History is not an exact science like physics and historians have no way of confirming a theory in an experiment.
Historians had therefore to develop criteria to assess the credibility of a document or a source.

For instance, if person A hates the guts of person B but they say something nice about person B it’s more likely to be true because person A is not inclined to do so unless it was true.

I won’t bore you with all the criteria but the gospels, viewed purely as historical documents, are very credible.
I want to focus on the criterion of embarrasment.
When people make stuff up they usually don’t make themselves or their cause look bad and they usually don’t invent things that undermine their credibility.

In the gospels the disciples are described as cowards, one of them as a traitor and one of them as a serious doubter who was around Jesus for a long time but still he doubted.
Peter denied Jesus thrice. The disciples sometimes were depicted as not very smart.
Jesus was not as the Jewish people expected him to be.
In a society which could by today’s standards be characterized as mysogynistic women weren’t even allowed to testify in courts.
In the Jewish society of Jesus’ time the witness of women was considered unreliable.
With that background in mind, the prominent role of women in the gospels is even more remarkable.
Furthermore, at the time the gospels were written it must have been especially embarrassing that women, the witnesses considered the least reliable, were the first ones to find the empty tomb of Jesus.

In short, if you wanted to make up a story of a Jewish messiah and his faithful disciples in ancient Israel you would make up something much less embarassing.
This makes the gospels very credible.

I wish you all a HAPPY EASTER.

“vaffanculo” would be the predictable answer a Frenchman would get if he demanded from an Italian reparation payments for the slaughter that the Roman legions unleashed in Gaul and for the countless human beings that were enslaved by the Romans in Gaul.

The answer which translates to “kiss my a**” is rude but it is also perfectly justified and I hope it becomes clear why that is.

One doesn’t necessarily have to use that kind of language but the reparation payments for slavery that the city of Boston is considering should be rejected equally vehemently.

One could make a case that post-WWII Germany or modern Turkey should pay reparations for the holocaust and the Armenian genocide because these crimes happened in the name of these states and because as legal successors to the 3rd Reich and the Ottoman empire both countries should assume to some extent legal obligations of their predecessors.
Other than that reparations are unjust and evil when they have to be payed by people who have done nothing wrong.

If we were to be punished for the sins of our ancestors we ALL would be screwed.
I don’t care who you are. If you go back in time far enough you will find amongst your ancestors someone who did some horrible things to other humans.
You will find pirates, murderers, thieves, rapists, slave owners and persons who are guilty of too many crimes to mention here.
However, if you go back in time far enough you will also find ancestors of yours who were victims of some horrible, horrible crimes.

Forcing people to pay for crimes they never committed to people who were never victims of these crimes is deeply unjust to begin with but for the reasons mentioned above it is also totally impractical.
Everyone would be entitled to reparations and everyone would also have to pay reparations.

Everything written so far is made worse by the Left’s collectivism because it views people not as individuals but as parts of a collective, which is the reason why the Left calls for collective punishment.
Yes, the reparations the Left is calling for are nothing but yet another form of collective punishment.
You would be punished not even for the crimes of your ancestors but simply for being a part of a collective.

The problem with collectives is that every human being is not just part of ONE collective but of an unlimited number of collectives.
One could always pick the one collective that suits one’s own plans.
If a person who happens to be a woman and who lives in Armenia wanted to get money from a fellow Armenian who happens to be a man all she would have to do is to say that the person she wants money from is not only an Armenian but also a man and that because of that he should pay for all the wrongs that men had ever done to women.
The poor fellow would have to pay simply for being a member of the collective called men despite the fact that Armenians treat their women very differently than, say, North African men who were allowed to have up to four wifes and an unlimited number of concubines.

If there was a game called reparations roulette with the ball landing not on a number but on a country or a collective of any kind I would virtually always win.
You are from Zimbabwe and I’m an Italian? You owe me because the pharaohs enslaved the Hebrews, a Mediterranean people.
Doesn’t matter that the Egyptians never enslaved Italians. The Egyptans, like you, were Africans and you as an African owe me, one of the Mediterranean people, reparations.

You are an Indonesian and I live in Sweden? You owe me because the Ottomans colonized, enslaved and oppressed southeast Europe and robbed boys to turn them into fanatical warriors, Janissaries, who would fight their own parents.
Doesn’t matter that Indonesians never colonized Sweden. The Ottomans were Muslims and you as a Muslim owe me, a European, reparations.

You are an african-American and I’m an Austrian? You owe me because North African pirates plundered the coasts of southern Europe and enslaved their populations.
Doesn’t matter that North Africans never raided Austria. The pirates were Africans and you as an African owe me, a European, reparations.

Now, I can hear you, my black brothers and sisters in humanity say: “We had nothing to do with that. We were in America.”
That’s exactly the point.
Neither had Irish, Italians and Jews who immigrated to America at the beginn of the 20th century anything to do with slavery in North America.

Lastly, some words about the unDemocrats aka the “Democrat party” who are calling for reparations.
At the beginning of the American civil war only 10% of families had slaves.
This party which portraits itself as the the champion of “the little guy” had poor southern boys die on the bloody battlefields of the civil war, defending the interests of rich plantation owners.
Today the very same party wants the little guy to pay again for the sins of the rich and it imports a new generation of quasi slaves, illegal aliens.
While big corporations are reaping the profits of dirt cheap labour the little guy is screwed again by the unDemocrats because it is the little guy who has to pay for the illegal aliens’ housing, medical care, schooling etc.
The unDemocrats (with the support of globalist RINO Republicans) are still the party of slavery.

You might have noticed that the truly monumental, paradigm-shifting events of the recent years didn’t just happen out of the blue. They were announced in advance.
What’s the point of announcing an event in advance?
Well, if one has foreknowledge that an event is going to happen, either because one knows things that others don’t know or because one plans to engineer an event, and one also doesn’t want to leave it to chance how people will react when the event happens then one announces the event in advance but framed through a certain narrative, told in a certain way, viewed through a certain lens which makes it very likely that people will react in the way one wants them to react.

This might be a bit too abstract. That’s why I will give you an example which makes everything clear.

The Prelude

Let’s say that John lives in a nice little town and I’m the corrupt mayor of that town.
During urban construction work in the vicinity of John’s house, archaeological objects from a long-lost Indigenous civilization were discovered by chance.
Among other things, they include the finest gold work of incredible value and sensational ritual objects made of precious stones.

As the client for the building work, I swore the company carrying out the work to the utmost secrecy, shared the profits with them and commissioned the company TerraVal (specialists in private treasure hunts and archaeological excavations) to find out whether there were any other treasures in the vicinity and where exactly they were located.

TerraVal’s radar team located a huge cavity right under John’s house and their team of archaeologists suspected that there was a very high probability that there were more treasures there.
Based on the findings so far and the size of the cavity, TerraVal estimates that the value of these treasures might be between 100 and 200 million dollars.

The Problem

A shell company has been set up to buy John’s house, supposedly to build a hotel there, but John is comfortable in his great-grandfather’s house and has no thoughts of selling, not even for the very generous price he is being offered.

I come to the conclusion that he is so attached to the house that he would never sell it.
So how do I get my hands on the treasure?
The only way to separate John from his house is to destroy it completely.

Further inquiries have revealed that John’s financial situation is poor, his house is insured for far less than its value and that his income is too low to afford the necessary loan to rebuild.
He would also have no collateral for the loan if the house were lost.
He knows absolutely nothing of my diabolical deliberations and would very likely sell his great-grandfather’s plot at a very generous price to build a new house somewhere else.

So I just have to solve the problem of destroying his house without making myself suspicious.

The Solution: Mindgames

I could have come up with many different solutions but I’m lucky.
I was just handed the perfect solution. As I was watching TV I saw an interesting news item.
NASA scientists were anouncing that there would be an increase in solar activity which would reach its maximum in 62 days and that it would be the highest solar activity since the last maximum 80 years ago. It would be so intense that it would strongly interfere with the electrical grid.
CLICK! A chain reaction is triggered in my mind.
Solar activity, interference with electrical grid, FIRE, JOHN’S HOUSE BURNS, problem solved.

I will set his house on fire in 60 days with the solar maximum as the perfect cover.
The NASA scientists didn’t mention fires explicitly but who cares. It’s a plausible cause for his house burning down to the fundaments.
All I have to do is planting the seeds in everybody’s mind so that when his house burns, everyone, including John, will think that it was because of the solar maximum.

Tomorrow I will go to work and start my mindgames but first I need a catchy phrase, a catchy slogan with a catchy tune.
How about this?
“We’re SMART. We’re SAFE.
‘Cause we didn’t start a fire.” (to the tune of Billy Joel’s “We didn’t start the fire”).
Yes, that’s perfect.

Local TV/Radio will play every 3 hours a publicly paid ad which starts with slogan+melody, has a 30 second message and it ends with slogan+melody.
Messages will be “Keep always a fire extinguisher near you, disconnect your appliances, keep inlflamables away from cables” and other stuff of that kind.
It doesn’t matter whether the message is useful or absolutely useless. That’s not the point.
The point is to hammer into everybody’s mind that there is a very real danger of fires just starting spontaniously.

I order the fire department very publicly and with great fanfare to conduct drills for the solar maximum with the local media prominently reporting about it.
I order these drills 5 more times
I give many interviews. Movies with the theme “Fire caused by electricity” and flicks celebratings firefighters as heros “just play randomly”.

I try not do overdo it with the public appearances. If it reached Fauci levels of media saturation it would be too obvious that it’s a manipulation campaign.
The mindgames are already a phenomenal success.
Man, not only does it pay to be a criminal but you get very popular in the process.
My popularity as a mayor is trough the roof.
I am percieved as decisive, competent, proactive and as caring for the safety of my citizens.

Execution

It’s day 60. Showtime!
John wants to go to sleep when he gets a call.
It’s a fake call to lure him away from his home.
He will tell later to the TV interviewer that it was divine providence that made him leave the house.
No, it is diabolic calculation.
I need him to leave the house not because I care for his life but because I don’t want to endanger the mission.

While he is away a professional arsonist sets his house on fire.
It’s a spectacular success. He returns to his home and he finds only a pile of ruins, still smoking, with the truth in ashes.
Needless to say, as your decisive mayor I’m fully involved in the investigation of the cause of the fire.

Mission Accomplished

There is a problem with the police chief but in the end I convince him to let “Dirty Willy” do the investigation.
Willy is not the sharpest knife in the drawer and, more importantly, he’s also lazy which is why he goes the easy route and determines that the fire was caused by a cable because of the solar maximum.
Mission accomplished. John’s house is gone and no one is suspecting me.

But what about the mission to prevent fires?
What about it? It was a phenomenal success!
Of the 1,200 houses in the town only one went up in smoke. The measures were almost 100% effective.
Would have been much worse without my measures, right?
My measures were even more effective than some miraculous “vaccines” with 95% effectiveness.

I am privileged. I look back at my childhood with great fondness and I pitty the children of today who are increasingly robbed of something wonderful: innocence.
I could be a boy without being told the gender and woke nonsense today’s kids have to deal with. I could be unashamedly and unabashedly a boy, enjoying the things that all boys love: adventure and physical activity.

I laugh at all the idiots who tell us that gender is a social construct, who believe that humans are clay that you can form however you wish, who believe that you can turn boys into girls and vice versa.
Idiots!
Only God can form humans like clay.
Idiots!
No one told me that I have to like big trucks, caterpillars, heavy noisy machines, cars and rockets.
No one told me that I have to like playing in the dirt instead of playing with dolls.
I just was naturally attracted to one and not the other.

The other thing I was spared was this filthy, perverse and evil sexualization of kids.
My father never swore when he was in the presence of me and my brothers. Never.
Knowing his sometimes volcanic temper, I can appreciate that even more.
Unlike other men who throw the F-word and other profanities around to show how tough they are, he didn’t have to.
When we smashed the window for the third time in a row his rightful wrath came upon me and my wild brothers and we would know exactly why we deserved the ensuing spanking, which happened very rarely because he wasn’t a man of gratuitous violence.
He was the toughest man I know.
Forget about Rambo and all the other fake tough guys. One day he pulled himself his rotten tooth out with pliers.
Yet, despite all his toughness he kept so much away from us and the older I get the more I appreciate it.

Protecting the innocence of children is not to pamper them but to keep the filth of the world away from them.
They will encounter the filth soon enough. Granting children those few precious years of innocence is something wonderful for which they will be eternally grateful.
We were not rich. We were not socially privileged and I’ve encountered some bad things in the world early on in my life but those things cannot spoil the years of innocence for which I will always be thankful.

Would you take a drug or undergo any kind of treatment if you didn’t know its side effects?
That was exactly what was demanded of us during almost four years of covid hysteria.
Worse, not only were the side effects unknown but it was unknown whether there were positive effects significant enough to justify taking the drug or participating, on a mandatory basis no less, in measures that were alleged to slow the spread of a virus.

In this imperfect world we’re living in everything has an upside and a downside and everything has potential risks and potential rewards. Everything has costs and benefits.
Yet, there were brainless mask zombies who would yell at you “Put the damn mask on!” and clueless, incompetent or criminal medical pros and politicians who were telling you essentially the same in slightly more polite words.
All of them were pretenting that there were no downsides to wearing masks or if there were downsides these downsides were negligible.
Never mind that there was never sufficient scientific evidence that masks slowed down the spread of the virus significantly, to this day there never was a study which examined BOTH negative side effects and benefits and that proved scientifically that the upside far outweihghts the downside.
The mask fascists refused to even examine the downside.

Well, a new study has done just that (hattip “Nurse Claire Says”).
I quote from the abstract (emphasis mine):

“We found an average bacterial load of 4.24 × 10⁴ CFU recovered/mask, with a maximum load of 2.85 × 10⁵ CFU. This maximum is 310 times higher than the limit value for contamination of ventilation system outlet surfaces specified by the German standard VDI 6022.”

The result of a simple calculation is that the average bacterial load of masks is still 46 times the limit value.
Masks are getting really filthy very quickly.

Another quote from the abstract:

“These aspects underscore the urgent need for further research and a risk-benefit analysis in respect of mask use, particularly given their unproven efficacy in disrupting the transmission of respiratory viruses and their adverse social consequences.”

Bacterial contamination is not a theoretical problem but it is very real.
I personally know a young lady who was working at a gas station and who contracted a nasal infection because she had to wear a mask for long hours at her work.
She had to suffer for half a year.

The paper is not yet peer-reviewed but I don’t expect much change in the results.

The same problems we had with masks we had with lockdowns and other measures: Unproven efficacy and absolute disregard of negative side-effects.

I knew early on in the pandemic that masks, lockdowns etc. had nothing to do with science.
How did I know?
Very simple answer: While our goverments forced masks and lockdowns upon us despite the fact that there was zero evidence for their efficacy and despite the fact that their negative side effects were completely ignored, the same goverments maligned and effectively outlawed hydroxychloraqine and ivermectin as treatments/prophylactics for covid because, wait for it, their efficacy had not been proven yet in double blinded studies.
While these two drugs have a great safety record proven in decades of their use in huge quantities and on a huge number of patients, masks and lockdowns, both with known and unknown negative side effects, were preferred.
This told me that the “anti covid measures” had nothing to do with science but that they were purely political in nature.

You may ask, why does this even matter anymore?
Because, dear reader, if we just forget everything, not only will those who forced their destructive policies upon us get away with their crimes but, given another opportunity, they will commit these crimes again.

For everything there is a reason and everything that God allows to happen, He does so for a good reason.
The darker things get, the greater the contrast between light and darkness.
Diamonds are often presented in front of a dark or black background.
The darker the background, the greater the brilliance the diamond radiates.

When we find ourselves in darkness, hard times or misfortune or when we are surrounded by evil it is perhaps so that we can let God’s light shine through us, so that we show His brilliance and let the light of His infinite goodness and power shine through us for His eternal glory, so that we can display His infinite love, mercy and grace he showers us with by sharing it with the world, so that we can display His awesome power by showing that nothing, absolutely nothing can break us because we trust in Him.

Whatever life throws at us, we can rest assured that God gives us everything we need to cope with it.

I really like and admire how pkAdams handles herself in difficult times.
Her trust in the awesome power and love of Jesus shines brightly.

Jesus Lights up the Darkest Days and Nights

Our old acquaintance sklyjd aka Crocodile Dumbdee never misses an opportunity to embarass himself, which can be entertaining for a very short while but talking to idiots is not fun and it gets tiresome very quickly.
I don’t mind people vehemently disagreeing with me or criticising me in their comments on my blog but I have little tolerance for the kind of abject stupidity that sklyjd displays.
To give you an example, in my post “Necro Joe” I wrote about Biden’s sorry mental condition.

In one of his comments sklyjd remarked: “Are you a neuro specialist? Trump is also forgetful mixes up names and is often incoherent, no different to Biden, both are over the hill and should be retired.”

The idea that one needs to be a “neuro specialist” to see that someone has severe mental problems is in itself stupid.
One has not to be a “neuro specialist” to see that someone has severe mental problems that are progressively getting worse.
One has also not to be a “neuro specialist” to compare two persons and to recognize that one person has much greater mental problems than the other.
However, even if we accepted for the sake of argument sklyjd’s premise that only “neuro specialists” are qualified to make determinations about other person’s mental health, we find that he has to be abysmally stupid because he himself makes exactly such determinations in his very next sentence and we know that he is NOT a “neuro specialist.”
In other words: His first sentence renders his second sentence utterly worthless and utterly meaningless.
This is a level of stupidity that boggles the mind.
It is a repeated pattern that we can observe in his comments, irrespective of the topic at hand.
He frequently contradicts himself within one comment and sometimes even within the same sentence, shooting his own arguments down.

I’m not going to waste my time with sklyjd and dumb my blog down, losing multiple IQ points in the process.
He has amply demonstrated that he is a moron, and I really mean moron because that level of stupidy is not a sign of willful stupidity, which could be fixed even though that would take a lot of time, but it is a sign that he is genuinely intellectually underpowered.

That’s why I blocked ALL his comments.

Thís message is for you, sklyjd:
I have configured wordpress to move ALL your comments straight to the trash folder.
I don’t even read your comments and neither can anyone else read them.
Of course, you can keep commenting but that would only prove that you’re a blithering idiot.

Am I too harsh? I don’t think so.
Read for yourself what he himself writes on his blog here: https://sklyjd.wordpress.com/

He uses the words “stupid” and “idiot” an awful lot and he attacks others constantly.
While this moron who couldn’t find Italy on a map of Italy and who would turn chat GPT into artificial stupidity if he trained it, calls other people stupid, he is too stupid to see his own stupidy.

Also, I wonder why sklyjd doesn’t link to his own blog in his profile.
Is he just a coward who doesn’t want to expose himself to the same attacks he likes to dish out?
Isn’t the whole point of having a blog to spread your word?
Isn’t having a blog and not advertising it, well, stupid?

Winter is receding. Nights are still cold but the days are getting warmer. Flowers, trees and humans are blossoming.
God, I love this time of year. Life is teeming everywhere and I get such a rush of new life and energy that it drives me almost nuts.
Life everywhere around me.and inside me. Spring is the time of new hope, new plans and new life.
It makes you feel years younger, bolder and more energetic.
Winter is about survival. Spring is about thriving.
I hail you, spring and I thank the Lord who gave you to us.

A Matryoshka is a traditional Russian wooden doll which can be opened and which contains another, smaller Matryoshka inside.
That smaller Matryoshka contains another, smaller Matryoshka and so forth and so forth.
The image of the Matryoshka came to my mind when I read the latest revelation on the corrupt Biden enterprise which in this instance involved Russia.
It is the perfect representation of the corrupt Biden Inc.
You open one corruption scandal and underneath you will find yet another corruption scandal.
Just like the Matryoshkas which differ only in the details of their painting but not in their forms, the same can be said about the corruption scandals of the Biden family. The details may vary but the form is always the same.

Investigative reporter John Solomon published a story that deserves much more attention than it has gotten.
As he reports, Hunter Biden and his partners tried to expand their business in Russia from 2010 to 2014 when Putin’s invasion of Crimea ended their ambitions for Russia.
Although Solomon doesn’t mention it, we know what Hunter was selling, influence and access to then Vice President Biden.
Hunter and his partners had at least some success.
Anyway, so much for “Russia collusion”. It’s the Bidens who would happily sell out to Russia and Russian oligarchs.

Unlike the WAPO or NYT, the sculptors of disinformation who would create from the raw material of innuendo, hearsay and flatout lies any statue their clients from the “deep state” would want them to create, John Solomon is an old school reporter who always delivers the receipts for his stories as he does in this story too.

What is new for me is that Hunter was not merely the bagman for the criminal Biden enterprise but that he and his partners were the marketing division of Biden Inc.
This makes Joe Biden look even worse because it shows that Joe Biden would sell out to ANY client, no matter what negative consequences for his country or other people that might bring.