Elon Musk's SpaceX turned a smallbore squabble about an alleged unfair labor practice into a massive assault on the administrative state that could result in the entire enforcement structure of the National Labor Relations Board being declared unconstitutional.
“Kamala Harris in and of herself has more experience than the whole GOP ticket put together. They only have six years of public service experience, and I often point out to people, you wouldn’t go into brain surgery and ask for the freshest neurosurgeon out of medical school,” Whitmer said[.]
"Ladies and gentlemen, unlike our opponents, our candidate is a career politician."
Here I thought the prosecutor thing was a dangerous ploy. Or Maybe Whitmer's trying to sabotage Kamala to keep her from being in the way in four years?
Apropos of the last two posts, a Jewish business associate of mine is visiting Asheville next week and wanted to meet up. In case he wanted to meet over a meal, and in case he keeps Kosher, I was trying to see if there are any Kosher restaurants in Asheville. Yelp suggested this one.
I don't know a lot about Kosher, but I do know that shellfish isn't on the list! It turns out there aren't any Kosher restaurants in Asheville, and not many Jews either -- the closest synagogue I know of is actually a Methodist church that loans itself out to them on Saturdays. The very small Jewish population has been around long enough that there's a Jewish section in one of the old segregated cemeteries near Hendersonville, but the population has never grown large. It's no surprise that there are no restaurants that go to the very substantial trouble of maintaining a Kosher kitchen -- you have to have a whole separate kitchen, as well as separate utensils and all the rest -- to cater to such a tiny populace.
However, the Lobster Trap bit reminded me of a joke I read in a book by Isaac Asimov. I no longer have the book, but the joke goes approximately like this:
On the holiday of Yom Kippur, the solemn day of atonement, a synagogue's congregation sat waiting for their rabbi to turn up. He was late, and later, and still hadn't appeared well into lunchtime. In addition to being hungry, they were very worried that something had happened to him. So they began calling all around town to see if they could locate him or get word of what might have happened to him.
Finally someone reported that he had been seen at a local seafood restaurant. The congregation went to find him, and discovered him eating a big plate of oysters. Looking on in horror, they exclaimed, "Rabbi! Rabbi! How could you do this, on today of all days?"
He looked at them quizzically and replied, "What? There's an 'r' in 'Yom Kippur.'"
“If you remember one thing, one thing from this speech, remember this: Our enemies are your enemies,” Mr. Netanyahu said. “Our fight is your fight. And our victory will be your victory.”Iran, he said, wants to impose “radical Islam” on the world and sees the United States as its greatest enemy because it is “the guardian of Western civilization and the world’s greatest power.”He argued that Iran-backed militias like Hamas, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen, whatever their aggression against Israel, are actually fighting a different war.“Israel is merely a tool,” Mr. Netanyahu said. “The main war, the real war, is with America.”
It's definitely true that Iran has been about destroying America from its beginning, and that it aspires to turn the whole world to its brand of Twelver Shi'ite Islam, which can reasonably be described as a radical position within Islam (both Twelver Shi'ite views and the view that the entire world needs to be brought under that particular strain; the view that the whole world should convert to Islam is not especially radical, any more than the view among Christians that every person will someday confess the divinity of Christ).
Normally, in American politics at least, the other side would attempt to rebut such a central claim. Not this time! This time they pulled down the American flags off Union Station's poles and burned them, ran up the flag of Palestine, carried the black flag of ISIS with signs stating that Allah was bringing about "the final solution" (supposedly while protesting against 'genocide'), burned effigies of both Netanyahu and Biden, attacked the police perimeter around the Capitol while successfully storming the Capitol (remember how fighting the Capitol Police and storming the Capitol on J6 was portrayed as an insurrection against America itself?), vandalized every American monument nearby and generally did all they could to underline the same point.
So ok, maybe there's some reasonable argument to make that things would calm down if there was a ceasefire in the war -- at least for a while, until Hamas rearmed and was ready to start the war back up again on its own terms. There isn't, apparently, any real debate that the side Israel is fighting is also an enemy of America. They themselves would like you to know that, would like to demonstrate it as clearly as they can.
Helping your friends and harming your enemies was the account of justice that Plato's Republic attempted to rebut. However, one of the key rebuttals was that you might be mistaken about who your enemies are. At least in this case, it's hard to believe there's any mistake.
UPDATE: NPR: Protests “Largely Peaceful.”
... “In 2003, a district attorney in San Francisco named Terence Hallinan was investigating Mayor Willie Brown’s friends. He was also investigating the priest scandal of sexual abuse in San Francisco, and that touched some very powerful institutions, including an elite prep school that involved the Gettys, Gov. Jerry Brown, etc. Their involvement with that school.”......“The priestly abuse scandal that was taking place, she never prosecuted a single case, Sean,” Schweizer added. “Of the 50 largest cities in America, San Francisco was the only one that that didn’t prosecute a single case, and she covered it up by deep-sixing documents that her predecessor had obtained.
[W]e humans can't possibly understand God's ways. A worm understands more about your 401(k) investment strategy, than we understand about God's plan. To an unborn child, birth is a catastrophe, the end of everything he knows; but to us, we know that it's the start of something far greater, and the end of something that could not possibly go on any longer.I would be very, very cautious about seeing "the hand of God" in anything other than your own life (and even that, mostly in retrospect). God is never doing just one thing, and further is primarily concerned with the salvation of individual souls rather than anything else.
"It's really hopeless" is not a happy claim, but it could be true without being happy. But it may not be functional even if it is true, as Kant said of determinism: even if you decide to believe that you have no free will and everything is determined by physics, the choice to make that decision about what to believe seems to be a free choice. You can't really function as someone who believes in determinism; every day you experience choices that you seem to make and need to reason about (e.g. 'should I have donuts for lunch, or something healthier?' doesn't seem to be deterministic; even if Krispy Kreme just opened across the street and makes donuts right at your lunchtime, it seems like you can at least occasionally decide to eat something else). Students and teachers like Nicholas of Cusa have gone a long way down this path of showing that God's infinity makes him fundamentally unknowable; I myself doubt whether infinity is a proper metaphor, because it seems to be a feature of creation rather than the uncreated. Still, many of Nicholas' basic points hold even if you say that infinity isn't a large enough concept, so to speak.
Fortunately, you have another road you can choose, which is scripture. This seems to be the source of Janet's claim that God is principally interested in saving souls: it's not reasoned from nature, as we can't even prove the existence of souls from nature. Scripture provides a number of positive claims about God. For example, the prophecy of Ezekiel provides an extremely mysterious account of the chariot of God that Moses Maimonides wrote a book about interpreting. Such interpretations do tend to suggest that God takes sides for reasons of his own, as with Moses; we still may not always understand these reasons, as when he orders Joshua to engage in what seems like wholesale genocide. Sometimes people doubt at least some of the scriptures' authenticity, especially when it seems like an argument that God took one group's side over the other's; the scripture really does seem to say that, but it's out of order of deductions like those that begin the Declaration of Independence, i.e. that God loves everybody equally.
For Christians, scripture also includes an apparently easier path: Jesus as intermediary personhood, whom you can relate to directly as one human being to another (fully man and fully god, somehow). This point is raised by Tex; yet of course Jesus is not merely man, though fully man, and by nature exceptional and extraordinary, and thus a model that can't be expected to hold for the ordinary and normal.
Still, it's attractive because then the path is not necessarily much harder than developing a relationship with another person, except that you only get to meet the person through scripture or as you imagine interactions through prayer. However, then you have the same problem as the mystic, who approaches God and knowledge of god through meditation: how much of what you are 'finding out about God' really is your imagination rather than a genuine encounter with the divine? I'm reminded of a favorite quote from the movie Ladyhawke, wherein the thief says to the knight, "Sir I talk to God all the time, and the truth is he never mentioned you." Yet at least in the movie, the thief was just trying to avoid an arduous and scary duty that really did lead to what the author depicts as prophecy and divine justice.
You can try to test your imagination or meditations also against scripture, of course, to see that you're not getting too far astray. But we also have scriptural interactions with God the Father in the Old Testament, especially in the Book of Job. Job is actually full of a set of claims about God that I would say are characteristic of another major approach to theology, which is negative theology. Job, upset about all the misery inflicted upon him even though he has tried to live a just and faithful life, is confronted with evidence of things God is not: specifically, God does not share Job's limitations. Job can't hang the stars in the sky, or set the firmament on its foundations. We aren't really told anything about how God can do those things, so we don't really know much more about him: but we do know that there are ways in which God is different from us, and these are ways in which he lacks our limitations and instead possesses great powers.
Job contains at least one passage, though, that suggests yet another approach to God. I have written before on several occasions about its description of the horse:
Hast thou given the horse strength? hast thou clothed his neck with thunder? Canst thou make him afraid as a grasshopper? the glory of his nostrils is terrible. He paweth in the valley, and rejoiceth in his strength: he goeth on to meet the armed men. He mocketh at fear, and is not affrighted; neither turneth he back from the sword. The quiver rattleth against him, the glittering spear and the shield. He swalloweth the ground with fierceness and rage: neither believeth he that it is the sound of the trumpet. He saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha; and he smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting.This is an interesting passage, though: because horses are like that, but only if men make them so. By pure nature, a horse will avoid any danger, and is scared like a grasshopper -- or of a grasshopper. The Lord's point in speaking to Job, if Job were the kind of man who could understand it, was that this is indeed what men do with horses.
Given the lack of an adequate response from Biden administration officials and the public’s growing mistrust of the Biden FBI and Department of Homeland Security, people are looking at the timeline of the assassination attempt and drawing their own conclusions.Look at what's happening in the polls as more and more people conclude these people are lying to us 24/7/365.
But what about Corey Comperatore, a loving and devoted husband, father, and public servant? Was it God's plan for him to die?For every person who is saved from cancer by the power of prayer, there are thousands for whom those prayers are never answered. When we were in Cambodia, I witnessed more than the horrific effects of human trafficking. We visited some of the Killing Fields....
When my grandmother was buried, child me asked why anyone would fear God, as the scripture said. I know now. God getting involved is terrifying.
People say to pray for the nation. I’m not the sort to say things like that. But I am praying.
