Tuesday, October 30, 2018

"New York ain’t New York anymore"

A knish is just a knish,
A blintz is just a blintz.
Of that you can't deny...

Well, apparently not anymore!!

One man recently related:

"13th Avenue used to be fantastic. Carini's for pastries. Scotto's for "Brooklyn bread" and salviatas and other cookies. Long gone. [Yes, Scotto's is still there, but under "new" management.] And it's not just the paisans who are gone. Not that long ago, lady friend and I visited the old neighborhood, and she wanted a knish, like she used to buy for her mother on the avenue. We drove all the way from 38th Street to the New Utrecht Avenue el, not one Jewish deli with a lousy knish."

And a former New Yorker friend's recent experience:

"Speaking of knishes, we went to Yonah Schimmel’s, the most famous place in the world for knishes and they were awful.

Apparently, it’s now a mostly Internet mail order business so they are kept frozen and if you come in person (as we did) they microwave them. Ugh.

Yet another great New York institution down the drain."

My friend also mentioned that all her favorite restaurants were gone too!!

Monday, October 22, 2018

NEW SCHOOL PRAYER

BY A 15-year-old SCHOOL KID who got an A+ for this entry:
The Lord's Prayer Is not allowed in most US Public schools any more.
A kid in Minnesota, wrote the following.
NEW School Prayer:

Now I sit me down in school
Where praying is against the rule
For this great nation under God
Finds mention of Him very odd.
If scripture now the class recites,
It violates the Bill of Rights.
And anytime my head I bow
Becomes a Federal matter now.
Our hair can be purple, orange or green,
That's no offense; it's a freedom scene..
The law is specific, the law is precise.
Prayers spoken aloud are a serious vice.
For praying in a public hall
Might offend someone with no faith at all..
In silence alone we must meditate,
God's name is prohibited by the State..
We're allowed to cuss and dress like freaks,
And pierce our noses, tongues and cheeks...
They've outlawed guns, but FIRST the Bible.
To quote the Good Book makes me liable.
We can elect a pregnant Senior Queen,
And the 'unwed daddy,' our Senior King.
It's 'inappropriate' to teach right from wrong,
We're taught that such 'judgments' do not belong..
We can get our condoms and birth controls,
Study witchcraft, vampires and totem poles...
But the Ten Commandments are not allowed,
No word of God must reach this crowd.
It's scary here I must confess,
When chaos reigns the school's a mess.
So, Lord, this silent plea I make:
Should I be shot; My soul please take!

Amen

Friday, October 19, 2018

2016: Solar and wind constituted 1.3 and 3.9 percent of the planet’s electricity, respectively

...we should be honest that such subsidies for solar and wind are policy sweeteners needed to win over powerful financial interests and not good climate policy.

What matters most is that we accept that there are real world physical obstacles to scaling solar and wind.
READ MORE

Monday, October 15, 2018

An American snowy winter: The ‘new normal”

8:00 - I made a snowman.


8:10 - A feminist passed by and asked me why I didn't make a snow woman.


8:15 - So, I made a snow woman.


8:17 - My feminist neighbor complained about the snow woman's voluptuous chest saying it objectified snow women everywhere.


8:20 - The gay couple living nearby threw a hissy fit and moaned it should have been two snow men instead.


8:22 - The transgender man.|.woman.|.person.| asked why I didn't just make one snow person with detachable parts.


8:25 - The vegans at the end of the lane complained about the carrot nose, as carrot veggies are food and are not to decorate snow figures with.


8:28 - I am being called a racist because the snow couple is white.


8:31 - The Muslim gent across the road demands the snow woman wear a burqa.


8:40 - The Police arrive saying someone has been offended.


8:42 - The feminist neighbor complained again that the broomstick of the snow woman needs to be removed because it depicted women in a domestic role.


8:43 - The council equality officer arrived and threatened me with eviction.


8:45 - TV news crew from ABC shows up. I am asked if I know the difference between snowmen and snow-women? I reply, "Snowballs" and am now called a sexist.


9:00 - I'm on the news as a suspected terrorist, racist, homophobic, sensibility offender, bent on stirring up trouble during difficult weather.


9:10 - I am asked if I have any accomplices. My children are taken by social services.


9:29 - Far-left protesters offended by everything are marching down the street demanding for me to be beheaded.


Moral: There is no moral to this story. It's just a view of the world in which we live today...and it's only getting worse!!



Sunday, October 14, 2018

THE MAGIC PILL

This Australian documentary is about YOU!

Please, don't miss it.

YouTube: THE MAGIC PILL

Also on Netflix.

Friday, October 12, 2018

What is "Social Justice" really?

The term “social justice” was apparently coined by a catholic priest named Luigi Taparelli in the 19th century to describe a process by which justice is applied in society. In the 20th century, however, social justice became a relative term. It had entirely different definitions for different people. For instance, Adolf Hitler used the term to describe his motivations to liberate Aryan Germans from the disproportionately wealthy and–in his mind– oppressive Jews. However, his rival, Winston Churchill, used the term to describe his and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s motivation to liberate the world from Hitler.

Over time the term ‘social justice’ became associated with critical theorists and Neo-Marxists from the Frankfurt School in Germany. They rejected universal rights or human rights as a basis for justice. They essentially rejected liberty for individuals as the hallmark for justice in society. They believed, instead, that parity between groups were the mark of justice in society. They rejected individualism and embraced collectivism. They did not define justice as equality of opportunity; they defined justice as equality of outcome.

They agreed with Karl Marx that disparities between privileged and underprivileged members of society are indicative of injustice. They believed privileged members of society and underprivileged members of society make up the oppressor and the oppressed. Therefore for them, justice—social justice meant eliminating disparities between groups in society. They concluded that justice is when a society implements a system that produces equality of outcome for groups, instead of equality of opportunity for individuals.
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Thursday, October 11, 2018

The fate of Khashoggi is the latest sign of what’s really happening inside Saudi Arabia

The Muslim Brotherhood, though, has always been at odds with the Wahhabi movement. Khashoggi and his fellow travellers believe in imposing Islamic rule by engaging in the democratic process. The Wahhabis loathe democracy as a western invention. Instead, they choose to live life as it supposedly existed during the time of the Muslim prophet. In the final analysis, though, they are different means to achieving the same goal: Islamist theocracy. This matters because, although bin Salman has rejected Wahhabism — to the delight of the West — he continues to view the Muslim Brotherhood as the main threat most likely to derail his vision for a new Saudi Arabia. Most of the Islamic clerics in Saudi Arabia who have been imprisoned over the past two years — Khashoggi’s friends — have historic ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Khashoggi had therefore emerged as a de facto leader of the Saudi branch. Due to his profile and influence, he was the biggest political threat to bin Salman’s rule outside of the royal family.

Worse, from the royals’ point of view, was that Khashoggi had dirt on Saudi links to al Qaeda before the 9/11 attacks. He had befriended Osama bin Laden in the 1980s and 1990s in Afghanistan and Sudan while championing his jihad against the Soviets in dispatches. At that same time, he was employed by the Saudi intelligence services to try to persuade bin Laden to make peace with the Saudi royal family. The result? Khashoggi was the only non-royal Saudi who had the beef on the royals’ intimate dealing with al Qaeda in the lead-up to the 9/11 attacks. That would have been crucial if he had escalated his campaign to undermine the crown prince.
READ MORE

Monday, October 08, 2018

The real issue here is the communist revolution to overthrow the Constitutional Republic of the United States.



The prophetic fall out from Kavanaugh
NOTEWhen writing about God and Jesus, The Daily Jot means YHVH as God and Yeshua Ha Mashiach as Jesus--the actual original names and the true nature and character of them.
  
Monday, October 8, 2018
The Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation was the most vile, divisive, uncivil, immoral, unethical display of scorched-earth politics witnessed by Americans in recent history. No matter how much the Democratic Party tries to hang on its opponents for confirming Kavanaugh, there is nothing that excuses the shameful behavior of Democrats and their supporting cast of leftists, communists and anarchists. All the deeds they accused the conservatives of doing-lying, violence, harassment, bullying, victimization, hypocrisy-they themselves put on full display before the world. The poster child moment was crazed women clawing and banging on the Supreme Court doors during the swearing in ceremony.
 
What is this all about? Folks, we have to discern. It was not about abortion, race, religion, or LGBTQ rights. Those were only the fear issues that the puppeteers used to cobble together a coalition of useful pawns that could be whipped up into a frenzy or paid to act out on cue. The real issue here is the communist revolution to overthrow the Constitutional Republic of the United States. It had progressed quite well over the years with only a road bump during the Reagan years. Before that, and afterwards, it's been an easy and gradual slide into socialism. Socialists have embedded in all aspects of the government awaiting their complete takeover, which was supposed to be crowned with Hillary Clinton's coronation.
 
When that didn't happen, Americans had to pay the price. A "resistance" movement began. It became very aggressive, and at times, violent. We have not seen the peak yet. The Kavanaugh confirmation has only exposed it further. The prophetic fallout from Kavanaugh is this: Expect further division, more bullying, extraordinary legal actions, more outlandish claims from leftists in Hollywood and at so-called news organizations. Expect to be further disenfranchised and labeled if you challenge any part of the coup-makers' agenda. Everything they do and think will be projected onto those with whom they disagree. There will be further, even violent, condemnation of those who follow Christ.
 
These are of the seed of rebellion. It's not only rebellion against law and order, its root is rebellion against God. As Jude writes: "It was needful for me to write unto you and exhort you that you should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints. For there are certain men crept in unawares, who were before of old ordained to this condemnation, ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness, and denying the only Lord God, and our Lord Jesus Christ...Likewise also these filthy dreamers defile the flesh, despise dominion, and speak evil of dignities." This is what is happening in our nation. As Christ followers, we must be a prophetic people to stand in the gap and shine the light of salvation and righteousness. We have a say here, and the freedom to say it. Let's use it so we don't lose it.
Have a Blessed and Powerful Day!
Bill Wilson

Thursday, October 04, 2018

COLLUSION BOMBSHELL

...the FBI had good reason to suspect the dossier was connected to the DNC’s main law firm and was the product of a Democratic opposition-research effort to defeat Trump — yet failed to disclose that information to the FISA court in October 2016, when the bureau applied for a FISA warrant to surveil Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

“This is a bombshell that unequivocally shows the real collusion was between the FBI and Donald Trump’s opposition — the DNC, Hillary and a Trump-hating British intel officer — to hijack the election, rather than some conspiracy between Putin and Trump,” a knowledgeable source told me.
READ MORE

Wednesday, October 03, 2018

EPITAPH FOR A DYING CULTURE

a-dying-cultureThe Kavanaugh confirmation hearings and their endless sequelae have ended up as an epitaph for a spent culture for which its remedies are felt to be worse than its diseases. Think 338 B.C., A.D. 476, 1453, or 1939[i].
The coordinated effort to destroy Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court required the systematic refutation of the entire notion of Western jurisprudence by senators and much of the American legal establishment.
There was no hesitation in doing just that by Senate Democrats, the #MeToo movement, and the press.
I write this at a moment in which conservatives and Republicans still control the majority of governorships, state legislatures, the U.S. Senate, the House of Representatives, the Supreme Court and the Presidency—a reminder that culture so often is far more powerful than politics.
So, here we are, left with a new legal and cultural standard in adjudicating future disagreements and disputes, an utterly anti-Western standard quite befitting for our new relativist age:
1. The veracity of accusations will hinge on the particular identity, emotions, and ideology of the accuser;
2. Evidence, or lack of it, will be tangential, given the supposed unimpeachable motives of the ideologically correct accuser;
3. The burden of proof and evidence will rest with the accused to disprove the preordained assumption of guilt;
4. Hearsay will be a valuable narrative and constitute legitimate evidence;
5. Truth is not universal, but individualized. Ford’s “truth” is as valid as the “Truth,” given that competing narratives are adjudicated only by access to power. Ford is a victim, therefore her truth trumps “their” truth based on evidence and testimony.
6. Questionable and inconsistent testimony are proof of trauma and therefore exactitude; recalling an accusation to someone is proof that the action in the accusation took place.
7. Statutes of limitations do not exist; any allegation of decades prior is as valid as any in the present. All of us are subject at any moment to unsubstantiated accusations from decades past that will destroy lives.
8. Assertion of an alleged crime is unimpeachable proof. Recall of where, when, why, and how it took place is irrelevant.
9. Individual accusations will always be subservient to cosmic causes; individuals are irrelevant if they do not serve ideological aims. All accusations fit universal stereotypes whose rules of finding guilt or innocence trump those of individual cases.
10. The accuser establishes the conditions under which charges are investigated; the accused nods assent.
Our cultural traditions are being insidiously rewritten in this New Dark Age.
We know now that Euripides’s Phaedra should have been believed, as a female accuser of rape that never happened.
Perhaps university presses can either reissue properly corrected editions or ban the Hippolytus entirely. No doubt we will ban Racine’s Phèdre as well.
Harper Lee’s Tom Robinson deserved his fate because his female accuser should have been believed—and perhaps To Kill a Mockingbird  should be rewritten as well.  (But what to do about the movie, with Gregory Peck’s Atticus, hailed as “the greatest movie hero of the 20th century,” who defended an innocent black man in the Jim Crow south from the lies of a white girl who said he raped her?)
In our time, we have finally and only now belatedly realized that Tawana Brawley’s voice was stifled.

History as Melodrama
In an iconoclastic age, when statues are toppled, and when street names at Stanford University are renamed (but, mysteriously, not the politically incorrect name Stanford itself), the past is captive to the present. Realities are erased according to current ideological agendas.
Our pastime is to blame those of the technologically backward and impoverished past.
In most cases, they accomplished things that our present generation lacks the courage and resilience to do—whether navigating the Atlantic in a leaky boat without accurate navigation, homesteading on the prairie in an age without machines or modern medicine, or flying a B-17 without fighter escort over 1943 Germany.
Is it our envy of their courage or own self-hatred for our manifest inferiority that forces us to judge figures of the past in our modern courts on the basis of their purported race, class, and gender crimes?
So, history has become melodrama, not tragedy. Figures of the past who were human and not perfect, and who prove, according to today’s value systems, not good progressives are thus deserving of historical annihilation.
The affluence and leisure of the present creates the luxury of such pampered intellectual indulgence in a way the existential crises of Civil War, the Great Depression, and World War II did not.
In our own age, the disproven but still legendary tales of “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot,” the Duke Lacrosse fantasies, the Rolling Stone folktales, or Lena Dunham’s fictive memoir won out and became fact, inasmuch as such lies were not real lies given their service to progressive aims.
And that is where we are now headed—the world of the Socrates-murdering Athenian popular court, the Inquisition, the Salem Witch Trials, the Star Chamber, the cycles of the French Revolution—except that in all those cases, reason and sanity eventually returned. Perhaps not now.
We are entering a New Dark Ages.
If we to look to the universities for truth and courage we find increasingly medieval darkness, where in matters of alleged sexual harassment there is no due process for the accused.
Free speech on campus vanishes if minority views are dubbed “hate” speech or declared merely “hurtful.”
There is little diversity of opinion and even less tolerance of any dissent from majority dogma. Obsequiousness so often is redefined as courage; real courage condemned as a crime against the people. Campus segregation becomes desirable, if privileged by “safe spaces.”
Censorship is sensitivity and justified by “trigger warnings.” The apparent absence of bias becomes proof of bias if dubbed a “micro-aggression.” Racial discrimination in admissions affirms liberality.
The sensuality, personal indulgence, and even recklessness of the 1960s still continue, but become criminal, if post facto, one party finds his or her immoderation unfulfilling or in retrospect embarrassing. Woodstock is now married to the Victorian parlor, the common denominator for our self-absorbed generation seems to be to enjoy the refuge of shame and honor when gratification proves not gratifying.

Welcome to the Progressive Church
If we look to the media, there is an overarching dogma that governs the veracity of all other “truths.” “Fake News” is a misnomer, given that the general force of prejudicial media coverage is not just falsity, but the effort to substantiate progressive agendas.
The embryo of modern journalism is either progressive graduate schools or past progressive political campaigns and service, and so the media is an extension of the progressive movement.
The trivial to the substantial are all invented to advance narratives, whether a greedy U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley’s supposedly ordering self-indulgent $50,000 drapes or Mark Judge purportedly recalling, and thus de facto corroborating, Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations.
If we look to our brave, new technologies—social media, the Internet, the linked world of instant communication devices—they prove entirely missionary and ideological. Their reason to be is accelerating social and cultural change—albeit with the assumption that their the masters who run these technologies assume that their own privilege and vast wealth have insulated themselves from any unwelcomed ramifications following from their own ideology and advocacy.
So everything from Facebook and Twitter censorship to politically recalibrating the order of Google searches serves the larger collective “good.”
Even ancient ideas of wealth and poverty fade before our current ideology. If riches are used for social change, even if cynically and for careerist and self-interested reasons, then how they were obtained or otherwise used is irrelevant; if not, then they are proof of greed in their acquisition.
Multibillionaire George Soros might be a wanted felon in France or have attempted to break the Bank of England and thereby ruin small depositors. But his wealth is welcomed because he invests a small percentage of it in progressive causes and thereby purchases his own progressive insurance and protection.
As did the Catholic Church in the Dark Ages of yore, the Progressive Church now sells indulgences.
If we look to consensual government for hope, we see instead the courts and the permanent administrative class more often as the new governance. Their directives are to obstruct or overturn residual popular forces of tradition and custom, whether that consists of overriding bothersome federal immigration law, or advancing states’ rights ideas of nullification such as “sanctuary cities.”

Few Escape Routes Left
In this growing New Dark Age, nothing is at is was. We have only faint memories of what was normal just decades ago.
Professional sports become vehicles for promulgating progressive versions of social justice. Athletic excellence is increasingly adjudicated on the basis of ideology, despite the dark lessons of totalitarian societies that have done just that in the past.
Hollywood has run out of ideas, reduced either to making pale imitations of classic films or flat psychodramas about courageous, perpetually 30-something social justice warriors.
Late-night comedy, indeed all comedy, has disappeared and turned into boring regurgitation of progressive themes or safe situational banality—reminiscent of the decline of Old Comedy of Aristophanes to the psychodramas of Hellenistic New Comedy. Even left-wing comedians such as Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, or George Carlin could not now exist.
In science, we are back to the age of silencing Galileo.
Dare suggest that human efforts to address purported man-caused global warming are not cost-effective, and one’s academic career, his funding and status are imperiled.
Suggest that research shows not all the accusations of sexual harassment of females are to be believed without corroborating evidence, and one is damned as a retrograde sexist if not a closet assaulter himself.
Imply that the greatest health crisis facing black youth is the violence on the streets of a Baltimore or Chicago, and one is a supporter of police misconduct.
Hint that our sex is almost always innate and biologically determined and not usually socially constructed, and one becomes a “-phobe” of some sort.
Language is in service to the state and progressive agendas, either by the creation of new words or refining old ones.
“Homosexual” and “transvestism” are not any longer clinical vocabulary, but slurs. “White” is not descriptive so much as pejorative. “Liberty” and “freedom” are synonymous with selfishness, if not conspiracy.
To join “overseas contingency operations” to thwart “man-caused disasters” and “workplace violence” could mean almost anything and thus, by design, they mean nothing.
The result is that, in lieu of pushback, to escape the New Dark Age, tens of millions of Americans are increasingly dropping out in search of some sort of physical or mental monastery, an escape, a refuge from a vindictive state and from those who crafted and are invested in it.
Millions no longer watch the Emmys or Grammys or any sort of entertainment awards event. They do not go to the movies or even watch new Hollywood releases on their computers or televisions.
Popular music is skipped on the expectation that it is not just vulgar and foul, but incoherently politicalized. They more and more pass on professional sports, neither watching nor attending what has become condemnatory rituals or lectures on social justice from pampered multimillionaire athletes.
At work, they keep their thoughts to themselves and nod assent to received pieties.
Courtship resembles a careful script in which a wrong word, an unartful advance can spell career destruction. To be safe, would-be couples inquire firsthand about their respective politics and traditions. The amoral marketplace, in Brave New World fashion, answers with promises of inanimate and mechanical sex partners.
All scour their past—in fear that something 20, 30, or 50 years prior might resurface, immediately become mythologized and thus weaponized to destroy them, especially should they have achieved status, public recognition, affluence, or influence.
One’s personal privacy is kept hidden, not just in disgust with our generation’s therapeutic maladies in which others pour out their emotions and fragilities in lieu of an idea, but because any disclosure is expected later to be used against oneself.
An idea of retirement is not merely a house by the lake or a cottage on the coast to die in peace, but now a mental refuge in which we are at last free from 24/7 sermonizing and worry over thought crimes, both in person and electronically—a world in which a sermonizer on a computer screen or in a television set does not lecture us for perceived shortcomings without acknowledgment that he is more likely than not to also fail to meet his own standards of morality.
In other words, America is resembling the medieval Balkans, where spent traditionalists fled to the mountaintops, abandoned the plains of a dying culture to the new zealots who stormed in under the pretense of civilization.

Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
_______________________________
[i] 338 BC – The Battle of Chaeronea, at which Phillip II of Macedon (Alexander’s father) snuffed out the glory, liberty, and existence of Ancient Classical Athenian Greece forever.
476 AD – The Fall of the Roman Empire, when the last Roman Emperor, Romulus Augustus, is deposed by a German barbarian, Odoacer, and the Middle Ages of Western Europe begins.
1453 – The Sack of Constantinople by Moslem Ottoman Turks, whose rape and slaughter of countless Christians ended the Eastern Roman Empire of Byzantium.
1939 – The start of World War II, with Hitler invading Poland, and Britain, France and allies declaring war on Nazi Germany.

Monday, October 01, 2018

The Nine Major Flaws in Kavanaugh Accuser’s Testimony

Sex crimes prosecutor who questioned Kavanaugh accuser released a memo claiming no "reasonable prosecutor" would bring charges against the Supreme Court nominee.
The prosecutor who questioned Brett Kavanaugh’s accuser, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, at last week’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing released a five-page memo on Sunday in which she concluded that no “reasonable prosecutor” would bring charges against the Supreme Court nominee.

Arizona sex crimes prosecutor, Rachel Mitchell, wrote in her memo that the case is “even weaker” than a ‘he said, she said’ case. “A ‘he said, she said’ case is incredibly difficult to prove,” she wrote. “But this case is even weaker than that. Dr. Ford identified other witnesses to the event, and those witnesses either refuted her allegations or failed to corroborate them. For the reasons discussed below, I do not think that a reasonable prosecutor would bring this case based on the evidence before the Committee. Nor do I believe that this evidence is sufficient to satisfy the preponderance-of-the-evidence standard.”

Mitchell then outlined nine major flaws in Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony during last week’s hearing:
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