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Roxanne Mathai, a lieutenant with the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office (BCSO) at the time she traveled to Washington, will receive $395,000 in a settlement reached after she sued her former employer, the parties in the case told The Epoch Times.

“Being a parent is always standing on the bridge, watching the water flow.” — James Lileks

“You have to do what others won’t so that you can eventually do what others can’t.” — Rollo Tomassi.

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The source of biblical theology comes from the biblical languages. So imperative is the study of the Bible’s original languages, that I will make this declaration: as soon as a Christian university or seminary gives up the necessary study of Hebrew and Greek, its theology will move from its foundations. The reason? If there is no original word from which our words come, then biblical theology can easily become a man-made theology.

Amen to that.

Brief example: Consider Ephesians 5:22, translated by the Authorized Version as “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as to the Lord.” Except that it doesn’t actually say that–Greek has a perfectly good word for ‘submit’, hupoballein, which is not used in this passage.

Greek doesn’t have separate specific words for ‘husband’ or ‘wife’; the term for ‘spouse’ is suzugos, and one adds ‘male’ or ‘female’ to specify which one. But suzugos isn’t used in this passage either. The actual words used are anEr (‘man’) and gunE (‘woman’), so it would apply to boyfriend/girlfriend (or ‘partner’) as readily as to a married couple.

The verb almost always translated as something like ‘submit’ is actually hupotassein, which is a technical military term used (for example) in indicating that soldiers are lining up in formation for battle behind their commander. So a better translation would be ‘Women, fall in behind your own men.’ Makes a bit of a difference, does it not?

But if you’re just reading a translation by people with a theological axe to grind, you lose any significant chance of truly understanding what is going on. Nuance matters. And if you don’t make an effort to understand the original language, you’ll miss it.

Translators lie as readily as politicians, and from the same motivation, an attitude of patronizing moral superiority. Resist them, steadfast in the faith.

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The Hebrew word “hostages” can be translated into English as “children of surety,” and in many languages the word for “hostage” means both “security, pledge” and “people captured (held) in pledge.” The Greek for “hostage” (hóm?ros) will come as a surprise to many. Is this, we wonder, the meaning of Homer’s name? Why was the most famous Greek in history called this? Since nothing is known about Homer, we will avoid guesswork. In any case, the word does not go back to the poet’s name: the opposite is true. Moreover, this noun occurs in neither the Iliad nor the Odyssey. Though its etymology is far from clear, hóm?ros does not seem to have emerged from any root meaning “pledge” or “security.” May the poet sleep in peace, while those whose only connection with Homer is by way of Homer Simpson enjoy their hero’s deeds. Needless to say, Homer is a fully acceptable name in today’s English-speaking world.

“Conservative is just the long spelling of Retarded.” — ZMan

ZMan is not objecting to conservatism but rather the current incarnation of Conservatism, Inc.

ZMan looks ahead.

There is an old expression in politics that roughly says the most successful politicians are blessed with the right enemies. William Weld, a long time Massachusetts politician, was enormously gifted, until alcoholism got the better of him. He could have reshaped state politics and become a national figure, but he ran into the far wilier Billy Bulger at the local level and the more powerful duo of John Kerry and Ted Kennedy at the national level, so he never lived up to his promise.

We seem to be seeing the opposite with Donald Trump, who has better political instincts than most seasoned professionals, even though his only political experience was at the very top of the game eight years ago. Imagine a fighter stepping into the ring for the first time and the opponent is the reigning world champion. Then imagine that guy winning, and you see the enormity of 2016. Since then, the system has thrown everything at the man, and he is still going.

The main reason Trump continues to move toward the Republican nomination and a general election rematch is he is blessed with the best enemies. The two Federal court cases are now stalled indefinitely. In both cases, the reason for the delay is the chief inquisitor appointed by the Biden administration is proving to be an incompetent fanatic who cannot stop lying to the court. In the most recent example, he was forced to admit the FBI tampered with evidence and lied about it.

Wall Street Journal.

Surprise fees are widely hated, but they are still sneaking onto the bottom of bills for everything from concert tickets to dinners out.
More companies are unbundling the cost of their goods and services, retail analysts say, tacking on 3% for swiping a credit card or adding a little extra for gas. With Live Nation Entertainment facing scrutiny over its ticketing process, singer Maggie Rogers recently urged her fans to buy tickets to her next show at the box office “like it’s 1965” to avoid fees, even showing up at one herself. The Cure’s Robert Smith, meanwhile, convinced Live Nation Entertainment subsidiary Ticketmaster to offer some fee refunds.
The upshot is that prices we see, whether on a restaurant menu or flight-booking site, are rarely the ones we end up paying.

Babylon Bee.

A new wave of controversy erupted as 12 women came forward alleging they had been sexually assaulted by whoever Trump’s vice presidential pick would end up being.

The Economist.

Financial crime is as old as money. Hucksters were dreaming up Ponzi schemes centuries before Charles Ponzi gave his name to the ruse. Where there has been tax, there has been evasion. The looting of national coffers is as time-honoured as politics itself. But the late 20th and early 21st centuries saw an explosion in the scale, scope and level of sophistication of financial shenanigans, as globalisation fuelled the growth of offshore finance, and particularly the use of anonymous shell companies and trusts to shroud nefarious activity. This, in turn, has sparked a crackdown, albeit a fitful one, by governments—as well as leaks like the Panama Papers. However, as recent scandals from 1mdb to Wirecard attest, the battle to end financial secrecy and the dodginess it engenders is far from won. Here are five books to help you understand why.

Steve Sailer.

Over the last year, I was doing a lot of driving and thus a lot of listening to the radio. My impression of the three songs most often played on English language Los Angeles radio in 2023-24 are The Eagles’ “Hotel California,” Boston’s “More Than A Feeling,” and Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams,” all of which came out when I was a freshman in college in 1976-77.

These days’ radio stations seem to play each band’s most popular song vastly more often than even it’s second most popular song. I must have heard “Hotel California” ten times as often as “Take It Easy.” (Granted, “Take It Easy” is probably played more often in Winslow, Arizona than on Sunset Boulevard.) In the old days, disk jockeys would get bored and play other songs, but I’m sure now MBAs have moneyballed playlists.

Also, there seems to be a sharp dividing line determining which oldies are too old, at least during drive time, set at about 52 years ago. I’m guessing that radio stations figure people first imprint on new music at age 13 and retire from daily commuting at age 65. The first month I was driving, the oldest song I could remember hearing on a commercial radio station was Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer.” I heard very little Beatles or Stones. “Take It Easy” came out in 1972 so it’s right about the point the point at which commuters are retiring to take it easy, so it’s not played that much anymore.

When I was in college, the idea that popular music stations would play music from fifty years ago would have been laughed to scorn.

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If you look at the paws of a cat, a dog or even a kangaroo, you’ll notice they have something in common with our hands. Even if some might be shrunken or differently positioned, all of these mammals have five digits, or fingers. Why do we share this pattern with our furry friends, even though we evolved under different conditions?

Just lucky, I guess.

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Every four years we hear Alec Baldwin, Babs Streisand, Michael Moore and other flaky leftists say they will leave the country if a Republican wins the presidency, and one of these days they may actually mean it, though I doubt it. I recall my mentor Stan Evans joking that “I voted for George W. Bush because Alec Baldwin said he’d leave the country. Which just goes to show that pragmatism doesn’t work.”

There is a YouTube channel that will help: Nomad Capitalist

Read it.

Le Monde reports Belgium’s ports drowning under glut of Chinese electric cars: ‘Some are parked here for a year, sometimes more’.

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Continued fighting in Ukraine and Middle East, plus the worldwide persistence of Islamic terrorism and urban violence, has revived interest in William Fairbairn, the developer of close combat methods used by police and the military, especially special operations or commando type troops.

Fairbairn died in 1960, having developed close combat fighting methods and taught them to soldiers and police personnel starting in the 1920s, continuing through World War II and for over a decade after the war. Fairbairn specialized in what he called gutter fighting, a ruthless, no holds barred form of combat referred to as The Fairbairn Method, which were developed in Shanghai, China, during the 1930’s when Fairbairn was an officer of its Chinese police force.

Fairbairn also developed various forms of hand-to-hand combat as well as innovations like the Kill House and bullet-proof transparent shields for police, the commando knife, and pop-up targets. Fairbairn trained allied commandos during World War II and these special operations were so feared by the Germans that Hitler ordered that any who were captured were to be immediately executed. The Germans believed, with some justification, that these commandos could be dangerous even when handcuffed or otherwise restrained. Authors of espionage and special operations publications found, and still find Fairbairn’s books excellent sources of material and details of close combat.

Read it.

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Dora Moutot is a committed feminist. She was deputy editor-in-chief of Konbini, a website aimed at young people. She has a degree in arts and fashion.

“The hard thing to do and the right thing to do are almost always the same thing.” — James Sexton

Watch his interview with Chris Williamson

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DEI statements are affirmations made when you’re applying for college admission, university jobs, or even science-society grants, recounting to the authorities your philosophy of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” your history of DEI activities, and how you will implement DEI initiatives if you get the admission/job/grant. I have posted quite a bit about them (see collection here), and object to them because they are not only compelled speech and are often completely irrelevant to what you’re applying for, but also ignore the fact that there are many ways to make contributions to society beyond enacting DEI. (For example, what about a college applicant who has taught illiterate adults to read?) And I think many institutions are eliminating them. For one thing, some of them may violate the recent Supreme Court decision on race-based admission. Now MIT has joined the statement-eliminators.

Gabe Bult.

Austin Williams.

The military has a technical term for people who call attention to themselves.

They’re called ‘targets’.

Puck.

A secret billionaire dinner party in Hollywood, convened by Elon Musk and David Sacks, presages a major political realignment as Silicon Valley money turns against Biden and begins flowing to Donald Trump.

Associated Press.

Across the U.S., the Catholic Church is undergoing an immense shift. Generations of Catholics who embraced the modernizing tide sparked in the 1960s by Vatican II are increasingly giving way to religious conservatives who believe the church has been twisted by change, with the promise of eternal salvation replaced by guitar Masses, parish food pantries and casual indifference to church doctrine.

The shift, molded by plummeting church attendance, increasingly traditional priests and growing numbers of young Catholics searching for more orthodoxy, has reshaped parishes across the country, leaving them sometimes at odds with Pope Francis and much of the Catholic world.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Wikipedia.

The theory of constraints (TOC) is a management paradigm that views any manageable system as being limited in achieving more of its goals by a very small number of constraints. There is always at least one constraint, and TOC uses a focusing process to identify the constraint and restructure the rest of the organization around it. TOC adopts the common idiom “a chain is no stronger than its weakest link”. That means that organizations and processes are vulnerable because the weakest person or part can always damage or break them, or at least adversely affect the outcome.

The Foundry.

For most of our lifetimes, classically liberal economics so dominated the Right that nobody wondered if conservatives were abandoning free markets. In recent years, though, a new generation of conservative thinkers—more traditionalist, populist, or nationalist than libertarian—has challenged the utility and even the morality of laissez faire economic policy.

We welcome their questions and critiques, as they have compelled American conservatives to have a long overdue conversation about the market, the family, and the state. But the blunt truth is the movement cannot abandon free markets. The moral and practical case for free enterprise is as necessary today as it was when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher used it to rescue their nations’ economies and win the Cold War.

Our aim—today as much as it was in 1980—is not economic efficiency for its own sake, but as a powerful means to further human flourishing, what Aristotle called eudaimonia and the Founders called “the pursuit of happiness.” Conservatism seeks the good, the beautiful, and the true—not just the efficient.

OffGuardian.

With the coordinated global release of the Covid-19 narrative in late 2019 and the subsequent illogical demands of governments — allied with transnational organisations and pharmaceutical giants — many people around the world began questioning the hasty, unprecedented, and sweeping technological and technocratic changes being made to societies in the name of a highly marketed “medical emergency”.

Despite new policies emanating from authorities to isolate, to mask, to restrict all social contact, to accept without question unique experimental gene- and nanoparticle-based injections, and to abide by novel and absurd social norms, many people pushed back against the apparent tyranny. The more enthusiastic that governments were in deleting civil rights, suppressing freedom of speech and due process, the more that people sought to expose the story behind the mainstream Covid-19 narrative.

The modern dating scene.

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A personal library differs from a impersonal library in the fact that a personal library is an interpretation of a source material. These interpretations include: photographs from different photographers at the same event, or favorite scenes from a movie, or favorite passages from books, parts of songs that bring you to tears, etc. Importantly, these interpretations create unique sets that go on to create unique problems which require unique, idiosyncratic solutions. Sound familiar?

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If anybody remembers the opening segment from the Will Smith zombie apocalypse flick I Am Legend, it starts with a comically ironic scene wherein a precocious female scientist, endearingly played by Emma Thompson proudly announces a “cure for cancer” that involves reprogramming the measles virus to act more beneficially toward its human host – thereby eradicating cancer cells, and thus, the disease itself.

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A worldwide conflict between communism and capitalism defined the latter half of the twentieth century. The United States’ ideological battle was the central drama of my childhood, and it was with a combination of glee, pride, and “told you so!” that my fellow Americans watched the wall fall in Berlin, and the USSR dissolve shortly thereafter. I expect few would deny that the US is the standard bearer for capitalism.

Yet, there’s a flaw at the heart of this claim. While the United States operates as a free market economy, the key agent within modern capitalism – the corporation – works more like an authoritarian state. Given how much of our world is built around corporations, this truth and its impacts are critical.

The confusion between ‘capitalism’ and ‘free market economy’ is endemic in the modern world. ‘Capitalism’ is the accumulation of resources for use in production, which is the hallmark of modern industrialism–indeed, if you were to substitute ‘industrialism’ for ‘capitalism’ wherever it is used in modern literature you would clarify things tremendously–and ‘capitalism’ is just as much present in ‘socialist’ and ‘communist’ economies as in free market systems.

Cat Rotator’s Quarterly.

The Poles call them “little stone cheeses.” The Germans prefer one long word that translates “small stone balls with a groove carved in them.” The come in many sizes, although most are smaller than large, and can be made from any of a list of kinds of stone. Archaeologists have found them from northern Italy to the Baltic, from Gaul to the western steppes in what is now Beylarus and Ukraine. They are all Late Bronze Age, thus far, and no one knew quite what they were for.

Then someone said, “What if they were weights fo some kind. Not loom weights, but measuring weights?” And someone else, four someones else actually, did a lot of careful tedious work weighing, measuring, and recording the little stone cheeses and running the data through computers. Lo and behold, they probably were weights. Prehistoric metrology for the win!

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After years of leftist activists disrupting the speech of groups and individuals they disagree with and threatening people with “cancellation” for having the “wrong” opinions, it’s hard to find sympathy for them when they finally get a taste of their own medicine. Woke protesters have recently sought to bring back the old Seattle CHAZ model of taking over public property and declaring it their own territory; in this case the territory is college campuses around the US.

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Cassidy and colleagues used the ancient man’s molars to reconstruct the first ancient genome for S. mutans. The new data, analyzed in conjunction with modern genomes, allowed them to build a picture of the evolution of the bacteria across millennia for the first time. Previous work with modern oral microbiome genomes suggested that S. mutans populations increased following the adoption of cereal agriculture 12,000 years ago. But the new findings indicate they really skyrocketed around 250 to 750 years ago, when sugar and processed carbs, such as rice and bread, became a big component of human diets. S. mutans particularly loves sucrose, Cassidy says. “It helps it create the sort of sticky film that this bacteria uses to colonize the tooth surface so it can consume all different sugars.”

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Cats love sitting on any square object, as if drawn by some primordial instinct. A new study shows that the square can even be an optical illusion.

Strategy Page.

One of the transportation difficulties between Ukraine and the NATO countries is the different gauge railroads used in Europe and Ukraine. Europe uses what is known as Standard Gauge. Gauge means the distance between the two rails. Standard gauge rails are 1,455mm apart. The Russian gauge is wider with the rails 1,524mm apart. In other words, Standard gauge tracks are four feet 8.5 inches wide while Russian Gauge tracks are five feet wide. Since Ukraine was until 1991 part of the Soviet Union, all the Ukrainian railroads are Russian gauge. To deal with this problem, Ukraine is building a transshipment point in the west Ukraine town of Uzhhorod which is on the border with Slovakia and near the Hungarian border. Here there are cranes that will quickly lift standard cargo containers from Russian gauge flatcars and load the containers onto European Standard Gauge flatcars. Passenger trains have a similar arrangement where passengers can disembark and walk a short distance to trains with a different gauge.

This greatly hampered the Germans during WWII.