Richard Wurmbrand.

 Release International (formerly CMCW) was founded by the Rumanian Pastor, Richard Wurmbrand who, after 14 years, including torture, in a communist prison had got so close to God, that he stated that he wouldn't have avoided the experience but would have happily repeated it had he been faced with the same circumstances.

It is one of my regrets that I never got to meet this inspirational saint.

Our Sure Foundation.

I Do Hope That This Is Not The What Is Occurring In The Final, EU Trade Negotiations.

 

Birdie.

 

Christian existentialism.

 The ultimate oxymoron.

The Serious Crime Which Is So Often Ignored.

 It is one more disaster in this decrepit and failing legal system of ours - that perjurors prosper.

As a JP for ten years I saw a huge number of people who lied under oath and who should therefore have received a hefty prison term but then have their brazen lies ignored by the system.

This makes perjury the attractive option and is both morally and practically, indefensible.

Welby Sabbatical Welcomed.

 DON'T CRITICISE JUSTIN WELBY FOR TAKING A SABBATICAL. HE'S ONLY FOLLOWING CHRIST'S EXAMPLE

The Archbishop of Canterbury has faced a barrage of criticism following the announcement he will take a three month sabbatical in 2021. But Mark Melluish says the decision is wise, and Christians should welcome it . Premier Christianity.

Blogger: He'll be doing less damage out of the limelight: I welcome his absence!

I Now Boycott Starbucks.

 https://www.christianpost.com/news/starbucks-fired-christian-worker-for-refusal-to-wear-lgbt-pride-t-shirt-lawsuit-claims.html

Quite Possibly Out In Two Years For Heinous Crimes!

 

Rotherham Groomer Kamir Khan Gets Short Sentence for Abusing 11-year-old Girl

South Yorkshire Police

JACK MONTGOMERY

 28 Nov 20201,215

2:49

South Asian heritage predator Kamir Khan has been imprisoned for grooming and abusing an 11-year-old girl in Rotherham.

31-year-old Khan is the latest in a long line of abusers to be convicted for abusing girls and young women in Rotherham, where South Asian heritage gangs once preyed upon mostly white, working-class victims in untold numbers with near-impunity for years, due to the authorities’ reluctance to intervene in case they were accused of “racism”.

Khan was convicted of “two counts of assaulting a girl under 13 by touching, inciting a girl to engage in sexual activity and engaging in sexual communication with a child” at Sheffield Crown Court, according to an official South Yorkshire Police news bulletin.

The court heard that the paedophile had bombarded the girl with “over 4,000 messages over a three-month period” over Snapchat and WhatsApp. including “lewd photos”, under the alias ‘Zayn’, “and at one point, even told her he loved her and wanted to marry her”.

Khan “inappropriately touched” the 11-year-old on two occasions in 2019, with the abuse only coming to light when the girls’ mother went through her phone. She then became “visibly distressed” and revealed what had been happening to her.

The sentencing judge saw fit to impose only a light sentence on Khan, however, handing him a term of just four and a half years.

Criminals in Britain do not typically serve their full sentences, either, with non-“life” sentences typically including a right to automatic early release on licence at the halfway or, more rarely, two-third point in the term. Breitbart.

Dawid Malan Shows England The Way.

 In the second T20 of three, England took a narrow - and unassailable - lead in this short series versus S. Africa.

Chasing what appeared to be a modest total of 146 England got into trouble just as they had in game one. This time it was a fine, calculated knock by Yorkshire's Dawid Malan to the rescue rather than Yorkshire's Johnny Bairstow.

This was as slow a pitch as could be imagined and few batsmen were able to time the ball - hence the low totals.

Campaign For Real Christmas Cards - This NOT The KInd of Rubbish You Should Be Using To Honour The Saviour.

Christmas cards are now being bought. Think before you take the plunge and buy such offensive claptrap.

 

My Random Thought.

Precisely how many practising muslims will be turned down as foster parents for believing that homosexuality is immoral, I wonder?

How many muslims will be turned down for adoption or for sitting as magistrates, I wonder?

Healer of The Brokenhearted.

As believers, we must not just say this - nor even believe it. Neither will do.

 We must EMBRACE it! (Not easy, is it? But when we stop taking half measures - then, and only then - are we going to see the kind of answers to prayer that we all so desperately need.)
 

Prayer.

 St Bernard of Clairvaux.

"Prayer is a virtue that prevaileth against all temptations."

Shameful.

 

Terrorist Friend of Ariana Grande Concert Bomber Being Released from Prison

Abdalraouf Abdallah, who was friends with Salman Abedi and was communicating with him in the months leading up to the Manchester Arena terror attack, is due to be released from prison this week.

Birdie.

 

Learning Together. Learning WHAT? - We Must Ask!

This do-gooding prisoner rehabilitation scheme should be investigated for its role in the London Bridge attack.

Learning Together, the educational initiative supported by Cambridge University, must be seen as a major contributing factor to the tragedy

PROFESSOR DAVID WILSON 

28 November 2020 Daily Telegraph.

The upcoming inquest to be held in early 2021 into the events at Fishmonger’s Hall and London Bridge, which saw Jack Merritt and Saskia Jones murdered by Usman Khan on the 29th November 2019, will have to find a way of making sense of multiple, and at times competing narratives, which resulted in three people losing their lives as a consequence of attending ‘The Learning Together Anniversary and Alumni Event’. 

Learning Together is a prison-based, eight-week educational initiative supported by the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Teaching and Learning, which started in 2015 at the pioneering HMP Grendon – the only prison in the whole of Europe to work as a series of therapeutic communities. 

Learning Together brings together prisoners and those studying Criminology at Cambridge to study alongside each other "in inclusive and transforming learning communities" – an approach that their website describes as "being, belonging, becoming". 

At the inquest there will rightly be an understandable focus on the tragedies of Jack and Saskia’s deaths – the former employed by Cambridge University to work full-time for Learning Together and the latter a graduate in Criminology – and a tendency to responsibilise Khan, a convicted terrorist, for their murders. DT.

Brilliant Bairstow's 86 not out Leads England Away From The Brink To An Improbable Five Wicket Win at Newlands.

New Apple Discovered.

 An apple found by chance in woodland turned out to be an "interesting" new variety.

Nature lover Archie Thomas stumbled across a solitary apple on a wooded trackway near his home in Wiltshire in early November.

The apple, which Mr Thomas said was “unlike any I’d seen before”, had come from a lone old apple tree in the hedgerow with a large number of fruit on it.

A "wild apple chase" led him to an expert who identified it as a new variety which he could propagate and name.

Mr Thomas, who works for wild plant and fungi conservation charity Plantlife, was keen to identify the unusual apple from the little-visited spot in the Nadder Valley, Wiltshire.

He said: “While I am certainly no fruit expert it immediately struck me as highly unusual, unlike any apple I’d seen before.

“Excited by the pale and mottled oddity, I set about trying to get it identified with a view to perhaps one day being able to name it.

“That was the dream, but I did half suspect it would turn out to be something much less exciting than it is.”

After what he describes as a “wild apple chase”, with many fruit experts flummoxed by the find, he received help from Plantlife colleagues.

Archie discovered the apple on a wooded trackway alongside a large area of ancient woodland near his home (Image: Hannah Thomas/PA Wire)

He was then pointed towards the Royal Horticultural Society fruit identification service at RHS Wisley.

RHS fruit specialist Jim Arbury inspected three of the apples and informed Mr Thomas it was a new variety which he could propagate and name.

Mr Arbury said it was “a very interesting apple”.

He said: "It is clearly not a planted tree, but a seedling that could be a cross between a cultivated apple and a wild Malus sylvestris, a European crab apple.

“It tastes quite good. It’s a cooking apple or dual purpose, you can eat it, it’s got a bit of acidity but it’s got some flavour, and some tannin, which is what you have in cider apples." Wales Online.

Does The UK Have A Death Penalty?

 Does this country have a death penalty?                              

The answer to the question in the title is an unequivocal 'yes'. Unfortunately however, it is solely exercised by criminals!

Why Opine That Life Has No Meaning?

Purpose

Over the ages, I wonder how many people have stopped and pondered the meaning of life. (More than eleven, I'd guess.)
Most will ask - "What is it all about?

And, let's be honest, an answer of "42" is not really all that satisfying.

What puzzles me are the nihilists and atheists and existentialists who insist that 'there is nothing beyond this life'.

Such people merely exist in a hostile, meaningless universe. How appalling life must be for them - particularly as they near their end.

But as 'realists' they will insist to the rest of us who have even the tiniest vestiges of faith that we are just fooling ourselves.

From such a depressing state, it amazes me that so many reach the ultimate depths of negativity based on mere opinion or 'a gut feeling'.

Jesus said 'Seek and you WILL find."

Comics Mark Our Social Decline.

 Social decline seen via comics.

Go back 40+ years and comics played a valuable part in the maturing of young people.

I am afraid that I cannot start to analyse what happened in comics for girls but I do know what happened in comics such as The Victor, The Eagle and The Hornet.

Although derided by English teachers because they were not actually books,

these were of great social value.

They promoted: courage; fortitude; decency; kindness; honesty. Their heroes

did not have 'feet of clay' and ambivalent philosophies.

They wanted to see achievement in all areas and did not give us 

manufactured icons for silly hero worship but rather fictional creations who embodied moral completeness - ones whom children might have wished to emulate - and often did.

Their loss has been serious and their replacement by the likes of Grand Theft 

Auto and other such monstrosities has done us all few favours as a nation.

"I'm An Atheist Because My Feeble Brain Cannot Grasp Why God Acts As He Does: My Miniscule Handful of Brain cells Against A Brain Which Fills The Universe."

 Christians who have experienced God's love can be in no doubt as to its reality.

Unbelievers are hardly in any position to see this with their intellectually puerile, "God cannot exist because some really bad things happen" mantras.

So. How's about trying to put the argument differently to them?
Try saying " Okay, let us assume that God is not good for the reasons you are presenting. But that does not provide any arguments whatsoever as to His alleged non-existence. 

His existence cannot be dependent on His nature. 

So if you do not believe in a loving God - start by offering Him the deference and respect that He is due as the most powerful being in the universe.

We'll have to get back to the 'why He is good bit' - on another occasion!

Quite So.

Campaign For Real Christmas Cards.

 Please. This Christmas - No jokey cards; no party cards; no irrelevant cards; no Dickensian cards; no cartoons; no irreverent cards and no smut.

An original idea - why not send cards related to the birth of the Saviour. After all, HE is what Christmas is actually all about. Innit?

Birdie.

Pope Gets Something Right Shock.

 The Pope compares abortion to 'hiring a hitman' as he encourages women to protest new law legalising the procedure in Argentina.

Pope Francis has sent a handwritten note to anti-abortion protesters in his native Argentina, telling them that the country is 'proud' of them and to keep fighting against attempts to legalise it. Mail.

Well, What Can You Expect From A Shape-Shifting Lizard?

Prince Philip is a 'devoted reader of books about UFOs and aliens and has spent years building an extensive collection'

It is believed that he became interested in UFOs and aliens because of his uncle Lord Mountbatten - who wrote an official report about a flying saucer landing on his estate. Mail.

(This Blogger takes a wry smile at the expense of a certain Mr Icke!)

Little Wonder So Many People Vote Labour, Is It?

 One in EIGHT Britons believes Covid-19 pandemic is a 'plot', new figures reveal.

Dr Sander van der Linden of Cambridge University, pictured, has completed research that one in five Britons would not advocate taking a Covid-19 vaccine due to conspiracy theories. Mail.

The Biggest Political Question of Them All.

 Why Are We Still Debating the 'Merits' of Socialism?

To understand socialism, one needn't fixate on its most-horrifying elements-gulags and executions. Think about the simple stuff. Like aspirin.

In the 1970s, my Dad flew from his home in Pennsylvania to a medical center in Houston to have a then-innovative bypass surgery that extended his life by more than three decades. At the same time, my wife's family was sending bottles of aspirin to their relatives in the Polish socialist paradise. That dichotomy—Americans receiving cutting-edge medical care even as Eastern Europeans were lacking the rudimentary medicines—always stuck in my mind as I've written about political systems.

To understand socialism, one needn't fixate on its most-horrifying elements—gulags, executions and endless repression. Think about the simple stuff.

After Boris Yeltsin joined the Soviet Politburo in 1989, he visited Johnson Space Center and stopped in a typical Texas grocery store. "When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people," he later wrote. At the time, Russians waited in line for whatever crumbs the bureaucrats would sell them.

Why are pundits and politicians talking about socialism again, 28 years after the fall of the Soviet Union? Donald Trump's vow that the United States would never become a socialist country got people talking. Good for him, even if he should stop praising and excusing North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, who runs a communist dystopia often described as the "the world's biggest open prison camp."

The real reason for the renewed discussion, however, comes from politicians on the other side of the spectrum. It's apparently hip to be a socialist now, even among contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination. A year before Yeltsin's U.S. visit, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) took a strange trip to the Soviet Union. A video of the shirtless then-Burlington, Vt., mayor singing with his Soviet hosts as part of a sister-city event has gone viral. That was ages ago. What bothers me is what he—and others on the Democratic Left—have said more recently.

In an article headlined, "Sanders could face more scrutiny for socialist leanings," The Washington Post referred to the 2016 primary debate between Sanders and Hillary Clinton. Sanders was asked by the moderator in Miami—a city filled with people who fled Cuban communism—about seemingly positive things he had said about Fidel Castro and Nicaragua's socialist strongman Daniel Ortega. "The key issue here was whether the United States should go around overthrowing small Latin American countries," Sanders said. That was a transparent dodge. One can oppose American military intervention without having a soft spot for dictators.

These days, some progressives describe themselves as "democratic socialists," which makes the idea sound kinder and gentler. They aren't thinking about crumbling buildings in Cuba, starving children in Venezuela and genocide in Cambodia, but might be envisioning a facsimile of Portland, Ore.,—a place with cool, fair-trade, vegan restaurants and hip bars, but without all that private ownership stuff. Yet socialistic policies could turn the nicest cities into wastelands.

Apparently, the leaders in those bad socialist places didn't do socialism right. As a former Barack Obama national security adviser told the Post, "I think the challenge for Bernie is just going to be differentiating his brand of social democratic policies from the corrupt turn—and authoritarian turn—socialism took in parts of Latin America."

A turn? Authoritarianism is the inevitable outcome—a feature of socialistic systems, not a bug, because those systems empower government at the expense of individuals.

On its website, the Democratic Socialists of America say they "believe that both the economy and society should be run democratically—to meet public needs, not to make profits for a few." They don't offer many specifics, but perhaps your tenants will vote on the rent until you decide to leave the apartment business. These "new" socialists seem as utopian as the old ones. DSA notes that, "a long-term goal of socialism is to eliminate all but the most enjoyable kinds of labour." Until work is fun, though, someone must divvy up unpleasant tasks on a more equitable basis. You've been warned.

Despite air-conditioned homes, full bellies and consumer gadgets courtesy of capitalism, some Americans yearn for a socialist paradise. We can cross one off the list. In 2013, Salon published a piece about the Venezuelan leader's "full-throated advocacy of socialism and redistributionism" titled, "Hugo Chavez's Economic Miracle."

Four years later (with a different strongman but same policies), the BBC described that miracle: "Despite being an oil-rich country, Venezuela is facing record levels of child malnutrition as it experiences severe shortages of food and an inflation rate of over 700 percent."

Maybe Venezuelans didn't do it right. Nor did the Russians, or anybody else. Or maybe socialism is a fundamentally flawed idea that always leads to misery by design. We shouldn't need this discussion in 2019, given mounds of evidence and victims, but here we are again.

This column was first published in the Orange County Register.

STEVEN GREENHUT |

Corbyn Cornered.

 

Leon Neal/Getty Images

VICTORIA FRIEDMAN

24 Nov 2020Breitbart.

3:30

Labour’s chief whip has told Jeremy Corbyn he must “unequivocally, unambiguously and without reservation” apologise for his response to the EHRC’s report on Labour antisemitism where he claims that the “scale of the problem” had been “dramatically overstated for political reasons”.

Mr Corbyn was also told to edit or delete the Facebook post where he had made the statement, according to the letter sent by Nicholas Brown and published in the Daily Mail on Tuesday.

On October 29th, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) publicly released its report on the findings of the handling of anti-Jewish hatred in the party under the former leadership of Mr Corbyn.

The report found that there were “serious failings” in the handling of antisemitism complaints. The EHRC had said that the party had broken equality laws under Corbyn’s leadership, with the body’s lead investigator Alasdair Henderson saying Corbyn was “ultimately accountable and responsible for what happened at that time”.

Christians Afraid of Death - Why?

 Dear Christian.

Are you afraid of death? - If so, there is something profoundly amiss with your theology and/or experience!

(I think you can be reasonably be permitted to be a tad wary of the process - but not too much, of course!)

Stroppy, Sulky Animals.

Animals have strops over virtually nothing – they're more like humans than we thought

'We found animals’ emotions influence unrelated behaviour, with those that won a contest experiencing a more positive mood'

ByHenry Bodkin, HEALTH AND SCIENCE CORRESPONDENT27 November 2020 • 6:00am

Animals fall into prolonged bad moods over minor slights in the same way as humans, scientists have discovered....

God's Grace.

Hedgehogs - By Royal Appointment.

His Royal Spine-ness! Prince Charles adopts three baby HEDGEHOGS to keep down slugs at Dumfries House 

Staff at the Ayrshire estate are hoping the animals - two females and one male - will lead to a breeding boom of Royal hoglets, partly to keep down slugs and other pests in the gardens. Mail.

Birdie.

Magpies.

 

Oh dear. I was right, the RSPB was wrong!

The Songbird Survival Trust charity blame the larger birds - known as Picus picus in Latin - for contributing to the decline in other feathered garden creatures by raiding nests and eating eggs.
Culling magpies is legal under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, providing it is done humanely and for a specific purpose, for example to protect crops or conserve wild birds.
The most common method is to use a trap and then wring the bird's neck.

Nick Forde, a trustee of the SST, has said in the past: 'This is a difficult subject because talk of culling magpies or grey squirrels does not go down well with the public and that's why the government is ignoring this issue.”
He told the Daily Telegraph: 'I don't like the idea of harming animals but if they are destroying our biodiversity, then we have to take action.

“Unless the population of some predators is controlled, there is little, if any, hope that the small bird populations can recover.'
Mr Picton, who lives with partner Amanda Eeles, took the photograph in mid-morning from his bedroom window.

If you have a legal shotgun or even a powerful air weapon, please kill every magpie you possibly can. Saving our songbirds is impossible without this measure. Or - buy your own Larsen Trap.
Those areas which have seen the proliferation of magpies have had horrific falls in the numbers of songbirds.
The RSPB MUST get its head out of the sand before all areas succumb to this wretched menace!

Do Your Anti-PC Christian Friends A Favour.

 Know any anti-PC Christians?

If you do, then grant them the biggest of favours - simply send them the address of this Blog with your recommendation.

http://christianityisnotleftwing.blogspot.com/

A Vital Verse.

Birdie.

Death of John Edmond Haggai.

 https://www.christianpost.com/voices/john-haggai-who-transformed-global-christianity-dies-at-96.html