Karim Khan (Wikimedia Commons)

The International Criminal Court is seeking arrest warrants from the court’s pretrial chamber for leaders of both Hamas and Israel for war crimes committed on October 7th and in the resultant war in Gaza.

My weekly routine involves watching Walter Kirn and Matt Taibbi on their Friday podcast, America This Week. Appended to their commentary and observations about the events that make up the most current news cycle are short stories of timeless application to the human condition. This week the story was It’s Christmas Not Just Once a Year by Heinrich Böll:

Among our relatives, symptoms of disintegration are beginning to show up that for a while we tried silently to ignore but the threat of which we are now determined to face squarely. I do not yet dare use the word “collapse,” but the alarming facts are accumulating to the point where they represent a threat and compel me to speak of things that may sound strange to the ears of my contemporaries but whose reality no one can dispute. The mildew of decay has obtained a foothold under the thick, hard veneer of respectability, colonies of deadly parasites heralding the end of the integrity of an entire clan. Today we must regret having ignored the voice of our cousin Franz, who long ago began to draw attention to the terrible consequences of what was on the face of it a harmless event.

FJ spent the weekend making the campaign pitch to Black voters … accompanied by a giant pile of cash for Historically Black  Colleges.   The full frontal assault on what should be his core supporters speaks volumes.    The most recent polling numbers I have seen indicated that Trump’s support among Black voters was about 20% and going up.   It’s no surprise.    The weaponization of the legal system against Trump is the causal factor mentioned by the talking heads.   But there’s more than psychology at play.   There is a stark economic case for Trump.    In contrast to the MSM narrative of Trump-as-racist, the data show something very different …

Let’s look at real (inflation adjusted) wages:

Here’s a little game we played at the staff meeting at our Mission this week. Three questions about people, objects and events from the Bible that you would happily bring into the world today to make it a better place. I was curious how the fine people of Ricochet would answer these questions, so here goes:

1. If you could bring any person from the Bible into the world (your personal life, the political world, anywhere else), who would it be? (Sorry, excluding Jesus, God the Father, and the Holy Spirit because I believe they are still around.)
2.  If you could bring any object or animal from the Bible into the world, what would it be?
3. If you could perform any miracle from Scripture today, what would it be? (At the Mission we had to exclude the water into wine as we are a Recovery site, not that’s not a problem here.)

A few weeks ago, I was at a lunch with a number of very wealthy men. And, as seems to happen in non-religious circles, the wealthy men brought their trophies with them. These particular trophies were lovely and intelligent – for actresses and supermodels. Which made me realize that, in the minds of these men, the young ladies were, in fact, not different from wives. The arrangements seemed to be mutually satisfying: each party was trading one thing for another.

From an economic or contractual basis, there is really no difference between prostitution and marriage. Once you strip out the time horizon – the length – of the relationship, then the arrangement seems to essentially have the same core elements, whether it lasts for a night or for decades.  I am quite sure this is how those men (and probably those women) see it.  It seems likely to me that they have seen no convincing counterargument.

Your enjoyment of this film will likely depend on whether you were listening to Christian pop music three decades ago. I was a youth pastor at the time, so, sure, I took students to see Michael W. Smith in concert introducing DC Talk as his opening act. Unsung Hero features actors playing performers central to the world of Christian music in the 1990s. Rachel Hendrix plays a kind and gracious Amy Grant. Jonathan Jackson plays Eddie Degarmo (of Degarmo and Key), a benefactor of the film’s family. Joe Chambrello plays Carmen who isn’t very helpful. There’s serious nostalgia cred as the film opens, with Christian hair band Stryper playing at the Sydney Opera House.

That’s when we meet the central figure in the film: Christian music promoter David Smallbone (played by David’s son, Joel Smallbone). His promotion of Stryper’s Australia tour led him to believe he was set on a path to fame and fortune, so he invested everything the family had in his next venture: Amy Grant’s Australian, Lead Me On, tour. His wife is unsure about this venture; he ultimately loses their savings and their house. He pins his career hopes on a deal with Christian mega-star Carmen in America. At his wife’s insistence, they pack up their six (with one on the way) children and move to Nashville, Tennessee.

With his family in an unfurnished rental house, no car, and little cash, David’s deal with Carmen falls through. He falls into a deep depression.

David Chalmers, a leading philosopher of mind and consciousness, tells us that the “hard” problem is qualia, that is, explaining the subjective experience of experience.  Explaining the sensation of seeing the color red, for example. How do we explain the subjective internal experience of seeing the color red?

The philosophers always seem to choose the color red, for unclear reasons. First of all, I object, because I am partially red/green color blind. I can’t see any numbers in those Ishihara plates with all the colored dots. So my experience of red is not exactly the same as that of other people. In medical school, when we had to identify gram-negative organisms under the microscopic, I saw grey. My classmates saw vivid bright red. I aced the exams because the gram-positive organisms that we had to distinguish from the gram-negative organisms was easy: distinguish grey from blue. No problem.

In preparation for the presidential election debates, each candidate has proposed certain conditions.

Former President Donald J. Trump specifies that the debates must:

AI searches the published world to source anything it says.

But if you Google something right now, some AI engine will write an answer. That answer will read like a boring article. And it may or may not be right. But here’s the kicker: the AI that looks for answers cannot tell the difference between a real source, or an AI-generated one. Which means that, like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy, anything resembling the original information source is so far diluted and lost, that it is indistinguishable from dreck.

This came up Sunday night at a cocktail party of my pickleball friends: A wealthy divorcee who has recently traveled around the globe on vacations was asked to describe one of the resorts she had visited and she said it was like South of the Border outside Dillon SC. As the host of this festivity, I was greatly offended. “South of the Border! That is where I went on my honeymoon and you come here into my house and mock me by denigrating South of the Border. Shame on you! Pedro will always be welcome here!”

Actually, my wife and I honeymooned in St. Augustine FL 55 years ago because we couldn’t afford Pedro’s resort.