Author: Papa Giorgio

Mother Of All Bombs (MOAB) Used in Afghanistan (NEW VIDEO!)

Published by Papa Giorgio

GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast (commonly known as the Mother of All Bombs) was just used for the first time in combat. This is our largest non-nuclear bomb in the U.S. arsenal (a 21,000lb bomb). Thank you ISIS for being the prime “real world” test platform for the MOAB. God’s speed to hell. (See more at the WASHINGTON TIMES)

KEY STATS:

✦ Nicknamed the ‘Mother of all Bombs’
✦ The world’s largest non-nuclear weapon
✦ Each bomb costs around $16 million (£12.8 million)
✦ Its explosion is equivalent to 11 tons of TNT and the blast radius is a mile wide
✦ First tested by US forces in 2003
✦ It is designed to destroy heavily reinforced targets or to shatter ground forces and armour across a large area
✦ 30 feet (9 metres) long and 40 inches (1 metre) wide
✦ Weighs 21,000lbs (9,500kg) – heavier than the Hiroshima nuclear bomb
✦ Blast radius stretches a mile in each direction
✦ Leaves no lasting radiation effect

HOW IT IS DEPLOYED

✦ The bomb has ‘grid’ fins that fold into the body during carriage
✦ It can only be deployed out of the back of large cargo plane due to its size
✦ The bomb rides on a pallet – a parachute pulls the pallet and bomb out of the plane
✦ The pallet then separates so that the bomb can fall to its target
✦ The bomb’s grid fins extend to help control the bomb’s descent
✦ It accelerates rapidly to its terminal velocity and is partially guided to its target via satellite
✦ It explodes six feet (1.8 metres) above the ground
✦ The idea behind this ‘airburst’ mechanism is to spread its destructive range

|DAILY MAIL|

Evil, Logic, and Reincarnation (Groothuis and Zacharias)

Published by Papa Giorgio

The below is an extended example of the weakness of the pantheistic religions in describing reality and supporting THEIR OWN claims:

  • Douglas Groothuis, Christian Apologetics: A Comprehensive Case for Biblical Faith (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2011), 620-625.

4. The nonexistence of evil. One way to dispense with the problem of evil is to dispense with evil itself. This route is taken by various forms of pantheism, such as Advaita Vedanta Hinduism, Zen Buddhism, assorted New Age worldviews and mind-science churches such as Christian Sci­ence, Religious Science and Unity. Since all is ultimately divine, evil is unreal; it is only a problem of perception, and not a problem of objective reality. Pantheists hold that God “is beyond good and evil.” The difference between good and evil is apparent and not real.17 The more a person ap­proximates the divine Mind, the more these distinctions drop out of view. A sixth-century Zen poem puts it this way:

If you want to get to the plain truth
Be not concerned with right and wrong.
The conflict between right and wrong
Is the sickness of the mind.18

But consider this poem. It advocates “the plain truth,” which must be taken as objectively good. Otherwise, there is no reason to “get the plain truth.” The poem then offers an imperative: “Be not concerned with right and wrong,” because “the conflict of right and wrong is the sickness of the mind.” The imperative is a moral one, an injunction to “get the plain truth” by being unconcerned with the sick idea of moral conflict. The poem re­duces to this:

  1. There is no right and wrong that are in conflict with each other.
  2. One should not be concerned with right and wrong, since to be con­cerned with right and wrong is a “sickness,” which must be taken as wrong.

But statements 1 and 2 contradict each other and yield:

  1. If statement 2 is true, then statement 1 is false.
  2. If statement 1 is false, then there is a conflict between good and evil.

Despite its insistence that good and evil are illusions, pantheism still issues moral judgments and makes moral commands. As such, it is logi­cally and existentially inconsistent. These considerations should lead us to reject the idea that no objective evil exists.

5. Karma and reincarnation. Many believe that karma and reincarna­tion answer the problem of evil. The evils of this life cannot be justified if we have only one life to live. However, if we have lived before and will live again (reincarnation), the scales will balance out because karma (a law of moral assessment and administration) assigns rewards and punishments from lifetime to lifetime.19 Nevertheless, multiple problems dog this at­tempted response.

First, most forms of Buddhism and Hinduism, the two leading reli­gions that advocate karma and reincarnation, deny the existence of a substantial and personal soul (an individual, spiritual substance that en­dures through time, whether of a human or nonhuman being). Bud­dhism has many different schools, but all claim that the individual self does not exist (see chap. 23). The self is nothing but a name for a collec­tion of separable parts (skandas)—like a chariot that has no essence. There is no substance that binds the parts together in an essence. At death, the parts—which combined to form the illusion of a self—sepa-rate. If so, no personal self is available to be reincarnated, since there was no self to begin with. But if there is no personal being who exists from lifetime to lifetime, then there is no way for that being to experi­ence either good karma or bad karma, since the karma has nothing to work on.20

Hinduism displays a dizzying diversity of schools, but the form most popular in the West (Advaita Vedanta) also denies the existence of an in­dividual self.21 The one reality is Brahman, or the Absolute Self. Finite, individual selves are illusions of the unenlightened mind. Therefore—although its metaphysics of the self differs from that of Buddhism—Hinduism faces the same problem concerning reincarnation. Because it claims that Brahman is the sole reality, there are no individual selves avail­able to endure from lifetime to lifetime on which karma might attach with its various outcomes.

For there to be reincarnated subjects of karma, there must be indi­vidual, personal selves that endure and continue as themselves from life­time to lifetime. But Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta Hinduism do not affirm the existence of individual, personal selves. Therefore, these reli­gions cannot logically support the existence of selves that endure from lifetime to lifetime or which are subjects of karma. Therefore, these Eastern religions cannot logically support reincarnation. If this argu­ment succeeds, it not only demonstrates that they cannot solve the prob­lem of evil, it further shows that both religions propose essential truth claims that contradiction each other: (1) there is no self, and (2) reincar­nation and karma. Thus, both religions fail the test of internal logical consistency and are necessarily false.

Second, Buddhism and Hinduism cannot explain the system of karmic evaluation and administration. Both religions affirm that karma is a uni­versal system that evaluates the moral conduct of human beings and ad­ministers rewards and punishments appropriately. Even those versions of Buddhism and Hinduism that grant a personal deity do not claim that this deity administers the karmic system, which is deemed a brute fact. The system is thoroughly impersonal.

But how can an impersonal (meaning unconscious and nonagentive) system morally evaluate the worth of actions by human persons? Karma is a law akin to a natural law of science. G. R. Malkani, a Hindu, claims that karma “automatically produces the appropriate results like any other law in the natural domain. Nobody can cheat the law. It is as inexorable as any natural law.”22 But this law is nothing like any law of nature described by science. The law of gravity, for example, explains the regular behavior of physical objects. It has nothing to say about objective moral values; rather, it predicts the automatic reactions of material entities. But moral states are very different from material states because they are nonphysical and re­lated to human agents, who are not reducible to the physical realm, as ar­gued in chapter seventeen. When considering the moral value of an act (or attitude), we necessarily think of judgment or evaluation. Moral judgments require an evaluator, as argued in a chapter fifteen. However, the idea of karma does not include a moral evaluator of any kind. Therefore, the no­tion of karma is logically unsupportable. In addition, this problem ration­ally disqualifies the worldviews of Hinduism and Buddhism in toto, since both affirm reincarnation and karma as essential religious doctrines that turn out to be irrational and thus false.

But problems continue to mount because reincarnation and karma also require moral administration. The impersonal karmic system must meet out rewards and punishments universally and for all time to all sentient beings—a fantastically complex process of cosmic government. But it is government without a governor—a vast system of karmic coordination and implementation, but all without the benefit of a mind to plan the ad ministration or a will to implement it. Yet surely a personal and moral agent would be required for such a grand scheme of administration.

The Hindu and Buddhist doctrine of karma and reincarnation cannot solve the problem of evil, nor is their central teaching rationally warranted. Therefore, these religions are disqualified as rational worldviews.

Third, the doctrines of reincarnation and karma do not solve the problem of evil because they cannot explain the reality of evil. One of the engines of the problem of evil is innocent suffering. This is a vexing conundrum for any worldview, but karma does nothing to solve or allevi­ate it. According to karma, there is no unjust suffering. Everyone gets what he or she deserves, even supposedly innocent children. This should strike us as counterintuitive. As Paul Edwards points out, it would hardly be consoling to a mother grieving over a severely deformed child to be told by a reincarnationist minister that this death was morally deserved because of an evil committed in a previous life.23 Edwards suggests that if he were the mother and a baseball bat were available, he would clunk the person over the head and say, “You deserve your pain not because of a sin in a previous life but because you are a monster right now. You see that justice has prevailed.”24

Fourth, karma and reincarnation are not adequate responses to the problem of evil because they cannot insure that good wins out over evil in the end. The goal in Hinduism and Buddhism is to escape the realm of karma and reincarnation (samsara) and to attain enlightenment in an inef­fable realm beyond personality, individuality, morality and history (nir­vana for Buddhism; moksha for Hinduism). There is no final vindication of the cosmos and its beleaguered pilgrims. The cosmos and humanity it­self must be left behind because both are trapped in an endless cycle of futility. Life will not be redeemed; it must be obliterated. The contrast with the new heavens and new earth promised to Christians could not be more striking (see Revelation 21-22).

In conclusion, the Eastern systems of karma and reincarnation do noth­ing to solve the problem of evil. We must look elsewhere.

Thus far, I have eliminated five alternative strategies for explaining the problem of evil: atheism, a finite god, a morally impaired god, a world without evil and karma/reincarnation. We now explore ways to approach the problem from a Christian worldview.

(17) See Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 36.

(18) Quoted in Alan Watts, The Way of Zen (New York: Vintage Books, 1957), p. 115. See also pp. 107, 147 on the Zen’s denial of objective morality. Given my argument for objective morality in chap. 15, this fact alone is enough to disqualify Zen Buddhism as a true and rational world-view. See Harold Netland, Dissonant Voices (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), pp. 189-92.

(19) However, the goal of religions that hold to karma is not a world of perfect justice sometime in the future but the escape from the world of space and time and personality entirely.

(20) ‘See Paul Griffiths, “Apologetics in Action: Buddhists and Christians on Selves,” in An Apolo­getic for Apologetics (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1991).

(21) On the various schools, see R. C. Zaehner, Hinduism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).

(22) G. R. Malkani, Philosophical Quarterly (1965): 43, quoted in Paul Edwards, Reincarnation: An Examination (New York: Prometheus, 1996), p. 39. This reference is to an Indian publication, not the more well-known Scottish journal of the same name.

(23) Edwards, Reincarnation, p. 45. Ibid.

Don Rickles Tributes and Roasts (Videos)

Published by Papa Giorgio

The Aftermath of the Attack In Syria

Published by Papa Giorgio
  • Joke: All jokes Assad, things are getting pretty Syrias right now.
  • A friends response: I’m laughing so hard I’m Putin!

PICTURE: Al-Shayrat Airfield, which is where these chemical attacks were launched from… AFTER Tomahawk Barrage

This is from the U.S. NAVAL INSTITUTE NEWS post, which includes videos of the launching of some of these Tomahawks:

…..“The strike was a proportional response to Assad’s heinous act,” Davis’s statement continued. “Shayrat Airfield was used to store chemical weapons and Syrian air forces. The U.S. intelligence community assesses that aircraft from Shayrat conducted the chemical weapons attack on April 4. The strike was intended to deter the regime from using chemical weapons again.”

A U.S. military official told USNI News that Russian forces in the country were given a “heads up” ahead of the launch of the missiles. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said in a statement that the U.S. did not seek Moscow’s permission for the strike.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who serves on the Senate foreign relations and intelligence committees, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper this evening that “I don’t believe this is a message; I believe this is actually a tactical action that furthers an objective, which is important. My guess is, and I think you’ll see confirmation of it shortly, al-Shayrat Airfield, which is where these chemical attacks were launched from with fixed-wing aircraft a couple days ago, is going to be the target, and that is the airfield from which the chemical attacks were launched. It’s also a critical point in a part of the country where they’re battling rebels, non-ISIS rebels, in the northern part of Syria. So as I said, it’s an important and decisive step that was taken. It is not a message; it is an actual degrading of the capability of Syrian regime to carry out further chemical attacks against innocent civilians. This will degrade their capability to launch those attacks from the air, and I think it was an important step and hopefully it’s part of a comprehensive strategy moving forward to bring to a close this chaos that’s happening in Syria.”

Asked about the significance of this first attack in the bigger context of the ongoing situation in Syria, Rubio told Cooper, “I’m not saying this accomplishes everything, but I am telling you that this is the area from which those chemical attacks were launched and where we were going to see future attacks come from, particularly targeting innocent civilians in an area where the regime felt it was losing territory after making significant gains.”….

And — more from DEBKA FILE:

…Washington has NO DOUBT that the Syrian SU-22 bomber which Tuesday dropped a sarin gas bomb on Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib province, killing up to 100 people, was a joint Russian-Iranian-Syrian gambit to divert the Trump administration from a comprehensive plan for Syria. As US President and commander-in-chief he could not ignore this provocation.

Our sources report that the new US administration’s plans for Syria center on an offensive to evict the Islamic State from its Syrian capital, Raqqa, a mission for which US military preparations have been going forward for the past two weeks at five centers. To this operation Moscow, Tehran and Damascus were not averse. But that operation was also designed to rid Syria of Iranian and Hizballah forces – to which they were.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said that despite previous agreements, Syria had not surrendered its chemical weapons stockpile, and accused Russia of “failing in its responsibility to deliver on its commitment” to supervise the surrender of those chemical weapons. “Either Russia has been complicit or simply incompetent in its ability to deliver,” Tillerson continued.

The question now is whether Vladimir Putin will decide to hit back at the US operation. Russia did not retaliate for the Israel air strike on March 17 over the northern Syrian T4 air base. If Putin chooses to sit on his hands once again, the same question may be addressed to Iran and Hizballah.

Very possibly, Trump and Putin reached accord on the limits of the US punitive attack in Syrian in long hours of debate during the day between the US State and Defense Departments and the Russian Foreign and Defense Ministries, which were first reported by DEBKAfile 24 hours ago. Pentagon sources report that Washington gave Moscow advance warning of the coming US attack on the Syrian Shayrat base where Russian air force units are also deployed.

Follow-up US military action may yet come after the US president asserted that for him, “many, many lines were crossed” by Assad’s chemical attack and his attitude towards Syria had changed….

Myth #5: The Rich Get Richer, The Poor Get Poorer

Published by Papa Giorgio

A series of 5-myths via Daniel Flynn’s excellent book — Machiavelli said, “One who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived.”

  • Daniel J. Flynn, Why the Left Hates America: Exposing the Lies That Have Obscured Our Nation’s Greatness (Roseville, CA: Prima Publishing, 2002), 138-143.

MYTH #5: THE RICH GET RICHER, THE POOR GET POORER

WRITER JAMES L0EWEN laments the fact that publishers re­frain from printing “a textbook that would enable readers to understand why children of working-class families do not be­come president or vice-president, the mythical Abraham Lin­coln to the contrary.” Without a hint of irony, the author penned these words when the occupant of the Oval Office was a man abandoned by his father and raised in poverty by his strug­gling mother in Hope, Arkansas. The writer’s ideological my­opia regarding class and success in America is a central tenet of leftist philosophy. The Left’s propaganda campaign has been so effective that a majority of Americans now believe that the American system benefits the rich at the expense of the poor. A December 2001 Harris poll, for instance, revealed just how the belief in class rigidity remains entrenched in the collective consciousness. Sixty-nine percent of Americans agreed with the assertion that, in their country, “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” The facts do not support this popular belief. Nor do they buttress the idea that the system is set up to bene­fit the rich.

The burden of taxation overwhelmingly falls on the rich. The federal government relieves the poor of paying even a nominal amount of income taxes. The Internal Revenue Ser­vice reports that in 1999, the richest 1% paid more than a third of all income taxes it received. The richest 5% paid well over half of all federal income taxes. Only $1 out of every $25 collected by the IRS came from taxpayers on the bottom half of the economic ladder. To state that such a system unfairly ben­efits the rich, as many politicians perennially do, requires an abandonment of the facts as well as common sense.

The poor’s share of the economic pie has undeniably shrunk, however slightly, in recent decades. But the size of the entire pie has grown larger. Every economic class now receives a larger piece because they feast on a larger pie. From 1967 through 2000, the household income of the poorest tenth of the population increased by more than 33% in inflation-adjusted dollars. Surely it is better to have a smaller piece of a massive pie than it is to have a larger piece of a small pie. Countries exist, of course, where income equality is more pronounced among the masses. Economic equality for the populace (but not the leadership) is far more evident in China, Cuba, and Libya than it is in the United States. But what good is equality if it results in making everyone equally poor? Only one consumed by envy prefers equality of condition to increased prosperity for all.

A $9 trillion economy hardly leaves much room for what the rest of humanity considers true poverty. In more than 100 countries, America’s poor would be considered the moneyed elite. To its critics, the obscenity of our free-enterprise system is that some still go poor in a nation that houses Bill Gates and Leona Helmsley. Strangely, the system where everyone shares financial degradation equally earns higher marks from such critics. Such utopians fail to realize that only the system that keeps in place the natural rewards for hard work and ingenuity realizes the desired widespread prosperity. Government schemes that remove incentives seal the degraded fate of their own citizenry.

The United States is a free country. Any country that values liberty necessarily shuns the socialist’s conception of equality. The two ideals are incongruous. Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek astutely observed in The Constitution of Liberty,

From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their ac­tual position, and the only way to place them in an equal posi­tion would be to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict with each other; and we can achieve either the one or the other, but not both at the same time.

A variety of income levels usually reflects the health of free­dom in a nation. What truly would frighten would be no differ­ences in income.

Ignoring the absolute gains of the lowest economic class while stressing their relative losses serves as one example of the mathematical legerdemain the Left plays in the service of class warfare. A second trick involves the portrayal of “the poor” as a static group of individuals rather than as an economic class whose membership constantly rotates. The people we refer to as “the poor” today are not at all likely to be the people we refer to as “the poor” a few years from now. This reality alone rebuts the notion that the rich get richer while the poor get poorer. Today’s rich are often yesterday’s poor.

Hard statistics demonstrate that economic mobility is widespread. A Treasury Department study tracking class move­ment from 1979 to 1988 discovered that 86% of 1979’s poor no longer remained in the lowest income quintile in 1988. More of 1979’s poorest quintile actually found themselves in the richest 20% of Americans in 1988 than were still mired in the poorest 20%. Considering that the bulk of the survey focused on the Reagan years, the very time the Left describes as an era of un­precedented misery for the poor, the numbers are quite devas­tating to any claim of a static class structure.

An Urban Institute study at around the same time yielded similar results. The group found that the greatest proportional income gainers from 1977 to 1986 were 1977’s poorest quintile. This bottom fifth of the economic ladder saw their incomes climb 77% during the time period. By way of comparison, the average income gain during the 10-year period was 18%. Con­spicuously, 1977’s richest quintile experienced an anemic 5% increase in their earnings. In many ways, the Urban Institute’s findings merely confirm common sense. Poor people, having nowhere to go but up, experience more rapid proportional gains in income than the rich. To advance an ideology that ig­nores this reality flies in the face of common sense.

Over the past two decades, the U.S. Census Bureau has tracked individual income fluctuation from one year to the next on seven occasions. Even over a period as short as two years, the studies reveal a startling fluidity in the economy. In each of the Census Bureau’s seven two-year studies, at least three-fourths of all individual incomes fluctuated up or down by 5% or more. The studies affirm that the average American sees his earnings change significantly from year to year. A similar Census Bureau study of poor people in the mid-1990s found that nearly one-quarter of impoverished citizens in the first year of the study es­caped poverty by the end of the next. Again, the poor are not a fixed group of people. Poverty is a condition that different people find themselves in at different times. Students, the young, and newly arrived immigrants may constitute “the poor” during one still frame but live quite comfortably once we fast-forward their lives.

Just as the extremely poor are not typically chronically im­poverished, the extremely rich usually were not born into afflu­ence. Historians generally regard John Jacob Astor as the first man to be worth $10 million, Cornelius Vanderbilt, $100 mil­lion, and John D. Rockefeller, $1 billion. Significantly, each of these men earned his own wealth and rose from a fairly modest background. When we look at the rich today, the tradition of self-made wealth still holds true.

The self-made rich constitute the majority of wealthy people. Someone born into wealth stands a far greater chance of dying wealthy, of course, than someone born into poverty. But this hardly supports the claim that “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” Nor does it indict the American system. The advantages of inherited wealth occur not just in the United States but everywhere else in the world as well. In viewing the Forbes 400, the annual ranking of America’s superrich, one finds quite a few spots on the list that, like the publisher’s chair of the magazine compiling the report, are occupied by the inheritors of great wealth. Sam Walton’s wife and children constitute half of the Forbes top 10. A brood of Rockefellers populate the list. Five generations after the launch of Johnson & Johnson, nu­merous members of Forbes’s exclusive club bear the genes of the company’s founders. Old money has its advantages.

Yet these people are the exception. A perusal of the most recent list of the 400 richest Americans yields a count of 252 men and women, 63% of the total, described by Forbes as “self-made.”74 Their stories are truly amazing.

Texan Red McCombs (ranked at 158), the son of an auto mechanic, made billions selling the cars his dad was paid a few dollars to fix. Equaling McCombs in wealth is Kenny Troutt (158), a man who grew up in a housing project, only to establish one of the most successful communications companies in the United States. Andrew McKelvey (172), founder of Monster .com, got his start selling eggs. He later graduated to peddling ad space in the Yellow Pages, which undoubtedly planted the seeds in his mind for his successful Internet classified-ad com­pany. Both Marcus Bernard (60) and Arthur Blank (136) grew up in dilapidated tenement housing in and around New York City. After Bernard and Blank were fired by the Handy Dan home improvement store, they decided to launch their own venture. Handy Dan is out of business. Home Depot is one of the most successful stores in history. West Coast financier Leslie Gonda (136) escaped the Holocaust. The odds do not get much worse than that. Yet he made it. The lives of Mississippi sharecropper’s daughter Oprah Winfrey (280), college dropout Steve Jobs (158), and paperboy, horse breaker, and greeting card salesman H. Ross Perot (47) all serve as testimony to the reality of the American Dream.

These aren’t Horatio Alger stories. The rags-to-riches tales found in the Forbes 400 really happened. If the American Dream can become real for a Jew fleeing from under the jack­boot of Nazism, whom can’t it become real for?