When Jesus said, “I go to prepare a place for you,” He was talking about our eternal home with Him (Rev 21-22), not some temporary, 7-year visit to heaven.

I don’t approve of foul language. But I’m eternally grateful for @realDonaldTrump, @elonmusk, @ConceptualJames, @JMilei, and @TRobinsonNewEra. I even appreciate a lot of Bill Maher’s takes on things. 🤷🏼‍♂️

Note "to your right" not "on the right", which means that he gets to attack as many people on the right as he wants, and as long as he considers himself further to the right than them, his cute little moral gotcha absolves him of his own standard applying.

Reality has a right wing bias, but power has a left wing bias

#OTD October 17, 107: Ignatius of Antioch was fed to the beasts in Rome. “Nearness to the sword is nearness to God; to be among the wild beasts is to be in the arms of God; only let it be in the name of Jesus Christ. I endure all things that I may suffer together with him, since he who became perfect man strengthens me.”

Some more thoughts on the disgrace of NatCon in Jerusalem. Almost all of the conference was classic right-wing: immigration, family values, national identity, and security. On Wednesday night (Oct 7), the conference hosted a panel on the American "new right". The participants repeatedly shifted between brave truth-tellers and outsider non-experts just sharing vibes. What followed was a Groyper shitshow. The panelists were all unanimous that Jews need to stop speaking about antisemitism. As one speaker put it (I may be paraphrasing), charges of being a Nazi have no currency today. When challenged (by me) on whether they think that there is real antisemitism, or real Nazis, and what the response should be, they offered no answer. Let's be clear - antisemitism is real, and its not confined to the Left. In the past few years, there have been mass murders of Jews by neo-Nazis at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh (2018), the Poway Chabad Synagogue (2019). Neo-Nazis coordinated attacks on synagogues in the Northeast and Midwest in 2018. The FBI foiled plots against synagogues in Colorado in 2019. This is of course without getting into the new darlings of the right - Tucker, Fuentes, Candance Owens, Daryl Cooper. Do the panelists believe them to be antisemitic? Are we allowed to say so? They all implied that calling them out is a form of "cancel culture". The panelists repeated objectively false reasons for the decline in support for Israel, and not simply as descriptors. Again and again, they said (some implicitly and some more explicitly) that Israel manipulates America into costly Middle Eastern wars. This is simply a lie. Over the past 50 years, the United States has gone to war to protect Kuwait, the Balkans, South Korea, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia and others. Americans have NEVER shed blood for Israel. Israel did not make the US conduct costly (and ultimately pointless) nation-building exercises in Iraq and Afghanistan. The recent was in Iran began when Trump promised Iranian protesters that "help is on the way". Israel, in fact, is probably America's most self-reliant and independent ally. Completely absent was any talk of American benefits to the alliance with Israel. Then there was the usual canard about Israel taking American money. While I am sure most conference participants would support Israel weaning itself off of American aid, let's remember that the United States wants Israel to be reliant on aid as a tool of pressuring Israel. American aid is not charity - it must be invested in American technology and weapons. It is also being progressively phased out. Jordan and Egypt also receive over a billion dollar in foreign aid packages, but I've yet to hear hostility expressed towards these countries. Finally, there was repeated talk of liberal Jewish American organizations, especially their support for immigration. The subtext was that Israeli Jews are somehow responsible for the policy choices of American Jews. As if there is some shadowy Jewish cabal to exploit America for Israel's sake. The worst of all speakers was William Wolfe, who I would venture to say was the only speaker who I would characterize as an actual Jew-hater. He spoke of "Jewish" voting priorities that hurt him as an American Christian, implying that his opposition to Israel is a means of getting back at them. Let's be clear - American Jews are American citizens, and have every right to promote their political preferences. Israelis have nothing to do with that. Wolfe also believes that American Jews are conditional citizens. He spoke of pride of his ancestors having been in America since the Civil War, noting that no Jews signed the American constitution. So what? His implication was that they are not real or full Americans. (Somebody pointed out that Haim Solomon financed the Revolution). He also said that only one million Jews voted for Trump, out of 77 million Americans. Jews are the "junior partner" in conservatism and "need to know their place". He also spoke of his anger of American Jews largely voting Democratic. Again - so what? American Jews don't owe you anything. Wolfe also claimed that he wanted an American-Israeli partnership devoid of religious or cultural meaning, purely transactional. And then he took Israel to task for selling drones to Azerbaijan, which in his words kill Christians in Armenia. Of course, Azerbaijan is a close ally of Israel, and sits on Iran's border. Armenia has close ties with Iran. As an Orthodox Jew, its not my place to comment on Christian theology. But Wolfe took Evangelicals to task, saying that the "Old Testament" is a Christian book, for Christians, thus cutting off the Jewish roots of Christianity. In between the lines, Wolfe ascribes to classic supercessionism, in which Judaism has been replaced by Christianity and Jews have finished their historical role. That explains his antipathy to Israel and Zionism - the Jews are done and have no more right to statehood (or even existence as a group). Hazony and co billed this event as having hard conversations, yet they objected to partipants who had serious concerns about the points raised, vigourously denying even the possibility of antisemitism or anti-Jewish undertones. Wolfe was combatant and intentionally provocative in private exchanges. He didn't come for conversation. He came for the applause of his Groyper twitter base at telling the Joos the truth to their face. @NatConTalk is the right wing equivalent of Jews for Mamdani, putting their prefered policy preferences ahead of Jewish security and safety. Jews were silent as the Left was taken over by antizionists and extremists, for the sake of unity against the supposed greater enemy on the Right. This is the exact same dynamic that is happening of the Right. @yhazony has brought Groypers to Jerusalem. It is a disgrace. Proud Jews and Zionists should not go along with it. לְמַעַן צִיּוֹן לֹא אֶחֱשֶׁה וּלְמַעַן יְרוּשָׁלַ‍ִם לֹא אֶשְׁקוֹט

On this day, in 1536, William Tyndale was strangled and burned at the stake for translating the Scriptures into English for the common man. His final words, “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.”

Looks like Israel figured out the formula to get them to stop launching rockets for over a year.

When Paul warns Gentile Christians, "Do not boast against the branches," he is specifically speaking about the Jewish branches broken off because of unbelief (Romans 11:17–20). That is such an important point. Their unbelief is the very reason he commands us to remain humble. He goes further and warns that if we become arrogant toward unbelieving Israel, we risk also being cut off. To those of us who are, by His grace, believers, that point should be terrifying.

In Texas, I'm voting Republican down ballot. I think I've been convinced today that it might even mean voting for French. We can fight about ideology later. For now, it's the Milei approach: Don't give the leftists an inch.

It's quite clear to me that other people don't have any kind of invisible internal world. Therefore I see no difference between ChatGPT and the average person. At most I am willing to concede that my wife's boyfriend may possess some kind of vague conscious experience.

The sexual revolution has vastly increased the power of the state:

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is easily as much an American as this guy.

I believe a Christian can have full assurance of salvation through faith in Christ. That said, I would not argue that being absolutely, infallibly certain of your standing before God is a requirement for salvation. Jesus compares faith to a mustard seed: small, yet capable of moving mountains. We see this kind of weak but genuine faith in the desperate father who cries out to Him, “I believe; help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24). Saving faith does not need to be strong faith. But God wants your faith to grow strong. And I think this is one reason Scripture so constantly calls us to remember. Remember the LORD who brought you out of slavery (Deut. 5:15). Remember the LORD who has led and sustained you (Deut. 8:2). Remember His wonderful works (Ps. 105:5). Remember that He is your rock and your redeemer (Ps. 78:35). Remember His covenant (Ps. 105:8). Remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead (2 Tim. 2:8). We are forgetful creatures. Our faith becomes weak when our eyes drift from what God has done and toward ourselves, our circumstances, our failures, and our doubts. And I believe this is one of the great purposes for which Christ instituted the Lord’s Supper: “Do this in remembrance of me.” (Luke 22:19; 1 Cor. 11:24–25) We return again and again to the Lord’s Table, not to regain graces we have lost, but to remember the grace that has been secured for us in Christ. We eat the bread. We drink the cup. We proclaim His death until He comes. Salvation rests not on the strength of our faith, but on the object of our faith: Jesus Christ. Weak faith and strong faith lay hold of the same Christ. So when your faith is weak, REMEMBER. Remember who saved you. Remember who keeps you. Remember who promised to finish what He began. “I believe; help my unbelief!”

On September 17th, 1939, the Soviets invaded Poland, 16 days after the Nazis invaded. The communist and Nazi armies would cooperate in dividing the country in half. The USSR also took over 200,000 Polish prisoners, many of whom were massacred the next year in the Katyn massacre.

We talk about extinction risk from LLMs -- virtually zero probability We don't talk about potentially large loss of freedom and privacy from being monitored by LLMs -- extremely high probability That's a creeping catastrophic risk that we rarely talk about Strange

Wow. This woman says she grew up with a mother like Lindsay Clancy who would have murdered her & her brother if she knew she would get away with it. She says Lindsay is cut from the same cloth of women who torture their children because they hate & can’t control the father of their children. Interesting x.com/boldtiming/status/2096…

To some degree this is unsurprising given the reemergence and popularity of antisemitism, including amongst American women. Antisemitism is a fundamentally conspiratorial belief system, and it shouldn't surprise us that this indulgence of conspiracism in one domain will bleed into the indulgence of conspiracism in other domains. Especially conspiracism that presents itself as a righteous fight against a powerful force (in the case of Lindsay Clancy the powerful force being the patriarchy. We are living in a post-truth era where the boundaries of fact and fiction are being purposefully discarded for ideological crusades. To that end, I’m thinking a lot recently of the quote by Hannah Arendt below. As one friend wrote to me: ‘post-truth speakers don't simply lie to hide the truth. They lie so blatantly and so massively so as to erode the difference between what's true and what's false so that the audience stops even trying to get to the truth and gives up on the whole concept of truth and truthfulness. This is one of the key features of Russian propaganda.’

You aren’t alone. How do you murder one child, have a conversation with your husband and then go back to murdering your other two children? According to her a voice told her to do it. I guess that voice magically stopped long enough for her to speak with her husband and then after hanging up with him, the voice returned and she commenced with killing her other two children. She planned this out. She did Google search’s on “how long does it take for someone to die who’s been strangled?” Was the voice telling her to look for that then? Because according to her the voice only happened that one time at the time of the murders. So then if she’s looking for ways in which to murder her children BEFORE the voice told her to do it then how does that square up? It doesn’t. She planned these murders. She knew what she was doing. She states since the murders that she never had heard the voice again. I don’t think there ever was a voice. She wanted those children gone. She’s not the first nor will she be the last. Unfortunately our society is too awash with brainwashed and brain dead women who think it’s impossible for her to have done this and blame her ex-husband. Then you have the other group of the brainwashed, brain dead who “understand” how stressed she was. She had a nanny. She had her parents and her in-laws. She had her husband who worked from home. She was also able to run and exercise every day for 3 hours. That’s 21 hours per week to herself. Postpartum depression and especially psychosis occur within 2 weeks of delivery to 8 weeks post delivery. By that time hormones regulate and most women are able to go about their daily lives. For someone to develop PPD after 6 months is well outside the norm. To then develop psychosis is unheard of.

Wow, this guy is a lead pastor and he doesn’t have the basic discernment to see how disgusting The Chosen is?