Sisyphus Achaean – Page 2

Project Veritas, the New York Times, and an American Justice

I received this today from James O’Keefe, reporting on Project Veritas’ lawsuit against the New York Times, and am inclined to share.

Late last year, The Times accused us of deception and a “coordinated disinformation campaign.” So, we sued.
The Times begged the Court to dismiss the case. However, Justice Charles D. Wood DENIED The New York Times’ Motion to Dismiss this lawsuit, stating “here there is a substantial basis in law and fact that” The Times’ reporters “acted with actual malice, that is, with knowledge that the statements in the Articles were false or made with reckless disregard of whether they were false or not.”
Now, we get to depose The New York Times, and it will be glorious:
The Times thought they could get away with labelling our Minnesota ballot harvesting video “deceptive” – the same video where ballot harvester Liban Mohamed was recorded bragging about hundreds of ballots in his car and how money is everything in a campaign:
When we sued, The Times argued their “deceptive” label was just an “unverifiable expression of opinion” and asked the Court to dismiss the case.
Justice Wood had to teach Journalism 101 to these corrupt Mainstream Media hacks:
It is that simple.
“If a writer interjects an opinion in a news article… it stands to reason that the writer should have an obligation to alert the reader … that it is opinion.”
Justice Wood called the failure to do so a “disinformation” and “deceptive”:
There it is.
“The dictionary definitions of ‘disinformation’ and ‘deceptive’ provided by [The New York Times’] counsel … certainly apply to [Times’ reporters’ Maggie] Astor’s and [Tiffany] Hsu’s failure to note that they injected their opinions in news articles[.]”.
The Times went further, however, arguing that in effect they are entitled to lie about Project Veritas because – WAIT FOR IT – the Mainstream Media and Big Tech don’t like us exposing them.
Justice Wood apparently did not appreciate The Times’ reliance on other media articles, a simple Google search, and a Wikipedia entry (yes… Wikipedia):
Did you catch that? The New York Times, even with its submission of a 45-page motion, three sworn statements, 66 exhibits, and three additional briefs/letters to court, was not able “to prove that the reporting by Veritas in the Video is deceptive.”

Justice Wood has done something that I thought I might never see again in this benighted land. He has held power to the standard of truth. The NYT citing Wikipedia in a court case is just the cherry on top of this fine sundae.

Andrew would be very proud.

Jesus and the Adulteress

It is an essential story of Jesus’ ministry. From John 8:

“3Then the scribes and Pharisees brought to Him a woman caught in adultery. And when they had set her in the midst,
4they said to Him, “Teacher, this woman was caught in adultery, in the very act.
5“Now Moses, in the law, commanded us that such should be stoned.d But what do You say?”
6This they said, testing Him, that they might have something of which to accuse Him. But Jesus stooped down and wrote on the ground with His finger, as though He did not hear.
7So when they continued asking Him, He raised Himself up and said to them, “He who is without sin among you, let him throw a stone at her first.”
8And again He stooped down and wrote on the ground.
9Then those who heard it, being convicted by their conscience, went out one by one, beginning with the oldest even to the last. And Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst.
10When Jesus had raised Himself up and saw no one but the woman, He said to her, “Woman, where are those accusers of yours? Has no one condemned you?”
11She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said to her, “Neither do I condemn you; go and sin no more.”
12Then Jesus spoke to them again, saying, “I am the light of the world. He who follows Me shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life.”
– NKJV

But that is not the quote of the day. There are always new translations that tug this way and that on points of doctrine or suggest novel insights into the most scrutinized texts in the history of the world. President Thomas Jefferson was famous in part for his groundbreaking, albeit private, edits of the Bible. Striking every passage witnessing to Jesus’ divinity, Jefferson reduced his own personal Jesus to a simple moralist. His mundane vision presaging a thousand sermons on the “Miracle of Sharing,” reducing the fish and loaves miracles to a mundane example of the power of sharing. Jefferson was privately a Deist while publicly posing as a worshipping Anglican. But he does not provide the quote of the day, either, just a useful example of the passion of sinful men to eviscerate the divine to claim absolute authority in their own right. Jefferson exercised vile authority over hundreds of slaves. And he shared this thought on the institution of slavery:

I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.

So pretending that the Lord, the Creator of Heaven and Earth, was a mundane moralist of no particular authority comforted him in a way that tickled his intellectual vanity while calming his anxiety that he might be held accountable for his many, many sins. While there was forgiveness in the mercy of the Lord, as he would have heard every Sunday from his paid seat at Bruton Parish Church while studying law under the Whig George Wythe in Williamsburg, Jefferson clung to his cult of self with the enthusiasm of a dyed in the wool Modernist and Rationalist.

If Jefferson found anxiety in the authority of the divine, imagine a man whose crimes dwarf Jefferson, a holder not of hundreds of slaves but millions. Xi has undertaken to reform the revealed word of the Lord, which he finds to be irredeemably flawed. Xi and the CCP are excitedly working to produce a new, improved scripture that better reflects their views. From them, a fragment leaked to the Union of Catholic Asian News, as related by Crisis Magazine, sheds new darkness on the story of Jesus and the adulteress, changing the ending as follows:

When the crowd disappeared, Jesus stoned the sinner to death saying, “I too am a sinner. But if the law could only be executed by men without blemish, the law would be dead.”

Jesus then stones her to death.

Satan could not have put it more blasphemously himself. That is the quote of the day.

And having exposed you to such demonic tripe, I leave you with these words from Saint Paul as a consolation:

I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel— not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed.
-Galatians 1:6-9 (ESV)

Lord have mercy.

This post originally appeared on the Main Feed at Ricochet.

Why Do We Need a Pastor?

I spent most of my life as a homeless Christian, confirmed in His life, sacrifice on the cross, and resurrection, but without a trusted church body to inform and strengthen that faith. In the course of time my need to find a proper church home coincided with the ability to access and compare the representations of the major options and, in a time of disabling pain and illness, I found my way into an orthodox church body that teaches Jesus and Him crucified for our, even my, salvation. Praise His holy name.

A question came up in Bible Study under the topic of communion. “Why do we need a pastor?” This raised a cavalcade of possible responses. Why do we need a pastor for communion? Because that was the context of the Words of Institution and that was the institution that comes down to us from the early Church. In the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, we hold to the true presence of Jesus Christ in the bread and the wine through the words of consecration, those words spoken by an ordained minister of God acting as a proxy for Christ, and we don’t move on to unscriptural philosophical natterings. It is recognized to be a mystery, and it is a regular and central part of orthodox Christian worship, from Eastern Orthodox to Roman Catholicism to those parts of orthodox Protestantism that hold to the real presence rather than mere symbolism. (Hearing pastors in church bodies that hold to a symbolic interpretation laugh and remind us over barbecue that He said, “this is My body,” and “this is My blood,” when the question arose made for an orthodox wedge in the Protestant formation.) And if one who says they are without sin is a liar, how is any of us to navigate the modern religious bazaar to find the narrow gate without the right teaching, the orthodoxy, presented authoritatively by a right teaching pastor?

I am thankful every day for my right teaching pastor. Sin is sin, God is God, Satan is Satan, and Jesus is, every Sunday, crucified and risen for our salvation.

Now unpack all of that for a modern American seeker that has wandered in off the street in two or three sentences. Maybe stuffed full of prosperity gospel, or that name it and claim drivel that someone told them was Christianity. You, Dr. Augustine? Maybe you, Dr. Luther? Dr. Aquinas? Dr. Chrysostom? You know where to find me when you are ready.

His peace be with you.

Andrew

We lost Andrew nine years ago today. He left a widow, four children, and a huge vacuum that hundreds have stepped up to try and fill. At the time, PayPal refused to allow the trust created to help raise his children. They created a special rule in an attempt to deprive four children of comfort and support after the loss of their father. There are no words.

You shall not mistreat any widow or fatherless child. If you do mistreat them, and they cry out to me, I will surely hear their cry, and my wrath will burn, and I will kill you with the sword, and your wives shall become widows and your children fatherless.
– Exodus 22:22-24

But checks work. The most recent address I found for the trust is

Breitbart Children’s Trust
149 S. Barrington Ave, #735
Los Angeles, CA 90049

Contribute. Because you love Andrew or because PayPal is such a force for evil in the world. If you wear the rollerblades to do it, let us know. Rest in peace, Andrew.

Who Are the Canceled?

The Cancel Culture is amusing in an ironic sense. The canceler knows not what he does. And here I am not addressing the troll who gets blocked for name calling or profanity or sexual content. No one has a right to afflict others in that way. I’m thinking of the one that collects triggers like trading cards. He mentioned the governor’s ignominious conduct in blackface, canceled. She defended the governor’s ban on church services and restaurants while the casinos are running wild, canceled. We find ourselves in a world where there are fewer and fewer who believe that reasonable men of good conscious can disagree. Our institutions, even our Constitution, are under assault. Refuse to sit and be viciously slandered by a venomous, racist “anti-racist” whose entire philosophy revolves around perpetuating racism in every facet of life and you can pack up your things and hit the bricks. And Washington is eager to make it worse.

So let’s look at what happens when someone is canceled, to the canceler as well as the canceled. Taking the simplest case first, social media person one rises up to denounce Christians as responsible for every bad thing that happened in the last 2000 years and social media person two crushes that block widget to consign one to non-existence (in a totally solipsistic, post-modern, subjective, by which we mean false, way). I get it, I really do. We are not always tanned, rested, and ready to engage the endless stream of haters. But the possibility of finding common ground is lost. For the one issue the canceler surrenders any possibility of discovering an ally on other issues. Or even that rarest of treasure, a friend. Or even a savior.

Congressperson Ocasio-Cortez denounced Father Damien as a part of “white supremacist culture.” Ocasio-Cortez trades freely on her Catholicism, for example, here in an article she wrote for America, the Jesuit Review. Father Damien, a Catholic, came to a place where the lepers lay like rubbish in the streets, ignored and shunned by one and all, living the most debased existence while their disease progressed. As the Christians who came before him to establish the first hospitals and care for the ill at great personal risk, Father Damien conceived and led a ministry tending to these souls with selfless dedication and, on a nearly inevitable day at the age of 45, addressed his charges saying, “my fellow lepers.” White supremacist? Jesus sees all people One can fairly debate the merits of replacing a statue of Father Damien with a statue of Queen Lili’uokalani. Some might even argue that the spirit of Father Damien is an alien intrusion into the “sacred” halls of Congress. Saint Paul wrote in Galatians 3:28, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Father Damien lived that creed to his own destruction, in service to the very lepers that everyone else walked past or banished to Molokai, a living witness to his Savior’s true and selfless love of neighbor. His detractors, not. Ocasio-Cortez later addressed the issue with Catholic News Agency, and then her staff tried to characterize her remarks in awkward fashion. By demeaning and canceling Father Damien, she has placed a stumbling block between herself and the image of Jesus revealed through Damien.

Jesus’ career is a long chain of cancellations. Herod the Great slew the Innocents of Bethlehem to assassinate this King of the Jews. Herod developed kidney issues and gangrenous genitals, dying an ugly, itchy, painful death soon after. The scribes and Pharisees and Sadducees sought mightily to cancel the rabbi that preached to large crowds in the Temple and scattered the moneychangers who paid the Temple priests to occupy the Porch of the Gentiles, the space reserved for gentiles to stand and hear the sermons and the Word of the Lord. Three of the brightest lights among the Pharisees would come to defect to this troublesome rabbi and claim a place in history and among the saints. The Sanhedrin, the high Jewish council of Jerusalem, plotted against Jesus, tried him, convicted him of blasphemy. Surely, convicting the Lord of being a blasphemer is a huge milestone in the chronicles of the Cancelers. A generation later Titus crushed Jerusalem and destroyed Herod’s Temple. Judas Iscariot plotted to cancel Jesus, whether to immanentize the revolution or hide his thieving or something else altogether is lost to history, but it is revealed in Luke 22:3 that Judas falls under the control of Satan after the Last Supper as he goes to put the conspiracy to arrest Jesus into motion. With Judas’ suicide, hanging himself from a tree, a most grievous and dishonorable fate in Jewish eyes, Judas has also canceled himself. Pontius Pilate comes across as indifferent at the trial, finding no fault, contriving an excuse to release either Jesus or Barabbas, but once that verdict comes down he shows our Lord the fullest cruelty available to Roman law. The scourging, the mocking, the procession, and, finally, the crucifixion. Pilate disappears into history soon after, and his beloved Rome will ultimately fall to this Jewish rabbi and see its great buildings picked apart to provide materials for other, lesser buildings. And then there is Satan, the accuser himself, the tempter in the desert, the possessor of demoniacs, and finally the possessor of the Lord’s own Apostle. His tireless work to effect this cancelation is fully realized at the cross. Satan has prevented Jesus’ Davidic reign on Earth and stands a colossus over the fallen world.

And then there was Sunday, and the canceler was canceled. The battle continues, but the war is over. He is risen. He is risen indeed.

Happy Sunday.

Remembering Law Enforcement

I worked at a convenience store while I was in college. The neighborhood was mostly safe and lawful with occasional dramatic exceptions. My convenience store career would come to an abrupt end when a robber shot a hole in the ceiling while I was off work, and I negotiated a career change to make mom less agitated. But while I was working those night shifts, police were regulars. Coffee, maybe a scoop of High’s ice cream, and a bit of conversation on what the Russians were up to or the travails of trying to meet the right girl in a town that was not often receptive to law enforcement officers. They would tip me off if a customer was carrying a weapon. Occasionally a gun, more often a knife or a straight blade. Given the cue, I learned to look for such things, but they were always better.

A couple of year after I changed jobs, the news came. Phil, the senior officer in our little circle, answered a call and was ambushed. Officer dead. Manhunt under way. He was still single, still hadn’t found the right woman, and now he would never meet his children, never teach them to play ball or watch them graduate high school. Never again swap stories about the ludicrous and terrible things that happen on that job. Lord bless and keep him.

This year, some people have expressed grievances with our police, thinking that our society would function much more to their satisfaction if there were no officers tasked with maintaining public order. Some corrupt politicians and their supporters have gone so far as to pay the bail for felons charged with violent, even capital, crimes. On this first Sunday in Lent, on contemplating my valiant friend, I must sharply voice my objections and thank the honest law enforcement officers who make life safer for myself and my family. The proposed policies make everyones lives more dangerous, and their supporters are no friends of liberty.

Welcome. May His blessings be with you all this first Sunday of Lent, 2021.

Rich Mullins, Ragamuffin

Rich Mullins lived the life of a seeker. He grew up on the family farm with two brothers and two sisters and wrote songs about the farming life. Disappointed in love early, he would never settle, embracing the role of a ragamuffin. He took being in the world but not of the world very seriously, from 1995 until his death, he lived on a Navajo reservation in New Mexico teaching music to the children and attending Christian services.

Being a ragamuffin, he was always experimenting with his music. Few artists would reflect on the usefulness of a screen door on a submarine, but he did. Taking the Dylanesque tramp folkie image to heart, he kept his work fresh by finding new narrative approaches and drawing from many musical traditions.

Among his greatest achievements, there is “Creed”, where he makes some of the oldest words in Christianity fresh again with a musical riff that reminds me of “Where the Streets Have No Name”:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=9LR2hFP1yb4%3Ffeature%3Doembed

And “We Are Not as Strong as We Think We Are”, in which he pierces our public masks and petty pride to leave us naked in the shame of Eden, but more gently than I make it sound:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=B9vogh4Il34%3Ffeature%3Doembed

and “If I Stand”, where he deals with weakness and grace and faith in a resolutely spiritual and mature voice. Every artist that has written a mawkish sentimental Lord save me this life is so bad ballad should take a minute to listen to this before turning theirs loose:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=AoNXSAKRQ0I%3Ffeature%3Doembed

From a report by Jennifer Comes Roy writing in the Wichita Eagle on the occasion of his death:

Rich Mullins never thought of himself as famous or talented, and never cared about being rich. What he cared about was serving God and serving others _ a message of joy that resonates throughout the contemporary Christian music he wrote and recorded.
A former Wichitan and a graduate of Friends University, Mullins, 41, was killed Friday night in an automobile accident in Illinois. Mullins and a friend, Marshall McVicker, 24, were on their way from Chicago to Wichita for a performance Saturday night at Lawrence-Dumont Stadium. The concert was a benefit for a youth ministries organization of the United Methodist Church.
“In the industry, he was considered by many to be the greatest writer of our time, ” said Mullins’ manager and friend, Jim Dunning Jr. “I believe that.
“But if Rich had his preference, I think he’d prefer not to be remembered. Rich would prefer that the God he believed in be remembered.”

Just like all those Madonna and child portraits, where Mary is in some way pointing to the child.

The next video starts a little slow, but I think the patience is well rewarded. Rich was gone before I came across his music. I did not discover this next song until after I knew the circumstances regarding his death. He and a friend were traveling in a Jeep on Interstate 39 near Lostant, Illinois on September 19, 1997, 23 years ago today, when there was an accident and he was thrown out of the vehicle and then run over by a tractor-trailer truck in the dark. So I can never hear this song without imagining that night.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=4ZDIsJ6M_b0%3Ffeature%3Doembed

A posthumous record was assembled, the Jesus Record, using many demo tracks by Mullins for the projected content. And then covers by other artists of the songs, including Amy Grant, Rick Elias, Ashley Cleveland, Michael W. Smith, closing out his final project as well as could be managed. I am sure the original vision has already been performed brilliantly for his Lord.

Mullins was posthumously awarded the GMA Dove Artist of the Year 1998 award, the 1999 Song of the Year for “My Deliverer”, and the 1999 Songwriter of the Year. He was nominated many times when he was alive, but like canonizing saints, his earthly recognition came after his earthly travails.

The following is from a tribute concert performed in Nashville, TN. It captures the essential magic of the song:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=SS-dw2KYPx0%3Ffeature%3Doembed

At his death, Rich’s net worth was around $6 million, but he never knew that. When his career took off, he arranged for his fortune to be managed in a blind trust with him receiving a modest allowance. In the music industry, he knew full well what money and temptation could do to a man. Like Joseph confronted with his master Potipher’s aggressively lustful wife, he fled the temptation.

In the world, but not of it.

The Lord’s peace be with him, and with you all.

This article originally appeared on Ricochet.com.

The Nephilim

Father Andrew Stephen Damick, author of Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy and prolific podcaster for several years, and Father Stephen De Young, have created a wonderful podcast for Ancient Faith Radio, the Lord of Spirits. Over the years I have seen many theories on the nature of the Nephilim mentioned in Genesis and Numbers. Answers in Genesis provides a representative view of the general treatment of the question: “There is a great deal of confusion over the word Nephilim. No one today really knows what it means. It is related to the verb series “to fall” (naphal) in Hebrew, which is why some direct this to fallen angels or more appropriately, the offspring thereof. However, this also gives strong support to the view that men had fallen away from God.” And the various fictional treatments I have sampled missed the target in my opinion.

The priests at the Lord of Spirits have very broadly surveyed the religions of the Biblical world and developed some very interesting theories on who the Nephilim were and why, when translating the Hebrew into Greek, Septuagint scholars chose to translate Nephilim as Gigantes, the Greek word for giants. Who were the Nephilim, how do they bridge the Flood when we have accounts of all eight survivors of that cataclysm, how do they relate to the Greek legends of Gigantes, and how do they relate to powers and principalities? Give it a listen and tell me what you think.