Glitch in the matrix

If the world is a simulation, like The Matrix, Jews are when the same black cat walks through the lobby twice

Let me talk about old things.

I’ve driven past the Pickering House in Salem, Massachusetts probably a few dozen times; it is old. The story goes, John Pickering, a carpenter, built it with his own hands in 1657, and handed it down to his son John Jr. It remained in the Pickering family through ten generations, supposedly the oldest house continuously occupied by a single family in America. I’ve also been to Kent in England, and any Brit would tell you with a smile, that an old house in America is not really old. The Church of St. Martin in Canterbury, Kent has been standing since the 7th century. I’ve never been to the resort island of Minorca, where Brits go to get naked and drunk, though not necessarily in that order. “That’s nothing,” says the Spaniard tending bar, pointing at the Naveta des Tudons, built around 1200 B.C., said to be the oldest standing building (it’s actually a funerary monument) in Europe.

Image: DALL-e

The pyramids of Giza were constructed somewhere around 2550 to 2490 B.C., yawns the Egyptian merchant selling miniature Sphinx earrings along with lukewarm cans of Coke from a cooler near the tourist bus parking lot. I’ve never been to Giza, but I expect the tourist vibe is fantastic. Then there’s the dark-haired professor named Amir Golani, who would casually tell you about the find he made 10 years ago outside of Beit Shemesh in Israel. It’s something like between five and ten thousand years old—a house from the early Bronze Age.

Now you’re talking, says the Chinese scholar. When the first stories of the Bible were written down, China already had 4,200 years of begets, begots and harlotry to read about. When the Old Testament was barely completed, the Chinese had discovered magnetism, advanced irrigation, glass, and were beginning to construct the Great Wall.

The point of all this talk about oldness is that world history has lots of repeating patterns. Civilizations rise, consolidate, fall, and are conquered. Solomon’s kingdom split, and the northern kingdom of Israel was conquered. China didn’t suffer the expansion of Rome, or the Persians, Carthage or the Punic Wars. Its dynasties stretched over two thousand years as kingdoms battled for control. There’s a reason Han Chinese culture is so rich and well established: it’s been around forever, in historical terms.

So many civilizations go the way of the Dodo that some historians think that they don’t really die at all. They just recycle and transform into other things. Of course, that’s a minority view today, when such terms as “settler colonialism” define a form of western, white supremacy, and when good ideas (or recipes) are borrowed from one culture by another, it becomes “appropriation” as if culture had intellectual property rights. Some cultures and civilizations continue—DNA doesn’t lie—because of geographical isolation.

The Indus Valley Civilization existed in the Bronze Age, covering what is now modern Pakistan, northeast Afghanistan and northwestern India. It thrived for two thousand years from 3300 to 1300 B.C. The end of the Indus Valley Civilization was not due to some conqueror, but because of a geological shift in the river’s course. The civilization simply petered out over time as families migrated to where the food was.

Booms, busts, conquests, eruptions and civil wars mark violent growth and demise of some cities, but entire civilizations, people groups, rarely disappear in a puff of smoke. They continue as something else. History repeats itself but the useful things do tend to last: Roman civil law, the Magna Carta, the Great Qing Code, and of course, the Bible.

Similarly, many “fallen” people groups survive to this day, but not as powerful, advanced cultures. One culture that seems to have always gotten the short end of the stick is the Roma people (the vulgar term is “gypsies”). Everywhere this people group, which has been around for well over a thousand years, end up, they are rejected. Romania forced them into slavery; Germany, Poland and Italy expelled them. In medieval times, England, Switzerland, and Denmark put them to death.

Somewhere between 10 and 12 million Roma live in Europe today, mostly in central and eastern Europe. They generally live segregated, in slums, in many places without access to good education or health care—even in countries where such things are guaranteed and provided free by the government to others. The reason for the Roma’s plight is “not the inevitable result of poverty,” Amnesty International writes. “It’s because of centuries of prejudice and discrimination from governments, institutions and individuals. Together, they have pushed the great majority of Roma to the margins of society – and kept them there.”

Similarly, Armenians have had a violent history of persecution, despite having more-or-less a homeland of their own. According to the U.S. Department of State, “[between] the 4th and the 19th centuries Armenia was conquered and ruled by, among others, Persians, Arabs, Byzantines, Mongols and Turks.” For about two years, 1918-1920, Armenia was an independent republic, before being forcibly absorbed into the Soviet Union as the Trans-Caucasian Socialist Republic.

After the breakup of the USSR, President George H.W. Bush formally recognized Armenia on Christmas Day, 1991. About 3 million ethnic Armenians live in Armenia, with around a million in Russia. During World War I, the Ottoman Empire, which ruled Armenia at the time, drove Armenians from their land, or killed them, in what is near-universally recognized as a genocide. Modern-day Turkey continues to expend vast resources in denying the genocide occurred. Those Armenians who fled their country over the centuries, and especially during WWI are known as the Armenian diaspora, or spyurk in their language. About half the Armenians in America live in Los Angeles County—numbering around 200,000.

It’s a funny thing. There are no protestors marching for Armenia. In September, Azerbaijan launched what it called “localized anti-terrorist measures” in Nargorno-Karabakh, which was until then a self-governed region within Azerbaijan bordering Armenia, and mainly populated by ethnic Armenians. While 2,000 Russian “peacekeepers” stood by and did nothing, Azerbaijani troops, backed by Turkish forces, drove more than 100,000 Armenians from their homes. This happened on October 2, five days before the depraved and bloodthirsty attack on Israel from Gaza took place on 10/7. Yet there are no packs of wild students on elite campuses surrounding Azerbaijanis and calling them genocidal oppressors.

But the Jews.

The Jews, as a people, have been expelled from every nation in Europe. Jews have endured a diaspora nearly 2,000 years ago when the Romans crushed the Judean rebellion. Since then, they have suffered through the Inquisition—not just in Spain, but also Portugal, not to mention the Goa Inquisition, the Peruvian Inquisition, and the Mexican Inquisition—pogroms in Poland, Russia, Belurus, and of course the Holocaust. At the end of 1939, there were 16.6 million Jews in the world, over 58 percent in Europe. By 1948, the number had dropped to 11.37 million, with only 33 percent in Europe.

“In terms of the world Jewish population, more than one-third of the total was exterminated,” wrote Leon Shapiro and Boris Sapir in 1948. A “social disaster without precedent even in Jewish history.”

In 1948, there were a million Jews in Asia: 50,000 in Iran; 90,000 in Iraq; 30,000 in India and Pakistan; 20,000 in Syria and Lebanon. There were only 750,000 Jews in Israel, and 200,000 of those were refugees who fled Europe after spending two years living in the same death camps they were consigned to by the Nazis. In Africa, 286,000 Jews lived in Morocco; 30,000 in Libya; 130,000 in Algeria; 70,000 in Tunisia; 75,000 in Egypt.

Between 1948 and 1951, over 121,000 Jews emigrated from Iraq, leaving only 15,000. Israel absorbed them, even helping to smuggle Jews out of Baghdad, where they had been stripped of all their assets. They left their possession and lives behind and were placed in refugee camps in Israel until permanent housing could be arranged.

It has been such since the beginning of Israel’s existence. Jews fled from nations where they were no longer wanted or tolerated, with no other place willing to accept them, and found refuge—as refugees—in Israel. There are effectively no Jews left in Iraq or Iran; there are officially no Jews in Morocco, Libya, or Algeria. Israel has, over nearly 80 years, become largely a country of refugees, Jewish refugees.

Yet the other refugees from the 1948 Israel war of independence, the ones who were paid to move to the land the British called Palestine during the Mandate starting at the end of World War I—when the Ottoman Empire was dismantled—to 1948, remained in refugee camps, because no state was willing to repatriate them. Israel had accepted the original U.N. Partition Plan that the General Assembly approved in November 1947. The Arab League rejected it and walked out in unison. The refugees in 1948 numbered somewhere between 500,000 to 700,000. Today it’s close to six million.

The Roma people have no dedicated U.N. agency to represent them. The Armenians have none either. Only the Palestinians, who have been left to languish in permanent refugee camps, with no nation willing to accept them, led by rent-seeking demagogues, death cultists, and outright criminals who live in luxury while they perish, left to throw rocks at tanks, stab innocent Israelis and blow themselves up at bus stops, have a U.N. agency dedicated to them. The UNRWA employs people who outright work for Hamas. In Gaza, Hamas weapons have been found in U.N.-labeled crates by the IDF.

In 2022, the U.N. voted 27 times on resolutions to criticize nations. Russia had six resolutions, mostly for attacking Ukraine. North Korea, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Syria, Iran and the U.S. each had one. Israel, then at peace with its neighbors and fresh from the Abraham Accords, had 15 resolutions. There’s one Jewish state in the world, and from 2006 through 2022, the U.N. Human Rights Council (a poor joke in itself) adopted 99 resolutions against Israel, more than double the number of the next highest count—41 for Syria. Objectively, it can’t be denied that the U.N. hates Israel, the Israel it helped create.

Why the Jews?

When the Roma people were persecuted, they took to pickpocketing, stealing, swindling, and traveling in groups. There’s a truth to Cher’s “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves.” When the Jews were denied entry into the trades, the guilds, the universities and landed gentry, they took to building their own yeshivas and learning what trades they could in their own communities. When the church said moneylending is sinful, they asked the Jews to do it. Then when Jews became good at moneylending (banking), they were persecuted as Shylock and his pound of flesh for doing it.

When Jews were thrown out of Eastern Europe, they settled in Western Europe, where they were accepted, earning a good living for the most part, and participating in local culture, such as in Germany and Switzerland, where a particular mathematician and physicist named Albert Einstein rose to prominence. He escaped to the U.S. before the Holocaust.

When American Jews were denied entry into elite American universities, they set up their own schools, such as Brandeis. When they were denied entry into many professions and social circles, they went into entertainment, in Vaudeville and the Borscht Belt. When they did well in entertainment, they were criticized for “running Hollywood.”

Jews were supposedly a defeated civilization, a powerless ethnic and religious group with no powerful country. Yet throughout history, people have accused Jews of controlling the world. Since 1948, Israel has won every war for its existence, even the ones it should have lost. And Israel has developed a very powerful military for the sole purpose of preserving its existence, and the existence of the only safe place in the world for Jewish refugees.

Apparently Jews in New York control the world from Israel, and Jews in Philadelphia with Israeli ties are responsible for what the IDF is doing in Gaza. They say it’s not Jew hatred to only hate Zionist Israel, but in practice, they blame all Jews.

Not only that, but Jews, with just 0.2% of the world population, have won an astounding 22 percent of Nobel Prizes, especially in scientific fields. Since the millennium, this percentage has actually increased to 24, and 26 percent of scientific fields. The statistical anomaly here is beyond an outlier: 11,250 percent above the mean, or in other words, it takes a logarithmic scale to represent it as a standard deviation chart versus non-Jews.

It’s just unfair. Jews must be from another planet, or they possess some kind of super IQ mind. If the world is a simulation, like The Matrix, Jews are when the same black cat walks through the lobby twice. Jews are the glitch in the matrix. Something’s been changed, and one of the defeated civilizations of the world, the one that gave the world the Old Testament but was supposed to die when the New Testament church took over, has refused to die and even flourished beyond any reasonable measure.

For over 4,000 years, older than the pyramids, Jews have been kicked out of nations, forced into slavery, supernaturally freed, marched into the desert by the million, forged by 40 years with nothing but their God and manna (so says the Books of Moses), then poured into the land they were promised by God five hundred years earlier. There’s enough physical history to fill fifty museums, buried under the modern State of Israel. of the ancient Kingdom of Israel, and the Kingdom of Judah, and the exile to Babylonia, and the destruction of the First Temple, and the construction of the Second Temple.

But when the Arab refugees from 80 years ago, who were left to fester like a wound on Israel’s back, break out of their fences in a carnival of rape, murder, torture and kidnapping, it’s the Jews who are blamed for their own persecution. In so-called civilized western cities where Jews were historically raped, stripped of their property, and tortured, crowds gather to praise those who do the same to Jews in Israel. Women who have marched under the banner of #MeToo exchange their signs to #NotYou for Jewish women who were raped.

Why are there no giant crowds shouting “occupiers!” to the Han Chinese who are engaged in ethnic cleansing of Uighurs, or surrounding Azerbaijani students with chants and slurs, or standing up for the Armenians who are being displaced even now? There are just as many people in these ethnic groups as there are Jews. There are just as many Roma people suffering in Europe as there are Jews in the Israel, and a good number of Jews in Israel arrived as refugees. But Jewish refugees are called “settler colonialism,” while other refugees are simply refugees.

The world says the Jews were not supposed to thrive. They were supposed to die. The world can’t stand a glitch in the matrix, because a glitch points to a change, which points to someone who made the change—someone who is capable of making a change in the matrix of our reality. If there isn’t such a someone behind the world we live in, then Jews themselves have to be responsible for it, hence it’s logical to blame the Jews for their own persecution. The world accuses Jews of cheating. The only other explanation is that there is a God, and that God has chosen Jews as His people, that He has prospered them to be “a light to the nations,” but has also allowed them to suffer until such a time as when He Himself will return to redeem them.

But that sounds an awful lot like the story of a Messiah who came, died, rose, and made prophetic statements, of which some have come to pass, and others are yet to come. To believe all that, you’d have to buy in to the rest of it. Heaven, hell, the enemy of our souls, a Holy Spirit of God, the Bible as inspired holy text, that kind of stuff. Nobody is forced to believe it, but the glitch doesn’t go away, does it?

So instead, blame the Jews. Blame the glitch for the Jews’ success. Blame the glitch for all the hate against the Jews. Blame the glitch for the plight of the Palestinians. Blame the glitch for everything wrong with the world even as the glitch itself provided cures for diseases, scientific breakthroughs, and the greatest capital investments the world has ever known, lifting billions out of misery and poverty. But blame the Jews for a few million Palestinians whose suffering wipes out everything good, because the Jews haven’t died like the world said they were supposed to.

Blame the Jews, and the glitch still doesn’t go away. One day we’ll all have to deal with the glitch.

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Terrorists profited from insider trading ahead of 10/7.

I hate the CNN headline “Unknown traders appear to have anticipated October 7 Hamas attack, research finds.” Did these unknown traders consult their psychic hotlines? Did they summon their astrologers? Did they read tea leaves? Did they throw the bones of a dead chicken on the ground?

No. They were terrorists or terrorist-supporters. They profited off the deaths, mutilations, rapes and kidnapping of innocent people. They are the worst scum of the earth. CNN was careful to note that the “preliminary research” has not been “peer reviewed,” meaning they want to keep looking for a reason it didn’t happen.

The research found that on October 2, just five days before the Hamas attack, “nearly 100% of the off-exchange trading volume in the MSCI Israel ETF … consisted of short selling.”

“Days before the attack, traders appeared to anticipate the events to come,” the professors wrote.

Yeah, it happened. And though some Yale professor told CNN that regulators “appear to lack the ability to discover the entities responsible for this trading, which is unfortunate,” I think Israel will figure out who did the trading. And woe be to those who did.

I’d be in favor of U.S. law enforcement seizing all the assets of any company that assisted in the execution of these short contracts, because it’s blood money. I’d be in favor of locking up whoever helped the traders place their orders, or paid the margin, or delivered the profits. I’d actually rather them be hung in the public square, but we don’t do that anymore.

I thought I could not be more disgusted about this war than I was before today, but I’m clearly wrong.