Israel is Antisemitic

 If Israel didn't exist, the enormous amount of antisemitism we are currently experiencing probably wouldn't be happening. 

Between 1795 and 1918, Poland ceased to exist. After WW I, the League of Nations brought Poland back into existence, taking territory from Germany, Austria and Russia in order to accomplish the deed. This created an enormous amount of anti-Polish hatred during the inter-war period in those nations, as both Russia and Germany viewed the League of Nations intervention as outright territorial theft. Poland was seen by many Eastern European Axis supporters as an illegal state, created out of whole cloth by the Western Allies who had conquered them. 

So, what was the very first act of WW II? Germany and Russia invaded Poland and repartitioned it, taking back the territory that the League of Nations had stolen from them.

That whole sequence of events worked so well, that after WW II, the UN repeated the mistake. The UN tried to bring Israel back into existence, with similar consequences. But the attempt to reconstitute Israel failed for an even more foundational reason. Poland had been out of existence for less than two centuries. Israel had been out of existence for nearly two millennia. The new Poland had never lost its majority Catholic population, but that wasn't true for Israel. The original Israel was a religious state built around Abrahamic faith. But the 20th-century version of Israel was created by secular atheists, socialists who weaponized Christian ignorance and stupidity in order to guilt the West into attempting to recreate the country. Ben-Gurion himself saw socialism and Zionism as two sides of the same coin. 

Unfortunately for everyone involved, Zionist socialist ideology has nothing to do with post-Temple Judaism. And post-Temple Judaism has literally nothing to do with Temple Judaism. The current state of Israel is founded on socialism and nominalism, the idea that words are just interchangeable labels. But words mean things. As Lincoln pointed out, if you call a dog's tail a "leg", that doesn't mean a dog has five legs. 

The current state of Israel has literally nothing to do with any preceding entity, much less any Biblical entity. Israel is a bullshit country that exists by fomenting antisemitism in other countries in order to force Jews to emigrate to Israel "for their own safety". Apart from redefining "Jewish" (which is also a constant work-in-progress), it was, and still is, the only way to keep the Jewish population at high enough levels to justify the existence of the country. Recall that between 1948 and 2010, the country with the largest Jewish population in the world was the United States, not Israel. 

Israel can only work if Jews feel unsafe everywhere else and think their only hope for safety lies in moving to Israel. Wherever non-Israeli Jews live, Zionists must drive them out of that location and into Israel. 

In December, 1938, David Ben-Gurion, one of the founders of the state of Israel, specifically said, "if I knew it was possible to save all children of Germany by their transfer to England and only half of them by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, because we are faced not only with the accounting of these children but also with the historical accounting of the Jewish people." This was not just rhetoric.

In 1945, Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders vetoed the immigration of 1,000 orphans from Germany to England, even though the necessary permits had been secured and these children were in grave danger of death due to the harsh winter. Zionists also managed to stop another group of roughly 500 children from reaching France, where rabbinical institutions had offered them safe haven. 

As 1930's Germany demonstrated, the best way to drive Jews out of an area is to make it impossible for Jews to live there. Antisemitism serves the political purposes of the state of Israel. Antisemitism is a nation-building activity for the state of Israel. Zionism is functionally antisemitism run by a nation-state actor for their own political purposes. Seeing the Zionist success, Palestinian-wannabees imitate it. This is why both the Muslims who attack Israel and the Jews who defend it are so politically insane that both sides literally sacrifice their own children in order to attain their nation-state objectives. 

Parents who care about their children move to safe locations to raise them. Israel is not a safe location. Only politically insane people would move to Israel/Gaza/West Bank, or stay there, to raise a family. Raising a family in that area necessarily involves you, as a parent, to be willing for your own children to be killed so that the greater good of the nation-state can be attained. This attitude is purest socialism, the elevation of the state above everything, including the family, just as Marx and Engels commanded.

But this is not a surprise. Again, most people in the 21st century forget that Israel was founded as a socialist state. Most conservatives, especially Christian conservatives, find it impossible to grasp that nearly all modern Jews are extreme leftists, generally socialists. Jews always vote for the most extreme left-wing candidate available. Christians are so blinded by Biblical references that they literally cannot see that post-Second-Temple Jews are not Biblical Jews, or that the 1948 socialist-founded state of Israel is nothing at all like ancient Israel. 

Christian conservatives created the phrase "Judeo-Christian morality" in order to facilitate conversion of Jews to Christian faith. It didn't work. But the Christians used their invented phrase so frequently that they successfully fooled themselves into thinking there was some commonality between Jewish and Christian worldviews. In fact, Judaism shares as much, if not more, of a worldview with Islam than it does with Christians. Jews can worship in mosques, but not in churches. Most medieval rabbis agreed that Jews could pray with Muslims, but not Christians. According to this Jewish expert, the Torah says Jews must kill Christians. Jews and Muslims share a morality that Christians consider self-centered, even bordering on narcissistic. 

Zionism is antisemitism. Period. 

Subverting Nature

"The entire leftist regime is an artificial construct reliant on the subversion of nature via a leviathan capable of wealth extraction. They treat the return of the natural order as an existential threat because it is"

While the sentiment is, in a certain sense, laudable, it is also pretty selective. Part of that same "subversion of nature" is air-conditioning, vermin control, antibiotics, combustion engines, fresh oranges in winter, etc.

Putting a uterus into a man's body is the leftist version of putting air-conditioning into private homes. When even genetics can be manipulated (thus the leftist hard-on for mRNA vaccines), then there are no limits.

It's a real existential question. Are we subverting nature? It's not like we aren't still bound by the laws of physics and chemistry. It's just our power in physics and chemistry, our intimate knowledge of THOSE laws, allows us to manipulate biology to a hitherto unequalled degree.

The "natural order" is that our lives are brutish, painful, disease-ridden and short. Pretty much EVERYONE rejects at least some part of the "natural order." That's why we wear clothes and use fire to cook our food. The question is whether there is a line that can/should be drawn.

The whole transgenderism push is insane for those of us who see biology as a fundamentally different science than physics or chemistry. But, to those who see biology as a mere extension of physics and chemistry, who see biology merely as an application of physics and chemistry, than a uterus transplant into a man is no more "subversion" than any other application of physics and chemistry we have hitherto made.

And it is probably as likely to be something we can stop as any other technology has been, which is to say, it can't be stopped. 

The Israeli Grift

 Israel gave over one billion dollars to Hamas via Qatar. Think about that. Hamas' charter states it intends to wipe out Israel, yet Israel funnelled over one billion dollars to this known terrorist organization.

The Hezbollah explosive comms op was run side-by-side with this overwhelming Israeli financial support for terrorism. On Oct 7, "music festivals" were run near both the West Bank (Abu Gosh, Oct 3-7) and the Gaza Strip (Supernova, Oct 7), while Israeli military forces stood down. 

Hamas/Gaza fell for it and ran the inevitable terror op on Oct 7, generating 1100 Jewish corpses. Suddenly, 1100 deaths was given the same label as 6 million deaths and the "new Holocaust!!!" became the excuse to wipe out Gaza, invade the West Bank (which had done absolutely nothing), invade southern Lebanon, bomb Syria and permanently annex the Golan Heights. 

Coincidentally, all those areas either had total fertility rates (TFR) which threatened Israeli sovereignty or occupied territory the Israeli government had long coveted, or both. 

But, fortunately, the terror attack, which Israel paid over a billion dollars for, allowed Israel to obliterate Gaza's TFR and also allowed all the above land to be invaded by or claimed for Israel. What a strategically fortunate tragedy! What luck that Israel had apparently prepared for it for years by giving money and explosive comms to the right people! 

The Education Grift

 People are complaining about grade inflation again. They simply don't understand how education works.

You have to understand that education actually has nothing to do with education.

McDonald's LOOKS like a fast-food franchise, but it's actually a real-estate company that also sells fast food:

Former McDonald’s CFO, Harry J. Sonneborn, is even quoted as saying, “we are not technically in the food business. We are in the real estate business. The only reason we sell fifteen-cent hamburgers is because they are the greatest producer of revenue, from which our tenants can pay us our rent.”

Rental car companies arbitrage the difference between buying new cars in bulk, then reselling each car individually. Rental fees are just gravy collected between the purchase and the resale.

Education works the same way. Educational institutions exist to suck in state and federal funding. The students are just there to plump up the funding levels. In lower education, it's about butts in seats, in higher ed, it's about warm bodies signing for loans. In both cases, the state and federal money goes into the admin and faculty pockets - that's the point.

That's why there are more administrators than teachers. The administrators who grease the paperwork, the admins are the REAL money-makers. The teachers are just the grift to get people in the front door. 

In higher ed, the students sign for the loans, the college admins/faculty get the cash, then the students are on the hook to pay the loans back. It's the perfect grift. To keep the marks from finding out they've been grifted, you have to pass as many as you can, make sure they get their graduation ceremonies and framed pieces of paper. I've worked middle school, high school, college - it's all the same. You are REQUIRED to pass a certain percentage of each class, or your life is made into hell or you are fired. So, yes, of course, grade inflation. 

That's why most institutions of higher education have mostly adjunct faculty. There is no such thing as adjunct administrators, just adjunct faculty. The faculty aren't important, they can be part-timers, and in most institutions, more than 70% of classes are taught by part-time faculty. But all the admins are full-time, because the administrators who maintain conformance for government loan and grant guidelines are the ones actually bring in money. The classroom costs money, the admin suite brings in money. The classroom is a loss-leader for the back-end administrative profit center. 

Once you understand the economics, it all makes perfect sense. The system is designed to produce the results you see. If you thought it was supposed to do something else, well, then the system works.

This Is Of God

Hinduism dates back to at least 2300 BC in the Indus Valley civilization. Some scholars suggest origins as far back as 4000 to 10,000 BC

Buddhism was founded by Siddhartha Gautama, also known as the Buddha, in the late 6th century BC.

Taoism was founded in the 6th century BC, with the teachings of Lao Tzu considered its foundational inspiration.

Zoroastrianism was founded by the prophet Zoroaster (also known as Zarathushtra) in the 6th or 7th century BC

Jainism was founded by Mahavira (c. 599–527 BC).

If we insist on arguing that any religion which survives millennia of sin and divisiveness must be of divine origin, then since all of the above still exist, all of these theological systems are of divine origin.

Indeed, it is pretty clear that Islam is nowhere near collapsing, and is only 600 years younger than Christianity, so Islam is likely also of divine origin.

Obviously, this is a ridiculous argument. Christians should really stop mouthing this nonsense. It is not a defense of the Church, it is just a public exhibition of the Christian's complete ignorance concerning the histories of other theological systems. Making this argument just makes Christians look really stupid. 

Why Pope Leo?

The world's cardinals have elected South Americans twice in a row. 

They are clearly concerned about South America.

During the decade Pope Francis was in office (elected 2013), Argentina's Catholic population fell from 76% to 49%.  That clearly didn't work, so now they're trying a more conservative version of Pope Francis. That won't work either. 

Watch Peru's statistics over the next decade. If it drops - and the Catholic population percentage in South America will most definitely drop during Pope Leo's pontificate - then what happens? 

I've got nothing against Pope Leo. I'm sure he is a good man and will be as good a Pope as anyone can be. But this kind of thing has been tried before. During World War I, the French were certain that technology could not overcome the human spirit. Vital impetus, or "élan vital", a belief in the power of a strong, offensive spirit to overcome any obstacle, turned out to be much less effective than a wall of high-velocity lead spewed out by machine guns and the power of tons of explosive from long-range artillery shells. 

Similarly, a marvelous papal personality is not going to overcome technology. If anyone were going to succeed by force of personality, it would have been John Paul II (1978-2005). 

A 2012 document reported that for more than a quarter-century [Poland's] church attendance and declarations of religious faith have been stable, decreasing only minimally since 2005 when the grief related to the death of Pope John Paul II led to an increase in religious practice among Poles. In a 2012 study, 52% of Poles declared that they attend religious services at least once a week, 38% do so once or twice a month, and 11% do so never or almost never. Meanwhile, 94% of Poles consider themselves to be religious believers (9% of whom consider themselves "deeply religious"), while only 6% of Poles claim that they are non-believers.

But even during John Paul II's reign, the percentage of Catholics regularly attending Mass dropped consistently from year to year, until it fell off a cliff:

The new data, released by Statistics Poland (GUS), a state agency, show that in the 2021 census, 27.1 million people (71.3%) identified themselves as followers of the Roman Catholic church. That was down from 33.7 million (87.6%) at the last census a decade earlier.

The election of John Paul II solved several pressing European problems in the late 20th century. Among the most significant? He kept the Catholic population from melting away in Poland. The cardinals gambled that Pope Francis could solve similar problems in South America. That didn't work. So, they're trying again with a Peruvian candidate. Below is a graph of Catholic percentage in Peru's population:

Pope Leo XIV is supposed to solve the problem of  the disintegrating Catholic population in Peru and in South America as a whole. It can't work. Pope John Paul II got away with it due to a unique set of circumstances surrounding communism, trade unions and Catholic Faith. That's not going to repeat in Peru or any other South American country. 

Given his apparent good health, and the advances that will be made in medicine over the coming decades, Pope Leo XIV will probably have a fifteen to twenty-year pontificate. By the time the next papal conclave convenes, South America will no longer be majority Catholic. All eyes will be on Africa. The next Pope will be African, because it will be a hotspot by then, and the cardinals will have given up on South America, just like they have already given up on Europe and North America.

The Status Quo Can't Quo

Capitalism depends on growing global TFR and growing population. That's gone.

Capitalism was a SUPERB ride, gave us everything we have, but it can't work anymore. We don't have the population growth to make it work. We won't have it for the foreseeable future. For all we know, capitalism might be giving us both obscene wealth and absurdly low TFR.

Socialism, anarchy, communism, have always been worse than useless. Mercantilism stopped working in the mid-1800s.

We need a new paradigm. Maybe Trump's tariffs are it. I don't know. Now, make no mistake. I despise Trump as a human being. I have never voted for him and never will. Furthermore, if a politician were doing this, I would scream bloody murder. Politicians are empty-headed fools. They don't understand what they are doing half the time. 

But Trump isn't a politician, he is a business man. He may not be likeable, but he isn't stupid and he is very experienced. He routinely negotiated huge deals with some of the biggest sharks in one of the richest countries in the world. For him, tariffs are not politics. If he implemented tariffs, it is part of a larger negotiation. He's playing a game. I don't know what the game is. And while I wouldn't trust Trump in many, many situations, if he's arguing the American side in a business negotiation, I trust him ahead of any politician.

Again, is he right in this? I still don't know. But what everyone is doing simply cannot continue. We no longer have population growth, or even people attempting to grow the population. This is not normal. Something has to change. The economics we have used up to this point cannot work. 

The TFR is dropping, and no one knows how to fix it. Keep in mind, Christianity has been completely unable to assist with the problem. Christianity has been essentially moribund since industrialization came on the scene.

The Enlightenment was a reaction to the increasingly obvious failures of the Christian world view to explain reality. Christianity arguably created the scientific paradigm, but none of the religious structures in any culture have really survived contact with the scientific paradigm, and that includes Christianity.

Judaism birthed Christianity but became a postage stamp as a result. Christianity birthed the scientific paradigm and has become mostly irrelevant as a result. Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Christianity - none of it works, not now. Capitalism has never been shown to work with a decreasing TFR. The social safety nets that capitalism and growing population allow cannot survive a dropping population. Once the social safety nets collapse due to population collapse, the economics will collapse along with it. Nobody knows how to fix this.

Going forward, for the next century at least, something will have to change. The economics, the TFR, the safety net, the work we do... something has to change. The status quo can't quo. 

The Problem with Embryo Ownership

 First Things has published an essay with the same name, in which the author bloviates about the moral problems with IVF, which are - admittedly - legion. But the author fails to address the central problem.

God participates in IVF by creating and infusing the human soul.

He doesn't have to, but He chooses to.

So... what do you do with that?

Now, you can argue that this is part of God's magnificent freedom, part of His gift to human persons. After all, in an act of pure love, God created and formed the universe. He lets us do whatever we want with this universe. He holds it in existence from moment to moment, while our sin abounds. If we turn lead into bullets and fire a bullet into someone's skull, He will hold that bullet in existence and allow it to smash open a brain pan. It's a radical freedom to give us suzerainty over the universe like that. 

But this is a bit different. This isn't just God holding some pre-existing something in existence. This is an honest-to-God act of ex nihilo creation. During the IVF process, God creates a new human soul and infuses it.

Think about that.

He has to actively take part in our attempt to create a new human being. He has to actively create the new human soul out of nothing and infuse that newly created human soul into the attempted embryo as part of the process. God is as much an active participant in this process as the lab tech infusing the sperm. God ACTIVELY PARTICIPATES in the creation of the life of the new human embryo. If He did not, the embryo would never form.

Christians don't believe souls pre-exist conception, so that makes God an ACTOR, a PARTICIPANT in the IVF sequence. And He appears to be fine with it, because He makes sure the human soul is present and operational.

So... what do you do with that?