The Economic Inevitability of War

My heading reads, "People come to this blog seeking information on Albinism, the Miller kidnapping saga, the Duggar adultery scandal, Tom White's suicide, Donn Ketcham's philandering, Arthur and Sherry Blessitt's divorce, Michael Pearl's hypocrisy, Barack Obama's birth, or Pat and Jill Williams."
These are the main topics that have driven viewers to my blog for the last couple of decades, and I note that The Iran War is not listed as such a topic, even though I wrote on it prolifically back in 2012. It's ironic that what I expended so much effort on researching and predicting, when it finally happened, was such a non-event in the grand scheme of things that it's already been almost forgotten, less than a year later.
But such is the nature of war: every new war is fought because people forgot the lessons learned from the last one.
I grew up studying World War Two. The leaders of my day had all come up through that war, and one of the lessons they learned was that one typical cause of war is treating an enemy like a major trading partner, or a major trading partner like an enemy--especially when one swiches from one approach to the other.
Case in point, Japan. The US government disapproved of Japan invading China, all the while serving as a major trading partner, allowing Japan to build up a huge navy with steel purchased from America. But no problem, that navy wasn't being used to invade China, and the US wasn't at war with Japan. Right?
When the US finally decided that enough was enough and cut off Japan's supply of oil and steel, Pearl Harbor became inevitable.
But alas, the generation that learned that lesson is long gone from power, and the current generation are having to learn it anew for themselves. The West has spent the last three decades enriching Russia by buying their oil and gas--money which Putin stashed in Russia's war chest to get them through the inevitable sanctions that would follow his invasion of Ukraine--kind of like Japan frantically building the ships that would destroy Pearl Harbor in advance of the sanctions that would follow their invasion of China.
Ukraine, for their part, have largely removed the Russian threat--at least the conventional one. But what about China? Over the past three decades, the West moved most of its industrial facilities to this communist nation to save money, which means that now, should they decide to sanction us, we would be as outmatched economically as the American South was when they launched the War Between the States.
This is why wars are inevitable. The love of money drives free people to enable the leaders of enslaved countries, and greed for land drives the leaders of enslaved countries to invade their neighbors.
Free people could, should they so choose, live without supporting dictatorial regimes. But they can always live a little better when they do. But alas, dictatorial regimes are never content to enslave their own poeople; they are also driven to conquer their neighbors. So the cycle of: 1) Build up the enemy's resources while pretending they are not an enemy; 2)Finally admit they are an enemy and cut off supplies to their war chest right about the time it's full anyway; 3) Suffer attack and loss from the very enemy you enabled to infict it; runs its course at least once in every mortal lifetime.
I've lived long enough to see Russia go from a mortal enemy, to a major trading partner, and back to a mortal enemy again, with American-made missles soon to rain down destruction on Russia for the first time in their mutal history. Such is the inevitability of war.

What now, Google?

Whilst the US Federal Government is locked in shutdown, something unexplained has happened to this blog: it's gone viral. Unlike before, it's not a single post that has gone viral, but viewership of the blog in general has shot up from one or two per day to dozens--and in the past few days, hundreds. I can't imagine why, other than that Google is no longer suppressing me in their search results. For example, a search on the phrase "white man blog" brings up a link to this blog in the very first line, something that hasn't been the case for many years.
I'll let my readers know if and when I figure out just what happened to bring this about. And, since I now have so many more readers, I'll make a point of posting more frequently than I have been for these last few months.

A life not wasted on education

There's been a bit of a buzz recently regarding a ground-breaking discovery by a young mathematician who goes by the name Hannah Cairo. You won't read anything about it in the linked article, but this teenager who is generally regarded as female is actually an imposter in that role, having started out life as a male whose Christian name has been so effectively wiped from the record that I will just be referring to him in this article as Cairo (in that, at least, I have literary company).
What interests me the most about this story is not that a teenager was able to solve a 40-year old problem in higher mathematics, but that doing so was able to propel him over several of the barriers that have been erected to keep free-thinking individuals out of higher education. Cairo, you see, will be entering a doctoral program in mathematics at the age of seventeen. What’s so unprecedented about this is that he not only doesn’t have a master’s degree in the field, the usual prerequisite for embarking on a doctrinal program—-he doesn’t even have an undergraduate degree. And for what it’s worth, he’s never even been to high school; he went directly from homeschool to taking advanced college math classes.
Now, the vast majority of universities to which Cairo applied did turn him down, citing the usual standards of their gatekeepers. But he was accepted by the graduate schools of Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland, who were somehow able to make enough exceptions to their enrollment policies to squeeze him in.
Decades ago, I noted the irony of Lynn Conway bragging about being the only woman in her electrical engineering graduate program at MIT, when in fact Conway was a man named Robert at the time (it's also very interesting to note that Conway went on to become a tenured professor at the University of Michigan, without having jumped through the requisite hoop of first obtaining a doctoral degree). Now, I note the irony that an alleged female math prodigy can’t be celebrated as such because it would only bring attention the fact that he’s actually a male. The article can only emphasize Cairo’s youth as an unusual aspect of his accomplishment, not his alleged gender. And I have to wonder whether Cairo would have stood any chance of hurdling over the entrance barriers to the PhD program he’s now entering had he not been granted special handling due to self-inclusion in the protected class of transgender.
What does it tell you that, as a male, Cairo would have been sent back to high school to jump through dozens more hoops on his way to eventual stardom, but as a female, he found the hoops magically disappearing before him? The movie Some Like it Hot seems eerily prophetic on this note.

FINALLY!

Over a dozen years later, my prediction of a decisive blow by Israel to take out Iran's nuclear capacity has finally come true. DEVELOPING . . .

Did Jackie Shroyer murder her husband?

To cut to the chase, the answer to the question I just asked is "no," although she was charged this week as "co-author" of his murder and will be facing trial sometime in the next year or so in Angola.
According to this Minnesota news website, Beau Shroyer was killed in "an act of violence" on October 25, 2024 on the outskirts of Humpata, Angola, where he and his wife Jackie were serving as missionaries with their children.
As more news came out, it appeared that Jackie was implicate in his death, the story being that she had hired one of their security guards to stab him, using a knife from their kitchen, for figures variously cited at $5000 or $50,000. This due to her being in an affair with the guard, and wanting her husband out of the picture.

Now, I'm not saying that missionary wives never cheat on their husbands, or vice versa--despite the rigorous screening that occurrs as part of the missionary application process, it does happen; but these allegations simply defy logic, and it appears that all of them are coming from Jackie's co-defenents, all of whom are said to have criminal records.
Now, I'm not saying that missionaries have never been known to murder their spouses, or even to feign distress when they learn of the news, but the story here is totally different. Jackie was present (if temporarily out of the scene) when her husband was murdered, so there's no question of her killing him; she didn't. The only question is whether she conspired to have it done, and it appears that the only allegations that she did, are coming from the killers themselves. That doesn't strike me as credible testimony whatsoever.
Furthermore, the money. Missionary families don't have $5000 laying around that they can spend on hit jobs, much less $50,000. Yes, they may have spent thousands of dollars on a security fence in their high-crime neighborhood, and maybe that's what planted that outlandish figure in the security guard's head, but such funds are carefully allocated, and there's no way Jackie could have slipped $5000 out of the pot to fund her husband's murder.
Without having access to any more of the facts than have come forth so far, I'm calling foul on these allegations, and unless further evidence comes out that actually implicates Jackie, I don't believe them.

I'm praying for Jackie, currently incarcerated in an Angolan hellhole, and their five children, now back in Minnesota with relatives. They NEED our prayers. Here is a video of the Shroyers' testimonies.
I'm also praying for Isalino Kayoo, Gelson Ramos, and Bernadino Elias, the other three implicated in this murder.

Finally, a Presidential Penny Policy.

Seventeen years ago, I noted that minting pennies was a drain on the Treasury, and forecast an end to the practice within the next decade. Like most of my predictions, I was over a decade ahead of the game, as it is only now that President Trump has indicated that US Pennies will no longer be produced.

The Nude New Jews (and Jewesses)

I have written earlier about nude baptism being the standard of the early church, and that the office of deaconess was orginially tied in with the responsibility to minister to female baptizands; it turns out that this practice was actually inherited from the Jews (edited to add: I noticed that one of my commenters had already pointed this out).

I quote here Gill's comments on Matthew 23:15 (note that, being a Whelmist, he is reluctant to transliterate the word in question):

The Ethiopic version reads the words, "baptize one proselyte, and when he is baptized"; referring to a custom among the Jews, who baptized; or dipped their proselytes in water, as well as circumcised them; about which there are great disputes in their writings; some alleging, that the dipping of them was necessary to the making them proselytes . . when he is healed [from the circumcism] they immediately dip him; and two disciples of the wise men stand over him, and acquaint him with some of the light commands, and some of the heavy commands; then he dips, and comes up, and is as an Israelite in all respects: if a woman, the women set her in water up to her neck, and two disciples of the wise men stand by her without, and inform her of some of the light commands, and some of the heavy commands.''

"Says R. Eliezer, in the name of R. Jose ben Zimra, if all that come into the world were gathered together to create even one fly, they would not be able to put breath into it: but you will object what he saith, "the souls they made in Haran", Gen_12:5, but these are the proselytes whom Abraham proselyted; but why does he say "made", and not proselyted? to teach thee, that whoever brings near a stranger, and proselytes him, "is as if he created him". You will say Abraham made proselytes, but not Sarah: the text is, "the souls which they made in Haran": which he made is not written, but which they made: Abraham proselyted the men, and Sarah proselyted the women.''

So we can see that even in Jewish culture, baptizing was in the nude, and special considerations had to be given when women were being so baptized. This separate practiced was inherited by the Christian community.

One last post on Arthur Blessitt

As referenceed in my main article about him, Arthur Blessit has died at the age of 84-only barely outliving the US Presidential candidate he ran against for the Democratic nomination in 1976. Now that he's dead, I wanted to share one last anecdote about him that I heard from a staff member at a hospital in of one of the tropical countries he passed thorough in the 1970's. He got really bad blisters and stopped in at a missionary Hospital, where he was amazed to be treated without charge. Later some hospital employees spread the story he was really a spy, and carried a camera inside the cross. As if being able to photgraph as one walked down a road could be a national security issue.