Pat’s Answers Blog – Page 74 – Everyone is entitled to MY own opinion

A Prayer for Saturday, September 22, 2018

-Revelation 21:8 and -Revelation 22:15

Prayer

But as for the cowardly, the untrustworthy, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those involved with the occult and with drugs, idol-worshippers, and all liars — their destiny is the lake burning with fire and sulfur, the second death.

–Revelation 21:8

Outside are the dogs and sorcerers and the sexually immoral and murderers and idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices falsehood.

-Revelation 22:15

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Tall oaks from little acorns grow

he important thing is, however, that if it’s an acorn, it’s edible, no matter what species it comes from.

acorns

DISCLAIMER: It is my belief that this information is true and accurate, however, understand that if you choose to follow what is posted here you do so at your own risk. The author of this article and the management of this website assume no responsibility for your application of this information and, specifically disavow any responsibility for any outcome therefrom.

In the United States, there are quite a few different species of oak trees, and many of them vary by climate and region. The important thing is, however, that if it’s an acorn, it’s edible, no matter what species it comes from.

In our area of the Ozarks, we seem to be dominated by white oaks, but you may find that the oaks that populate your region are quite different. Regardless, the process of collecting, processing, and eating is much the same.

The first thing to consider when foraging for acorns is the timing. Oaks have two distinct phases when they drop acorns. An early drop and then the good drop. Early in the fall, you may notice that oak trees are dripping with acorns for the first time – this is not the time to collect nuts.

If you collect from the first fall, you’ll be disappointed to find that every single one is bad. In some, inexplicable way, oak trees know what nuts aren’t developing well or are infected with insects, and so they rid themselves of the unworthy nuts as soon as they can. Many of these acorns will still have their caps firmly attached (a sure sign of a bad nut).

It’s the second drop you want to watch for, usually happening sometime in October. These nuts are the good ones! You can crack open a few acorns with a rock to test them

Now, there are some options when it comes to gathering. At the beginning hunker down under the most productive oak trees and pick up acorns by hand. It’s quite easy to sort through acorns by sight.

How to tell a good acorn from a bad one? It basically comes down to inspecting the disc on the top for dark marks, watching for weevil holes, and ignoring ones with the caps still attached.

A much faster approach is to use the Garden Weasel Nut Gatherer.

Though the collecting tool is indiscriminate in whether it’s picking up a good acorn, rotten acorn, or rock, the time it saves in not having to bend over and the speed of gathering made it totally worth using. Under a good tree, you could fill a five-gallon bucket in under an hour! Granted, there will be the odd stick and stone in your pail, but you can easily sorted those out when you get back inside and began to process the nuts.

Once you have your haul of nuts, it’s important to get them drying or processed as soon as possible. Since acorns are naturally rather moist, they can go bad really quickly when piled in a bucket.

If you can’t process them immediately, lay them out flat in a single layer somewhere where air can circulate around them.

Also, be aware that acorn weevil larvae will appear soon – even some good-looking nuts are secretly host to the little grubby nut-destroyers.

The grubs are not harmful in the least, as they can’t re-infect other acorns, and they don’t bite. Be aware that the grubs’ sole desire is to get back into the ground so that they can pupate and infect next year’s crop of acorns. It might be best to dispose of them somewhere far from your choice oak trees.

The first step to process your acorns is to wash them. Filled your kitchen sink with half full with water and dump several scoops of acorns into it. Immediately, most of the acorns dropped to the bottom. These are likely to be good.

You’ll find that the acorn caps and many bad acorns float on the surface – this makes the first step of sorting quite easy! Take note, however, that almost all dried acorns will float, so if you dry your acorns before processing them, the float test won’t be useful to you.

All the acorns that looked good should be spread out in a single layer on several cookie sheets. Toast them in the oven at 175 degrees Fahrenheit for an hour and a half. This serves to dry them off and warm them for cracking.

Now, there are several options when it comes to cracking loads of acorns. It can be as simple as smashing them open with a hammer on a flat surface or as sophisticated as buying a specialized nutcracker for the purpose.

Anysell88 Manual Heavy Duty Rocket Nut Cracker (https://www.amazon.com/Anysell88-Manual-Cracker-Nutcracker-Sheller/dp/B07GZCVCBM/ref=sr_1_1?s=home-garden&ie=UTF8&qid=1537112237&sr=1-1&keywords=anysell88+manual+heavy+duty+rocket+nutcracker)

During this stage that do the bulk of your sorting. It’s inevitable that some bad acorns will ride along with the good ones, but once they’re cracked open, the good is super-easy to separate from the bad.

Any that were moldy, had clear evidence of being nibbled by bugs or were covered with dark spots go into the compost, and all the tan, waxy, nutmeats go into a large stock pot so that they can be leached.

During this stage, most of the testas (the dark brown, papery coating over the nut) also comes off. Some sources say that you must remove every trace of the testa to have tasty flour, but the odd piece here and there really doesn’t make a difference.

This next part is important. It’s possible to eat a single acorn raw with no ill effect, but I don’t know if you’d want to repeat the experience. The high amount of tannins in acorns make the raw product quite unpalatable. Leaching – soaking the acorns in water to separate the nut from its water-soluble tannins – makes them edible!

Cold leaching acorns results in a versatile end product, one that can be used as a fine flour or coarse polenta, as well as in all the ways you can use hot leached acorns. Acorn flour doesn’t have gluten in it, but it’s a versatile flour, nonetheless, especially when the tannins are leached with cold water.

Because it contains no gluten, acorn flour won’t rise on its own. That’s why you’ll often see recipes calling for half acorn flour and half regular flour. However, some baked goods, like cookies and brownies, work well with cold-leached acorn flour alone. Acorn flour adds richness and depth to anything you use it in. The starch you preserve by cold leaching helps bind the baked goods and lets you use your acorn flour in lots of different ways.

Native peoples used to let running water do the work of leaching by tethering baskets of acorns in a stream and allowing the cold water to run through the nuts for several days. I don’t have a stream, but I do have a toilet tank.

The Jar Method for cold leaching acorns.

It’s low tech, and requires only a little more effort on your part. For this method, you’ll need to grind your shelled acorns into a coarse meal before leaching. You can do this in a high quality blender, like a Vitamix, or with a hand mill, sold for grinding whole corn kernels. A hand mill produces a coarse grind, which is perfect for recipes like falafel and veggie burgers, while the Vitamix produces a finer flour, excellent for baking.

Find a large, clear glass or plastic jar with a tight-fitting lid. Fill the jar halfway with coarsely ground acorn meal, then top it off with tap water. Use a chopstick or the handle of a wooden spoon to poke out any air pockets in the acorn meal, close the lid, and give the jar a good shake. Move the jar to the refrigerator. The acorn meal will settle out of the water with time, and the water turns brown as the tannins leach from the nuts.

Let the jar sit for 24 hours in the refrigerator, then carefully pour the water off the meal. Don’t worry about getting every last drop. Refill the jar with water, and replace the jar in the refrigerator. You’ll need to do this several times, depending on how bitter the nuts were to begin with. After pouring off the water for the third time, taste the acorn meal. If it’s bitter, continue to change the water every 24 hours until no trace of bitterness remains.

Once the bitterness has been leached from the acorn meal, pour the meal out into the center of a dish towel. Gather the four corners of the towel together and twist the dish towel closed, then continue to twist until water begins to drip from the bottom of the dish towel. When no more water can be removed by twisting, squeeze the dish towel as hard as possible to remove as much water as you can.

If you’re in a big hurry for leached acorn flour, try the running water method. This is the most labor-intensive method, but is by no means difficult. Put a cup of shelled nuts in a blender and add water to four to five inches above the level of the nuts. Pulverize to create a slurry, and set aside. (If you have already ground your acorns into meal, but not yet leached them, you can also use the method described below.)

Place a large colander in the sink and line it with a dishtowel. Pour the slurry or meal into the colander, then run cool water into the colander and stir with a large spoon. After eight minutes of stirring, taste the slurry. If there is any bitter flavor, let the water run for another two or three minutes and taste again. You should be able to stir without spilling, which is why this is best done in small batches in a large colander. Once the acorn meal is not at all bitter, squeeze out as much excess water as possible, as described in the jar method, above.

If you have a dehydrator with fruit leather sheets, spread the moist acorn meal across the sheets and set the temperature to the lowest possible setting. Depending on the humidity where you live, your meal will take between 12 and 24 hours to dry. Check it after several hours and break up any large clumps to speed the drying process. An oven or warming drawer will also work, as long as the temperature is below 150F.

You can stop here, at the dried acorn meal stage, or grind it to make a fine flour for baking. The dry grains canister of a Vitamix does a great job in under a minute, but an ordinary spice grinder also does a very good job, albeit in smaller batches. I like to keep jars of both coarse meal and fine flour on hand.

Once the acorns (whole or ground) have dried, they’re ready to be measured, sealed, and stored. A vacuum sealer is a handy tool for preserving freshness, but if you don’t have a vacuum sealer you can store your leached acorns in ziplock bags. Close the bags most of the way, then suck out as much air as you can with a drinking straw before sealing them all the way.

Whole nuts will keep for several years in the freezer; the smaller amount of exposed surface area means slower oxidation. Flour and meal should be used within a year.

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Frankly my dear…

We’ve never stood in your way but we don’t really care if you have good neighborhoods or not.

woodpile report

The following is a Guest Post from Ol’ Remus of the late and greatly missed Woodpile Report.

With all the recent troubles we’re again being invited to an honest and open conversation about race, or said differently, the browbeatings will be resumed. Try this for honest and open: many of us, probably most of us, are tired of your whining, your so-called grievances, your violence and crime, your insults and threats, your witless blather and pornographic demeanor—all of it. You’re not quite 13% of the population yet everything has to be about you, all day, every day. With you, facts aren’t facts, everything’s a kozmik krisis, and abusive confrontations are your go-to.

Here’s the thing: some of us despise you, although fewer than you believe, but most of us plain don’t care about you or your doings. There was a time when we did care, but you betrayed our good will and played us for fools. We laugh about it now, but we actually believed you wanted equal opportunity and mutual respect and to live in harmony—all that stuff. Ain’t it a hoot? Imagine our embarrassment.

We talk among ourselves just like you do. It’s true, we have “frank and open discussions” when you’re not around. Why? Partly because it’s exhausting to tippy-toe around you. Partly because you think it’s your celestial right to tell us what we can say. And partly because you’re alarmingly aggressive or painfully dim-witted by turns. We never know which “you” will pop out of the box, or when. But mainly because you’ve revealed yourself as grasping opportunists without honor or principle. There’s your deal-breaker. There’s more.

During the recent riots you expected us to believe heisting snack food then torching the place was “standing up for justice”. When we didn’t buy it, you told us the looting and arson wasn’t done by the rioters after all, no, all the bad stuff was done by rioters from out of town. Apparently you think it makes a difference to us. And if we don’t fall for that one, you tell us you’re the real victims, you’re the ones “hit hardest” because the neighborhoods you looted and burned are, um, looted and burned.

We’ve never stood in your way but we don’t really care if you have good neighborhoods or not. The evidence says you don’t care either, unless we build and maintain them for you, what your enablers call “investments in urban communities.” They don’t mention the return on our past “investments”. Our former neighborhoods weren’t improved by your arrival. Your contempt for ordinary civility tells us no level of “investment” would make a difference. Listen up. It’s simple. Just like our neighborhoods are our responsibility, so are your neighborhoods your responsibility, not ours. Your clownish leaders will tell you otherwise but they’ve always been your responsibility and they always will be your responsibility. Accept it or don’t, you’re the ones who live in them. There’s more.

Your air conditioned, smart phone equipped, EBT-financed “poverty” doesn’t wash to begin with, yet you’d have us believe poverty causes crime. There’s no payday for assault and rape and random killing. Police say 20% of your criminal violence is related to dope-dealing, okay, business disputes of a sort, but it says the rest of it is largely pro bono. We also notice you have a working knowledge of jury nullification and take pride in not “snitching”, typical gang behavior.

We say “what you think, you do. What you do, you are.” We know what you think—we hear it every waking minute. We know what you do. How could we not know what you are? Just so it gets said, crime causes poverty. It drives away productive people, their businesses and the opportunities you said you wanted. More bad news: you’re free to accuse them of anything you wish but they’re not coming back.

Schools haven’t been educating our kids for a long time. They’re too busy conjuring up new ways to teach yours, in fact, we’re beginning to think yours are the only ones who matter. There’s always some new scheme claiming dazzling success which, in the end, amounts to handing out the answers with the tests, or taking the annoying hard stuff out of the coursework, or entering unearned grades by hand. Whatever they’re doing they’re doing it wrong. Your kids are telling us, in every way they know how, they have neither the interest nor the inclination for academics. Perhaps we should listen. If what they want is “out” it’s worth considering and probably worth encouraging.

You tell us the schools have “failed to meet their needs.” And what are their needs, pray tell? Higher standards and tougher tests? Stricter rules and a dress code? Or some alternate universe where credit is earned for putting teachers in the ER, or for a string of abortions before the tenth grade? If you’d tell us what their needs are we’d at least know what needs we’re failing to meet. Until then we’ll mark it down for what it is, another lame excuse. They’re supposed to be schools, not day care or orphanages or theme parks.

You pester us with the “civil rights movement” of fifty years ago as though it happened last week, with tedious 1960s footage and cloying voice-overs, in an endless loop, like Groundhog Day, decade after decade. It’s understandable, you haven’t met any real resistance since those days. Breaking news: none of it matters any more, it all devolved into just another swindle, an extortion racket, “pay up or we’ll make a stink—and the bad optics are on you”.

Schools now teach something called White Privilege, which claims no overt act is necessary for us to be racist, in fact, absence of such acts is said to be direct evidence. It’s the “original sin” concept in a different wrapper, meaning our putative racism is bone deep and can’t be discharged by good works. Even so, they say we must atone in perpetuity for being white. They suggest we devote our lives in selfless service to you. No. Sorry. Whatever white privilege there may be, it isn’t enough. In fact, being subjected to White Privilege prattle is worth a couple of privileges.

Speaking of privilege, 60% of your college grads—and 20% of all of you—are employed by government. The intent is to create an artificial middle class of course, hence the trivial positions with imaginative titles and weighty salaries. In the lower reaches it’s the quota hires, typically unqualified. It’s a great offer. You pretend you’re doing something useful and we pretend to believe you. The rest of your grads are largely diversity directors, window dressing, teachers of dubious “studies” and improbable “histories”, and similar warehousing schemes for the otherwise unemployable. It’s as good as it’s ever going to get, except for those on the skinny end of the bell curve—for whom we have genuine, i.e., earned respect. You’d be a fool to leave it on the table, for as long as it lasts.

So here’s the deal. If you want to know what we really think of you, the answer is we don’t, unless you’re making yourself unavoidable or we’re cleaning up your latest mess. We can safely rely on you to make astonishingly irresponsible choices and blame us for the consequences. And you’ll demand we make good on them for you. We won’t take a chance on your sincerity ever again. Take it somewhere else, you have no credibility left with us. You’re a net liability, predictable to the point of surety. So we attend to our own lives and our own problems. It’s as it should be. We recommend it. As for you, frankly my dear, we don’t give a damn.

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Newspeak

When Justice Anthony Kennedy asked the Department of Justice if the Obama administration was truly arguing that, according to the Constitution, book sales could be prohibited, the Justice official replied, yes, “if the book contained the functional equivalent of express advocacy.”

Its fake news

Reblogged from Front Page Magazine

We’re rightly upset at the censorship of the big social media platforms, and our morale wasn’t improved when something north of three hundred newspapers wrote editorials in virtual unison, or when Mastercard, in cahoots with the Southern Poverty Law Center, attempted to shut down our Center. Thankfully, we won and they lost. But the efforts to silence conservative spokesmen seem to be intensifying, which makes strategic political sense to me. If you can’t win an argument on the merits, then either discredit or silence your opponents.

The Left has lost most of the substantive arguments—from health care to taxation, from foreign policy to defense spending–and their best political chance is to silence the opposition. This campaign rages throughout the society, from social media to the educational system, from publishers to movie makers.

There is seemingly no limit to their zeal in silencing their opponents, even to changing our Constitutional system. Did you know that the Democratic Party is on record against the First Amendment? Officially, publicly, and, in the United States Senate, unanimously. They tried to rewrite it in 2014, and introduced a Constitutional Amendment that would have enabled federal and state governments to prohibit various kinds of political spending, broadcasting or publishing.

This remarkable measure, which flew in the face of the Bill of Rights and the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, had no chance of being approved by the requisite majorities in Congress and the states. It was, therefore, a purely political maneuver, laying down a marker for voters and opinion-makers. Still, the numbers are astonishing: 49 Senators voted for it, and not one—not a single one—voted to preserve the First Amendment.

It gets worse. Outraged by the Democratic stance against freedom of speech and press, Senator Ted Cruz introduced his own amendment, which consisted of the First Amendment itself. Once again, the numbers were remarkable. Not a single Democrat voted for it, either in committee or in the full Senate.

So the Democrats have put us on notice: they are fully prepared to undo the First Amendment if they gain enough political power to accomplish it. Cruz aptly calls them “Fahrenheit 451 Democrats,” after the book by Ray Bradbury featuring book-burning “firemen,” and one couldn’t ask for a better label.

As Senator Cruz observed:

When Justice Anthony Kennedy asked the Department of Justice if the Obama administration was truly arguing that, according to the Constitution, book sales could be prohibited, the Justice official replied, yes, “if the book contained the functional equivalent of express advocacy.”

That was a shocking exchange. The government made an unabashed argument for the government being able to stop a book from being sold.

That’s what silencing your opponents is all about.

Did you expect them to engage in an open debate? They regard that as a sucker’s game, because they invariably lose. Far better, if your mission is to win elections, to peddle your ideology without fear of contradiction.

Most Americans don’t realize that the Democrats are quite willing to undo the Bill of Rights, ban books, and block conservative ideas in all possible ways. It seems preposterous in a society as wide open and enthusiastically contentious as ours, and yet, in many ways, they are succeeding. Silencing dissent is blatantly rampant in the printed and virtual media, the schools, the movies, even book publishing.

What to do? My impression is that the tide is turning, as censorship becomes more visibly absurd. When an 8-year old gets punished in a schoolroom for calling his teacher “ma’am” the censors have crossed a line—good manners are now banned—I believe most Americans want preserved. The remedy is political, and therefore local: replace the censors, throughout the society, and at all levels, with tolerant people. We need new school boards, new directors at universities, new directors and managers at social media companies, and new representatives in Congress and the Senate who will reject the calls of the Fahrenheit 451 Democrats. Turn the November elections into a referendum on the First Amendment. Throw out the anti-American censors, let’s vote for a free society.

Or lose it.

Yes, this sounds like the Tea Party all over again. As well it should. The censors shut down the Tea Party when they saw their domination challenged, and used the instruments of power—notably the IRS—to paralyze the movement. I don’t think Trump’s IRS would do the same (although his inability to properly staff his administration is often very unsettling). So it’s a good time to challenge the censors, restore free speech to its rightful place, and restore real debate, on the urgent matters that we must deal with, to the mainstream.

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Chicken-of-the-woods mushroom

“All mushrooms are edible… once.” NEVER eat mushrooms that you are not 100% sure are edible. Having said that, it looks like a “Chicken of the woods”.

Chicken-of-the-woods-fungi

A friend of mine on FaceBook posted this on Saturday, September 15, 2018; “Believe it or not, this is a mushroom we found growing on my uncle’s property in Minnesota….isn’t it weird??” They were wondering if it was edible. My response was; “All mushrooms are edible… once.” NEVER eat mushrooms that you are not 100% sure are edible. Having said that, it looks like a “Chicken of the woods”.

You can easily spot the chicken of the woods mushroom by its impressive size and vibrant yellow-orange colors. This large polypore has surprised many a nature lover the first time they found it! Yet did you know they’re also edible, and considered a delicacy in some parts of the world?

This mushroom has a lemony, meaty taste. Some think it tastes like its chicken namesake; others describe the flavor as being more like crab or lobster. Whatever your opinion, the chicken fungus makes a great substitute for meat in almost any dish.

It’s important to note that this is one of those mushrooms that sometimes causes gastric distress in certain people. If you want to avoid a possible stomach misadventure, only try a little bit your first time to see what it does to you. Also always avoid chicken of the woods growing on conifers, eucalyptus, or cedar trees, as these are reported to contain toxins that can make people sick.

Chicken of the Woods identification is infamously easy, thus they’re considered one of the “safe” mushrooms for beginners. I encourage hands on education from a local expert, so please don’t rely on just the Internet to learn how to identify mushrooms.

If you think you’ve found a chicken of the woods, check for these familiar features:

Cap/Stem:

The sulphur shelf has no real stem. The caps grow in large brackets, which are individual “shelves” ranging from 2 to 10 inches across (about 5 to 25 cm) and up to 10 inches long.

The brackets are roughly fan-shaped and may be smooth to lightly wrinkled. They grow in an overlapping pattern stacked one on top of the other. Thus the fruiting body can be quite large!

The outside cap color ranges from bright whitish-yellow to bright whitish-orange. If you cut them open, the inside flesh will be soft and similarly colored. As the mushroom ages, the brightness of the colors fade and the flesh becomes harder and more crumbly.

The caps sport whitish to yellowish pores on the underside, not gills.

Habitat:

Always found growing on or at the base of dead or dying trees, never on the ground or alone in fields.

These mushrooms grow on dead or dying hardwoods, most commonly oak but also cherry or beech. Species growing on eucalyptus or cedar trees should be avoided, as they may cause gastric distress. They’re sometimes found under conifers as well.

Laetiporus species are all over North America and Europe.

Time of Year:

Summer through fall, which is August through October in most areas. Other species that grow in warmer climates may be found in early winter as well.

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What’s in a handshake?

There’s an old Scottish saying that in one variant reads: “Many a little makes a mickle.” That is, the accumulation of many little things leads to one big thing.

handshake

I received this in an email. I researched this story. It is true.
At first glance this may seem like a trivial story, but what lies hidden beneath it could have serious consequences for our children and grandchildren.

In Switzerland it has long been customary for students to shake the hands of their teachers at the beginning and end of the school day. It’s a sign of solidarity and mutual respect between teacher and pupil, one that is thought to encourage the right classroom atmosphere. Justice Minister Simonetta Sommaruga recently felt compelled to further explain that shaking hands was part of Swiss culture and daily life.

And the reason she felt compelled to speak out about the handshake is that two Muslim brothers, aged 14 and 15, who have lived in Switzerland for several years (and thus are familiar with its mores), in the town of Therwil, near Basel, refused to shake the hands of their teacher, a woman, because, they claimed, this would violate Muslim teachings that contact with the opposite sex is allowed only with family members.

At first the school authorities decided to avoid trouble, and initially granted the boys an exemption from having to shake the hand of any female teacher. But an uproar followed, as Mayor Reto Wolf explained to the BBC: “the community was unhappy with the decision taken by the school. In our culture and in our way of communication a handshake is normal and sends out respect for the other person, and this has to be brought home to the children in school.”

Therwil’s Educational Department reversed the school’s decision, explaining in a statement on May 25 that the school’s exemption was lifted because “the public interest with respect to equality between men and women and the integration of foreigners significantly outweighs the freedom of religion.” It added that a teacher has the right to demand a handshake. Furthermore, if the students refused to shake hands again “the sanctions called for by law will be applied,” which included a possible fine of up to 5,000 dollars.

This uproar in Switzerland, where many people were enraged at the original exemption granted to the Muslim boys, did not end after that exemption was itself overturned by the local Educational Department. The Swiss understood quite clearly that this was more than a little quarrel over handshakes; it was a fight over whether the Swiss would be masters in their own house, or whether they would be forced to yield, by the granting of special treatment, to the Islamic view of the proper relations between the sexes. It is one battle small, but to the Swiss significant between overweening Muslim immigrants and the indigenous Swiss.

Naturally, once the exemption was withdrawn, all hell broke loose among Muslims in Switzerland. The Islamic Central Council of Switzerland, instead of yielding quietly to the Swiss decision to uphold the handshaking custom, criticized the ruling in hysterical terms, claiming that the enforcement of the handshaking is “totalitarian” (!) because its intent is to “forbid religious people from meeting their obligations to God.”

That, of course, was never the “intent” of the long-standing handshaking custom, which was a nearly-universal custom in Switzerland, and in schools had to do only with encouraging the right classroom atmosphere of mutual respect between instructor and pupil, of which the handshake was one aspect.

The Swiss formulation of the problem weighing competing claims will be familiar to Americans versed in Constitutional adjudication. In this case “the public interest with respect to equality” of the sexes and the “integration of foreigners” (who are expected to adopt Swiss ways, not force the Swiss to exempt them from some of those ways) were weighed against the “religious obligations to God” of Muslims, and the former interests found to outweigh the latter.

What this case shows is that even at the smallest and seemingly inconsequential level, Muslims are challenging the laws and customs of the Infidels among whom they have been allowed to settle [i.e., stealth jihad toward sharia dominance]. Each little victory, or defeat, will determine whether Muslims will truly integrate into a Western society or, instead, refashion that society to meet Muslim requirements.

The handshake has been upheld and, what’s more, a stiff fine now will be imposed on those who continue to refuse to shake hands with a female teacher. This is a heartening sign of non-surrender by the Swiss. But the challenges of the Muslims within Europe to the laws and customs of the indigenes have no logical end and will not stop.

And the greater the number of Muslims allowed to settle in Europe, the stronger and more frequent their challenges will be. They are attempting not to integrate, but rather to create, for now, a second, parallel society, and eventually, through sheer force of numbers from both migration and by outbreeding the Infidels, to fashion not a parallel society but one society now dominated by Muslim sharia.

The Swiss handshaking dispute has received some, but not enough, press attention. Presumably, it’s deemed too inconsequential a matter to bother with. But the Swiss know better. And so should we.

There’s an old Scottish saying that in one variant reads: “Many a little makes a mickle.” That is, the accumulation of many little things leads to one big thing. That’s what’s happening in Europe today. This was one victory for the side of sanity.There will need to be a great many more.

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Prayer for Saturday, September 15, 2018

Armour of God

Prayer

¹⁰Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. ¹¹Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil.

Ephesians 6

Standing for truth

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Enemy of the People

There has never been a time in the last century when enemy propaganda wasn’t on the front pages of the major newspapers of America.

Its fake news

Is the media really the enemy of the American people? Let’s tackle the question objectively.

Enemies hate you and want to destroy you. Do the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, CBS, and the whole alphabet soup of organizations with corporate headquarters in major cities really want to destroy the people who watch their programs, buy their papers and serve them soup after hours?

It seems implausible. But so did the Communists of the Khmer Rouge shooting everyone who wore glasses. Or North Korea’s multi-generational concentration camps, Nazi Germany diverting crucial resources from the war effort to kill Jews, or Venezuela shipping oil to Cuba while its people starve.

Plausibility is a poor measure of what fanatical ideologues might do. Let’s start with what they do, do.

While Jim Acosta was demanding a retraction for being called an “enemy of the people”, the media had thrown every effort into opening the border. The American people are defined by their physical possession of the territory. And that territory and its possession is defined and measured by a border.

You can’t advocate the destruction of the American people and then object to being called their enemy.

Without a border, there is no America and no American people. The territories formerly known as the United States fill up with various peoples who claim the entitlements of citizenship but not its responsibilities, whose identity is not of their current country of residency, but of their country of birth.

You don’t need to be an American to watch CNN, MSNBC or serve soup to one of their reporters. They would rather you weren’t. That’s what replacing Americans with cheap labor and cheap votes is about.

The media’s first allegiance is to the left. Not to America. Its people are not Americans. They’re leftists. The politics of the left are geared at replacing Americans with leftists through a combination of indoctrination, demographic replacement, economic warfare and voter suppression.

Destroying the American people would be an act worthy of an “enemy of the people”.

The media is offended by being referred to as the “enemy of the people”. But does it believe that the American people have the right to exist and maintain their existence? And if so, on what terms?

The media has opposed every war that against Communism or Islamism that the United States has fought. It has sought to undermine our country and our soldiers in these conflicts on various pretexts.

The media has covered up numerous acts of violence by Islamic terrorists. It has sided with Islamic terror networks such as the Muslim Brotherhood. It has urged our government to arm Islamic terrorists. It has supported Iran’s push for a nuclear bomb. It has spread disinformation about the links between Islamic terrorists and their domestic support networks. It has worked to silence law enforcement and intelligence officials who attempted to warn about the threat of Islamic terrorism.

If the Muslim Brotherhood controlled the media, would the news look any different than it does now?

This isn’t a shocking new development. The media repeatedly sided with Communist nations, guerrillas, spies, terrorists and superpowers against our own government. It covered up atrocities by the Soviet Union, glamorized Communist spies, urged that we arm and aid Communist nations, and undermined allied governments, and even our own government and its soldiers when they fought Communism.

There has never been a time in the last century when enemy propaganda wasn’t on the front pages of the major newspapers of America. After the fall of the USSR, the media traded the red for the green. Its collusion with the Islamic conspiracy is a sequel to its collusion with the Communist conspiracy.

Is this the behavior of an American institution or an enemy institution out to destroy America?

Available at amazon.com “A Republic, if you can keep it”

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Turning the tables

remember that it is the GOVERNMENT that actually stole your wages from you first, while you DID NOTHING.

Rules for radicals

“We now live in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the press destroys information, religion destroys morals, and our banks destroy the economy.” And how is this accomplished? By the global elite’s use of police that have pledged to “protect and serve” but instead “oppress and terrorize.” – Chris Hedges

Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen – Friedrich Nietzsche

Lord save us from the spineless, witless partisans destroying this nation, and smite them from the face of the land – Warrior King

If I were to categorize myself, it would be as a conservative libertarian constitutional Christian – by no means a bleed/bleat-ing heart liberal.

Having declared that, I have sharp feelings regarding social support services. We have allowed the government to create almost a monopoly on charitable organizations, by virtue of taxing people beyond what our Founders intended, resulting in people having less income to donate to churches or support extended family. We have sat back, happy to let the government expand. There was a time when people would have considered it serfdom to be taxed even 2% of their wages.

The fruits of our labor are pillaged to pay for infanticide, land theft and regulation, godless and empty education, and even persecution of those who believe in the same divine providence that guided the creation of our country.

So for those who find themselves needing more private banking cartel IOU’s to exist in this system, if they still have scruples and classic values and yet end up using TANF, EBT, WIC, food banks, etc – GOOD. BLEED THE BEAST. Let them get as much back from the corrupt system as they can. And while you may squawk that such a person is “paying for stuff with other people’s money” – remember that it is the GOVERNMENT that actually stole your wages from you first, while you DID NOTHING.

“Revolutions start when food is unavailable, or too costly for poor people to get. One of the reasons the “Arab Spring” happened was due to a massive, over 200 percent rise in the cost of bread in Tunisa. The French Revolution was triggered by bread shortages due to an Icelandic Volcano eruption in 1783. The Russian revolution was triggered by bread shortages and the riots they caused.“

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That’s Racist, (or sexist or something)

Now………..very important here………….fair opportunity for all is just and noble but only if everyone is evaluated by the same standards…………but making fair as an outcome for all through egalitarian ideology is a receipt for failure……………

white male privilege

I want everyone to give this some serious thought……..

Why is it that males……and specifically White males……….rose above all other races and the female gender to have created and dominate modern civilization as we know it?

Why?…………

OK, I read a really interesting book about four decades ago that may have provided ONE of the answers to the FIRST part of the Question – which is why do MALES specifically (race can vary by time and place) get to be the ones that are the “Greats” for the most part: Kings, Composers, Authors, Statesmen, Generals, Explorers, etc, etc (fill in the blank).

The book had one sentence:

“In most times and places men have wives, most women don’t.”

Is it fair to females and the other races?

No…………

But since when is life or reality for that fact fair?

I’m not saying we can’t right wrongs as we see fit but let’s be very honest here…….White males are in a position in modern society because of their capability of being in that position to begin with and history has demonstrated this over and over again.

In our current existence as a human species if you want to live in a modern first world society then all evidence demonstrates that if you don’t have White males running the show (or providing the means and understanding for non-white males) then you will not have a modern first world society very long.

Affirmative action and diversity in hire without concern to merit as the top priority in a hire is denying reality……..

This country will fall flat on its face if they keep this nonsense of “white privilege” and “male privilege” up.

Available at amazon.com “A Republic, if you can keep it”

Follow me on Twitter @OzarksAuthor