Prayer for Israel

Video shared, and translation from, Peter B at TXRed’s.

The original text is in the video posting; here’s a translation:

Our Father in Heaven, Rock and Redeemer of Israel, bless the State of Israel, the first manifestation of the approach of our redemption. Shield it with Your lovingkindness, envelop it in Your peace, and bestow Your light and truth upon its leaders, ministers, and advisors, and grace them with Your good counsel. Strengthen the hands of those who defend our holy land, grant them deliverance, and adorn them in a mantle of victory. Ordain peace in the land and grant its inhabitants eternal happiness.

Lead them, swiftly and upright, to Your city Zion and to Jerusalem, the abode of Your Name, as is written in the Torah of Your servant Moses: “Even if your outcasts are at the ends of the world, from there the Lord your God will gather you, from there He will fetch you. And the Lord your God will bring you to the land that your fathers possessed, and you shall possess it; and He will make you more prosperous and more numerous than your fathers.” Draw our hearts together to revere and venerate Your name and to observe all the precepts of Your Torah, and send us quickly the Messiah son of David, agent of Your vindication, to redeem those who await Your deliverance.

Manifest yourself in the splendor of Your boldness before the eyes of all inhabitants of Your world, and may everyone endowed with a soul affirm that the Lord, God of Israel, is king and his dominion is absolute. Amen forevermore.

Praying for our elder brothers, and their (non-ironic) good neighbors.

Running to Trouble

Rule one, don’t become another victim.

That said…. read the article.

Cat Rotator's Quarterly

Not in the sense of “Oh great, here comes So-and-So, we’re doomed.” You’ve probably met those people, the ones that somehow can make any situation worse just by walking up and saying, “Hi! What’s up?”

No, I’m thinking of people like the men in the video from Israel, the ones who, as soon as they confirmed that no more pieces of debris or rockets were landing on the block, ran toward the remains of the bus that got hit by a rocket. They were not firemen, didn’t have emergency medical supplies in their hands, but they ran toward trouble. (I suspect that they had some form of First Aid and trauma care skills, because of their military service, but they were not official first responders.)

For whatever reason, I seem more inclined to move toward trouble than to freeze or to flee. That is, once I’ve determined that the best…

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Israel: Rocket fire and riots in mixed Jewish-Arab towns; Netanyahu gets a new lease on political life? [UPDATED]

Long quote:

Rocket fire continues, with HamAss claiming its latest creation can reach Eilat (!), though that may well be empty bluster, Yesterday, in the town of Sderot bordering the Gaza Strip, a rocket appears to have penetrated the metal hatch and window of a safe-room, and killed a 5-year old boy inside. Yes, over a thousand missiles fored at “the Zionist enemy” achieving deaths of several fellow Arabs, an Indian nurse, and a five-year old boy. I would not insult the insane by calling HamAss insane.

Most worrying is the spiraling violence in mixed Jewish-Arab towns. It began with Arab mobs torching synagogues and attacking Jewish civilians for the crime of being Jewish; then our own crabgrass started acting in kind and now it’s going both ways. (Some of these appear to be out-of-town agitators.) Politicians across the spectrum have condemned the violence and many have expressed anguish, up to and including the head of state, President Reuven “Ruby” Rivlin.

Spin, strangeness, and charm

We spent the last two nights sleeping in the “safe room” of our suburban Tel Aviv apartment, woken up a couple of times by rocket alert sirens. As I am typing this, I hear Iron Dome intercept booms.

You can ask Mrs. Arbel: when this latest round of rocket fire and internal violence started, I predicted it would give Binyamin “Bibi” Netanyahu another lease on political life. Now just an hour ago, the Times of Israel reports that Yamina leader Naftali Bennett has bolted from the attempts by center-left Yair Lapid to assemble a “change coalition”, and instead has reached a deal with acting PM Netanyahu and with Ra`am leader Mansour Abbas to back direct election of the PM. In exchange, Bennett and his secular #2, Ayelet Shaked, will get reserved spots on the Likud slate and be given the Defense and Foreign portfolios. (A Channel 1 talking head claimed…

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Reblog: Being A Mother Is Not ‘Too Much’

Read the rest, but:

In our culture, we are told children should rank below attending college, below the ability to go out at your leisure. They are to rank below exercising at the gym, below any job you may have or financial stability you hope to achieve. Children rank below your desire to focus on your own “self-care.” In fact, there is a creeping normalization that it’s OK to regret having children.

From Megan West on Town Hall.

Gateway to Fiction up on Kindle

C. Chancy’s new non-fiction “help yourself writing” book is up. For both fan fiction and For Sale works.

I got a lot of utility/inspiration out of it when it was being produced in the proto-form/snippets on her blog.

Crossover Queen's Creative Chaos

Gateway to Fiction’s up on Kindle; the dead-tree version is still in review. Will let you know as soon as that’s available too!

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Today 66 years ago: VE Day 1945, and the very last German holdouts by… the North Pole

I would’ve *wanted* to surrender to get away from that duty station, too!

Spin, strangeness, and charm

A British movietone newsreel about that long-awaited Victory in Europe Day.

There was fighting going on until the last day — and indeed for some days beyond, in some cases by German troops trying to exfiltrate through Russian lines to surrender to the Western Allies.

There was no parallel in the of the decades-long Japanese holdouts like Hiroo Onoda, whose story was the inspiration of the concept album “Nude” by progressive rock band Camel. Two German U-boats, U-530 and U-977, set course for Argentina, which led to lots of postwar speculation and legends.

The very last German troops to lay down their weapons to the Western Allies were the 11-man crew of a Kriegsmarine weather station on Nordaustlandet, the 2nd largest island (after Spitsbergen) in the Svalbard archipelago. They had learned of the surrender by radio, but no transportation could be spared to retrieve them until a Norwegian…

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Self Care, Sanity, and Einkorn Thumbprint Cookies by Dorothy Grant

All Dorthy’s post is worth reading, but here’s the recipe:

Einkorn Thumbprint Cookies

1 stick butter

1/4 cup sugar (52 grams)

1 egg yolk

1.5 teaspoons lemon juice

1.25 cups all-purpose einkorn flour (145 grams)

1/2 tsp salt

jam (or marmalade for more awesome!)

1. Preheat oven to 350

2. Slap some parchment paper on a baking tray

3. In a large bowl, stick the butter in the microwave to soften. Mine half-melted, and came out fine.

4. Cream/Mix the butter and sugar together, then add in egg yolk, lemon juice, and salt. Mix until smooth.

5. Break out the kitchen scale and tap in flour if you do weight. This stuff is finicky enough about moisture I actually do that. Otherwise, scoop and dump the flour and whisk it all together (or use a mixer; whatever floats your boat. These are not supposed to be stressful to make.)

6. Grab a spoon and dust your hands with einkorn flour, then start rolling the dough into balls. At the size I rolled, just under ping-pong sized, I got 11 cookies. Remember they are going to be smashed, and then spread further while cooking, so leave space. Re-flour your hands frequently to prevent sticky dough sticking.

7. Keeping your thumb dusted, make a… thumbprint. Or a cross. Or whatever design kicks over your gigglebox, as long as it doesn’t make the bottom of the jamwell too thin for cookie integrity.

8. Spoon jam into the depression, in quantities just small enough it won’t overflow.

9. Bake for 12-19 minutes, until golden brown. If you like tiny cookies, 12 will do. If you like large cookies, just keep careful eye on ’em once past 14 minutes.

10. When you pull them out, set the timer for 8 minutes, and do not, no matter how tempting, give in to poking the cookies before it goes off. You just pulled boiling sugar out of the oven, and it’ll stick like napalm to the roof of your mouth with great burnination if you don’t let it cool!

11. When cool enough, grab a drinkable and enjoy!

If you were hoping for a calorie or carb count, you’re missing the point of having fun. Make your treats actually treats, and don’t detract the joy by worrying about it!

According To Hoyt

How are you doing? Oh, don’t tell me you’re fine. I’m a woman; I know full well just how vast and unhappy the spectrum of “fine” can be. It’s been a crazy few years, and at some levels, like national politics, the forecast is calling for 100% chance of more crazy. (It’s the rising percentage in the forecast for boogaloo that worries me more.) However, right now we don’t get to armor up for the zombie apocalypse or break out the metal colander mask and the thunderdome. Right now, we need to keep going, and not let the crazy break us down.

In aviation, we say to passengers, “In the even of the loss of cabin pressure, put your own oxygen mask on first.” There’s a reason for this: by the time you get through an OODA loop after loud…

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LifeSite may be down intermittently due to tech issues

Just got the email alert.

Source: LifeSite may be down intermittently due to tech issues

…this happens the day after Facebook deleted their page, permanently.

 

Governments, People, and Labels – Professor Ornery Dragon

 The Holodomor in Ukraine is another massive genocide that is mostly unknown outside of Ukraine. In the late 1920s, early 30s Stalin decreed the forced collectivization of agriculture, most of which was in Ukraine so efforts were focused there. The state seized every single farm in Ukraine, the so-called breadbasket of the USSR. Then the output of those collectivized farms was decreed to be only for Moscow. The result was wide-spread famine in Ukraine. In order to prevent Ukrainian peasants from going elsewhere in the Soviet Union, trains were stopped. The U.S. and Europe had trainloads of grain and seeds sitting on the border. Stalin refused to allow those trains in. 30 million people died.

Source: Governments, People, and Labels – Professor Ornery Dragon

MAY THE 4TH BE WITH YOU