...turn the other cheek...

I dislike presenting half-baked blog-posts but I don't have anything better than this today. So bear with me. I might never get a full resolution on this issue.

Matthew 5:38,39 reads

“You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, offer no resistance to one who is evil. When someone strikes you on [your] right cheek, turn the other one to him as well.

As a modern man reading this in 2026, it seems so very wrong. As a parent who has had to display "tough love" at times, it seems very wrong.

I read some commentaries. I read Chapter 5 several times for context and am still working to reconcile this quote with what I believe about humans.

Commentary

The most commentary by assorted preachers is that "slap" is to be interpreted as "an insult to our dignity or honor" similar to Black culture's "I have been disrespected". Their take on the verse is that Jesus is telling us to not escalate conflict but to ignore the insult.

Context, Part I 

That is very consistent with the vignettes that are immediately before this verse. All of them are some version of slippery-slope situations with the possibility where escalation is a natural and logical consequence. Jesus is telling us that are morally liable when we start down those paths.

That interpretation is also diametrically opposed to the interpretation of the radical pacifists who say this verse tells us that we must passively submit to evil and let God sort it all out on Judgement Day. We know from history that refusal to confront institutionalized evil allows it to flourish. That is the opposite of the meta-message about natural and logical outcomes.

Context, Part II

I think there is much value in thinking about the audience Jesus was speaking to. He was in Galilee which was a rural backwater.

Towns, such as there were, were tiny.

Archeological digs determined that the Nazareth of Jesus's day consisted of fifty foundations, not all of which were used for human habitation. Estimates in the 1800's was a population of 2000-to-2500. That has since been revised downward to 200-to-480.

Having seem images of the foundations of Roman era Capernum in Israel and measured them using Google Earth, it is hard to imaging 10 people living in a one-room house that measures 12'-by-8' so my gut-feel is that the number is closer to 200 than the 480 number.

Given the populations of those towns and the extreme lack of social mobility, i.e. they couldn't just let their lease lapse and move to L.A., the impact of people with Narcissistic and Borderline Personality Disorders would be enormous because it would be impossible to escape them. A typical town of 200 people would have three of these toxic people since the base-rate is about 1.5% of the population.

If you were to ask nearly any of the people in the audience listening to Jesus at the time "Can you name one person who is 'Evil'?" they would almost certainly name one of those three people in their village (maybe all three!). They would be unlikely to mention Harod the Great, Pontius Pilate, Tiberius Caesar or Donald J. Trump. Those people were as far removed from their daily lives as mythical creatures like mermaids.

Those people thrive on the energy they "create" through digs and insults. They crave it. They cannot live without it. If you feed the troll, the troll gets bigger and more powerful. If you ignore them they are diminished.

If you "feed" them, they will torment you. 

In today's society

It is my belief that the base-rate of Cluster B Personality Disorders is increasing rapidly. Our brains are very plastic and respond to our environments. The internet and social media rewards the trolls. It feeds them. They reproduced like mosquitoes after a hurricane.

Summary

My relationship with these Bible verses continues to evolve. My current stance on them is that Jesus is telling me to shun people who act in toxic ways when I am present. My interacting with them is harmful to me and it is harmful to them.

It does not mean that Jesus is telling me that I cannot exercise "tough love". It does not mean that I cannot respond with force to evil people who threaten life-and-limb. It does not mean that I must vote for judges and prosecutors who refuse to exercise legitimate, legal penalties against people who earned them.

Asking for a friend

So, do all of those women who took hormone therapy and had their plumbing rearranged have to sign up for Selective Service? They claim they are now "men".

Are they in arrears if they are over 18 and younger than 26 and their names aren't on the rolls? 

The spring-peepers are peeping away

The spring peepers are peeping. The violets are blooming. The filbert catkins are extending. The box-elder bugs are everywhere. The moths are flying by night.

That will all change tomorrow. We are expecting cold-front to push our warm air down into Indiana and generate some interesting weather in the process.

In a stunning stroke of good fortune, the rain we had this morning was a passing sprinkle. The sun broke through the clouds and I judge it to be dry enough to run the tiller over the potato patch where Kubota has flattened the weeds.

The weed stalks were crispy-dry and snapped into short pieces which mixed in with the dirt.

My goal in the first tilling is not to beat the dirt down to the molecular level but to mix the surface trash and the soil. Weed stalks rot very quickly when in contact with the soil and I am suddenly two full weeks ahead of my schedule for getting the potato patch ready for May 1 planting. 

Fine Art Tuesday

 

"The Old Pippin Tree". "Pippin" refers to an apple tree that was grown from a seed (or "pip"). This tree was likely planted by a horse with a goodly dollop of fertilizer.

Lemuel Maynard Wiles born 1826 in Wyoming County, New York. Died in 1905 in Manhattan.

Wiles was a member of the Hudson Valley School. Human figures were diminished and natural features like mountains, rivers and trees were oversized.

Wiles traveled widely, ranging from Panama to California.

Hat-tip to the tireless Lucas Machias. But don't pity Lucas. He seems to be doing "OK" in spite of his tire-free existence.

Springtime is accelerating

 

I got a big assist from Kubota, my youngest son.

Yesterday, he got the riding mower running and flattened the weeds where the 2026 potato patch will be planted.

While he was doing that, I was pruning grapevines. This is a "before" picture

This is an "after" picture.

I cut disposable, plastic grocery bags into strips. I use them to mark the canes I want to keep. I get tunnel vision when pruning and am apt to remove material I intend to keep if I don't mark it in a big and obvious way.

Then, I use the same strips to tie the canes to the wire. The UV will shred the thin plastic before it has a chance to girdle the growing stems.

I have been shrinking the number of grapevines. I am down to one full row and two partial rows. I will probably always have some vines but apples and Asian pears are much better at paying their rent and grass/clover is much less labor to maintain.

2 hours and 40 minutes time-on-task. About 3 hours and 30 minutes by the clock start-to-finish. I still have to drag the prunings out of the orchard.

Kubota's efforts probably saved me another three hours of time. 

Patterns of land ownership in Ukraine and eastern-Europe

It turns out that my readers have a dizzying array of skills, experiences and knowledge. I reached out to one of my readers who I suspected had first-hand knowledge of eastern Europe and asked him if he could explain how all of these Ukrainian vloggers have enough property to "homestead".

His response: 

"I was over there in the 1980's, well before the socialist states collapsed.  From the Khrushchev era on, laws allowed most citizens throughout the East Bloc to have (control, not ownership) small 1 acre to 3 acre individual parcels outside of cities to grow food on.  This was allowed to alleviate food shortages, which were terrible.  Mostly due to sorry logistics throughout the Bloc, which allowed most food to rot before it made it to market.  They grew enough food, but they could not deliver it to consumers (prior to reforms).  Their grocery stores were obscene.  Cigarettes were their only quality product! 

The laws eventually allowed building garden sheds on these smallholdings, which quickly transformed into marvelous vacation cottages.  Like everything East Bloc, they looked ramshackle on the outside, but were splendid on the inside.  Smallholders were generally allowed to pass these holdings on to their heirs, but not divide them or sell them to unrelated parties.  After 1990, the individuals who occupied these smallholdings were allowed to take legal title under a variety of laws which differed by country and republic."

 

The 500 Day Programs

The privatization of the Soviet Union actually began under Gorbachev, before the 1991 coup which destroyed the Communist Party.  The '500 Days Program' was laid out in April 1990 and set the ground rules for privatization of all assets in the Soviet Union.  It was the last gasp of the Soviet Communist Party to avoid the collapse of communist control which had occurred in the other Bloc countries.   All the former USSR republics' privatization efforts were based on the '500 Days Program'. (Note: Ukraine and most of the 'stans were republics in the former USSR) Other Warsaw Pact countries had different programs, because they had had well established private property laws and land titles prior to 1945.  The Russians did not even have intelligible private property law or titles prior to the Revolution.  Most land holdings were by order of the Czar, or simple adverse possession.  

Even today, roads in rural Ukraine are "rough".  Source

Outside of the cities, land has little value in Russia because there is so much of it.  Water, on the other hand, is quite valuable.

 

That explains the presence of all of the tiny, dug ponds scattered across the rural landscape. A pond is lower tech than a drilled well and a submersible pump. Source of image

Very large regions of Ukraine have annual precipitation of 20" or less

The '500 Days Program' was an excellent plan, but plagued by corruption.  The USSR and several Bloc countries had powerful criminal mafias which took control of their economies from the 1960's on.  This corruption was the only way Bloc citizens could get the necessities of life.  From this corruption rose oligarchs as communism collapse; oligarchs who hogged land and assets.   One reason Putin is very popular over there is his successful war on these mafias and oligarchs.  They are much more powerful today in Ukraine and the West than within Russia.

 

In many ways, the citizens of the former USSR were better prepared to endure the total collapse of their economy than we are...God forbid that it should happen. Even so:

 

The yellow highlighted region are the babies who would have been born during WWII.

The straight red lines are the babies who would have been born during the collapse of the USSR and in the chaotic decade afterward.

The region circled in blue are the "excess females". Men took the collapse with less grace than the women and there were many more deaths-of-despair (alcohol abuse, accidents, suicides...not going to the doctor).

 

My reader added in one of his emails that the Orthodox church was one of the few stable institutions and was a rock for many during those tumultuous years. It is pretty much a world-wide phenomena that women attend church at about 4X the rate of men.

 

Many thanks to my reader who wishes to remain anonymous. 

Targeting of infrastructure: Three days without water....

"Infrastructure" can mean a lot of things.

It can mean communication equipment and data-centers supporting banking and AI.

It can mean roads, rail and air-travel facilities.

It can mean oil refineries and electrical power generation plants. 

It can mean grain silos, flour-mills, bakeries and butcher shops.

It can mean hospitals and waste-water treatment plants. 

It can mean potable water conduits and desalination plants.

Destruction of some of these assets will cause little more than an inconvenience for the majority of people.

Others will cause a huge constriction in quality of life.

Still others will pose an immediate and dire threat to existing.

The Iranian Conflict proved to be a quick race to the bottom. It started with military targets but is now critical, civilian infrastructure is being targeted. You know, the very bottom of Maslow's hierarchy. The first few verses in the Law of Threes.

Iran, it is claimed, is targeting the water desalination plants that sustain the mega-cities lining the Persian Gulf possible. Link

It is good to live in a place where it rains on a regular basis.