The NIV's Reformed slant in Galatians 6:16

Part and parcel of Calvinism is the notion that the Church has replaced Israel as the object of Divine favour and as the recipient of Divine promises. Popularly called Replacement Theology, it's technically referred to as Supersessionism, and it not only serves as a doctrinal pillar of Reformed Theology, it can even be shown to have roots about as far back in Church History as we are able to go. The Epistle of Barnabas, placed by its compilers in the very text of Codex Sinaiticus and thought to date almost as early as the New Testament itself, features it as a core teaching. According to Wikipedia, it argues that the Old Testament scriptures were always intended for Christians, that the Jews misinterpreted them by taking the Law literally, and that the covenant with Israel was broken early on (linked especially to the golden calf incident). Christians alone, it argues, are the true people of God.

Now, there are a lot of Bible verses that have to be suppressed--or at least ignored--for this to work. In writing to the Romans, the apostle Paul painted a picture of the Gentiles being grafted into Israel, not replacing it. His concern with the Jews was not that God had rejected them, but that they had rejected God--a situation he clearly saw as temporary. Thus throughout the millennia, Christian scholars have wrestled with the paradox that although Israel appears to have been set aside in favor of the Church, God's eternal promises to Israel have not been, and cannot be, annulled, if the words of Scripture actually mean anything like what they say. 

Thus the Geneva Bible, in its notes on Romans 11, holds out hope that Israel will be saved eventually, but by joining the church; thus combining all of God's promises to Israel with the idea that the church would be their beneficiary. It was this very doctrine that led Oliver Cromwell to open the gates of England to Jewish immigrants, and eventually led to a widespread rejection of Supersessionism among readers of the English Bible--especially in the United States, where both Dispensationalism and Ministries to Jewish People flourished in the 20th century. It appears that which Bible translation one uses really can affect his theology, even at a national scale.

The point of this post is not to argue for or against Supersessionism, but to point out that the Committee for Bible Translation did that very thing. A main point of Replacement Theology is to equate the Church of God with the Israel of God, and this is exactly what several Bible translations do at Galatians 6:16.

Peace and mercy be upon all who walk by this rule, upon the Israel of God. --RSV
All who walk by this standard are the true Israel of God - his chosen people. Peace and mercy on them! --The Message
May God’s peace and mercy be upon all who live by this principle; they are the new people of God. --NLT
Peace and mercy to all who follow this rule—to the Israel of God. --NIV

All four of these, ranging from the fairly literal to the wildly paraphrastic, have to do one thing to be able to equate the two: ignore all three occurrences of the word και (and)--especially the last one, which appears to draw a distinction between two groups of people: "those who follow this rule" and "the Israel of God." 

Contrast this to the versions that don't leave out any of the conjunctions:
And whosoever shall follow this rule, peace on them and mercy: and upon the Israel of God. --Douay-Rheims
And as many as walk according to this rule, peace be on them, and mercy, and upon the Israel of God. --KJV
And as for all who walk by this rule, peace and mercy be upon them, and upon the Israel of God. --ESV

Here, the two categories are clearly separate. It's easy to see that someone whose theology would dictate that they equate Israel and the Church would be inclined to leave out all those 'ands' to find scriptural justification for their position.

Actually, this is one of the places where I don't think either the KJV or the NIV got it quite right. One recent craze in hermeneutics has been to find chiasms all over the scriptures, and while I think it's possible to take this way too far, the point can be made that a chiastic structure is in play in this verse, and it should actually be translated the way the HCSB did:

May peace be on all those who follow this standard, and mercy also be on the Israel of God!
 

Whether one directly translates all of the 'ands', or leaves out the first as superfluous in English, it's a doctrinal choice--not a linguistic one--to leave out all three of them.

The CBT made the doctrinal choice, by twice taking away a word from the Scriptures, to use their translation to push Replacement Theology--or at least the result was indistinguishable from if they had. This, from the Bible whose introduction states that the translators went to great lengths to avoid sectarian bias.

This post will probably undergo a lot of editing over the coming weeks, but it's been percolating in my mind long enough to finally start the process of getting it in writing.

A mathematical formula that can guarantee lottery winnings, revisited

It's been almost a decade since I first posted about the scam going around that a mathematical formula can guarantee lottery winnings. Well, I just found out that I was wrong--sort of--and I'm back to make an apology.
Joan Ginther was a math whiz as a kid, graduated at the top of her class at a small Texas high school, and went on to get a PhD in mathematics, with an emphasis on statistics, at Stanford. She then dutifully spend the next sixteen years teaching maths at small colleges in the Western US, but all that changed when she won a $5.4 million share of the Texas Lotto in 1993. Like most lotto millionaires, she quit her job. And like most lotto millionaires, she kept right on buying lottery tickets.
But here is what made Joan Ginther different: she actually HAD found a mathematical formula to guarantee lottery winnings, and she used her initial windfall to keep playing in such a way that she went on to win big two more times in the next 15 years--enough millions to keep up her lotto habit without having to borrow against future payouts. She'd found a way to lower her odds of winning from one in tens of millions down to about one in hundreds--which means that, given the right time and place, buying out her hometown Texas store's supply of lottery tickets produced better than even odds of hitting the jackpot. This she finally did in 2006, winning $10 million from one of a stack of $50 Extreme Payout tickets she'd gotten someone to purchase for her. She also allegedly hired an attorney to come to Texas, pick up the winnings, and return them to her Las Vegas hideout.

Once Texas Lottery officials realized this mega-winner obviously had some formula for buying winning tickets, they launched a full-on investigation of her. This turned out to be quite difficult to do, as she had stopped coming to Texas in person to buy the tickets, so there wasn't much to investigate. They tried to get the FBI involved, but once the FBI learned that she was using publicly available information--published by the Lottery Board itself--and legal proxy buyers, they had to patiently inform the Lotto officials that if researching ticket distributions was legal, and ordering publicly available information was legal, and hiring someone to buy and redeem tickets in your name was legal, then there was no crime to investigate.

Joan Ginther, though, never attempted to sell her forumla. Why would she? It was working fine for her. But after she cashed in for the fourth time, the ensuing investigation resulted in changes to the distribution of tickets that basically rendered her formula useless.
In 2010.
So by the time "Jared" started trying to sell me his mathematical secret to winning the lotto--if "he" had in fact managed to break into the Sanford Archives and get "his" hands on her dissertation from the early seventies (allegedly on the way winning lotto tickets were distributed)--it was already obsolete. So I do apologise for scoffing at the idea that it could be done--but I note that in the decade since I made that claim, every multiple lottery winner has turned out to be relying on fraud and inside access--not a mathematical formula. So yeah, it's not much of a mea culpa, because it doesn't have to be.

I also need to give credit due to Nathaniel Rich and Peter Mucha, the reporters who broke the story. According to Mucha, she never stopped buying Texas Lottery tickets, even after her big win, but the fifth big payout eluded her. As for me, I'm happy to go to my grave at a ripe old age never having purchased a single one.

John MacArthur and ancient baptism

A little further reaction to John MacArthur's sermon on 1 Peter 2:
It's actually a good sermon overall, encouraging believers to fill their lives with God's word. But besides reading the whole text through Calvinist glasses, John twists Christian History itself when he makes this claim:

There was an interesting routine that was followed by some early Christians in their baptism where they would be baptized in their old clothes, and then when they came out of the waters they would go to a dressing room and they would be given new clothes. This was a symbol of the fact that salvation marked the shedding of all that was old and the beginning of all that was new.

Alas, as longtime readers of this blog are aware, the ancient custom involved removing clothes, all right: but BEFORE the baptism, not after. Cyril of Jerusalem, for example, in his teaching on the Mystery of Baptism, is recorded as saying:
"As soon as you entered, you put off your tunic; and this was an image of putting off the old man with his deeds. Having stripped yourselves, you were naked; in this also imitating Christ, who was stripped naked on the Cross, and by His nakedness put off from Himself the principalities and powers, and openly triumphed over them on the tree."

John MacArthur and 1 Peter 2:2

I concluded this post with, "Calvinism, of course, does not stand or fall upon a paraphrase of 1 Peter 2:2. It is able to twist any scripture to its ends, and this one need be no exception. So why not just translate it as it stands, and leave its (mis)interpretation up to the theologians?" and I observed an interesting example of this in a sermon by the late John MacArthur that I heard recently on Christian radio.
John was exegeting 1 Peter 2 and read the verse in its entirety. Since his favourite Bible version contains the phrase, "with respect to salvation," he read that part too--but then went on to exegete the verse exactly as he would have had it not been present.

EDIT: Oh, what do you know--Grace to You has made the whole sermon available on their website, so you don't have to take my word for it.
Note what he did here: he took the words "with respect to" which are, at best, a loose paraphrase of the Greek word εις, ַand applied them literally--something I'm sure would be frowned upon if any of his homiletics students at The Masters College (formerly the Los Angeles Baptist College) tried it on virtually any other passage in the New Testament. It's a metaphor of salvation, he says. A figure of speech, not meant to be taken literally.
John, who started out preaching from the New Testament using the King James Version, switched early on to the NASB because, he said, it was so literal and close to the Greek (well, except for this verse, I guess). It should have bothered him, knowing Greek as well as he did, to see what liberties the NASB translators--some of whom he knew personally--took with this verse, but even when he helped oversee a revision of the NASB--the Legacy Standard Bible--he kept in the paraphrase, I suspect because it suited his Calvinist worldview like a literal, close-to-the-Greek translation (one that stands in the text of the ESV, but in the LSB was relegated to a footnote) never could have.

I thought that Calvinism, to pass itself off as a scriptural worldwview, would not have to rely upon a paraphrase that turned something literal on its face into a metaphor. But if that were indeed the case, why couldn't a Calvinist expositor and Bible translator, one who prides himeself in being as accurate to the literal meaning of the original languages as can reasonably be expected, handle a literal interpretation of this one verse?

A Calvinist Bias in the Translation of Hebrews 10:38--but was it an NIV innovation?

"Now the just shall live by faith: but if any man draw back, my soul shall have no pleasure in him."
--Hebrews 10:38 KJV

Note the words in italics: what happens if you try to read the verse without them?

"Now the just shall live by faith: but if draw back, my soul shall have no pleasure in him." 

Clearly, something is missing here. What is it? The singular generic pronoun 'he.'

"Now the just shall live by faith: but if he draw back, my soul shall have no pleasure in him." 

But wait! protests the Calvinist. A justified person can't lose his salvation, so how could God say that He would have no pleasure in him if he draws back? Well, before I come down to hard on the KJV here, let's see if the NIV managed to escape Calvinist bias:

“But my righteous[Some early manuscripts But the righteous]one will live by faith. And I take no pleasure in the one who shrinks back.”[Hab. 2:4 (see Septuagint)]

Oh, boy. Rather than hiding their bias in an italicized phrase, the CBT changed the personal pronout outright, obscuring the actual meaning even more.

Here is a quick rundown of the English versions WITHOUT a Calvinist bias (ie, they make 'just' or 'righteous' the antecedent:
ASV But my righteous one shall live by faith: And if he shrink back, my soul hath no pleasure in him.
AMP But My righteous one [the one justified by faith] shall live by faith [respecting man’s relationship to God and trusting Him]; And if he draws back [shrinking in fear], My soul has no delight in him.
CJB But the person who is righteous will live his life by trusting, and if he shrinks back, I will not be pleased with him.
ESV but my righteous one shall live by faith, and if he shrinks back, my soul has no pleasure in him.
HCSB But My righteous one will live by faith; and if he draws back, I have no pleasure in him.

Some versions are even able to play around with gender and number without making the one who turns back a different category than the just:

GNT My righteous people, however, will believe and live; but if any of them turns back, I will not be pleased with them.

But it looks like ALL translations based on the TR--starting with that bastion of Calvinist translation, the Geneva Bible--twist the text to separate the one who lives by faith from the one who turns away. An intersting exception is Young's Literal Translation, which makes the separation but blames it on being two separate quotes from the Old Testament:
and `the righteous by faith shall live,' and `if he may draw back, My soul hath no pleasure in him,'
Green's Literal Translation goes one step further, cutting the NT verse into THREE OT quotes, with reciepts:
"But the just shall live by faith;" "and if he draws back," "My soul is not pleased in him." Hab. 2:4; Zeph. 1:6; Mal. 1:10 
The problem with that third reference, though, is that it switches the person from second to third--Green should have put the end quotes after "pleased."

Now, the theme of drawing back is a big one in Hebrews, with five different passages warning of the danger of drawing back:
Hebrews 2:1-4 — Warning against drifting away from the message of salvation.
Hebrews 3:7–4:13 — Warning against unbelief and failing to enter God's rest (drawing from Psalm 95 and the wilderness generation).
Hebrews 5:11–6:12 (with the core warning in 6:4-8) — Warning against falling away after receiving enlightenment and spiritual privileges.
Hebrews 10:19-39 (especially 10:26-31) — Warning against willful sin and the terrifying prospect of judgment.
Hebrews 12:14-29 — Warning against refusing God's voice and failing to receive the unshakable kingdom.

Calvinists have their work cut out for them, proving in each of the five cases that these warnings don't apply to anyone that God has already justified. But it appears they needed a little help in this fourth passage, cutting the link between the just person and the one that draws back--a link so obviouls that dozens of English Versions had translators who could see it, and weren't ashamed to admit it. It's odd that the CBT, in cutting themselves loose from a lot of the language of the KJV, were unable to do what so many other modern Bible Version editors have done, and cut themselves free from its Calvinist bias as well.

In Which Michael Pearl Shows Himself to be Scripturally Illiterate

In this video, Michael Pearl attempts to dismantle the doctrine of pacifism, and in so doing he exposits Matthew 10, where Jesus sends out his disciples with no supplies. He reads the word "scrip" as if it were "script" and defines it as "Bible, books, notes, writing paper."
In fact, "scrip" is an old English word for the bag in which a traveler carried his supplies. Since Jesus was sending them out without supplies, he of course didn't expect them to tote around an empty rucksack. But in literally misreading this archaic word as something else, Michael totally misses out on its meaning. This didn't have to happen; had he just used a concordance to look up all seven uses of the word 'scrip' in the KJV, he would see it used six times in this same context, and once more--THE FIRST MENTION--for the shepherd's bag in which David stashed the stones that he took with him to take on Goliath.
David didn't wrap those five smooth stones in a book, or a bundle of writing paper; he put them in a BAG.
You can stop watching the video right there, because Michael Pearl does not have a sufficient understanding of the Bible to be trusted to explain the rest of what Jesus meant in those gospel passages.

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 photograph as one walked down a road could be a national security issue.

Jenkins v. Miller et al update

First of all, the platform host seems to have relented a bit and has allowe me to sign on without providing a second email address, so I'm back to being incognito, until further notice. So I'll go ahead and share more of what I have been able to learn about Janet Jenknin's RICO lawsuit against everyone who helped Lisa Miller shelter her daughter from the reach of her evil stepmother. Most of what I'll share is based on this website.
First of all, we learn the reason Lisa Miller is no longer named in the lawsuit: she settled privately, on the grounds that she waive her attorney-client privilege. Having accomplished that, the fight has moved into the area of just how much privileged material has to be provided. Lisa's legal team is arguing that her journals, retained by her lawyer for safekeeping, should be excluded, on the grounds of the right to personal privacy, and in a stroke of pure irony, they cite Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court ruling on birth control that opened up the way for Roe v. Wade and Obergeffel v. Hodges. The court shows the difficulty of settiling these issues ahead of the trial, giving us some clue as to why the lawyer fees continue to rack up without much progress. We are, as it turns out, on rather uncharted ground here.
"It is challenging to formulate a discovery plan that allows disclosure of the relevant portions of the journals while simultaneously protecting Miller's privacy. The journals likely contain private information that is irrelevant to the case. See, e.g., ECF No. 794 at 2 (Miller declaration stating that the journals contain “intimate details of romantic relations, financial struggles, personal reflections, and reflections on [her] day to day life”). On the other hand, for the reasons outlined above, they also likely contain private details relevant to the alleged conspiracy, including Miller's “spiritual beliefs” and even her “legal struggles with Ms. Jenkins.” --Jenkins v. Miller, 2:12-cv-184, 15 (D. Vt. Jun. 26, 2024)
What's particulary bizzare is that the court pages aloud through some of the allegedly privileged information, musing as to whether or not it should be allowed to be brought up at the trial--at the same time publishing it for all the world to see. In the end, it allowed the litigant to almost entirely pierce the veil of secrecy customarily allowed to a defendent in communication with his defense team.
And, despite Isabella's depostition that she is in no way having her interests defended by this proceeding, they still continue the legal fiction that this is all in the best interests of the "kidnap victim."
At last report, all defendents and ex-defendents who were overseas at various stages of this legal saga remain the the US pending outcome of the case.

Going dark?

I'm certainly not done posting on this forum, but I'm not sure how much longer I will be able to do so. The platform host is making it almost impossible to carry forward as an anomymous blog: they no longer allow me to log in just using my password, which means that I have to compromise my anonymity every time I post. Unless I can find a secure way of signing in, I won't be posting anything controversial here from now on out. So I may as well add now, that a comment which subsequently disappeared before I could approve it, noted that Donn Ketchum has quietly passed away.

Another win for Israel

For someone who’s been virtually beating the drums on an upcoming Israeli-Iranian war for well over a decade, it may seem odd that I haven’t weighed in much with that very war now having turned to a hot one. I guess the main reason is that there is so much available elsewhere, that I’d mostly be regurgitating what my readers could already find out on their own. But there’s a reason why I decided to finally weigh in, and that is that Israel’s latest move this past Shabbat was so brilliantly planned an executed on every level, it will not only go down in the annals of military exploits, but in and of itself basically elevates Israel to the level of regional superpower. Let’s briefly go over the ways in which this attack set precedents.

First of all—according to the New York Times—this is the first time in their decades-long struggle against Iranian aggression that Israel has openly admitted to attacking Iran. This signals a new boldness along with an outright stated intent to retaliate in kind if Iran decides to follow up this attack with one of their own. Iran is on notice: Look what we were able to do to you. We’re done for now; whether or not we come back to finish the job is totally dependent on your response.

Secondly, this attack came when Israel is already engaged in an existential struggle on three fronts: Gaza, Lebanon, and the Palestinian Territory. And they did it alone: no other country was openly involved either in the planning or the execution of this attack. In fact, well-known journalist Amit Segal, in commenting on this operation, specifically highlighted how it was carried out against the express wishes of the Harris-Biden administration (yeah, that’s order in which he gave the names), and that a Trump win in the upcoming election would make for an even bolder Israel in the face of Iranian aggression.

Thirdly, the level of precision at which Israel has conducted its war with Iran is also unprecedented. They had to fly over not just one, but two hostile countries to get at their target, greatly damaging those countries’ air defenses along the way to ensure safe passage back home, and while over Iran, they were able to limit their attacks to ONLY those Iranian targets that were directly involved in targeting Israel. No other attack in history has been able to to evade the “fog of war” as this one apparently has. Remember, Iran shot down one of its own airliners on takeoff during their surprise missile attack on an American base in Iraq, irrationally fearing that it was an enemy plane coming in to retaliate.

Fourthly, the success with which Israel carried out this operation has to strike terror in the hearts of any national leader contemplating a military move against that nation. Yes, Iran was able to shoot down a few missiles and drones, but were unable to touch a single manned aircraft. Their vaunted air defense system, recently purchased at great expense from Russia, was basically disabled in a single strike, without being able to inflict any damage in kind. Iran realizes that if they do anything to retaliate, their skies are open to Israeli bombs and missiles coming back to finish the job at the same level of precision they just demonstrated.

This attack was a game-changer in the Israeli-Iranian war. Will it serve to end that war? One key component to answering that question is something you probably aren’t getting from the news, and that is the massive turning to Christ that is going on right now in Iran. An estimated million Iranians have left Islam to follow the Jewish Messiah, and thousands of mosques now sit vacant for lack of attendees. Of course these new believers want nothing of a war with Israel, and increasingly the Muslim majority is losing interest in it as well. For the first time the Iranian leadership faces heavy opposition from within their borders against retaliating for this major loss of face, and who is to say what may emerge from the major shakeup that is no doubt now underway.

As someone committed to praying for the peace of Jerusalem, I am greatly encouraged by what Israel was able to pull off, and thank God that it went so well, especially with such minimal loss of life on the Iranian side. I pray they will not have to go back, but if they do, they will eliminate the nuclear threat the Iran poses to the entire region. I have no doubt now that they are capable of it: I understand that the latest generation of bunker-buster bombs is capable of penetrating through 200 feet of solid rock, and I’m sure the Iranians never ensured that level of protection when they buried their nuclear sites in the sides of their mountains.

Miller Trial Update

I'd like to give an update on Jenkins v. Miller et al, but, not having a reporter in the courtroom this time, the information I have to share is limited and maybe even a little speculative. However, from what little I have heard directly, the trial is just about through all the motions and ready to proceed, probably in Vermont despite the defendent's insistence that since all the tortious deeds took place in Virginia, that district should be the proper venue.
I do know that Christian Aid Ministry managed to get removed from the case very early on, apparently because they had no organziational knowedge of, or involvement in, the tortious action. Lisa Miller is even off the list, apparently because her daughter testified that she doesn't consider being raised by her own mother to be kidnaping. It's still "v. Miller et al" because two of the remaining defendents, Ken and Timo, are Millers. The most recent court document I could find on the case is this one, from June, in which the plaintiff requests summary judgement (it was denied). Interesting, isn't it, that the Southern Poverty Law Center, which was founded to defend civil rights advocates against persecution in the American South, is now the primary law firm for the plantiff's attempt to persecute Christians in Virgina.

One more blow against the death penalty

It has come to my attention that another chronological record had been broken--Iwao Hakamada was sentenced to death on September 11, 1968, which makes his time spent living under a death penalty the longest in recorded history--almost 58 years now. Due to the great likelihood that he was framed, no Japanese Minister of Justice has ever been willing to approve his execution, and he was actually released in 2014 pending a retrial, making his probably also the first-ever case of death row by home detention.

Israeli-Iranian War update

My longtime readers may find this title amusing: I first began predicting an Israeli attack on Iran over a dozen years ago, and finally gave it up when it never seemed to materialize. Well, it finally has, so I may as well weight in. What Israel used to attack Iran's nuclear stronghold was a stand-off missile, also known as an ALBM. Its range was just under the crucial distance to Isfahan, so what Israel did to surmount that was remarkable: They took over Syrian airspace long enough to send in a fighter armed with an ALBM, possibly along with tankers to get it back home. From there, the fighter launched the ALMB, which was able to reach Isfahan unmolested. This is significant in a number of areas.
First, it shows the ability of Israel to hit targets anywhere in Iran without having to risk having any of its planes shot down. This is huge, as the chances of being able to pull of a manned airstrike were always low enough to provide a major incentive against it. Israel now has shown that it has the means to take on Iran on its own turf. This sortie probably served more as a test platform than a real attack, and the missile used seems to have passed that test. It is almost certain that Iran was not able to intercept the missile--they would have said so if they had done so. Now they are probably frantically working to develop that ability, but Israel has also probably learned enough from this test to do an even better job next time.
Secondly--and this is also very significant--they got away with it. Iran decided that the best face-saving move was to claim that the missile didn't do any damage. No harm, no foul, no need to follow through on their promised massive retaliation. Any Iranian soldiers who witnessed the damage done are surely sworn to secrecty, and since the damage was behind the walls of the most secure site in the country, that secret won't be very hard to keep.
So for now, the tit-for-tat has probably reached equilibrium. Israel knows it can do serious damage to Iran, and Iran knows it too--this could go a long way toward keeping any further violence to a minimum. Which is exacly what Israel hoped for in this limited response to Iran's massive--but failed--attack on their citizenry, so it appears to have been a success.