Dear KAG: 2021-05-07

Another Friday, and time to gather at Wolf’s Pub. Welcome, and sit back for the smackdown! I’ve had it with the liberals. Enough is enough. We are long past niceties.

Our drink special today is a dose of Liquid Liberty, aka Hard Cider. Americans were cider drinkers from before we became the United States of America. The Founding Fathers were drinkers and fermenters of hard cider. It was pretty much the drink of choice for a long while, until ale and beer slowly supplanted hard cider, and it fell on hard times. The Revolution, birthed partly in the many taverns of the colonies, was fueled on alcohol, according to this article.

John Adams for instance, enjoyed his hard cider:

“It’s tough to say, but John Adams may have been the biggest drinker of the Sons of Liberty. He began every day with a draft of hard cider before breakfast. He drank three glasses of Madeira, a wine fortified with rum, every night before bed. During the bad old days under British taxation, Adams wrote to his wife, “I am getting nothing that I can drink, and I believe I shall be sick from this cause alone.” He died at 90. Of old age.”

A bar tab at the time of the Constitutional Convention included eight bottles of hard cider, among an astonishing amount of other alcohol:

“It is impossible for Americans to accept the extent to which the Colonial period—including our most sacred political events—was suffused with alcohol. Protestant churches had wine with communion, the standard beverage at meals was beer or cider, and alcohol was served even at political gatherings. Booze was served at meetings of the Virginian and other state legislatures and, most of all, at the Constitutional Convention.

Indeed, we still have available the bar tab from a 1787 farewell party in Philadelphia for George Washington just days before the framers signed off on the Constitution. According to the bill preserved from the evening, the 55 attendees drank 54 bottles of Madeira, 60 bottles of claret, eight of whiskey, 22 of porter, eight of hard cider, 12 of beer, and seven bowls of alcoholic punch.”

Speaking of George Washington, from an article about the history of hard cider in America:

“George Washington won his election into the House of Burgesses in 1758 after serving up 144 gallons of hard cider and other beverages to voters.”

Keep on reading that article for some fun information about the “hard cider candidate” for president in the 1800s. He won. Ahem.

I had no idea that hard cider was served at the Battle of Concord. Yep.

Here’s a quirky and fun video on how to make hard cider:

Here’s a lovely article on drinking hard cider for Passover (it’s gluten free), with some info on the Founding Fathers. Gives some nice suggestions for cider choices today.

And check out Cider Scene for a history lesson on the Way Back history of hard cider.

Today, hard cider has made a big comeback. Funny how things come round at just the right time. Angry Orchard is probably one of the best known hard ciders today, but then it’s owned by the Boston Beer Company, which also owns Sam Adams. Here’s a page of ciders for your perusal.

There are many local breweries that also make hard cider. You should check out your own area. You might find a delicious cider made locally.

Head over to the bar for a nice selection of hard ciders. Then we can get down to brass tacks.

HOUSE RULES

We’re supposed to be civil…with each other. Wolf’s rules are simple and finite:

If the American Revolutionaries can keep it together drinking hard cider during a battle then we can, too.

The Utree is for the knockdown stuff and to reconvene in case of emergency. On to the business.

An Open Letter to Liberals

Dear Liberal Friends (or not),

This letter has been rolling around in my head for awhile now, and I guess it’s time to let you know how I really feel about your politics. I’ve been quiet around you. I don’t share much because I know how it will cause division, and you’ve already caused enough division in our country. But I guess we are well past that now. I have seen how you treat others who are more open with their support of the Trumpian America First agenda.

You’re downright mean, nasty, uncivil, immoral and bullying. You are Anti-American. You are Un-American.

I want to address the hollowed out bubble you have lived in for many years. Some of you went to Ivy League schools. You got great jobs, met all the right people and settled in the typical enclaves of the elites. You live, work, shop, and educate your kids in these places where the people of color you see are often as educated and wealthy as you are. Have you noticed there’s no shortage of minorities in all sectors of our institutions? Surely, you see that. I mean, it’s right in front of your faces.

The hospitals in your area have lots of minority nurses and doctors. And yes, some of the more mundane jobs are done by minorities, like the landscapers, grocery clerks, and pool cleaners, and those who wipe the bottoms of the old people in nursing homes.

But somehow, you don’t see that plenty of white people are doing those mundane jobs, too. To you they are invisible. Just the color of their skin makes them not worthy of your paternal attention because…white privilege.

You’ve been convinced to feel guilty about your wealth and societal privileges. To feel better about it, you denigrate the great masses of working- and middle-class white people, who you call rednecks, racists, bigots, homophobic, ignorant and downright stupid.

You believe the traditional American values of patriotism, adherence to the Constitution, religious values and egalitarian tendencies are passé. You are a firm believer that the people in your economic and social class are the ones best suited to rule this great nation.

Pardon me, but YOUR ignorance is stunning. If only you would hear what Stephen Balch is saying:

“What’s more, because our elites’ mentality derives from Cloud-Cuckoo Land, they can’t deliver good governance, protective diplomacy, or material prosperity.”
Toward a National Liberation Movement

If only you were somehow compelled to get to know the regular working-class and middle-class individuals that fill the everyday lives of MOST Americans. I wonder if you would be surprised to know that we all get along just fine.

Our communities have been integrated for decades. We have intermarried and raised kids together. Few think a thing about it. We appreciate each other’s diverse cultures. We work together, worship together and hob nob with each other.

Yes, there are Spanish-language masses on Sundays (that liberal dioceses have added), and there are Baptist churches that cater almost exclusively to blacks, but that is a choice we are all free to make. Are there still racist people? You bet. And they are as likely to be people of color as whites.

Your group of people has been very busy bringing back racial division. It’s you and your fellow Democrat/Socialists who are the racists and always have been. How terrible, and what an indictment of your political ideology. You have made everything about race, just when America was on the verge of making nothing about race.

The strategies of the politicians you favor have divided our national house like no other. You sit back in your wealthy enclave, protected from the outcome of these racist and divisive policies. Do you really think that you are improving the lot of anyone?

The liberal policies of the Great Society created an underclass of minorities (with TRILLIONS OF TAXPAYER DOLLARS), the descendants of which populate sections of our largest cities. Fatherless, directionless, these lost populations have turned to drugs and gangs and trafficking. It is this group of people who have most been harmed by liberals such as yourselves.

And your planners have been whipping up anger and despair in order to effect a revolution against the people who have done more to make America a prosperous and free nation—the plumbers and soldiers, and teachers and machinists, the waitresses and small business owners, the office workers and homemakers (people of all stripes). In short, the people who support an America First agenda, the Deplorables. A name with which your High Priestess, Hillary Clinton, baptized us.

THE BIG LIE

In order to consolidate your power as elite rulers, New World Order citizens, you have given up even the pretense of a traditional morality. You know Joe Biden didn’t win. But the ends justifies the means to those destined to rule, eh?

Well, let me tell you something. You have lost any claim to a moral authority, let alone the authority to rule over us. And we aren’t going to give up our right to have an equal share in the governance of this great nation. You are not our betters. In fact, your nihilistic death-cult politics has put you far beneath the Average Joe.

You are the ones who are touting post-birth abortions, the mutilation of gender-confused kids, the eugenic fantasies of the academics amongst you. You are the ones who give the masses depraved entertainment that glorifies violence and hedonistic sex, and then point fingers at the mess society has become.

You have the money to mitigate the problems your politics and policies cause on a personal level (your kids are a mess, by the way.) The rest of us are left having to deal with the carnage on the ground with little resources to fix things.

For all your education and connections, you don’t know much at all. I consider you the useful tools in this revolution to overturn our Constitution and usher in a tyrannical world government. History tells us the useful tools always get consumed in the end.

However, the Deplorables will win and you will be saved. But I know you won’t be grateful. You’ll go to your graves lamenting the loss of authority and power of your tribe. The wokeness of the ruling class is a laughable testimony to your gullibility. Mark Twain once said, “All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal valuable knowledge.”

My liberal friends, you have had hidden from you this valuable knowledge:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Your whole political identity is based on the lie that education, money, and position confer intrinsic worth. And that the higher you are in the Ivory Tower (of Babel), the more godlike you become.

I am no longer astonished at your blindness. It’s all been written about before in that Book you either willfully misinterpret or reject outright.

God have mercy on you all. You’re going to need it.

Most Sincerely,

One of 85 Million Deplorables

Despair and Disillusionment

This very special DESPAIR & DISILLUSIONMENT thread
commemorates the greatest psy-op ever
attempted against Heaven’s beloved, mankind.

Here we are again

Imagine being Peter, seeing the miracles, the honor given to his teacher, the wild popularity with the people, and then, Jesus explains all of this is going to change.

³¹He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again.
³²He spoke plainly about this, and Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. ³³But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. “Get behind me, Satan!” he said. “You do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”

Mark 8:31-33

Peter feels he must help his teacher out. Jesus must be tired and have made a mistake. It’s hard to imagine the intensity of the sting of that rebuke from Jesus. Peter, soon to be the rock of the church, had been the mouthpiece of satan? Ouch.

But Jesus then pivots and turns this into a teaching moment Peter would never forget.

The Way of the Cross

³⁴Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. ³⁵For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it.
³⁶What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? ³⁷Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? ³⁸If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of them when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels.”

Mark 8:34-38

And then the ministry starts to get really busy. I wonder if Peter forgot those words in the whirlwind of activity, or did he in quiet moments would revisit that stinging encounter and try to make sense of it all?

Later on, Jesus would tell the parable of the tenants.

“A man planted a vineyard. He put a wall around it, dug a pit for the winepress and built a watchtower. Then he rented the vineyard to some farmers and moved to another place. ²At harvest time he sent a servant to the tenants to collect from them some of the fruit of the vineyard. ³But they seized him, beat him and sent him away empty-handed. ⁴Then he sent another servant to them; they struck this man on the head and treated him shamefully. ⁵He sent still another, and that one they killed. He sent many others; some of them they beat, others they killed.

⁶“He had one left to send, a son, whom he loved. He sent him last of all, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’
⁷“But the tenants said to one another, ‘This is the heir. Come, let’s kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.’ ⁸So they took him and killed him, and threw him out of the vineyard.

Mark 12:1b-8

Would that story haunt Peter’s dreams?

Then, in Bethany, a woman pours a very expensive perfume on Jesus’ head, scandalizing all present, excepting Jesus. Again Jesus patiently explains what is coming.

⁶“Leave her alone,” said Jesus. “Why are you bothering her? She has done a beautiful thing to me. ⁷The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them any time you want. But you will not always have me.
⁸She did what she could. She poured perfume on my body beforehand to prepare for my burial. ⁹Truly I tell you, wherever the gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her.”
Mark 14:6-9

This is when Judas snapped. He’d been following a madman. How could the Son of God be talking of defeat and death this way?

But Jesus did indeed suffer humiliation, torture, and death. Afterwards his closest disciples are ashamed at their lack of courage and in deep grief. His betrayer, Judas, hangs himself in despair.

The disciples of Jesus have taken a gut punch. The women following Jesus have proven to have much more courage than the men. What embarrassment! The only leadership shown was by Joseph of Arimathea, not in the inner circle at all, who boldly goes to Pilate and asks for the body of Jesus and gave some dignity to him in his death.

The disillusionment stung. The grief nearly unbearable. Such a dark fog of evil swirling around them, that they can’t even remember the promise he gave to rise on the third day.

While Christ is plundering hell, his disciples grieve.

Dear KAG: 20201127 Open Thread

Friday Happy Hour is here at the Wolf’s Head Pub.

What a week. The Kraken was released. Sidney Powell made good on her promise. The wailing and gnashing of teeth as the Fake News Media reacted was epic.

Her lawsuits in Georgia and Michigan caused Hack Dorsey to wrench down on censoring the filings. Good Lord, what a stinking loser. Pathetic. These tech lords haven’t stopped the truth. We are the news now.

Rudy kicked butt at his Pennsylvania hearing. The brave patriots who spoke out about voter fraud made me proud to be an American.

We need to brace for the backlash from the NWO cabal, though. They aren’t going down without a final fight. They are all in, and that means a fight to the bitter end.

But I can feel that familiar feeling of…WINNING. It never gets old, and we have our great President Trump to thank for that.

And, not so incidentally, our President pardoned General Mike Flynn. Sidney Powell reacts. This was an indication to me that the Kraken has been set free to crush the cheating Dems. This decision came from a position of strength. Perfect timing. And the pardon was phrased in such a way that General Flynn can serve in government again. Innocent!

Well, I say we should drink a toast to Sidney. I’ll be hoisting a Brandy Milk Punch, a favorite of that patriot and Founding Father Benjamin Franklin. Recipe here.

First though, just a reminder about our house rules. Make nice. Craziness belongs over at the UTree, not here at the QTree. Civility reigns. Rules here if you need a refresher or are new. We may be opinionated, but we do it with the highest regard for our fellow patrons and we never wish to cause the slightest worry to our patron, Wolf.

Back to Ben. Franklin was known for his admonishments to temperance, but the man enjoyed a drink, like many of the founding fathers. He liked his wine, and according to one article, “A brewer and distiller in his own right, he’s also famous for coming up with The Drinker’s Dictionary, over 200 euphemisms for getting tore up. Among my favorites: “Piss’d in the Brook,” “Wamble Crop’d,” and “Been too free with Sir John Strawberry.”

Heck, our first President, George Washington, had a still from which he produced 11,000 gallons of whiskey in 1799. He was known to put away four bottles of wine during an evening of dancing.

Thomas Jefferson imported thousands of bottles of wine from Europe. And can you say Sam Adams, who brewed his own beer? The colonials did not have access to clean water, so much of what they drank was alcoholic, from beer to mead to wine to hard cider and whiskey. Even kids drank a low alcohol content beer.

Remember the Tea Party? Ya gotta read this article. Is it possible that our revolution wasn’t kicked off in honor of tea so much as alcohol? Hmmm…that would make for some fun research.

At any rate, pubs (or taverns as they were called) played a big part in communications during revolutionary times. A tavern was a hotel, a bar, a restaurant, a post office, often a dancing hall, and an all around meeting place during colonial times. Interesting that Gov. Andrew Cuomo and other Democrat (commie) governors have been keen to shut down bars and dining establishments during the Year of the Covid, the NWO’s kick-off to their plan for complete world dominance. Cue Mike Myers, please.

And speaking of the New World Order, I remember former President George H. W. Bush. I found a video where he gives four speeches (the vid shows just the snippets) that mention the New World Order. Good God in Heaven, were we all just snoozing when this jerk was talking about this stuff?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=94gcYXDwIOI

I can’t help but think of his last years. Confined to a wheelchair, the old coot would grab women’s rears and grin like a demented monkey. A fitting end for someone who has done such harm to our Republic. May he forever be a potent reminder of the foolishness of the so-called elites, who sought to recreate the Tower of Babel in our time.

Our President is revving things up for getting rid of Section 230. It will be terribly sweet to see Twitter and the other tech giants get their comeuppance.

For purposes of National Security, Section 230 must be immediately terminated!!!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 27, 2020

Winning! President Trump keeps his promises! It’s a thing of beauty to see the steady unfoldment of a plan that we have been privy to, if only a bit.

And President Trump is cleaning house, getting ready for his second term.

Pentagon Purges Leading Advisors From Defense Policy Board

And just to finish up, wasn’t it so fitting and just in time for Thanksgiving that the Supreme Court slapped that insane clown, Andrew Cuomo, down? Freedom of religion!

It’s going to be a wonderful weekend!

Be Like Lions, Not Lambs

The shooting at the synagogue in Poway has interesting details
that we might want to keep discussing as we ponder
the aims, successes, and yes, failures of the puppet masters
behind these despicable attacks.

Combat Vet Who Stopped The Synagogue Shooter: ‘I Scared The Hell Out Of Him’

Rachel Stoltzfoos | Staff Reporter at DailyCaller.com

The man who fired a semi-automatic weapon inside the Chabad of Poway synagogue in San Diego on Saturday froze, dropped his gun and sprinted to his car when he saw Oscar Stewart come barreling toward him, yelling so loud the priest at a neighboring church could hear.

“Get down!” Stewart yelled, according to his wife and others who were at the scene. “You motherfucker! I’m going to kill you!”

Others who were there later told him it sounded like four or five people were shouting. He thinks maybe an angel was standing behind him and speaking through his voice. When the shooter ran, he immediately gave chase.

Stewart, 51, told The Daily Caller on Sunday he doesn’t remember any conscious thought from the moment he heard the gun shots until it was all over — he just acted on instinct to stop the shooter and prevent him from leaving so he couldn’t hurt more people somewhere else. The Iraq combat veteran said his military training kicked in.

“I knew I had to be within five feet of this guy so his rifle couldn’t get to me,” Stewart said. “So I ran immediately toward him, and I yelled as loud as I could. And he was scared. I scared the hell out of him.”

Stewart served in the Navy in explosive ordnance disposal from 1990 to 1994, then enlisted in the Army in 2001 because of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

“Looking back, it was kind of a crazy idea to do, but I did it.” He was deployed to Iraq in 2003 and left the military in 2004, as a staff sergeant. He’s now in construction work.

When the gunman opened fire, he was in the back of the synagogue. By the time he got to the lobby, the shooter had killed one woman, blown the finger off of a rabbi, and injured two others.

“I heard gunshots,” Stewart said. “And everybody got up and started trying to get out the back door, so I — for whatever reason — I didn’t do that. I ran the other way. I ran towards the gun shots.”

“When I came around the corner into the lobby area, I saw the individual with a gun, and he fired two rounds. And I yelled at him and I must have yelled very loud, and he looked at me, and I must have had a really mean look on my face or something, because he immediately dropped his weapon and turned and ran. And then I gave chase.”

Stewart said he chased him all the way out to his car and began pounding on it — the shooter had managed to lock himself in. When Stewart saw him reach for a rifle, he punched the side of the car as hard as he could, intending to figure out a way to drag him out of the car. That’s when a Border Patrol agent who attends the synagogue came running out to the parking lot, yelling for Stewart to get down because he had a gun.

Stewart says this man may have saved his life and pointed to his use of a civilian’s gun as evidence that gun control isn’t the answer to these kinds of tragedies. Stewart was off-duty and was apparently handed the weapon by someone else on the scene.

“It takes a good guy with a gun to stop a bad guy with a gun,” he told the Caller.

The agent fired several rounds into the lower part of the vehicle, intending to disable it, but the shooter managed to drive away. The two of them then grabbed a phone from someone and called the police to report his license plate. The shooter later turned himself in.

After he sped off, Stewart ran back into the synagogue and found a woman he knew, 60-year-old Lori Gilbert Kaye, unresponsive on the floor in the lobby. He began CPR and continued trying to bring her back to life as a couple of doctors arrived and began to assist him. She didn’t make it. The two had talked occasionally, and he remembers her as a passionate and kind woman.

“She had different political views, so we had interesting discussions when we talked,” he said. “We didn’t just talk about the weather. It was kind of cool. She was a very loving woman.”

Stewart considers her the real hero. Eyewitnesses said she jumped in front of the rabbi to save his life.

“People in the aftermath here have been saying it’s important to be strong and defend ourselves. I also think it’s important to know that being strong and defending ourselves requires a lot of sacrifice too.”

“I don’t know if I consciously made the choice to potentially sacrifice myself,” he added. “But I did. And this lady, she stood and she jumped in front of the shooter and she saved the rabbi’s life. When somebody said I was a hero, I’m like, she was a hero. I just did it instinctively, like an animal. There was no conscious decision. I just did it.”

He may not call himself a hero, but Stewart believes his actions effectively stopped the shooter. He doesn’t think reports of the shooter’s gun jamming as the reason he fled are likely to be true, because he was using a semi-automatic rifle. “Full automatic weapons will jam,” he said. “Semi-automatic weapons do not jam.” He thinks maybe the shooter had emptied his magazine. Whatever the case, the shooter let the slung weapon drop and fled.

“He was in the act of shooting when I saw him,” Stewart said. “When I yelled at him he turned and looked at me, and he like froze. And then the look on his face was one of amazement at first, and then one of fear. He saw me coming, and I was ready to do whatever I had to do to stop him.”

For his part, Stewart doesn’t attribute the shooter’s actions to a larger agenda and was reluctant to connect him to a larger political context. He doesn’t blame President Donald Trump and expressed hope that people don’t try to blame anyone else for the man’s actions. “He was an individual acting alone,” he said.

“If you’re ignorant and you don’t know what people are like, you don’t know that I’m a person just like you. I go to work every day in a manual labor job. I’m not some, you know – supposedly he said in his manifesto that the Jews control this and that — I don’t control anything. I go to work just like you every day. He didn’t know that.”

“If he had gotten to know me, he would know that I’m a great person, that I’m a nice guy, that I’m a very caring person,” he continued. “My apprentices — they all love me. They say that I’m the best teacher in the world, you know, that I care, that I try to teach them, and if he had known any of these people, like the lady Lori who died. She would go give Easter baskets to kids and that’s not even a Jewish thing, you know. … She was just a warm person.”

If anything’s to blame, he says it’s social media and the increasingly disconnected world we find ourselves in. “The whole media thing — people don’t get to know people, and they get to sit in a cocoon, and sit and make opinions on what somebody writes. It’s not good. We need to interact more.”

“The most important thing I want to share is that we need to know each other,” he said. “If you make an opinion on anyone, you need to know what they’re about, and who they are. You can’t generalize and say every blue person is evil because they’re blue. That’s ridiculous.”

The funeral service for Kaye is on Monday. He expects the synagogue will be totally packed.

https://twitter.com/45_Schedule/status/1122860395985866753

Wow! #Poway Chabad Rabbi had asked border patrol agent who took down the Synagogue shooter to pray armed – just in case. In doing so, they averted an even greater catastrophe! The agent only recently discovered his Jewish roots.https://t.co/taCgwSj8fQ

— Arsen Ostrovsky (@Ostrov_A) April 29, 2019

POWAY, California — Jonathan Morales, an armed off-duty US Customs and Border Patrol agent who recently discovered his Jewish roots, was among the worshipers at Chabad of Poway on Saturday when John Earnest entered the synagogue near San Diego during Passover services and began shooting.
The 19-year-old gunman killed Lori Gilbert-Kaye, 60, and wounded three people: Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein, 8-year-old Noya Dahan and her uncle, Almog Peretz.
“Morales recently discovered his Jewish roots. He would travel three and a half hours from [the California town of] El Centro to pray with us at our shul,” Goldstein told media at a Sunday press conference outside the synagogue. “He felt this was his house of worship. And many times I said, ‘Jonathan, you work for the border patrol. Please arm yourself when you are here; we never know when we will need it.’”
US President Donald Trump spoke with Goldstein on Sunday and took to Twitter to praise the rabbi and Morales, writing: “He may have been off duty but his talents for Law Enforcement weren’t!”

Sincerest THANK YOU to our great Border Patrol Agent who stopped the shooter at the Synagogue in Poway, California. He may have been off duty but his talents for Law Enforcement weren’t!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 27, 2019

As for why there weren’t any active duty guards at the synagogue, in an earlier interview with CNN Goldstein said, “Unfortunately, we couldn’t afford to have an armed security officer at every service, so whenever we had extra help, we were grateful for it.”
In a moment that Goldstein referred to as “miraculous,” Earnest’s gun jammed, and congregant Oscar Stewart, a 51-year-old Army veteran, and Morales attempted to subdue the gunman. Morales was also able to open fire and give pursuit.

After Earnest fled the building, Morales followed in his own vehicle and shot and hit Earnest’s car. Earnest soon turned himself in to law enforcement.
On Sunday, Goldstein, his two hands in fresh blue bandages, gave a detailed recounting of Saturday’s harrowing shooting in Poway, a suburban town just north of San Diego.
“I was preparing for my sermon, I walked out of the sanctuary and into the lobby and I saw my dear friend Lori Kaye,” said Goldstein. “I walked into the banquet hall to wash my hands, walked two or three footsteps and I heard a loud bang.”
That bang was the sound of the first shots fired by Earnest, a college student who entered the Chabad House undetected amid a flow of mourners who were gathering for Yizkor, the traditional memorial service held on the final day of Passover.
“I turned around and saw something indescribable,” Goldstein continued. “Here is a young man standing with a rifle pointing right at me. He had sunglasses on. I couldn’t see his eyes, I couldn’t see his soul.”
The rabbi said that when he saw the shooter he initially froze, then raised his hands to cover his face. Two of his fingers were blown off; one was reattached by surgeons at Palomar Medical Center in San Diego late Saturday.
Gilbert-Kaye, whom relatives and friends on Saturday described as a woman of unconditional love and unbounded generosity, was the only fatality of Earnest’s mass shooting.

Goldstein took several minutes to thank San Diego County law enforcement and to praise the wellspring of warmth and support that the local community has offered in light of the tragedy.

A chain of miracles

In a remarkable series of events, the rabbi and a handful of congregants were able to save a group of children playing in the adjacent banquet hall, preventing a full-fledged massacre.
“I ran [to gather the children],” Goldstein says. “My granddaughter, who is four and a half years old, saw her grandpa with a bleeding hand. She saw me shouting, ‘Get out! Get out!’ She didn’t deserve to see her grandfather like that.”
Aided by Peretz, an Israeli war veteran who was also at Chabad of Poway with his family Sunday, Goldstein was able to usher the children out of the banquet hall with the shooter in pursuit.
But in what Goldstein referred to as a “miracle,” Earnest’s gun jammed. Even while Morales was still on Earnest’s trail, congregants — who had been gathered in the sanctuary and would have made easy targets for Earnest had his gun not jammed — fled to Chabad’s front entrance.

Goldstein’s hand was bleeding badly and his two fingers were dangling by cartilage. “I grabbed a prayer shawl,” he said, wrapped his wounds, and stood on a chair to address his congregation.
“I said, ‘I gotta do something,’” he said. “I said to our congregation: ‘Am Yisrael chai [The People of Israel live]. We are a Jewish nation that will stand tall and we will not let anyone or anything take us down.’”

Farewell to an ‘angel’

“Lori took the bullet for all of us. She died to protect all of us. She didn’t deserve to die,” Goldstein said.
Gilbert-Kaye was one of the congregation’s oldest and most devoted members, the rabbi told media. A former employee of Wells Fargo, she was instrumental in helping Chabad secure the loan for the building in the early 1990s. She and her husband Howard were so close with the rabbi and his wife that two weeks ago they flew to New York City for Goldstein’s youngest daughter’s wedding, and danced together with the bride.

Roneet Lev, friend of Chabad of Poway
shooting victim Lori Gilbert-Kaye,
April 28, 2019. (Debra Kamin/Times of Israel)

Her generosity and kindness was lauded on Sunday by Roneet Lev, who was at the Chabad of Poway to mourn. Lev described herself as Kaye’s best friend.
“Lori Kaye is an angel on this planet,” Lev said. “She’s touched many lives in her own life. Not just in this community but throughout the entire world.”
Describing a woman who always carried gifts cards and greeting cards to offer as presents and who would regularly purchase extra coffees and donuts for homeless people on the street, Lev explained that Kaye was at Chabad of Poway to say the first Kaddish mourner’s prayer for her mother, who had recently died.
Kaye’s daughter Hannah lives in Los Angeles and had driven down to be with her mother for the service.
Lev offered hope and optimism as she spoke of her friend.
“Even in this horrible, painful event, we know good will come out of it,” Lev said. “Lori is known for bringing out the good in people. And look at these flowers. Look at this law enforcement. Look at the good people of San Diego. Lori is now bringing them together.”

Rabbi-speaks-after-shooting-at-synagogue

p.s., another article about the shooting from a local paper was originally posted with some odd wording that cast some shadows on the synagogue’s use of DHS funds to strengthen security. The second and third versions fixed this gaff and added a quote from the local ADL spokesperson.

Oh, VERY IMPORTANT!
The “AR” in AR-15 stands for ArmaLite, NOT assault rifle. This is a point we need to be making with everyone that we talk about such things with. Continue reading “Be Like Lions, Not Lambs” →

Male & Female

This very special MALE & FEMALE thread
celebrates Heaven’s original blueprint for
both the male and the female genders.

An African Cardinal Speaks

I believe this Cardinal, Robert Sarah, brings a beautiful moral clarity to many of the topics discussed here at Wolf’s Q Treehouse, but let’s to focus on the gender issue for a moment.

Cardinal Sarah, Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, says that the spiritual crisis that currently blights “the whole world” has its roots in Europe, because Europe has rejected God:

“Western people are convinced that receiving is contrary to the dignity of human persons. But civilised man is fundamentally an heir, he receives a history, a culture, a language, a name, a family. This is what distinguishes him from the barbarian. To refuse to be inscribed within a network of dependence, heritage, and filiation condemns us to go back naked into the jungle of a competitive economy left to its own devices. Because he refuses to acknowledge himself as an heir, man is condemned to the hell of liberal globalisation.”

Cardinal Sarah links this idea of the rejection of humanity’s inheritance to another that he says is at the root of current malaise: the rejection, in the West, of the idea of fatherhood.

The two rejections, he explains, are intimately bound up with our rejection of God.

“From Him we receive our nature as man and woman. This is intolerable to modern minds. Gender ideology is a Luciferian refusal to receive a sexual nature from God. Thus some rebel against God and pointlessly mutilate themselves in order to change their sex. But in reality they do not fundamentally change anything of their structure as man or woman. The West refuses to receive, and will accept only what it constructs for itself.”

He continues: “Because it is a gift from God, human nature itself becomes unbearable for western man… This revolt is spiritual at root. It is the revolt of Satan against the gift of grace.”

— Excerpt, Interview of Cardinal Robert Sarah, The Tablet

We ignore the gift of grace found in gender differences to our great loss.

However, I’d like to redirect our attention to something else about the Divine blueprint. There are two versions of the creation story in the book of Genesis. The first is more like a requirements specification, the second is more like an elaboration process.

So God created human beings in his own image.
In the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.

— Genesis 1:27

¹⁸Then the Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper who is just right for him.” ¹⁹So the Lord God formed from the ground all the wild animals and all the birds of the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would call them, and the man chose a name for each one. ²⁰He gave names to all the livestock, all the birds of the sky, and all the wild animals. But still there was no helper just right for him.
²¹So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep. While the man slept, the Lord God took out one of the man’s ribs and closed up the opening. ²²Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib, and he brought her to the man.
²³“At last!” the man exclaimed.

“This one is bone from my bone,
and flesh from my flesh!
She will be called ‘woman,’
because she was taken from ‘man.’”

²⁴This explains why a man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife, and the two are united into one.

²⁵Now the man and his wife were both naked, but they felt no shame.
— Genesis 2:18-25

Have you ever considered that Wolf’s famous BOTH logic applies to God? In the first reference the term human beings (Hebrew ’ādām) is the generic term for humankind and does not imply gender. In the blueprint, humankind is created in the image of God, BOTH male and female. To truly defend and honor gender, we must first respect this reality. There is the biology AND the spirituality.

John Eldredge’s writing have captured the power of celebrating the qualities of gender for the most recent generation. And recently a theologian has pointed out that section in that corresponds to the governmental portion of the Mosaic law in the Ten Commandments is, “honor your father AND your mother.” Talk about revolutionary. There have been patriarchal cultures and matriarchal cultures, but a culture of honor for BOTH???

What if we’ve been duped into looking at the wrong thing (again). What if true leadership and authority and inner peace flow out of embracing the partnership of two very powerful and very different genders, BOTH made in the image of God?

To be honest, I’m just scratching the surface of what feels like an intense and very deep reality here. I don’t think I’m even close to where we need to be on this. There is something here that we must understand in order to prevail in the culture/spiritual war we are dealing with. But it seems this needs to be put out there for discussion.

Despair & Disillusionment

This very special DESPAIR & DISILLUSIONMENT thread
commemorates the greatest psy-op ever
attempted against Heaven’s beloved, mankind.

Think’s Thoughts

Imagine being Peter, seeing the miracles, the honor given to his teacher, the wild popularity with the people, and then, Jesus explains all of this is going to change.

³¹He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again.
³²He spoke plainly about this, and Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. ³³But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. “Get behind me, Satan!” he said. “You do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”

Mark 8:31-33

But Jesus then pivots and turns this into a teaching moment Peter would never forget.