubles. If you haven’t seen him at work, I’ll save you the research and tell you that he’s a fire and brimstone sort of guy. Much more like Elisha than Paul. He has criticized Catholicism and modern morality, and I doubt he’s a friend of Islam. I’m a fairly kooky Protestant, and he even gets on my nerves. But I gather that his support for the reestablishment of Eretz Israel is what really puts off secular Jews and their very close relatives, Reform Jews.

One promising thing about the article: it reflects a growing realization that “mainline” American churches are hostile to Israel. Look:

A top Jewish leader said there is a different communal calculus in the face of mounting attacks on Israel by “mainline” Protestant churches. “Frankly, we’d rather be standing up with the Presbyterians than with people who speak in tongues, but we can’t because they are more and more biased against Israel. So Hagee looks more attractive to many.”

Yes, I suppose a sincere but odd friend looks more attractive than an outright enemy. I can see how that makes sense.

Notice the bizarre prejudice against pentecostals. Where did that come from? What did pentecostals do to deserve that? As far as I know, their record on Israel is virtually pure. No inquisitions. No pogroms. The Catholics can’t compare. Neither can the Orthodox churches or the Anglican Church. Not even the Baptists. I’m not trying to rub salt in old wounds, but things have happened, and they can’t be denied. What’s the deal with fearing one of the few groups of Christians that have not caused problems?

I have been involved with the pentecostals in one way or another since the early 1980s, and while they have many faults, I can tell you that I have consistently heard one message about the Jews and Israel: SUPPORT. Regardless of the nature of the reaction. Support, support, support. Not to gain influence in Israel, but to please God. Pentecostals would continue to support Israel even if Elijah appeared on a cloud and informed them that there was no possibility that any Jew would ever convert again. And they do not see themselves as “the real Jews,” and they do not want to move to Israel and take over.

I know pentecostals wish Jews would convert, and from time to time they proselytize. And some (some) have been known to say that Jews can’t enter heaven, because they haven’t accepted Christ. I can’t think of any other potential sore spots.

I have to wonder. Is it the bold and consuming faith of the newer Protestants that puts off Jews? Some people like God best when He is kept at arm’s length, and they’re freaked out by people who want Him closer. Is it our conservative streak? It’s completely unrealistic, at this time in history, to expect liberalism and support for Israel to exist in the same body of individuals. Maybe Jews are disturbed by the thing that makes pentecostals pentecostal. This guy mentioned tongues. Most Jews believe things like prophecy are dead. Maybe it offends them to see modern people who are not Jews, asserting that the Holy Spirit communicates with them.

Should any of those things make mainline churches preferable? To the Jews, we’re all heretics. What difference does degree make?

It’s confusing.

Check out this quotation from a recent website post by the IFCJ’s Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein:

I’ve spoken before about anti-Israel sentiment in “mainline” Protestant denominations like the Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA), the United Church of Christ (UCC), the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), and others. In recent years these groups have considered, and in some cases approved, measures that seek to punish Israel economically through divestment and condemn Israel’s attempts to defend itself through construction of a security fence.

Maybe the Jews are coming around. I know Rabbi Eckstein has. I hate to say this, but maybe appeasement is a concept that applies to watered-down Christian churches as well as Islamists. Israel can’t make the UCC happy. Why try? Rabbi Eckstein has said, “The Bible Belt is Israel’s safety belt.” I say, take your friends where you find them. Cyrus and Darius were primitive, warlike Gentiles, yet the Jews allowed them to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem. Surely John Hagee is easier to stomach than they were.

If I could be present, even at a distance, at the building of the next temple, and if I could see one stone I paid for put into place, I would fall on my face and weep at the honor. And so would millions of other American Christians.

It’s going to turn out, in the years to come, that most Christians are enemies of Israel. We’re already headed that way. The Jews need to discern the sheep from the goats and figure out which churches truly want to help. Urging appeasement and land concessions is not help.

Christians, who readily accept Jesus’s pronouncement that the church of his time was “the synagogue of Satan,” tend to feel that their enlightened churches are immune to corruption, and that they can’t be used by the enemy. But it’s not true. As churches age, they tend to conform to the world. And the very things that make them effective and sincere–their “saltness”–are the things that are discarded first. God becomes a myth. Jesus becomes a well-meaning eccentric who was mistaken when he said he was the only path to salvation. Regeneration by the Holy Spirit–the power supply of the body of Christ–is completely dropped as a doctrine. First thing you know, the church is inviting Oprah to stand at the pulpit and explain that every individual creates his own god, and that they’re all valid. That’s what she’s doing right now, if you didn’t know. She has hooked up with a false messiah who basically says anything goes, and she’s financing his sick, evil ministry. People seem to think one or two billion dollars automatically make you worth listening to. But the super-rich are just like you and I. Ordinary. Human. Mortal.

It’s only natural that mainline churches would be corrupted by the enemy and used to persecute Jews and, as Rabbi Eckstein calls them, “Christians who take the Bible seriously.” It’s happening. It’s going to get worse. Satan does much of his best work using the church, because he passes it off as God’s work, making it unassailable. Christians aren’t naturally smarter or better than Jews, and when we operate purely under our own strength, we are just as susceptible to misdirection. Churches that stick to old-fashioned, scriptural morality and rely on the Holy Spirit will be okay. Churches that are accepted by the godless world and by bizarre multifaith bodies will not. And a church’s treatment of Israel will be one way to tell the difference. No church that opposes Israel is led by God.

Jews and Bible-believing Christians make up one faction, and the rest of the world makes up the other. The spirit of anti-Semitism is the spirit that drives persecution of Bible-believe Christians. We may not be Jews, but we wear the same target on our backs. The world hates us for the same reason. So it’s wonderful to see bonds like those formed by Pastor Hagee and Rabbi Eckstein. In the future, they will be much more important than they are now.

Math Makes my Head Hurt

I just had an Oskar Schindler moment.

A while back I went to the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews site, and I ordered one of their free DVDs. I always take anything that’s free. I watched most of it yesterday. Wonderful stuff, about the Jewish underpinnings of Christianity. And of course, during the breaks, they talked about what the IFCJ does. At one point, they showed Ethiopian Jews, walking off an airplane onto the tarmac at Ben Gurion. I think it was a mother and two small kids.

A thousand dollars. That’s about what they cost. It costs $350 per person for you to fly a Jew to Israel, via the IFCJ’s On the Wings of Eagles program, so those three people represent about a thousand dollars.

I was thinking about that a minute ago, and I thought of Eliot Spitzer, spending $5500 an hour on prostitutes. For the price of an hour you could bring about 16 people to Israel. Lives changed forever. Oppression, gone. Persecution, gone. Charitable operations that give people one-time gifts of food and clothing are wonderful, but those things are of fleeting value. Change a person’s nation of residence, and with one act, you’ve made a change that will bless that person every day for the rest of his life. What if Eliot Spitzer had decided, on ten occasions, to send Jews to Israel instead of hiring prostitutes? There would be 157 people in Israel now, who would owe him a debt they could never repay. So easy for him, so hard for them.

I know it’s a crazy way to think. Unless Spitzer is very unlike other wealthy Jews, he has given plenty to charity. And if he hadn’t spent the money on prostitutes, he probably would have spent it on some other selfish item, and we all do that. It’s part of life. But it’s fascinating to think of the very different ways in which the same sum of money can affect the world. An hour of stupidity and lust, or sixteen changed lives.

I guess this is why I like telling people about matching gifts. Just as money spent on prostitutes differs from money spent flying poor Jews to Israel, one charity dollar spent on one program can differ from money spent on another, if the second program has a matching gift. For a certain sum, you might buy ten pounds of rice for people in Africa, or you might buy a hundred and fifty pounds, because various corporations match your gift. Money is so strange. One sum can do so many different things.

The IFCJ’s program has something many charities lack. Measurable, substantial, final results. As I said earlier today, they say they’ve flown over 300,000 Jews to Israel. Think of that! One in twenty Israelis! It’s not like other efforts, like the one in Darfur. People give and give and give, and years pass, and it seems like nothing changes. The bucket has a hole in it. Obviously, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give to people with persistent, stubborn problems. But there is something wonderful and reinforcing about knowing you accomplished something that can’t be undone.

Other charities have opportunities that are equally quantifiable, if less lasting. You can use the Gift Catalog at World Vision and buy a certain number of named items for a given price. For example, Bibles at $18 each. If you were to spend $72, you would know that somewhere in the world, four people had Bibles you paid for. You wouldn’t wonder if your contribution ran out of a hole in a sack in a grain warehouse. You wouldn’t wonder if some local fat cat skimmed it off the top. You could make yourself a list, and whenever you got discouraged about giving, you could look at the list and see the things you put in the hands of individuals. You wouldn’t necessarily know who they were, but you’d know what they got. Charities often have a “where most needed” option, and that seems like the most logical way to direct your money, but maybe the reinforcement of knowing exactly what you gave outweighs the benefit of doing more good, because it might make you more likely to continue giving.

The Gift Catalog is very humbling. You look at the things World Vision’s beneficiaries are thrilled to receive, and it breaks your heart. A small fishing kit. A single blanket. A handful of seeds. Seriously. Go look.

I guess that when you decide you want to give, you have a responsibility to shop, the same way you would shop if you were buying a computer or a refrigerator. This is why I generally turn down people who solicit money on the street. I usually can’t make a sound decision in five seconds. And I guess that when you decide what luxuries you want to buy for yourself, you might be smart to think about how many blankets or fishing kits the money would buy. Maybe that’s the way to understand how blessed you are and how much you owe to God. I have a custom-made suit I have probably worn six times. Suddenly I’m ashamed of it.

Don’t start telling me I’m an angel. If you read this blog, you know better. God has done a lot of work on me over the last couple of years. God gives you the ability to be good, and then He gives you the pleasure, and then He gives you a reward for it. How wild is that? If I had had my way, I would have stayed the same or gotten worse.

Lately I feel better about being good. Isn’t that crazy? Why would anyone need to feel better about being good? I have absorbed a lot of garbage from my surroundings, and I have made it part of me. For many years, I tried to squelch the empathy and openness I was born with, because I was surrounded by aggressors. Maybe God is peeling that uncomfortable crust off of me.

I had an idea the other day. A way someone could do a tremendous amount of good with no exertion and no cash out of pocket. You could put up a blog–Blogspot would be adequate–and you could contact a few charities. You could ask them to email you when they had special opportunities or needs or matching gifts. Then you could post links every day or two. People could come by when they wanted to see what was available. And if they wanted, they could copy the code from the latest entry and repost it on their own sites. Pretty easy.

Turns out the domain “matchinggifts.com” is taken. But it’s not a very good site. I couldn’t get it to work.

Maybe someone more focused than I am will figure out a way to do it.

Who is Austin Bay?

Moxie links to a marvelous piece about Eretz Israel.

Warning: I may be pulling your leg.

Rimfire Scope Installed

I got me a new scope. Ordered it off Ebay. It’s a 3-9x40mm Bushnell rimfire scope, for the Nylon 66 rifle. Some say the receiver on this rifle is too flexible to work well with a scope. Others say it will work fine. I’ll find out on Thursday.

Seems like the .22 is the biggest bargain in shooting. It’s accurate at under a hundred yards. The ammunition is nearly free. The rifles are cheap. You can kill surprisingly large game with it. You barely need ear protection. And it’s easy to shoot.

Milsurps can be very cheap and accurate and useful. But the ammunition costs money, and the optics are three times as expensive as rimfire optics. I know milsurps are useful for game a .22 can’t reliably kill, and I’m sure they’re better for self-defense. But on the whole, I give the nod to the .22. What do you think? Kim du Toit described it as a tool everyone should have, if memory serves. Like a beer opener.

If I can’t get good accuracy with the Nylon 66 and a scope, I’m going to get a Savage. They’re very cheap, and they’re supposed to be like lasers. I can’t think of anything that would improve my rifle shooting as much as a gun that accurately shoots dirt-cheap ammunition, with no recoil.

I still have to fill out the forms for my C& R license. If you ever want to pee yourself with fear in the middle of the day, send a request to the DOJ, forget about it, and then reach into your mailbox and take out a thick DOJ envelope with your name on it. I started thinking about all the tax returns I’ve ever filed. I overpay, because I’m lazy. But you never know when you might misplace a decimal point.

I know the IRS does its own black ops. They don’t need the DOJ to send their horrifying emails. But I couldn’t think of anything else I might have done wrong.

Oh Yeah, This Will Work

The news from Israel could be better.

First off, Leah Friedman is off her ventilator, but it is not yet clear how much brain damage she suffered when she went into respiratory arrest. So keep those prayers coming.

The local representatives of the Religion of Peace are doing their part to provide comfort at this trying time. Leah, who supports the reestablishment of Eretz Israel, has received five death threats by email and some others by phone. You have to congratulate Muslim terrorists on their uncanny ability to demonstrate their umatched cowardice by finding the weakest, least threatening victims on the face of the planet. In that regard, it’s hard to top an eighteen-year-old girl in a coma. Although they did beat and hang the dead bodies of American contractors in Iraq; that was even less brave than what they’re doing to Leah. It’s odd how often the people who clamor most for respect are among the least deserving.

One of the peculiar characteristics of thugs is that they try to make themselves appear manly and intimidating by means of shameful attacks on people who have no chance of fighting back. The elderly, women, children, and so on. Somehow they don’t realize it makes them look weak and small and underdeveloped. Like little boys. Which is what they remain, until the day they die.

Leah’s parents took her photo and email address off her blog. The damage is already done, but maybe her story will serve as a warning to other people who blog and who may be inviting reprisals without knowing it. If you’re a woman, you should never reveal your entire name and location on a blog, unless you carry a gun and you’re willing to face the consequences of your openness. And children just shouldn’t blog. Not unless every bit of their personal information is kept out of it, and their parents approve everything they put on the web. In my opinion, no one under the age of eighteen has any business whatsoever using the Internet without an adult standing behind him at all times.

Second, via Sondra, left-wing bloggers are going to Israel on a fact-finding mission. That’s like sending a rabbi to certify a kosher pork-processing plant. And you don’t need to go to Israel to learn the facts. These lying creeps already know the facts. They just don’t care. According to Ynet news, Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has been working hard to arrange this. It’s distressing to learn that the government of Israel is that foolish and uninformed.

Here is a politic and understated quotation from the article:

While Israel enjoys relatively balanced coverage in American mainstream media, there are numerous blogs identifying with the liberal left who are unwaveringly critical of Israeli policies, often referring to Israel as an apartheid state which, among other things, is responsible for Washington’s decision to go to war in Iraq.

“Relatively balanced.” Like a car on two wheels, which hasn’t quite reached the tipping point.

This trip is a mistake. The Israelis clearly have no understanding of the American left. That’s probably because so many Israelis are leftists and suffer from the ridiculous, idealist notion that other leftists are their brothers. They ought to keep two famous Georges in mind. The first is George Santayana, who made the famous remark about repeating history. The second is George Bush, who reached across the aisle repeatedly and always retrieved a bloody stump for his efforts. These bloggers are going to continue to attack Israel unfairly and dishonestly, because they are not driven by facts. They are driven by fashion and a perverted secular faith. The only difference between their pre- and post-visit coverage will be that they will be able to claim more legitimacy after returning home, because they went and saw the elephant for themselves.

Israelis are downright stupid about America. In polls, they say they think the Democrats will be better to them than Republicans. They would generally prefer to see liberals elected in the United States. This is one of the few areas in which they are in complete agreement with Osama bin Laden and other Muslim terrorists. Maybe it’s something they can build on. Maybe if they gave away more land, the Islamists would come to the table and celebrate this common view with them.

Jewish liberalism is probably the single greatest threat to Israel’s existence. In this respect it has completely supplanted Baal, Tammuz, Ashtoreth, Dagon, and the golden calf. Who needs an idol made of wood or gold when you have Karl Marx? And who needs strong enemies without, to conquer you in battle and take your land, when you have stronger enemies within, willing to give it back no matter how many times you buy it with blood?

Jews seem willing to forgive leftism no matter how many times it fails or how much it costs them. It failed in the USSR, but that’s because they didn’t do it right. It is costing them the battle against their genocidal, land-grabbing enemies, but that’s okay, because eventually, the Muslims will see that the Jews are decent, reasonable people, and they’ll want to coexist in peace. The way you would expect followers of a murdering gangster to do. The way they’ve always coexisted peacefully with each other.

You know what they ought to call the conflict between Israelis and Muslims? The Warm War. It’s too friendly and loving to be a cold war. Israel and the Bush administration are cozying up to Islamism and cuddling it, spoon-feeding it concessions and ignoring its dirty diapers.

I hope Israel learns from this futile and unbelievably naive experiment. I hope they learn something from the vitriol that continues to spew after these bloggers go home. But they won’t. Not any time soon.

A famous anecdote–mentioned in a recent Hal Lindsey column–says that Frederick the Great once asked his cabinet for a proof of the existence of God. And one of them said, “Have you considered the Jew, your majesty?” He was referring to the fact that Jews survived in spite of persecution. You might as well say, “Have you considered Israel?” One dumb decision after another, yet still she survives.

I guess the blogger trip is not that big a deal. The Jews survived Hitler, and they can survive Markos Zuniga.

Here’s a question: when is Israel going to pay conservative bloggers to travel to Jerusalem and come back and write fairly about Israel’s problems?

Oh, that’s right. They don’t have to. We do that already.

Interesting fact, before I go. Yesterday I learned that On Wings of Eagles, a program implemented by the conservative-Christian-funded International Federation of Christians and Jews, has moved over 300,000 Jews to Israel. That’s 5% of the population. One in twenty Israelis.

Hope that means as much to Israelis as a nearly fair blurb on Atrios.

PLEASE

I keep seeing and hearing that Condi Rice is going to be McCain’s running mate. Just in case it turns out that McCain is really that stupid, let me suggest three alternative choices that would be more popular with black voters.

1. David Duke
2. Tom Metzger
3. Duane “Dog” Chapman

Surely McCain will not do something this dumb. Surely he learned something from McCain-Feingold. If there is a person in the United States who is more uniformly hated by black voters than Condi Rice, I am hard-pressed to guess who it is. Black voters who would not leave their homes to vote for Obama will crawl on their bellies through molten lava to vote against Rice.

Are we really this out of touch? I was just starting to feel good about this election.