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Mustn’t ‘peace’ mean more than just the absence of war?

People have been crying for peace, peace, more loudly in the civilized West since the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the October 7th attack on Israel by Hamas. We good Westerners have tended to ignore conflicts in other parts of the world.

In our religion studies after Mass on Sunday, we were going over the meaning of the word “peace.” The Gospel reading for next Sunday is Luke 10:1-12, which includes:

3 Go; behold, I send you out as lambs in the midst of wolves. 4 Carry no money belt, no bag, no shoes; and greet no one on the way. 5 Whatever house you enter, first say, ‘Peace be to this house.’ 6 If a man of peace is there, your peace will rest on him; but if not, it will return to you. 7 Stay in that house, eating and drinking what they give you; for the laborer is worthy of his wages. Do not keep moving from house to house. 8 Whatever city you enter and they receive you, eat what is set before you; 9 and heal those in it who are sick, and say to them, ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you.’

The commentary in the study guides brought up the definition of shalom as it is used in Hebrew.

The ancient Hebrew meaning of shalam was “to make something whole”. Not just regarding practical restoration of things that were lost or stolen. But with an overall sense of fulness and completeness in mind, body and estate.

Too often in English, we see the word ‘peace’ as meaning the absence of direct violence or war. Thus, when people call for peace between Russia and Ukraine, or between Israel and the Arabs, they too often mean just a ceasefire. A ceasefire in itself is a very basic good, but mustn’t peace actually mean more than that? Mustn’t peace mean more than “I am not trying to kill anyone, and no one is trying to kill me”, but also mean “I don’t want to kill anyone, and no one wants to kill me”? Continue reading →

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Why do the left always root for the bad guys?

Have you noticed? The ‘heroes’ of the American left, like Michael Brown, George Floyd, Freddie Gray, and Trayvon Martin were all bad guys? Mr Floyd was a convicted felon and drug addict, caught in the act of passing counterfeit money, Mr Brown had just roughed up a shopkeeper half his size, and then attempted to assault a police officer. Mr Martin had assaulted George Zimmerman. Mr Gray had a criminal record with 18 prior arrests, on drug charges, three separate assault charges, and minor crimes and had spent time in jail.

You’d think that at least a few of the ‘heroes’ chosen by the left to condemn the police and the law would actually be decent people, but that never, ever seems to be the case. Even 12-year-old Tamir Rice was playing around with a toy gun, which had the bright orange tip that indicated it was a toy removed, and after being reported to the police, appeared to be drawing the weapon on officers. Young Mr Rice probably wasn’t a bad kid, but he did a very stupid thing, one that got him killed.

And so we come, yet again, to one of my favorite whipping boys, Will Bunch, the far-left columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer. In his Friday morning column, championing Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Mr Bunch admitted: Continue reading →

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Is Jake Tapper really this dumb?

Is this actually real? Did the distinguished Jake Tapper actually say, “Asking questions is literally our job. Demanding facts and answers, instead of just taking a President’s word for it”? After over four years of the credentialed media covering for Joe Biden’s descent into dementia, now Mr Tapper is saying that the media’s job is to demand facts and answers? Click on the image and you can see the video for yourself.

There’s a faked video of the Indiana Fever’s Sophie Cunninghan trashing Jacy Sheldon of the Connecticut Sun that’s making the rounds on Facebook that’s pretty funny. In it, Miss Cunningham said that Miss Sheldon fell into the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down, after the kerfuffle over Miss Cunningham’s hard foul on Miss Sheldon to stop a layup at the end of the game, a foul that was completely unnecessary, since the Fever were too far ahead of the Sun for the basket to have made a difference. It’s a good enough fake that it makes me wonder just how many artificial intelligence fakes there are in the world. Continue reading →

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The urban heat island effect drives climate change

Stephanie Abrams explains urban heat island effect on The Weather Channel. Screen capture by D R Pico on June 26, 2025.

My good friend William Teach of The Pirate’s Cove snarked this morning that it was “Your Fault: ‘Climate Change’ Made Current Raleigh Heat Wave More Likely,” which amused me greatly. I know, I know, it’s just shocking, shocking! that it got hot in a major urban area in the South, in the summer, but Mr Teach mocked WRAL telling people how horrible the heat was, and that it was all the fault of global warming climate change.

As it happens, I have my own weather station, and I’m OCD enough to keep an eye on it. And what I’ve noticed is that while yes, it got into the nineties at the farm, it was still a few degrees less than the forecasts.

It was 69.4º F at 7:00 this morning, lower than the forecast of 72º for that time. Continue reading →

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He threw his life away

Miles Pfeffer after being apprehended, with a “What the f(ornicate) did I do?” look on his face.

Mama, just killed a man
Put a gun against his head, pulled my trigger, now he’s dead
Mama, life had just begun
But now I’ve gone and thrown it all away. — Bohemian Rhapsody, by Queen/

Young Miles Pfeffer, a privileged punk kid and previously adjudicated delinquent who had been ‘sentenced’ to a whopping one month of probation, decided to go into Philadelphia for some harmless fun, jacking cars and petty theft. No big deal, right, just some harmless teenaged fun, right? After all, he was still a senior in high school, and what high school kid hasn’t gotten into a little trouble, right?

Miles Pfeffer, the Bucks County man who killed a Temple police officer, found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison

Continue reading →

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Was Yahya Sinwar actually insane?

Yahya Sinwar sent to Jahannam, heading to his 72 bacha bāzī boys.

We have previously noted how ‘Palestinian’ leader Yahya Sinwar was one of 1,027 prisoners that Israel exchanged for one, one! Israeli Defense Forces soldier, then-Corporal Gilad Shalit, and just how terrible a deal that turned out to be.

While The New York Times tried to tell readers what they could about Mr Sinwar, how his time in an Israeli prison hardened his heart and inspired him with renewed purpose, one thing the Grey Lady failed to tell us was that he was just plain nuts! Continue reading →

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There is only one crime in war, and that’s the losing of it

One of the most controversial episodes of the television show Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is “In the Pale Moonlight,” in which Captain Benjamin Sisko, plagued by the mounting casualty lists in the interstellar war between the United Federation of Planets and Klingon Empire against the Cardassian Union and the Dominion, concocts a plan to bring the Romulans, then technically neutral, into the war on the side of the Federation. The plan involves lying, forgery, deception, and in the end, murder. The story is told in a series of flashbacks, in which Captain Sisko confronts his series of moral choices, and in the end, he confronts the violations of his fundamental principles, and concludes that, with the goal of bringing the Romulans into the war changing the power dynamic, and helping the Federation to reverse the losses it had been sustaining, he can live with his actions.

Curtis LeMay was put in charge of our strategic bombing command, and he was the one who switched much of our bombing attacks on Japan from some relatively ineffective high-altitude bombing to the incendiary night attacks which devastated the island nation’s highly combustible cities. From Wikipedia: Continue reading →

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World War III Watch The nukes make all the difference

Trudy Rubin, who writes the ‘Worldview’ column for The Philadelphia Inquirer, states in her bio that she “tries to make sense of the world’s chaos and conflicts,” but, alas! sense is the one thing she doesn’t seem to have. In her column of Saturday, published before news of the United States strike on Iranian nuclear weapons sites, she wonders why the United States doesn’t want to fight against Russia for Ukraine, but seemed willing to fight for Israel against Iran: Continue reading →

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World War III Watch Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran

9:36 PM EDT — As we noted yesterday, the potential of launching an air attack on the Islamic Republic of Iran was something which had to be based on intelligence estimates, and sometimes intelligence estimates are wrong. As William Teach noted on the 20th, President Donald Trump had set a two-week window for negotiations with Iran to produce an acceptable result, but the President loves misdirection, and like the monitored communications between Captain Spock and Admiral Kirk in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, when hours could seem like days, apparently days could seem like weeks . . . or vice versa.

I cannot say that I am unhappy that the United States attempted to destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons sites, because, in the end, Iran simply cannot be allowed to develop and possess nuclear weapons. But I certainly am concerned, because we have, in effect, entered yet another foreign war. The President is scheduled to address the nation at 10:00 PM EDT, and I very much hope that he will tell us that this was one-and-done, that we are now staying out of the war between Israel and Iraq. But, of course, one nation cannot simply call off a war; there is the little matter of the enemy, and whether he will consider it called off. Iran will certainly talk big, and the Houthis will threaten American shipping, but only the Lord knows how this will play out.

I guess that I have to add the video Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran! Continue reading →