The Stumbling Stone for the Arrogant - by bionic mosquito

 If God’s mercy is not available to whoever wants or seeks, then why does He present His Commandments to us, and asks us to voluntarily accept Him with our own free will?

The Epistle of St Paul to the Romans, Fr Tadros Yacoub Malaty (PDF)

To pick up where we left off last week:

Romans 9: 15 For He says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whomever I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whomever I will have compassion.” 16 So then it is not of him who wills, nor of him who runs, but of God who shows mercy.

We see other verses that require our attention before concluding that this entire relationship with God is driven by His arbitrary choices.

Philippians 2: 12 Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; 13 for it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure.

We see in this verse the necessity of our cooperation with God and the work He is doing in us.

Matthew 10: 21 “Now brother will deliver up brother to death, and a father his child; and children will rise up against parents and cause them to be put to death. 22 And you will be hated by all for My name’s sake. But he who endures to the end will be saved.”

It is we who must endure. Of course, we cannot do so without God’s help. But it is on us to do so......

https://achristianhall.substack.com/p/the-stumbling-stone-for-the-arrogant?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=2189155&post_id=216385875&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=y7h5a&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email 

....God chose Moses and not Pharoah. Was this arbitrary? Not at all: God knew the yearnings of Moses’s heart and He knew the cruelty of Pharoah’s heart – in fact, Pharoah demonstrated his cruelty several times before God hardened his heart. Through this, God demonstrated His faithfulness and mercy to the children of Israel.

19 You will say to me then, “Why does He still find fault? For who has resisted His will?” 20 But indeed, O man, who are you to reply against God? Will the thing formed say to him who formed it, “Why have you made me like this?” 21 Does not the potter have power over the clay, from the same lump to make one vessel for honor and another for dishonor?

St John Chrysostom:

“He has not used this example to deny the gift of free will. Rather, he intends to reveal the extent to which we should obey God. By calling God as the Potter, we become as a lump of clay before Him.

“…do not think that [Paul] says these words to refer to the creation, and that it is obligated and devoid of free will. His purpose is to reveal God’s authority and His various plans...if we give a different interpretation other than that, we commit a number of errors. If the Apostle was speaking about man’s will in this passage, and stating that God has created good and wicked will, then he would have absolved man from responsibility and he would have contradicted himself. Indeed, St Paul always expresses great appreciation for the gift of free will.”

In other words, God is at work within us, and without this, we can do nothing. But with this, we are to do something.

22 What if God, wanting to show His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, 23 and that He might make known the riches of His glory on the vessels of mercy, which He had prepared beforehand for glory, 24 even us whom He called, not of the Jews only, but also of the Gentiles?

Conclusion

25 As He says also in Hosea: “I will call them My people, who were not My people, And her beloved, who was not beloved.” 26 “And it shall come to pass in the place where it was said to them, ‘You are not My people,’ There they shall be called sons of the living God.”

This entire chapter is focused on Israel, intended to get them off of the idea that God’s hands are tied only to them and no other – and always to them no matter their faith. Everything said about God’s will is intended to disabuse Israel of the arrogance of their place.

30 What shall we say then? That Gentiles, who did not pursue righteousness, have attained to righteousness, even the righteousness of faith; 31 but Israel, pursuing the law of righteousness, has not attained to the law of righteousness. 32 Why? Because they did not seek it by faith, but as it were, by the works of the law. For they stumbled at that stumbling stone.

The Gentiles did not receive the Law, but they saw through Christ the righteousness of the Law. Israel, instead, saw the Law in the context of works, not faith.

33(a) As it is written: “Behold, I lay in Zion a stumbling stone and rock of offense,

It is almost as if Paul is saying: Just as God gave many chances to Pharoah before hardening Pharoah’s heart, He has also done so for Israel. Finally, when Christ came, their hearts were clearly hardened.

Christ was their stumbling stone.

33(b) And whoever believes on Him will not be put to shame.”

The End of Bioware - by Vox Day - Sigma Game - Another game developer declines into oblivion......(WHY? Easy Peasy! - CL)

 Bioware was a very successful game company. In addition to playing a few of its early games, the company for which I worked as the game design expert was the primary investor in one of its hits, Neverwinter Nights. But something gradually changed over time. I wonder if you can tell what it was?

Men and women are different. They have different objectives, different goals, different modes of communication, different perspectives, and they are entertained by different things.

The problem that successful men who found organizations will always face is that a) women are drawn to success and b) low-status men always enthusiastically welcome female involvement. And since women are both mediocre and ruthlessly competitive, the first priority every woman who was drawn primarily by the organization’s success does is to start working to eject every man whose performance she finds threatening.

Obviously not every woman engages in this behavior. There are plenty of women who are simply there to do their job and go home at the end of the day. They are not the problem.

But the high-flyers, the outliers, the stars, the women who use their attractiveness and charisma to put themselves in positions of influence and leadership, will always weed out the competent men and replace them with ineffective women. Always and every single time. No exceptions.

I guarantee you that if you review the public statements of every woman who became the first female board member of a major company or CEO, one of the first statements she ever made was to underline the pressing need to bring in more women to the organization.

And once that process begins, the only question is how long outside forces will keep the organization propped up so that it can survive.

https://sigmagame.substack.com/p/the-end-of-bioware?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=2265630&post_id=221615769&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=y7h5a&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email 

Infant and suckling, camel and ass: Armenians as prototypical Amalekites – The Occidental Observer

In the earliest annals of Jewish history a people known as the Amalekites had their name and reputation forever infamed by the kosher chronicles of the Pentateuch. These Hamitic-Arab speakers south of the Negev desert became the first mortal enemies of the Israelites in a neighborhood trend that continues to this day. The Amalekites were vanquished on orders from the Hebrew God, but you wouldn’t know it listening to the bellicose screeds of modern Israeli politicians. For the memory of the Amalekites was morbidly preserved by the Jews over the ages and employed like a wandering specter, projected onto their main enemy of the day via the collective metaphor Amalek.

Fast-forward to the present and Amalek is in a most prolific flux, with both Palestinians and Iranians being the target of Knesset firebrands who quote the Torah’s commands to “Wipe out the memory of Amalek” and “Never forget what Amalek did to you.” These religious commands, while nominally contradictory, are in fact ritually celebrated as a paradox during Purim. The Amalekites were the ones wiped out—and the Jews still haven’t forgiven them for it, with the bad blood of earlier episodes in their shared history truly preventing bygones from being bygones. In the estimation of Jewish leaders, lugging around victimhood for centuries didn’t have to be heavy cargo—rather the memory of Amalek could provide motivation and momentum from the rearguard. A primeval grudge turned into a psychological weapon that the Jews have gotten more mileage out of compared to anything else in their caravan of hagiography......

https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2026/10/22/infant-and-suckling-camel-and-ass-armenians-as-prototypical-amalekites/ 

....To this we may as well add pet rocks and sea monkeys, because such portents of the Hebraic hegemon—the protagonist of Passover—are there not merely for dramatic effect. Such edicts reinforce the notion that, according to Jewish semantics and theological taxonomy, goyim are also considered livestock. The right approach for gentiles, therefore, is not to adapt the linguistic trappings of their antagonists. Bilzerian would be the first to point out that by appropriating such derogatory designations, the people who benefit most from making Amalek great again are the likes of Netanyahu, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. Nevertheless, understanding that on some level we are all perceived as Amalek—either dormant, passive or active—is a lesson on Jewish projection and parapsychosis not to be ignored.

CA Security Issues - Insanity Rules - Denninger - (India runs our cyber security? - CL)

 If you're offended by strong language then click away now before reading any more of this.

I'm tired of ****ing India scams and now they've reached banking and commerce writ large because we refuse to impose strong sanctions up to and including a complete cut-off of every mother****er and their corporation in that nation and its so-called "Internet" infrastructure -- or worse (meaning nuking them to beyond the orbit of Mars.)

We just had discovered that an "Intermediate" CA had extremely weak keys.  The Internet community generally freaked out instantly when this was discovered as well it should have.  But nobody is talking about how that happened and why the entirety of what all security when it comes to payments and commerce on the Internet has been corrupted by the largest firms in the world means.

I'm going to do precisely that.

But to understand that you must understand how all this works......

https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=256118 

....Contemplate the level of corruption here: The firms and entities involved in deciding which entities go into the trusted root CA list all agreed to allow this Indian firm into said list.  Said firm may or may not have had actual acceptable business practices but they did not, as evidenced by what happened, have COMPETENT people working there that generated this intermediate root certificate.  The ACTUAL keys (which were cracked and is thus known) were not "poorly generated" they were obviously created by someone who had absolutely ZERO concept of how this all worked yet they were hired for and were working in a firm that had total trust among the largest companies in the Internet space and which, to a large degree, are infested with these ****ing JEETS exactly NONE of which threw a flag and said "this place is full of ****ing idiots."

So **** YOU India, **** YOU to all of these firms who went along with this bull**** and rather than instantly delist and remove all Indian firms from said attestation because India (which has jurisdiction) apparently does not believe this sort of gross negligence or intentional misconduct is a CRIMINAL offense worthy of instant execution for everyone involved there is no way to know HOW MANY MORE of these examples exist IN INDIA and, by extension, RIGHT HERE IN AMERICA where all of these firms have been FLOODED by Indian nationals who, as is evident by the pattern of their employment, engage in the exact same sort of "caste" bull**** right here.  Every single one of the *******s here or of Indian descent should be expelled from the United States unless we can independently and personally verify all their capability via objective and proctored testing, with any and all such falsification subject to immediate criminal prosecution and revocation of any visa, green card or citizenship derived in any way from ANY false attestation.

Incidentally while caste-based and racist hiring is apparently not illegal in India it is in the United States to discriminate on that basis yet not one ****ing executive is rotting in prison and not one of these firms has been forcibly delisted from our Stock Exchanges so **** ALL OF THOSE and **** OUR GOVERNMENT TOO.

Further any university that has ANY H-1b or similar person hired must have their degrees shredded to worthlessness by everyone.  If you are such a university and brought or bring in even one such person you must be forced to expel them right here and now and replace them with an America.  If not I am fully in support of every single thing done to your so-called "educational institution" whether legal or not as that is exactly the path by which his level of goat-****ing stupidity occurred and every single university and corporation stands GUILTY until every single one of said people IS EXPELLED.

The only good news is that if you're doing business with a US firm it never had a reason to get a certificate from one of these places that, by all evidence, has people working there in security-sensitive roles that have the IQ of a pile of steaming cow****.

The Jewish Role in the Armenian Genocide and Bloodbath of Christians, by Jonas E. Alexis - The Unz Review

 Note: The historical essay presented here is extracted from a chapter of my book, Zionism vs. the West. For the sake of brevity, I have not included the complete set of footnotes in this version of the essay. However, all footnotes appear in the corresponding chapter of the book. To assist readers and researchers, I have included at the end of this essay a bibliography of the principal sources consulted in the preparation of that chapter.

When the Jewish false messiah Shabbetai Zevi converted to Islam on September 16, 1666—the year his followers believed the Messiah would bring redemption—his followers split into three groups. One of the groups actually believed that Shabbetai did not fail by converting to Islam; they believed that “one cannot know the mysteries of God’s chosen.” A large number of Jewish families, about three hundred of them, followed him. Those became known as Donmeler or Donme, meaning converts, and they didn’t mix with other Muslims until the twentieth century. They had their own schools, mosques, and even their own cemeteries, indicating that they were like the conversos of Europe. Jewish historian Marc David Baer writes, “Shabbetai Tzevi’s conversion was not profound, in the sense that it was not based on profound belief in Islam, and that rather, it was quite superficial, because he had been compelled to change religion.” The Donme proved this point when they migrated to Salonika, a cosmopolitan Jewish city in the empire.

One of the groups that followed Shabbetai actually believed that his conversion to Islam was the right move. “They found ample justification in Judaism for this double play. Moses, after all, with whom Shabbetai Tzevi compared himself, remained for a long time in disguise in Egypt. Shabbetai Tzevi’s order not to intermarry with Muslims is a near-literal rendering of a passage from the corpus of Jewish law, the Talmud.” The disciples of Shabbetai were commanded not to mingle with other Muslims or to intermarry, and superficially “avoided relations with Jews,” but the end result was “public secrecy,” a key aspect of Freemasonry. Endogamy was so strong that Donme leaders threatened those who intended to leave with the death penalty.

In a nutshell, they converted for good reason. “But their religion was not the religion of Islam…They became Muslim, but not in order to fulfill its commandments and believe in its faith.” The same people “continued to believe in his messianic calling and his religious beliefs and practices, which emerged at the intersection of Kabbalah and Sufism.” Shabbetai died in 1676, and by 1683, not even ten years, Shabbataeans began to emerge as a force to be reckoned with.

Baer compares Shabbetai to Jesus in that Jesus put an end to the Old Testament law. For their turn, Shabbetai and his followers “established a breakaway movement that emphasized divine renewal, which derived from Judaism but radically diverged from it, abrogating the original laws and becoming something quite different, even if like the first Christians, they too claimed to have discovered the true understanding of the religion and the means of fulfilling divine purpose.” But their conversion was allowed because in 1454, minority groups, known as millet, were permitted to form their own enclaves and pursue their own interests. Later, in the seventeenth century, the Ottomans gave permission to European states to protect non-Muslims in the empire.......

https://www.unz.com/article/the-jewish-role-in-the-armenian-genocide-and-bloodbath-of-christians/ 

Bosses Want the Secrets of the Family Firm That Has Never Had a Layoff in 75 Years - WSJ

 

Hundreds of executives have flocked to St. Louis to learn how the Gunds’ family business thrives by putting workers before short-term profits

Gund Co. President Brian Krupich, CEO Steve Gund and Rich Gund, chairman and COO.

By

Allison Pohle

| Photography by Zachary Linhares for WSJ

Oct. 22, 2026 5:30 am ET

Hundreds of executives have made the pilgrimage to St. Louis to try to replicate Steve Gund’s elusive feat: He’s the third-generation CEO of a family manufacturer that has averaged 18% annual growth for a decade—all without ever laying off an employee.

He said he does it with a leadership model that puts The Gund Co.’s 1,300 employees’ well-being over short-term profits. He has made it his mission to evangelize the approach, especially to leaders of other family owned companies.

“It sounds touchy-feely, but it’s profitable,” said the 55-year-old Gund, whose grandfather, Ed Gund, a former candy salesman, started the composite materials company in 1951. Now approaching $400 million in sales, its customers include General Electric and Rockwell Automation. Its parts can be found in nearly every aspect of the grid, from wind generators to the green boxes dotting subdivision lawns.

The model requires trade-offs, and a lot of discipline: Gund has never had a layoff but staffs sparingly so it can weather the leaner stretches. Employees are pushed to voice and document concerns on red cards displayed on the factory floor, putting leaders on notice to take care of problems quickly. Everyone from line workers to managers crafts a career-development plan. Yet those who don’t adapt to Gund’s high-performance culture are managed out. 

And there are financial gambles: This year the company spent tens of millions of dollars to buy back its existing employee-stock ownership plan with the aim of relaunching a similar program to employees in every country where it operates—including China. 

Many of the executives coming through Gund’s St. Louis headquarters and other Midwestern sites want to see if the Gund way could future-proof their own businesses. Some are running the companies their parents or grandparents founded and approaching a crossroads many family enterprises eventually hit: Either sell out, possibly to private equity, or find a sustainable way to keep it growing in family hands.

The sustainable way, Steve Gund said, is building a business around a larger sense of mission, both for its workers and future generations of family owners.......

https://www.wsj.com/business/bosses-want-the-secrets-of-the-family-firm-that-has-never-had-a-layoff-in-75-years-ac608165 

Erika and the Evo-Avengers 006 - Vox Popoli - (Math?....Whadat? says DaBiologist - CL)

 Neither Mathews nor any of her supporting cast of PhDs understand the basic concepts of math. For some reason, biologists are totally unable to understand the concept of “an average” or “an average rate” or even grasp the fact that if something happens multiple times over a period of time, then an average rate for that activity or process must necessarily exist......

https://voxday.net/2026/10/22/erika-and-the-evo-avengers-006/ 

....This level of retardery from scientists with PhDs is genuinely painful to read, because they’re confidently asserting that the very concept they just spent the previous twenty minutes using — average fixation time — doesn’t exist. I’m not asking about some sort of universal biological constant, I am asking what is the average rate of this process taking place over time?

You said you drove the car from New York to LA last week. Fine. How fast did you drive? That is not a question about a universal automotive constant.

What do they imagine 4N_e is? It’s the average time to fixation for a neutral mutation. It’s right there in every population genetics textbook ever written. What do they think (2/s)·ln(2N_e·s) is? It’s the average time to fixation for a beneficial mutation with selection coefficient s. Kimura derived these. They are the expected values — the average rates — of stochastic processes. The entire field of population genetics is built on computing expected values for fixation times, substitution rates, and allele frequency trajectories. That’s exactly what the field does.

Their wind speed analogy is particularly self-defeating. Meteorologists absolutely use average wind speeds. They’re essential to climate modeling, building codes, wind energy engineering, and aviation. The existence of hurricanes doesn’t make the average meaningless, it just means the distribution has fat tails, which any competent scientist accounts for rather than throwing up their hands and declaring all averages to be useless. And if a meteorologist told you “the concept of average wind speed is meaningless,” you’d rightly question whether they understood their own field..........