222 Easter 5: When Pushed, Push Back
“Let everything that has breath praise the Lord.” ~ Psalm 150
When Pushed, Push Back
“When things fall apart and you're thinking about shelter, clothing and self-defense, you realize you are now personally doing things you’ve had outsourced for your entire life.“ - Dr Koontz (BHoP Ep 40)
The absolute first thing to do when someone pushes you is push back.
There is no question about this unless you are a coward.
It is a fact: the most certain way to stop someone from harming you further after they have pushed you (which signals intent to harm) is to push back with all your ferocity in one, fierce and aggravated, “No!”
This means, “Stand down!”
After that, you take control. You dictate the terms. You choose not to fight because they submit.
Fight for the good is what a virtuous man does.
A man who is looking to take advantage of another is a coward. He is what he is because he is not naturally successful. He’s probably not good at much of anything, including fighting. Good fighters get paid well in all arenas. But a petty criminal is not even a thug. He is relying on your fear to win for him. He is a small fish in a big pond who thinks that you are a smaller fish.
So, be the big fish. When pushed, push back. Once. Hard. And, say, “No!” firmly, with a hand motion signaling to stop or stay away. Then, leave. Go to a safe location swiftly and with confidence. Keep your wits about you and be prepared to defend yourself again. If you must confront the same attacker, do it on your terms. Take control of the situation. Assert your rights with your heart and mind. He is the small fish. He is the coward.
This kind of information, drawn from the Modern Survival Manual, recommended by Dr. Adam Koontz back in 2021 on a Brief History of Power podcast, I find to be the sort of wisdom that replicates into other battles. Fighting isn’t just about fisticuffs. Undesired aggression comes in many forms. If you are going to be the one in charge, a single firm return is often all it takes.
What have you been reading about?
Till angel cry and trumpet sound,
The Mad Christian
Crime and Punishment
New York’s highest court has overturned Harvey Weinstein’s rape conviction, saying the Hollywood producer did not receive a fair trial. Some witnesses “made accusations against Weinstein that were not related to the charges at the heart of the case,” prejudicing the jury against him. Weinstein is serving 16 years in prison for a separate sexual assault conviction. (Just the News)
The Department of Justice has agreed to pay $138.7m to settle a lawsuit with gymnasts abused by national coach Larry Nassar. The DOJ failed to investigate complaints about Nassar, allowing him to molest girls for almost two decades. (WNG)
The SCOTUS has heard arguments about a challenge to a ban on sleeping outdoors. A small Oregon town, which issues fines to homeless people, says it needs the ban to prevent encampments forming. (BBC)
The City of Baltimore is suing the owners of the ship which collided with the Francis Scott Key bridge last month. “The city claimed that the freight ship was not seaworthy, and was not staffed with a competent crew.” (WNG)
The Biden administration is suing Sheetz, a chain of convenience stores over its hiring practices. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission says that the company’s criminal background checks “disproportionately impacted Native American, Black and multiracial job-seekers.” The lawsuit was filed “the same day Biden cheerfully stopped by a Pittsburgh location on Wednesday for food.” (Fox)
Births, Deaths and Marriages
The outcome of a cost-benefit analysis for having a child depends on your starting assumption. “Do you believe it’s good?” (The Federalist)
Declining birth rates is a blue state problem. (The Transom)
Preparing your kids for potential war. (Intellectual Takeout)
A pro-Palestine event in Connecticut brought in a drag queen to remind the children that "If you're a drag queen and you know it, shout 'Free Palestine'!" (Hot Air)
Hearts and Minds
How far does forgiveness reach? The story of the unspeakable evil of the Rwandan genocide, 30 years ago this month defies belief. The stories of forgiveness can also be hard to believe. One mother, whose neighbor killed her family, now welcomes the murderer as a son. “My heart had been freed from hate by then, because we widows had been reading the gospel together. Its message prepared my heart to forgive.” God be praised. (Plough)
Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn) and Utah’s Republican Governor Spencer Cox want to find out why Americans feel unhappy and hopeless. (Semafor)
Monday morning mood?
Coming to America
The coaches of New York boys’ soccer teams decided to cancel their match after illegal immigrants invaded the pitch and would not move, even for police. Erik Johansson, the coach for Manhattan Kickers, asked the men to leave the field but decided it was too dangerous to go ahead with the game when the group refused to move. “Johansson, a Swedish national, said the crisis reminds him of how bad things have gotten in his home country. 'I have seen this before, I know how bad it can get,' he said.” (Daily Mail)
A case against an Arizona farmer accused of shooting an illegal immigrant from Mexico has ended in a mistrial. Key evidence could not be found and George Kelly’s defense argued that the Mexican man was a smuggler who was likely killed by others in his party. (Not the Bee)
Thunderdome 2024
The US Supreme Court Justices called a special session to hear oral arguments about “whether and if so to what extent does a former President enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office.” If a president has total immunity while in office, that might encourage lawlessness. However, no immunity protections mean “former presidents can be put on trial for prior official actions, thereby incentivizing political prosecutions.” Observers of the Court believe it is likely the verdict will be that presidents have some immunity, within specific parameters, or they may send the ruling back to lower courts. Either way, it seems unlikely that the matter will be settled before November as prosecutors had hoped. The verdict, due to be handed down by June, will impact cases against Donald Trump, including one involving classified documents. (CBS, The Federalist, ZeroHedge)
Judge Aileen Canon has unsealed a number of documents which reveal quite a bit of mischief on the part of those prosecuting Donald Trump. The documents are part of Trump’s classified documents trial in Florida and show threats to judiciary and disparate treatment of President Biden and Donald Trump by the National Archive. The FBI also discussed surveilling Trump’s private plane. (The Federalist, Just The News, Newsweek)
An Arizona grand jury has charged 18 people with a scheme to create false electors to help Donald Trump in 2020, including Trump associates Rudy Giuliani and Mark Meadows. (The Guardian)
From the Mad☧Tank
Mad☧Mondays is your reliable white noise filtration system. If you like reading news that matters, then please support Mad☧Mondays! Get early access to Mad☧Tank articles and join the chat by signing up through Substack. Or support Frisby’s efforts with any amount here.
This week:
Recent stuff from our archive:
Have you composed a poem? Do you have some local news that our readers would benefit from knowing? A book review? Parenting advice? Theological treatise? Then send it to us! If you would like to submit your writing to be published in our Tank, please reply to this email. We would love to hear from you.
The Digital Age
The US Senate last week approved a bill which will ban TikTok in America if ByteDance, its parent company, will not sell it by the end of the year. TikTok has vowed to fight the bill, and would seemingly rather leave the US altogether than sell. American patronage accounted for 25% of TikTok’s overall revenues last year, but only 5% of ByteDance’s users. (ArsTechnica, The Register, The Guardian)
Russian hackers have been linked to a cyberattack which caused the overflowing of the water supply in a rural Texas town. An official said, “There were 37,000 attempts in four days to log into our firewall” before they “unplugged” it and operated it manually. (AP)
The Federal Communications Commission has voted to reinstate net neutrality rules. (TechCrunch)
Open AI CEO Sam Altman says language models like Chat GPT will need to get smarter not larger. Citing diminishing returns on continuous scaling and the fact that there’s only so many data centers you can build in a hurry. Altman says the goal should be to learn how to retain quality answers. (Wired)
The oldest website in the world. “Once the website finally went live, however, there was no one to visit it. To do so would require a web browser, another application that had just been invented.” (CERN, Cracked)
Straight Outta J-School
Corporate media is still convinced that Russian disinformation swayed the 2016 election and is not as trustworthy as it claims to be. But that aside, we can agree with this article that a TikTok ban will only solve part of the problem. Consumers of news need to sharpen their discernment skills especially if they intend to get their news from social media. Social media is “not made to inform people. It is designed to capture consumer attention for the sake of advertisers.” (Fast Company)
A satirical publication, The Onion, is under new ownership. The company has been purchased by a group of “digital media veterans” and will be run by former NBC reporter Ben Collins. (Hollywood Reporter)
Race
A proposed tent protest in support of Palestine at the University of Washington has been postponed because participants are not diverse enough – too many white kids signed up. (The Federalist)
State and local police have detained students protesting at the University of Texas. Within hours of clearing it out however, groups “moved back in to sit on the grass and chant under the school’s iconic clock tower.” Arrests were also made at the University of Southern California. (AP, Red State)
House Speaker Mike Johnson visited Columbia University last week to speak with Jewish students, calling on President Minouche Shafik to resign if she won’t do more to disperse the pro-Hamas protestors and “guarantee the safety of Jewish students.” (Politico)
Is Columbia funding its own protests? (Just the News)
A high school athletic director in Maryland has attempted to frame his school’s principal as a racist. Dazhon Darien used artificial intelligence to generate an audio recording to sound like his boss saying racist things. Reports say the action was revenge for an unfavorable performance review for the teacher. (Fast Company)
The disturbing rise of anti-white Tiktoks. (MadPXMonday via X)
Money, Markets and Jobs
The US Federal Trade Commission has taken action to ban non-compete agreements. So-called “gardening leave” means that there is an enforced break for employees moving from one employer to another. Wall St experts say that non-compete clauses help protect proprietary information. “The purpose of the non-compete is to allow the information to grow somewhat stale,” one executive said. Proponents of the FTC’s rules say it will “free talented traders, investors and bankers to leave jobs where they are unhappy and give a boost to well-run groups that can offer more money and a more congenial environment.” However, the US Chamber of Commerce has already filed a lawsuit and more legal action is expected. (Financial Review)
A key inflation measure - core personal consumption expenditures price index - is up 2.8% from last year. (CNBC)
Southwest airlines will drop four airports from its service citing losses and slow delivery of new jets from Boeing. (CNN)
California is pitching once more for a high-speed train. (NBC)
Science
NASA says it can communicate with Voyager 1 again. The craft which is 15 billion miles from earth, has sent unusable data since November due to a problem with one of its computer chips. Technicians were able to devise a plan to bypass the broken component. (NASA)
Chinese scientists have published the most detailed map of the moon so far, a decade in the making. (Nature)
New manta ray inspired submarine design can turn 180 degrees at full speed. (Interesting Engineering)
Health, Medicine and Food
Rating the amount of pesticides on various fruit and vegetables. (Consumer Reports)
A four year old boy whose heart stopped, started beating again after 14 hours, baffling doctors. (The Hill)
God’s Green Earth
Volcano in Antarctica spreads tiny specks of gold across hundreds of miles. (Accuweather)
Environmental groups in the Philippines have won their bid to ban genetically-modified rice. “Golden rice” is engineered to contain vitamin A in order to combat childhood blindness from deficiency. “Beta-carotene is in the plant but it is not found in the grain.” (Phys)
Arts, History and Sport
How air-conditioning changed the world. (Cultural Tutor via X)
Last week in history:
1800 “President John Adams approved the appropriation of $5,000 for the purchase of ‘such books as may be necessary for the use of congress’” and the Library of Congress was born. (Library of Congress)
1954 Salk trials: polio vaccines were given to elementary school children as part of human trials. (History)
1986 An explosion and fire at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine released large amounts of radiation into the atmosphere. (IAEA, Britannica)
Religion and the Church
The Supreme Court of Finland will hear arguments in a “hate speech” case against Lutheran and former MP Päivi Räsänen. Räsänen was charged with crimes after posting a Bible passage online in defense of marriage. She has had her case acquitted by lower courts. (Higher Ground Times)
Russell Brand, the gen-X hippie actor and influencer, says he is getting baptized as a Christian. It’s not clear what he understands about the sacrament but said his interest in Jesus has only increased as sources of meaning around him crumble. We pray he discovers that God is faithful, even when we are not. (X)
War and Rumors of War
The US Senate has speedily passed a funding bill to supply money to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was pleased with the move, saying that “failing to keep pace with Iran and North Korea’s supply of weapons to Russia would be detrimental to U.S. interests.” (WNG)
Ukraine and Russia have agreed to return each other’s children with 16 kids being sent back to Ukraine and 48 reportedly returned to Russia. Ukraine says Russia still has thousands of its children but Russia says it removed the kids from fast-moving front lines for their own safety in the early months of the war. (France24)
A bunch of arrests has revealed that Russia has people all over Europe. (Semafor)
The US quietly shipped long-range missiles to Ukraine a few weeks ago. (Reuters)
Two can play at this game: Days after the House voted to seize Russian assets sitting in American banks, a Russian court has ruled the Kremlin can take over $400m in assets from JP Morgan sitting in Russian banks. (ZeroHedge)
US Secretary Antony Blinken has announced sanctions against soldiers from an Israeli Defense Force unit. The sanctions come after reports of abuse of Palestinian prisoners. (AP)
A report commissioned by the UN concluded that Israel has yet to show proof that members of UNWRA, the United Nations’ Palestinian aid arm, participated in the October 7th massacre. (Politico)
The UN is demanding an inquiry into three mass graves discovered near a hospital in Khan Younis in Gaza. Palestinian authorities say there is evidence of execution and torture amongst the dead. “Israel’s military has rejected allegations of mass burials at the hospital, saying it had exhumed corpses in the hope of finding hostages taken by Hamas on 7 October.” (CNN, The Guardian)
A delegation from North Korea is reportedly in Iran. (DW)
Stories from Far Away
🇭🇹 Ariel Henry has stepped down as prime minister of Haiti allowing a transitional government to be installed. Gangs still control much of the capital Port-au-Prince. (Just the News)
🇦🇷Argentina has posted its first budget surplus since 2008 after President Milei’s dramatic economic austerity. But many public servants have lost their jobs and educational unions are protesting cuts to their budgets. (France 24)
🇬🇧A Jew outwardly? London police have approached a man in a yamaka, worried that he was “provoking” people at pro-Palestine protest by his “openly Jewish” presence. If they were worried about his safety, maybe they could tell a police officer? oh wait a minute… (ZeroHedge)
🇵🇬Papua New Guinea’s prime minster James Marape has taken exception to President Biden’s story of his uncle being eaten by PNG cannibals. PM Marape urged Biden to come and clean up WWII debris which is still scattered across the nation. (Politico, WION)
🇧🇪 Free speech advocates have expressed shock after Brussels’ socialist mayor sent police to shut down a conservative conference. (Alliance Defending Freedom)
🇩🇪 Germany has passed legislation allowing parents to choose a gender for their child from birth. How they can tell what that is is beyond us, but this madness is a logical next step for those who refuse to believe that God creates babies male or female and that he does not make mistakes. (Hot Air)
🇬🇧 Rumor has is that British monarch King Charles III is very unwell with plans for his funeral being fine tuned in the event of his sudden death. The king announced a cancer diagnosis some months ago. (Not the Bee)
🇮🇹 The Italian city of Milan has banned the selling of takeout food after midnight in a bid to curb noise in residential areas. Even gelato and pizza?? (CNN)
🥃 How is glass made?
⚽ 3 professionals vs 100 kids. Guess who scored first?
🇬🇷 Saharan dust turns sky in Athens orange
🎆 19th-century Japanese firework catalogues
…And vintage train tickets
🇬🇧 Spooked military horses in London cause chaos in morning traffic
🇫🇷 The Louvre will hold yoga classes during the Paris Olympics
🦮 A green Labrador?
🪨 World’s best rock skipper
Wondering what happened to John Michael Jones comics? Logic Monkey kindly updated us on all that’s been going on in his life and that’s quite a lot!
On Stop the White Noise (YouTube or Rumble) last week, Jonathan and Meridith spent a bit of time chatting about homeschooling, crucifixes and reading the Psalms. Some recommendations:
Without Flesh by Jonathan Fisk
Phonics books by Phyllis Schlafly
Jonathan posed a question on X: Why are you LCMS? Come for the responses, stay for the gifs..
Psalm 34 is pure gold
If you missed it, Meridith put out a call for anyone who would like to make a quilt for men who stay at the Hebron Collegium. If that is something you would be interested in helping out with, please reply to this email or send a message through madpxm.com/contact.
Our disclaimer: These are some resources the Fisks have found edifying, but when dealing with human-authored texts, apply discernment liberally!
This Week Preached:
Podcast Release:
Let us pray. O God, You make the minds of Your faithful to be of one will. Grant that we may love what You have commanded and desire what You promise, that among the many changes of this world our hearts may be fixed where true joys are found; through Jesus Christ, Your Son, our Lord, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.