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.

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.

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.

Liberals, Conservatives, and Traditionalists

 I've been musing lately on a certain sociological phenomenon, that humanity (at least in the cultures with which I'm familiar) can be divided into three distinct categories. Now, whilst the categories are distinct, it's also a phenomenon that many people, and groups, can be placed into one category for one issue, and into yet another on a completely different issue, and that these positions can change over a generation, and over a lifetime. Now, the distinctions all relate to how people view change. Liberals embrace change, believing it by nature to be good; on the other end of the spectrum, traditionalist reject change, believing it by nature to be bad; and, in between, conservatives are reluctant to change, but do not resist it per se, realizing that it may result in an improvement, just not assuming so without testing it first. A conservative came up with these categories, so those in the other two camps may not agree that they even exist as described; being probably too close to the question to further describe one of the categories objectively, I'll just focus my detached objectivity on the others.

Liberals tend to confuse the other two categories, as the people within both categories will often line up on the opposite sides of an issue, and seem to be the same. But traditionalists will likewise confuse liberals with conservatives, as those two groups will often appear to line up on the opposite side, all depending in either case on whether the change in question has passed the testing and found the approval of the conservatives.

The labels themselves can also be problematic: traditionalists don't call themselves by that title, and even liberals often prefer a label like 'progressive'. So it's one thing to label the categories, and yet another to get people to accept the label that describes them best.

Another interesting thing is the instability seemingly inherent in two of these categories. One would think perhaps that traditionalists, who hold that no improvement is possible over the old ways, would have passed on that belief from ancient times. But it turns out that in many cases, today's traditionalists are less than a handful of generations removed from liberal who got tired of stridently proclaiming that every new thing was by its very nature an improvement over the old, decided to give the pendulum a nudge back toward the other side of the spectrum, and didn't know when or how to stop its momentum. And many liberals are but one or two generations removed from traditionalists who had made a similar decision, just in the other direction. Apparently few can long endure a residence on either edge of the spectrum; excepting those few, and of course the many for whom the pendulum has happily found rest at the bottom of the arc, all are on the move, across any given generation, in one direction or the other.

I have seen this happen over the past generation with the licensing of homosexual relationships, which has become official government policy in the USA, and indeed throughout most of the world, only within the past decade. For a long time before that it was becoming more widely acceptable to liberals, at least in theory, being part of the preference for change which their category demands. But once the public policy debate was over, and it actually began to happen, many liberal Christians found that they didn't really want to be that liberal after all—that here was one issue on which they did align more with the conservatives and traditionalists. Thus a split began between those liberals holding tight to that end of the spectrum, and those liberals (for now) who wanted to nudge things back in the other direction, and that division continues to this day among the large denominations in America. One may be tempted to think by this that some sort of revival is afoot, but it's more likely just revealing a sociological axiom at work.

The Duggar Disaster deepens

 I see that this blog is drawing in a number of people seeking information on Josh Duggar, so it's time for another update. First of all, Blogspot has announced that as of July, they will no longer be sending email updates whenever I post on this blog, so this may be the last such announcement you get. Google continues to limit my exposure, since I refuse to participate in this for mutual gain, so anything I post here will get a diminished number of views at any rate. 

Now, on to the Duggars. Josh Duggar turns out to be an incorrigible sexual addict after all, having found a way to work around every limit put on him to date. This is of course a source of deep grief to his parents; his wife appears to still be in denial (she is currently expecting their seventh child--which, if he ends up serving anywhere near the prison term he faces, is likely their last). 

Now, what can I say to all that. Well, a few things. First of all, I'm glad he got caught. As careful as he was, clearly the feds have ways of locating people who seek out and share material online that's not protected by the Bill of Rights. I'm rather astounded, though, that it was Homeland Security who investigated the matter. Obviously this sort of crimes occurred before HS was a department of the federal government, but for some reason the investigation of these crimes has been taken away from the FBI at some level and transferred to them. It is a bit of concern that a cabinet department, familiar to those in totalitarian countries as focusing on defending the ruling party from the members of the opposition, is now in charge of investigating unprotected speech. 

Secondly, I receive a lot of inappropriate emails, with (usually somewhat blurred) obscene suggestions right in the subject line. They all go directly to Spam, and I never open the images in them, or click on any link in them. But the mere fact that they are emails addressed to me means that, from the perspective of someone monitoring traffic on my server, it's possible that I look like someone who is viewing illegal material. And such material could well be sent to me disguised in such a way that I would unsuspectingly open it to view--this did happen once, several years ago. So don't be too quick to judge someone who comes under such an accusation. Josh Duggar, on the other hand, had clearly structured his computer in such a way as to hide what he was doing--even going so far as to set it up on his work computer, where he could close his office door and indulge without the risk of his wife or kids catching him in the act.

Lastly, a brief comment on the costs of fame and fortune. When the Duggars embarked on their public career, it was in the realm of politics: Jim Bob ran for an open Senate seat. He lost, big time, but the fame that ensued catapulted him into the State House, and from thence to a gig on cable television. The Duggars thought the exposure was worth the opportunity it gave them to proclaim the virtues of a godly lifestyle to the world. But was it? Less than quarter century in, it certainly doesn't look like the gain has been worth the loss. Once nice thing about poverty is that it puts a lid on one's ability to get deep into certain sins. If one has to choose between putting food on the table and purchasing an inappropriate magazine, or getting an internet subscription, it limits the temptation. So, the riches that fame brought to the Duggars did come with an intrinsic cost. And it was the laptop of a political operative that first yanked Josh out of his sheltered world and introduced him to the siren call of online pornography, so the politics that catapulted them to fame also held a hidden bite. It turns out that raising your children in an extremely sheltered environment may leave them totally unprepared for handling the real world when they are set loose in it.

I grieve with the Duggars--all three generations. It looks like those seven kids are going to pretty much grow up without a daddy, or at least with a very distant one, adultery having long ceased to be a capital offense on this continent. I grieve for the missed opportunities to have done something different, with different results.  I grieve for the failed experiment in having a lifestyle worth proclaiming to the world. But I am relieved that fame and fortune have eluded me, and my family. Whatever mistakes we have made, whatever opportunities we have missed, whatever failures we have been--it all could have been worse, far worse, had fame and fortune intervened. 

I pray for Josh--that he will not be out of the reach of full repentance. And that it will reach him before his prison term begins. 

A Petition from the Church to Donald Trump--or is it?

Here is the stunning transcript of a video available on Youtube. I provide the relevant part:

Hello everybody! Welcome back to another episode of Anabaptist Perspectives. We're here in Boston, Massachusetts at Sattler College. We're with Dean Taylor. You're the president of the college here. We're in your office, and you did a lecture on this earlier this year that really caught our attention, and we wanted to talk to you about that and and see if we can hit some of those high points. So, during that lecture you said—and it was obviously rhetorical just kind of make a point—you read a petition to our president Donald Trump. Can you just read that and then explain kind of what you're getting at there and then how that all ties in with with parts of our Mennonite history.

 Alright. Well excellent. OK. I'll start with a letter, and then I'll explain what I was thinking. Sure. OK. The idea was, it was bringing out that, you know, there's been a lot of, you know, negative things against the president, and, you know, we know we're supposed to pray for our president and pray and the government, and so the idea, you know, that all these attacks on the president that we should say something. But, in that, I wanted to make a point though because I was... what I was feeling was that too many of our people are imbibing—they're taking on this whole way of thinking of the current presidency, and that's very scary. So I wrote this petition. Here it goes.

To the president, Donald Trump:

We, the conference of Anabaptists, assembled today in Shipshewana and the free state

of Indiana, feel deep gratitude for the powerful revival that God has given our

nation's through your energy and promises joyful cooperation and the

upbuilding of our fatherland through the power of the Gospel, faithful to the

motto of our forefathers, "No other foundation can anyone lay than that

which is laid which is Jesus Christ." With greatest excitement, we are following the

events of our beloved country and experienced in spirit the national

revolution of the American people. We are happy that, in America, after a long time,

a government that freely and openly professes God as creator stands at the

head of the nation. With special sympathy, we hear that the

government takes seriously the realization of Christian principles in

social, economic, and cultural life, and especially emphasizes the protection of the family.

And signed the conference that I was with]. 

So, the point that I was

making is that, with just a couple words changed, that was a telegram—

that was sent from the Mennonites of Germany to Adolf Hitler. 

Ken Miller Update

Ken Miller has, like the dangerous criminal the US Government believes him to be, been ordered to a Medium Security federal prison (but in his home state rather than in the state he was tried). He begins his 2 year minimum terms on March 22nd, 2016. You can send him letters of encouragement at:
Pastor Ken Miller

FCI Petersburg Medium 

1060 River Rd. 

Hopewell, VA 23860

UPDATE:
The good news is that at the last minute he was reassigned to minimum security. And, of course, no prisoner can receive mail by name, just by number. Here is the corrected contact information:

FCC Petersburg Low
Kenneth L Miller 08464-082
P.O. Box 1000
Petersburg, VA 23804

Pearl Harbor Revisited

Well, it's been going on three months since my last post, and I'm still alive, so I'd better send out another one.

I wrote this almost exactly one year before 9/11; before I had a blog.

At six in the morning of December Seventh, Nineteen Forty One, Hawaii Time, A Japanese Naval Task force of six aircraft carriers and their support craft reached a point two hundred miles north of the Hawaiian island of Oahu. As the first faint light of dawn gleamed in the eastern sky, forty-three fighter planes took to the air. These were followed by one hundred and forty bombers, many of them equipped with a secret new torpedo that was capable of operating in shallow water. Their target was the United States Pacific Fleet, which was at the moment lying at anchor in Pearl Harbor. It was Sunday, and most of the Fleet’s sailors were still asleep. It had been a busy week of one battle-preparedness drill after another, for war with Japan was considered to be just around the corner, and the fleet wanted to be ready for war when it came. It would come much sooner than any of them thought.

At six in the morning in Hawaii, it was 11:30 in the American capital, and after months of frenzied peace talks with the Japanese government, official Washington was strangely silent. The Chief of Staff of the United States Army had just returned from his usual Sunday morning horseback ride. Waiting for him in his office was an intercepted Japanese radio message instructing the Japanese diplomatic delegation that the peace talks were to be permanently broken off as of one p.m. Washington time. The message followed an earlier warning that had come in the week before, warning the Japanese embassy to destroy their code machines and stand by for a complete end to diplomatic relations. When this message was relayed to the Present of the United States on the evening of December Sixth, his response was to say: “This means war.” It was time to alert the Armed Forces in Hawaii and the Philippines to expect an imminent attack.

Back in Hawaii, as the sun came up over the eastern islands, the destroyer Ward detected an unidentified vessel in a secured area and implemented the shoot-on-sight orders that had recently been handed down. The dull thud of an underwater explosion lifted a tiny submarine to the surface of the water. It was obviously not American, and it had been right at the entrance of the Pearl Harbor Naval Base. Word reached the Admiral in Command of the Pacific Fleet that someone was attacking the base, and he hurried to get dressed. Forty-five minutes earlier, back in Washington, the top Commander of the Naval Forces had reached for the telephone to notify Hawaii that war would probably break out within hours, but changed his mind and telephoned the White House instead. At ten forty-five on a Sunday morning, the President’s phone line was busy. The top Army commander and the top Navy commander held a hasty conference, and rather that using official channels, they decided to send a warning message to their field commanders in Hawaii by Western Union Telegram. The telegram made its way across the US to a station in San Francisco, where it was relayed on through another telegraph company to their office in Honolulu. It was handed to a motorcycle-riding delivery boy who set off with the coded message just as a hundred and forty Japanese planes began to fill the sky over Oahu. It was five minutes to eight in Hawaii, and 1:25 in Washington. Two Japanese diplomats were on their way to a 2 p.m. meeting with the American Secretary of State. In their briefcases were copies of the message that had been intercepted by American Military Intelligence a day and a half earlier. Within hours the whole world would know what only a handful could now predict with certainty: The Unites States was at war.

Who was to blame for the two thousand and three sailors, two hundred and eighteen soldiers, one hundred and nine Marines, and sixty-eight civilians killed that fateful morning in Hawaii? Was it the Army and Navy commanders on the ground, who were relieved of their posts and spent the rest of the war fighting to clear their records of unspecified charges? Was it their supervisors in Washington, who right up to the minute of the attack refused to grant them access to the intercepted Japanese radio messages that caused so much alarm in Washington? Was it the president himself, who, while campaigning for an unprecedented third term in office, had assured audiences all over America that he would never, never, never, involve their sons in a foreign war? Who had, since 1939, been carrying out secret negotiations with Winston Churchill as to the conduct of a future war with Germany? Who, in the months leading up to Pearl Harbor, ordered his forces to share all intercepted intelligence information with the British--including information that was denied to his own commanders in Hawaii? Who had ordered, on July 26, that all Japanese assets in America be frozen, an order that everyone involved agreed amounted to an act of war? Who, as the Japanese attack force was secretly steaming east from its base north of Japan, gave orders to the Census Bureau to hand over a list of all the Japanese people in America?

The former commander of the Pacific Fleet, whom the President had dismissed from command at the beginning of 1941 for insisting that to base all of the Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor was to invite a Japanese surprise attack, put it this way to an investigator:

Assume you were the leader of the greatest nation in the world, and assume that you saw, in another hemisphere, the development of a power which you regarded as a threat to Western civilization as you knew it. Supposing, however, that for various reasons, your conception of the danger was not shared by your own people. Assume you saw that the only salvation of Western civilization was to repel this particular power, but that would require you to enter a foreign war for which your people were not psychologically or militarily prepared. Assume that what was needed to galvanize your own people for a unified approach towards this basic danger to civilization was an incident in which your posture was clearly of passive non-aggression and apparent unpreparedness; and the incident in question was a direct act of aggression which had no excuse or justification. Assume that you saw this potentiality developing on the horizon and it was the solution to the dilemma, as you saw it, of saving civilization and galvanizing your own people. It is conceivable, is it not, that you’d want to be sure that whatever the incident, it happened under circumstances where it was perfectly clear that you were not the aggressor, and the resulting incident galvanized your own people to a realization of the terrible threat which they faced from this totalitarian force. 

 

  What difference does it make to us who was responsible for involving our country in a war which we would have all repudiated? Who really cares, fifty-nine years later, that our nation was deceived into entering a war, a war that cost millions of human lives, by a coldhearted administration that made a calculated choice to act dishonorably in what they perceived to be the best interests of the nation and, ultimately, the entire world? 

Who really cares? I do--not because 10 years ago I stood over the hulk of the USS Arizona where it still lies at the bottom of Pearl Harbor and watched streaks of oil still bubbling up from the watery tomb where half the victims of that attack still lie buried. I care, not because I stood in the Arizona Memorial Visitors Center and listened to a tour guide go through a carefully prepared explanation of that attack, which had been modified to avoid offending the Japanese tourists who stood next to me. I care, not for reasons having anything to do with the fact that I was involved against my will in a war that could have easily been avoided. I care. The war brought about by the attack on Pearl Harbor is long since over; its survivors have by now mostly died; there are few left who still carry in their memories the horrors of that Sunday morning. Wars have come and gone since that time with enough horrors of their own. The full details of all the events leading up to Pearl Harbor will never be fully known. So what does it matter if someone in high places deliberately provoked that attack, suppressing both information that could have prevented it, and information about the attempt to let it take place?

Truth matters. The truth really does matter. What really happened really did happen, and no amount of lies, half-truths, deceptions, and cover-ups take away from that fact. I cannot stand before you today and say that the attack on Pearl Harbor came as a surprise to the highest officials in the US Government any more than I can say that the crucifixion of Jesus Christ was a plot hatched by his followers to gain public sympathy for his teachings. Regardless of what people have been told, regardless of what facts have been manipulated or suppressed, regardless of what the majority of the people believe, the truth is still true. The truth will always stand up to scrutiny. The truth will always bear up under investigation. The truth will always come out, because the truth is what really happened, and no one can ever change that, no matter how much they might wish to. You don’t even have to believe the truth to make it true--it just is.

Nickel and pencing us to death

I was in the store the other day where the cashier had run out of pennies, and was giving out change in nickels to the person ahead of me at the checkout. I pointed out that there were plenty of pennies (and a few coins of a more valuable denomination) in the 'penny jar' which is often found at the checkout counters of small stores. But the cashier wouldn't touch those pennies; apparently using them for any other purpose than providing a cash-strapped customer with access to free pennies needed to complete a purchase is culturally unacceptable. I intended to put a few of those pennies, and maybe even some of the larger denominations, to that very purpose--but as my purchase was being rung up, another store employee returned from a run to the bank, rolls of pennies in hand. I'm sure that bank run cost more than the store saved that day by giving out exact change (an inevitable result of ending all of their prices, already plenty low enough, with the digit 9).

It's been quite some years since I wrote on the upcoming demise of the American penny, and word out now is that not only the penny, but also the nickel, costs more than its face value. Yet the US Mint continues to churn them out, despite my prediction that the Obama administration would see an end to the penny. Well, in the meantime, Canada's penny, which is worth even less than America's, and produced of even cheaper metal, has in fact been pulled from distribution.

So what happens next? If the nickel and penny alike are too expensive to produce--as well as being worth less than a twentieth of what they were a century ago--the next logical step is remonetizing our currency down to the next order of magnitude; perhaps in conjunction with putting the visage of a woman on the new $10 bill.

That's probably the only way it would happen overnight.

Indiana Revival Report: Day 46

Baptisms are being held every Monday, Thursday, and Saturday. Kyle took the day off to celebrate his oldest daughter's tenth birthday in Dallas, so he didn't do any of them. He encourages whoever is discipling the believer to be the one to baptize him, so there were a lot of females baptizing females. He'd also encouraged people to reach out to their own family, so there was an elderly Puerto Rican candidate whose relative had led him to Jesus. Due to his frail physical condition, he was provided effusion in the place of baptism.

As I had predicted, a local government official was brought in to speak--the mayor, having been invited by his ex-next-door neighbor. His response to the request to share prayer requests for his city was a 20-minute prepared speech that hit on every single one of the Democrat talking points. What would Jesus think about a family losing their house because one of its members didn't have a health insurance, etc. But the striking thing was that, after basically apologizing for being a politician in a room full of Christians, he admitted that he considers himself to be a Christian, then reeled off a long list of offices he has held in his church; some of which he had to give up to serve as mayor, but--not to worry, said his pastor, Phyllis--he was serving God and the church through the government.

I note that this is a pretty solid chord struck whenever a Democrat speaks to a crowd of Christians. Republicans, on the other hand, tend to harp on the need to bring America back to its Christian roots. Democrats would respond that in their opinion, America is never more reflective of true Christianity than when it is being led by--let's face it--unbelievers.

What this revival really needs is for the local sheriff to stand up and say that due to their efforts, his deputies have a lot less to do. That hasn't happened yet, but when it does, I hope that even the mayor would be grateful. He didn't mention that none of the deputies in this county earn what any liberal would consider a living wage--something the sheriff is trying to change, but hasn't been able to push past the Republican-controlled county government.

Turns out we were never at the brink of war with Iran, after all

Taking a break from my coverage of the Indiana Revival, I return to a topic which I covered heavily a few years ago: Iran's impending production of nuclear weapons, and the likelihood that Israel would attack to forestall it. This scenario made it into Joel Rosenburg's thriller The Tehran Initiative. But it turns out to have been largely based on Israeli misinformation: Netanyahu knew that Iran wasn't that close to having The Bomb.

 According to Spy Cables – a cache of hundreds of leaked secret intelligence papers from all over the world, published by Al Jazeera's Investigative Unit in collaboration with the Guardian newspaper – at the time of Netanyahu's statement, Israel's intelligence service concluded that Iran was "not performing the activity necessary to produce weapons," estimating that Iran had 100 kilograms of uranium enriched to a level of 20 percent.

It's a bit ironic, that the Telecommunications Revolution which has made it all the easier for the government to spy upon its citizens, has also made it a lot easier for citizens to spy upon their government.

And thus the History books continue to be rewritten, with yet another version of the story.

UPDATE MAY 2015
Something happened to the cookie settings on my computer, and Google won't let me comment again. This is in response to Marko:
Thanks for joining in. I don't dispute that Al Jazeera has an agenda--but so does every  news outlet. You have to listen to both sides to know what either is being less than truthful about.

Indiana Revival Report: Day 30

Jackie came Monday night, along with her husband Dean, her mom, and most of her district staff. I didn't realize she was so tall--and Dean is even taller. She rearranged her weekly return to Washington so she could take in at least one night of the Revival. And of course she was given a chance to share. She warned that she may break out in tears, and she did. She focused on her former missionary service in Romania, and the chances she has to pray with--or for--world leaders, especially those in the Middle East. She mentioned that Israel is America's best ally, and that "those who have read Ezekiel, Daniel, and Revelation know how the story ends." Again, several pastors prayed over her. It's interesting that despite the egalitarian flavor of this movement, prayers of a rather different sort went up for "the Walorskis." There was a lot of focus on their marriage being strong despite the weekly separations. I suspect we'll begin to hear from some more local politicians before too long.

Monday was the first night of broadcasting in Spanish over WLDC, so, appropriately enough, a Hispanic pastor spoke. She was also the first female pastor so far to take to the pulpit. A man served as her interrupter, so from an English perspective at least, he delivered the written sermon.

And half the 'worship team' was of color, so the racial barrier is pretty much missing in action at Revive Indiana.

The local NBC affiliate gave detailed coverage on their 11:00 report--run supposedly because it was a slow news day, but of course this was the biggest local news item of the week. They interviewed Kyle, a sponsoring local pastor, and a high schooler who was an early instigator of the Skip for Jesus program. And news came in that yet another high school, not even in Elkhart or LaGrange County, has already approved a skip day for March Forth.

The meeting at 4:30 Monday with an assemblage of Amish bishops, ministers, and deacons (0ver 600 were invited) didn't yield any explosive results so far, but just the fact that even a few did show up to dialog with the Revive team was significant. [NOT QUITE--see next post]

I wrote earlier that Monday mornings aren't all that well attended. Not so yesterday--over 200 showed up.

Things show no sign of winding down, and there's a lot of talk about how we are going to keep this revival going long after the 52 days have come to an end. Next week, Revive Tupelo kicks into high gear--without the Revive team, who are all busy here in Indiana. A major focus there is healing between the races.

One humorous note--Kyle hardly ever lets a day go by without managing to work in a 'shameless plug' for his parents' Ace Hardware store in Middlebury.

Two responses to serious charges

There are two ways to respond to a serious charge of wrongdoing:
1. Refute the charges. This is how it's handled in a courtroom by a defense attorney.
2. Claim that the charges are so ridiculous, they aren't worth responding to. This seems to be how such things are handled everywhere else--at least by those who can actually afford the first option.

The US Government chose the second option when confronted with the charges in my most recent post.

The Sad Fate of Flight Three Seventy

I've written before about airplanes that fly into the sea, and the various reasons why this might happen. Which brings us to what may well be my final post on the fate of Flight Three Seventy.

I just ran across one theory, which doesn't seem like it would hold much water: The Electronic Fog. I quote:

The first indication the airliner may have been in trouble is when the co-pilot signed off from Malaysian air traffic control. He said �all right good night 370.� Normally he would say something like �Malaysian 370 contacting Viet Nam at 128.4 thank you goodnight.� Maybe the electronic fog had just attached itself to the aircraft so he cut the procedure short. They never contacted Viet Nam airspace and strange things started happening immediately after that last call. The fog can disable the radios. The Boeing 777 has a glass panel cockpit. All the panels could have turned off and turned blank. The pilots would have no idea of their exact heading because even the whisky compass would be spinning. They would have to rely on their mechanical backup instruments to maintain control. They are the altimeter, the airspeed indicator and the attitude indicator.

They made about a 120 degree turn to the left, apparently trying to aim for the nearest airport. It appears they went up higher trying to get above the fog and down lower trying to get below the fog but it did not detach. When the time came to the point where they should be able to identify the airport there was no visibility. They made some more turns and that would have disoriented them to the point where they are not sure of their heading anymore. Many pilots that have been in the electronic fog that crashed, went through a series of turns then became spatially disoriented and ended up entering what is known as a graveyard spiral which always ends up in death.

They may have been able to control the autopilot but the heading would have to be controlled by their input. After going through a series of turns they would be becoming disoriented so they did something similar to Flight 19. They just continued until they ran out of fuel. Also like Flight 19 they unfortunately aimed for a remote location over the ocean where they may never be found.

I think a better supported theory is that of Marc Dugain:

Dugain, a well-respected French author, argues that the Boeing 777 carrying 239 people crashed near Diego Garcia, a British island in the middle of the Indian Ocean used as a strategic air force and intelligence base by the US military, in the six-page article in Paris Match.

The US has always officially denied that flight MH370 came anywhere near Diego Garcia.

The latest theory into the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 on March 9, 2014 has all the ingredients of a spy thriller and has grabbed the French public’s attention. The former boss of Proteus Airlines travelled to the neighbouring Maldives where residents told local media on March 9th that they had seen an airliner fly in the direction of Diego Garcia. Their claims were promptly dismissed by the authorities.

“I saw a huge plane fly over us at low altitude,” a fisherman on Kudahuvadhoo island told Dugain. “I saw red and blue stripes on a white background” – the colours of Malaysia Airlines. Other witnesses confirmed the sighting.

Dugain speculates – adding to the numerous other existing hypotheses about what happened to flight MH370 – that a modern aircraft such as Malaysia Airlines' Boeing 777 could have been hijacked by a hacker. “In 2006, Boeing patented a remote control system using a computer placed inside or outside the aircraft,” he noted. This technology lead Dugain to the idea of a “soft” remote hijacking. But the writer also suggests that a fire could have led the crew to deactivate electrical devices, including transmission systems.

Whatever the initial reasons for leaving its flight path, Dugain suspects that the plane then headed to Diego Garcia, where a number of scenarios may have played out – including the US Air Force shooting it down for fear of a September 11-style attack. Dugain met the mayor of neighbouring Baarah island, who showed him pictures of a strange device found on a beach two weeks after the plane had disappeared and before the Maldives military seized it. Two aviation experts and a local military officer concluded that the object was a Boeing fire extinguisher. Dugain points out that for the extinguisher to have floated, it must have been empty, having been automatically triggered by a fire. He adds that precedent exists in which fires on board aircraft caused all passengers and crew to die of asphyxiation, while the plane’s automated systems extinguished the blaze and kept it in the air.

Okay, so we have no direct evidence of an Electronic Fog, but we do have indirect evidence of a fire on board a Boeing aircraft--along with eyewitness testimony of just such an aircraft, bearing the Malaysian livery, being where it did not belong. We know that Diego Garcia is a strategically important air base, in the center of a very strictly enforced restricted zone. By the way, the rumour that Philip Wood was imprisoned there was a cruel hoax, and easily refuted. But no one, apparently, has tried to refute the eyewitness testimony and fire extinguisher, both of which place the airliner within shoot-down range of the Naval Air Facility.

This is what apparently happened: The US shot down the plane when it looked like it was on a suicide run toward the most important US base within a thousand miles. Unsure of what they had hit, government forces didn't say anything at first, but worked to misdirect the search effort long enough to make sure they had cleaned up the crash scene. Then, realizing they could sweep the whole operation under the rug, they kept up the cover-up to this day.

You can count on official disinformation whenever there is a cover-up, and here we have it. Taking a page from the Soviet's Flight 007 playbook, a US submersible faked a sonar ping from the airliner's black box, leading search efforts to concentrate thousands of miles from where the plane was actually shot down. Everything that came out of the US role in the 'search effort' was misinformation from that point on.

This still doesn't address the question of why Flight 370 was misdirected, but the fact that the pilot had practiced simulator landings on Diego Garcia, combined with his Islamic world view, shows a man with the method, means, and motivation to set back the US War on Terror for years to come.

If he really was targeting NAF DG, there's no reason why he shouldn't have been shot down; since 9/11, it is official USG policy to shoot down a passenger jet in such a scenario.  But why admit that they did, when it turned out to be so easy to leave everything a big mystery?

UPDATE FEBRUARY 2019:
Well, the search has been called off--critically, without EVER searching in what this 60 Minutes investigation says is the most likely final resting place of the plane.

Voter manipulation by supercomputer

In this 2008 post, I wrote that one reason Bush won Ohio in 2004 was due to a huge turnout to vote for that state's Marriage Amendment (a now-unconstitutional part of their constitution).
It turns out that Karl Rove was behind much of that turnout.

In Ohio’s Democratic precincts in 2004, he says, “Rove went into union neighborhoods there and found the people who were concerned with gay marriage and just peeled them off."

The sine qua non of voter data crunching is Aristotle, Inc--founded by the guy who famously designed an atomic bomb his junior year at Princeton. Aristotle has a separate file on every voter, cataloging such minutiae as the contents of his library, his winecellar, and his gun cabinet--among other demographically useful details.  It's interesting to note that Aristotle--headquartered just around the corner from the Capitol--also has offices in Atlanta, San Francisco, Toronto, London, and Spanish Fork, Utah.

Spanish Fork, Utah?

What's in  Spanish Fork, Utah?

Well, that turns out to be the location of the NSA's ubercomputer data center.

Hmmm . . .

Why the government has to control the internet

The historic defeat of the House Majority Leader in a primary race goes to show that government officials can be incredibly unaware of what is going on at a popular level.

Or at least that is the story we are being told.

What is clear, though, is that the government wants to know everything about us. It is in their selfish interests not only to hold on to power, but to convince us that we want them to. Thus, it is inevitable that for a totalitarian government to hold on to power, it must control access to the truth. Fifty years ago, that meant government control of the newspapers, radio, and television.

No more.

Now, in order to suppress unfavorable news, the government will have to control the internet. All search engines must be kept from leading users to unfavorable sites--and must let the government know who is searching for them. The government must be able to read blogs like this one, and know who is writing them. The government must be able to read all subversive emails, and know who is sending them.

Right now, all of this is already possible--it just isn't being openly practiced. If we are ever to be kept under the thumb of a totalitarian regime, that will have to change. And you had better believe that right now, heads are being put together to figure out just how to pull that off.

Secular Government brooks no religious competition--not even from Jews in Brooklyn

The government of New York City is suing to ban stores in Brookly from posting their Hasidic version of the common but unconstitutional sign, "No shirt, no shoes, no service." “These stores are public accommodations, and they are prohibited from posting any kind of advertisement specifying a preference for one type of customer or another, or expressing discrimination against one type or another,” said Clifford Mulqueen, deputy commissioner and general counsel to the human rights commission.

Public accommodation is a legal term meaning entities like stores, public or private, that are used by the public. The signs are “pretty specific to women,” Mulqueen said. “It seems pretty clear that it’s geared toward women dressing modestly if they choose to come into the store, and that would be discrimination.”

There are two problems with this idea: one, no customer has EVER complained about being denied service on the grounds of immodesty--no male, no female, no other. Secondly, just because an unemployed city official could construe something as being unacceptably discriminatory, that doesn't mean it is. No one has grounds to sue against these regulations, because no one has been harmed by them.

Government continues to grow until it becomes so oppressive that the remaining populace resort to violence to throw it off their backs. Or, they could vote the bums out, but that never seems to happen.

Legislators laze, pilots perish

It is with great sadness that I read of this plane crash in Oregon today. Apparently one of the wings just fell off, causing the plane to fall out of the sky, killing both occupants. This sort of thing never happened twenty or thirty years ago, when small planes were manufactured by companies like Cessna, Piper, and Taylor. These mass-produced planes were simple to fly and incredibly airworthy. But none of these companies are in business today. Why? Every time a plane crashed due to pilot error, the manufacturer was held liable for the damages. Small plane manufacturers were sued out of existence. The result was fairly predictable--since the demand for small aircraft continues unabated, pilots have to fly their own homemade planes--a situation that has set general aviation back 100 years. Homemade planes were notorious for crashing then--and they are now. The blood of these pilots is on the hands of America's legislators, who sat on their hands while general aviation was being sued out of existence.

Predictions

In this post from just over four years ago, I made several predictions for the Obama presidency. Although it's a bit premature to reflect on the end of the first Obama administration, I do note that none of them have yet come true (although it is rather certain that an Obama election loss would have led to riots), with the exception of the one in which the federal deficit doubles. Amazingly, that happened even before Obama took office; http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/09/AR2008090901029.html.