About That Word ‘Jidrool’…

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I’ve been known to describe a certain kind of annoying person as “a jidrool.” The meaning is generally made quite clear by context; but where did that word come from?

“Jidrool”  (or “jadrool,” etc.) is a corruption of the Italian word for a cucumber, “chetriolo (or “citrulo”). But why pick on the cucumber? Why should the poor cucumber be synonymous with intractable stupidity?

Because it’s green? Or, “Giuseppe has no more brains than a cucumber”? The answer to this question has been lost in the deeps of time. Probably Julius Caesar could have answered it.

But whatever its history, it certainly sounds like a well-earned term of abuse. It’s not something you hear everywhere you go; but here, twenty miles from New York City, it’s heard fairly often. As in “Those jidrools in Congress.”

Are We Sure We Want That Kind of Revenge?

The Assassination of Julius Caesar /Caesar's Death Scene - William Shakespeare - YouTube

“Ah, we’ve just killed Caesar! Now what?”

I heard a commentator on the radio today who had a highly tempting message:

Now that Democrats have laid the groundwork, mapped out the path, for treating your political rivals as criminals, silencing dissent, and it being totally okay to set up “a mild species of dictatorship,” we who are not Democrats should be resolved that when our turn comes, when we have the power and they don’t, we are going to use that power as they used it–and hammer them silly.

Every red blood cell in my body cried out, “Yeah, man, yeah! Give it to ’em! Let’s see how they like it! At last the wheel turns! At last we’ll see the Democrats run over by it!”

But I soon got to thinking about the destruction of the Roman Republic… by the Romans. This is how it started: rival political factions pulling knives on each other. With us it’ll be “You threw our guy in jail, now we’ll throw two of yours into a worse jail.” The shooting and the rioting doesn’t start until a little later. In Rome it wasn’t safe to step out of your house to vote. That could happen here. Unless, of course, they’ve got the technology to change your vote even as you cast it.

Violence in Rome, chaos and fear–until finally Augustus Caesar is the last of the killers left alive, and the new ruler of the Roman world. Everyone else has been killed. And from now on, no republic.

So–do we just let the Democrats get away with what they’ve done? Heaven forbid. But there has to be a difference between accountability and vendetta. My flesh desires the vendetta, but it must not be.

Without any accountability at all, the whole nation is demoralized. Some of Biden’s stooges would do well to get out of town while the gettin’s good. But this must be law, conforming to the Constitution–not a blood feud. I don’t like saying so! But it’s the truth.

Heapin’ Up the Hubris

Abimelech.Death Of.BibleOutlines | Daily Office Asia-Pacific

We see this pattern over and over again.

In the Bible, the usurping tyrant Abimelech rides higher and higher–until a woman kills him with a piece of a millstone (Judges 10:18). In one Greek tragedy after another, the doomed protagonist just can’t stop pushing his luck until it finally deserts him altogether and the gods destroy him. And closer to our own time, we have Shakespeare’s tragedies–King Lear, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, take your pick: the hero goes too far, and that’s the end of him.

Question! Why, in so many different cultures, widely spread apart in time and space, do so many writers seem to write the same thing? The Bible calls it pride, the Greeks called it hubris: the pride that destroys its owner.

Why have so many different artists written about it–unless it’s because hubris is a real thing that happens in real life? Furthermore, it seems most civilizations knew that, even if they didn’t have the guidance of the Bible. The Roman general Flamininus wept for the foe he’d just defeated, all that splendor gone down in flames. He was afraid to rejoice in his pride, lest the same fate befall him. So you see, the pagans knew about this, too. God never kept it a secret.

Today we have the Far Left Crazy running wild, rejoicing in the fraud that put their puppet in the White House, licking their lips over the insane mischief they mean to do to this country. It’s their hour on the stage, and they strut and fret for all they’re worth. “We can do anything we want! To anybody!”

May the Lord deal with them as He dealt with Abimelech and all the other usurping tyrants of history, all buried under their hubris in the pit of Hell.

 

Breakers Ahead–Look Sharp

The Gracchi Brothers | UNRV.com Roman History

The Gracchi brothers

It must never be forgotten, and never accepted, that Democrats employed massive fraud to win the 2020 election, the greatest crime ever committed against the United States. Because of it, we are entering a very dangerous period in our history.

The only right outcome is for the Democrat Party to go out of business. After this, who but a fool or a fanatic would trust them? But their departure will leave a vacuum that, one way or another, must be filled.

Another likely outcome, which to me seems difficult to avoid, would be a split in the Republican Party, populists vs. elitists, with the elitists picking up a major portion of former Democrats. It was this very split that ultimately destroyed the Roman republic. At one point, the plebs were so angry that they deserted the city and refused to come back until the Senate conceded their rights.

But the tension between the two classes remained, and late in the Second Century B.C. boiled over. From 133 to 121 B.C. the Gracchi brothers, radical tribunes, strove against the Senate to reform the state and its economy. The Gracchi went too far, too fast, and the Senate had them assassinated. It was all downhill from there, until Julius Caesar in the First Century B.C. finally put an end to the republic except in name only.

We must not let that happen here.

One thing we have going for us, that the Roman republic didn’t have, is a written Constitution. Their constitution, to which all paid lip service, was always a work in progress, never finalized. It proved unable to defend itself. We have a written Constitution to defend. We will at least know what we’re fighting for.

Even more importantly, we have our prayers, we have a God who is righteous, just, and all-powerful to whom we can pray. We can hope in His mercy and His grace. If it pleases Him to save us, then we will be saved. But as it was our sins, our sloth, and our folly that landed us in all this trouble in the first place, we have some serious repenting to do.

If we want our republic, our freedom, our stability, and our prosperity to continue, we will have to be exceedingly careful for a long time to come.

May God uphold and guide us.

 

A Dynamic of History: the Devourer

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Genghis Khan’s piece of the world

The outward appearance of the world is always changing, but the dynamics of history never change.

One of those dynamics is this: there’s always somebody who wants to rule the world, a devourer of nations.

Pyrrhus wanted to conquer all the countries around the Mediterranean. He couldn’t have told you why. A woman killed him with a piece of a millstone: just like what happened to Ahimelech in Judges 9:53.

Alexander the Great conquered nations because he thought he was a god. Julius Caesar and his successors trampled other nations as their way of getting ahead in Roman politics.

Genghis Khan grabbed more of the earth’s surface than anyone; and God alone knows why.

Adolph Hitler tried to engulf Europe. His own ambition killed him.

Today there is no individual, no single nation, that’s out to conquer the world. But the dynamic of history remains. The new devourers of nations are globalists, consortia, an international gaggle of self-anointed big shots. Instead of Roman legions, they’ve got legions of lawyers. Instead of Panzer divisions, they’ve got waves and waves of “migrants.”

But it’s the same old thing, a yen to rule the world. The methodology has changed, but the motivation stays the same. Control everything and be as gods.

He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh; the LORD shall have them in derision… (Psalm 2: 4)

When He stops laughing, then they will learn who is God and who is not.

The Doctrine of Despair

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The first thing that greeted me this morning was an email from a Newswithviews reader–one of those emails carrying the cheerful message of “We’re doomed, we’re cooked, the bad guys totally win, the ones you thought were good guys, they’re the bad guys, too,” and so on.

I get a lot of messages like that, embracing–and, it would seem, trying hard to pass it on to the next poor guy–a doctrine of despair. “Game over, man! And it never was a game in the first place, we lost before it even started!” Woe is us.

And he goes on to tell me that everything and anything we try to do is futile because every single thing that happens in the world is totally planned and micro-managed for the benefit of [anti-semitic adjective deleted] “bankers” and the like–all-knowing, ubiquitous, all-powerful… and yet curiously unable to conceal their subtle machinations from Joe Blow on the Internet.

It’s true that there’s always some gavone, or group of gavones, trying to rule the world–or at least as big a chunk of it as they can grab. That’s a dynamic of history. Once upon a time it was the likes of Caesar, Genghis Khan, or Hitler. They tried to do it by force of arms: mostly someone kills them before their career is quite over. Nowadays it’s dorks in suits who want to set up a world government with themselves in charge, and think they can do it with Science instead of armies. Give us absolute power over every minute aspect of your lives, and we’ll save you from Climbit Change.

Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord and against His anointed, saying, Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us.

He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision. (Psalm 2:1-4)

God is laughing at these globalist big shots! They are, in His eyes, less than a bucketful of tadpoles.

True, it’s not so funny for us, when some wannabe master of the world starts a war or a famine, and a lot of us die. But there is no conqueror who ever stood alone. A crowd has to march behind him if he’s going to get anywhere. And they all have crowds of supporters–until the crowd turns against the leader and starts pulling down his statues.

To ascribe total power, omniscience, and omni-competence to people whom God is laughing at seems to me both unwise and impious. They do not know everything, they do not control everything, their plans are as full of holes as Swiss cheese, and God always smacks them down before they can finish their work. That these individuals and their pals are rich, powerful, and evil is true. That their fate is to be cast into Hell is also true.

The only right to world government belongs to Jesus Christ: and God the Father is jealous of His right.

By sitting around moping, giving up, throwing in the towel, giving way to despair, we only help the villains do more harm than they could have done if they’d been vigorously opposed from the beginning. I mean, really–look at them! The best they can do is Hillary Clinton? George Soros? Crazy Joe Biden?

Why aren’t you laughing?

It’s true that wicked leaders in the West have, in our own lifetime, managed to debase and corrupt their countries more than any of us would have thought possible. Those things were accomplished by very small minorities working fanatically, tirelessly, single-mindedly to get what they wanted. They weren’t more intelligent than us; they just worked harder.

Learn the lesson. And let’s prove we’ve learned it by annihilating Democrats in the next elections.

Comment Contest: 14 to Go

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I fully expected there to be a winner waiting for me when I came down this morning. Imagine my surprise when I discovered there are still 14 comments to go! So, like, there’s gotta be a winner sometime this morning.

I hope the winning comment, No. 33,000, turns out to be witty, pithy, a la Julius Caesar (“Veni, vidi, vinci”).

The prize is one of my books, autographed. It turns out I’m not allowed to award anyone a do-over of his or her teen years.

So where is everybody this morning? Saddle up, guys!

‘Burning Man’ Pagan Fest Expects to Draw 70,000

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It’s time again for the annual “Burning Man” festival of “radical inclusion,” whatever that is, out in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert; and this year organizers are expecting to draw at least 70,000 paying participants (http://www.sfgate.com/burningman/article/celebrities-and-tech-execs-going-to-burning-man-11742825.php), including celebrities and hi-tech corporate movers and shakers.

The highlight of the festival is the burning of a wooden human effigy. Anybody ever see The Wicker Man? Same thing, except in the movie they burn it with a live person and live animals inside it, as a sacrifice to pagan false gods. Julius Caesar had a major beef with the Gauls over this, and devoted a lot of work to stamping out this evil practice.

Now it’s where celebs and millionaires go to practice radical inclusion. Low-end tickets cost $425 each.

Would you believe The Burning Man got its start in San Francisco? Okay, I hear you saying “Where else?”

This year some of the hippier types are complaining that capitalism is “ruining Burning Man’s original spirit.” Maybe capitalism is one of those things you exclude when you’re doing radical inclusion.

I’d like to know how many liberal churchmen attend this jamboree. You know–the kind in pink or lavender shirts who perform same-sex pseudomarriages.

Anyhow, that’s the state of our culture. Burning Man is no big thing in itself, but all those little things add up into a burden that will one day crush us.

Because when you kill the culture, the culture’s gonna kill you back.

 

A Worse Taxation Regime Than Ours

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Julius Caesar

Don’t get me wrong–ours is pretty bad. My wife, with decades of experience as a top-notch bookkeeper, trained by CPAs, responsible for her company’s finances, took all week and half a ream of paper to prepare our taxes. If it’s that complicated and difficult for her, what’s it like for someone else?

But as bad as our taxation regime is, history provides us with one that was even worse, much worse–the one the Roman Empire used at the time of Christ.

Once upon a time the Romans financed their government with booty looted from the people that they conquered. Silver and gold, proceeds from the sale of slaves–it all went into the treasury. But eventually they ran out of rich peoples they could conquer, and at the same time, the Roman state became much, much bigger and costlier, so they needed another way.

Thus was born the Roman tax-farming system, perhaps the worst form of taxation ever devised by fallen man.

At least it was simple, though. The tax farmer purchased the franchise for a district to be taxed, paid the amount which the Romans had assessed the district for, and then it was up to him to get the money back, and then some. Naturally, the tax farmer had a big incentive to bleed the people of the district for all that he could get. That the system was onerous, unjust, notoriously corrupt, cruel, and could even be economically ruinous–well, the Romans decided they could live with that. Suddenly their reserve for uncollected taxes was “zero.”

Julius Caesar realized that these savings were illusory if you had to send in the legions to put down a revolt set off by insupportable taxation, so he tried to end the tax farming and replace it with a better system. Alas for all concerned, this was a battle even Caesar couldn’t win. Tax farming was too entrenched, and Roman accounting was unable to come up with a better way.

Now, here’s the question that occurs to me. Given the vast ignorance of history that pervades all levels of our own society, what would happen if someone introduced legislation to have “tax reform” by changing over to the Roman system of tax farming? “After all, it successfully financed the Empire for hundreds of years!” How many of our snail-brained leaders would vote for it? And which thugs and vampires would become our tax farmers?

Meanwhile, the Bible gives us a plain poll tax for an example, but no one’s interested in that.

Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it.   –Psalm 127:1