Yesterday, I decided to get a PC going that I'd been handed for free. It's an old Gateway server with a dual Pentium 3 motherboard, meaning it has little value, but would do for a second machine running Linux. So I went around looking for a couple of suitable processors.
Calling Gateway was, to put it bluntly, a waste of time. Their tech support has gone from pretty good to dogshit in the last two years, maybe three. But after twenty minutes I finaly was able to get out of the heavily accented immigrant tech what I needed: Socket 370, 667 or 800 MHz PIII processors with a 133 MHz front side bus.
Now, those parts should be dime a dozen. Thousands of those computers should be now in landfills in fact, and the rest should have an ACV of somewhere between plus twenty and minus twenty dollars. But of the ten hole in the wall places I've called locally not one has any, let alone two of them of the same speed.
Looking online has shown a few sources-but they want between $60 and $80 apiece. Per processor.
The computer isn't worth that! That's why it was given to me in the first place!
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Friday, September 21, 2007
Dr. Oliver Beats This Author to It Again
Before the previous post, I was wholly unaware of the following:
EVANGEL FOR BIBLIOPHILES; TEN PERCENT NORDIC
by Prof. R. P. Oliver
May 1986
If you like to collect odd books, you may look forward to acquiring a real curio, a polychrome "New Testament." According to "Christian News,"a consortium of "Bible scholars" is now going through the five hundred or so statements attributed to Jesus ben Yahweh and deciding, in the democratic way, by majority vote, which are authentic, which may perhaps be genuine, and which are just poppycock. They will then bring out an edition in which the certainly genuine remarks will be printed in red, the ones that may be authentic will be printed in pink, the ones that are probably spurious will be in grey, and the ones that are certainly drivel will be in a funeral black. What they will do with the narrative text in which the Jesus-talk is embedded is not stated, but I hope they will use orange ink for the parts they think plausible and blue for the tales they cannot stomach. That will leave lavender for whatever is in between, and the folio heads, chapter numbers, and page numbers could be in green. A lucky firm of printers somewhere will have an opportunity to create a "chef d'oeuvre."
Since the tales the holy men are winnowing are the only evidence their Jesus ever existed, one wonders how they are going to decide what he did and did not say. It's true that he contradicts himself many times, but he may have changed his mind or have been merely confused. Perhaps the Holy Ghost will be on hand to help the majority of the committee discriminate between the grain and the chaff. Some Protestants assert that the Holy Ghost was buzzing around when the translation of the Bible was made for King James, and that he thus guaranteed the authenticity of every jot and tittle in it, but, of course, he may have changed his mind, too.
The Church of Norway's Information Service has reported the findings of a "public opinion poll," according to which 84% of Norwegians own a copy of the Bible, but 63% of the total population never read the holy book. Since 7% claim to "read the Bible" daily, what is meant must be the reading of some chapter or snippet, not the whole collection of tales, and the rest of the 37% of the pious Christians read some chapters or passages in the course of a year. Now what is interesting is that although 63% of Norwegians show so little interest in holy fiction that the Church is said to be alarmed, only 13% stated that they did not believe the Biblical yarns. The rational 13% presumably included the 10% of Norwegians who said they were "opposed to the Biblical view of life," which probably means that as Nordics they perceived that the basically Oriental superstition was inimical to the weal of their own race. We must assume that the rest of the 63% who don't read the Jew Book assume that the tales in it are historical truth because they have never thought about it, and it is quite possible that many of them never read enough of the fiction to have their credulity overstrained. They are, so to speak, passive Christians, like their counterparts in the United States. They are an inert mass and doubtless make possible the manipulation of the nation by the vendors of humanitarian hokum. It is at least encouraging that ten percent of the Norwegians are still spiritually as well as physically Nordic. On them depends whatever future their nation may have."
http://www.faem.com/oliver/rpo038.htm
Heretical.com in the UK brings us this, possibly at considerable personal and professional risk. If one thinks the US is a pit of multiculti mass hysteria, things are ten times worse in Blighty.
EVANGEL FOR BIBLIOPHILES; TEN PERCENT NORDIC
by Prof. R. P. Oliver
May 1986
If you like to collect odd books, you may look forward to acquiring a real curio, a polychrome "New Testament." According to "Christian News,"a consortium of "Bible scholars" is now going through the five hundred or so statements attributed to Jesus ben Yahweh and deciding, in the democratic way, by majority vote, which are authentic, which may perhaps be genuine, and which are just poppycock. They will then bring out an edition in which the certainly genuine remarks will be printed in red, the ones that may be authentic will be printed in pink, the ones that are probably spurious will be in grey, and the ones that are certainly drivel will be in a funeral black. What they will do with the narrative text in which the Jesus-talk is embedded is not stated, but I hope they will use orange ink for the parts they think plausible and blue for the tales they cannot stomach. That will leave lavender for whatever is in between, and the folio heads, chapter numbers, and page numbers could be in green. A lucky firm of printers somewhere will have an opportunity to create a "chef d'oeuvre."
Since the tales the holy men are winnowing are the only evidence their Jesus ever existed, one wonders how they are going to decide what he did and did not say. It's true that he contradicts himself many times, but he may have changed his mind or have been merely confused. Perhaps the Holy Ghost will be on hand to help the majority of the committee discriminate between the grain and the chaff. Some Protestants assert that the Holy Ghost was buzzing around when the translation of the Bible was made for King James, and that he thus guaranteed the authenticity of every jot and tittle in it, but, of course, he may have changed his mind, too.
The Church of Norway's Information Service has reported the findings of a "public opinion poll," according to which 84% of Norwegians own a copy of the Bible, but 63% of the total population never read the holy book. Since 7% claim to "read the Bible" daily, what is meant must be the reading of some chapter or snippet, not the whole collection of tales, and the rest of the 37% of the pious Christians read some chapters or passages in the course of a year. Now what is interesting is that although 63% of Norwegians show so little interest in holy fiction that the Church is said to be alarmed, only 13% stated that they did not believe the Biblical yarns. The rational 13% presumably included the 10% of Norwegians who said they were "opposed to the Biblical view of life," which probably means that as Nordics they perceived that the basically Oriental superstition was inimical to the weal of their own race. We must assume that the rest of the 63% who don't read the Jew Book assume that the tales in it are historical truth because they have never thought about it, and it is quite possible that many of them never read enough of the fiction to have their credulity overstrained. They are, so to speak, passive Christians, like their counterparts in the United States. They are an inert mass and doubtless make possible the manipulation of the nation by the vendors of humanitarian hokum. It is at least encouraging that ten percent of the Norwegians are still spiritually as well as physically Nordic. On them depends whatever future their nation may have."
http://www.faem.com/oliver/rpo038.htm
Heretical.com in the UK brings us this, possibly at considerable personal and professional risk. If one thinks the US is a pit of multiculti mass hysteria, things are ten times worse in Blighty.
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
KJV Idolators-The Book As Where Life Begins
Fundamentalists are quick to criticize the Catholics for Marian idolatry. They say the superexalted status of Mary in the Catholic Church is without Biblical authority-and they are right. It's utterly unbiblical, and is something that evolved in relatively modern times for the same reason female figures of worship figured in pagan religions-it answered a human need at the time and therefore was a means of financial profit and a mechanism of control.
But not wanting to be left behind, some Protestants-admittedly not a hugh number, but a few-have made into the likeness of Mary, the book itself- the paper, which receives the ink, and therefore feminine, in the form of not just the Bible as content, but the literal form of the King James Bible. Even though the English language did not exist in the time of JoN, even though Greek and Latin were the languages of all studied peoples up until recent times (Catholic seminarians still study both, and Latin is the international language of the Catholic Church), even though the KJV was specifically written for political reasons, which found the Geneva Bible and others unsatisfactory, they somehow have come up with the idea that the KJV is God's Own, one true Bible. It is senior to the manuscripts from which it came, in their minds, having God's divine unction. Of course, it's no new concept: you didn't really believe seventy-two rabbis got the Septuagint all the same to the last jot and tittle, did you?
Needless to say the idea is idiotic on its face. If God had a certain translation in mind, as the one Bible for all on Earth, he wouldn't have provided it in English: not what with so many nations in Europe being far better for that purpose. And if he did, why would He have provided it through the sodomite King James?? Even the idea of the KJV being the one true English version doesn't hold any water.
The real purpose of the KJV Idolatry movement has to be something different, and it is. It is to incarnate the "Holy Word" into a form, a female, receiving form. It makes of Scripture a vagina.
Some KJV Idolatry sites:
http://www.biblebelievers.com/BibleVersions.html
http://www.av1611.org/vance/kjv_only.html
http://www.chick.com/search/searchask/questionans.asp?wpc=questionans.asp&wpp=a
http://www.thelionofjudah.org/whydowesupportkjv.htm
And of course, we must consult the most knowledgeable man on this issue:
http://www.revilo-oliver.com/rpo/calvin.htm
"There are innumerable English translations of the Bible, but in all of them the stories are essentially the same, differing only in diction and in details that concern only theologians who use them to whet their own axes. The Bible is not like another famous story-book, usually called the Arabian Nights, of which the four commonly used English translations differ enormously in content."
But not wanting to be left behind, some Protestants-admittedly not a hugh number, but a few-have made into the likeness of Mary, the book itself- the paper, which receives the ink, and therefore feminine, in the form of not just the Bible as content, but the literal form of the King James Bible. Even though the English language did not exist in the time of JoN, even though Greek and Latin were the languages of all studied peoples up until recent times (Catholic seminarians still study both, and Latin is the international language of the Catholic Church), even though the KJV was specifically written for political reasons, which found the Geneva Bible and others unsatisfactory, they somehow have come up with the idea that the KJV is God's Own, one true Bible. It is senior to the manuscripts from which it came, in their minds, having God's divine unction. Of course, it's no new concept: you didn't really believe seventy-two rabbis got the Septuagint all the same to the last jot and tittle, did you?
Needless to say the idea is idiotic on its face. If God had a certain translation in mind, as the one Bible for all on Earth, he wouldn't have provided it in English: not what with so many nations in Europe being far better for that purpose. And if he did, why would He have provided it through the sodomite King James?? Even the idea of the KJV being the one true English version doesn't hold any water.
The real purpose of the KJV Idolatry movement has to be something different, and it is. It is to incarnate the "Holy Word" into a form, a female, receiving form. It makes of Scripture a vagina.
Some KJV Idolatry sites:
http://www.biblebelievers.com/BibleVersions.html
http://www.av1611.org/vance/kjv_only.html
http://www.chick.com/search/searchask/questionans.asp?wpc=questionans.asp&wpp=a
http://www.thelionofjudah.org/whydowesupportkjv.htm
And of course, we must consult the most knowledgeable man on this issue:
http://www.revilo-oliver.com/rpo/calvin.htm
"There are innumerable English translations of the Bible, but in all of them the stories are essentially the same, differing only in diction and in details that concern only theologians who use them to whet their own axes. The Bible is not like another famous story-book, usually called the Arabian Nights, of which the four commonly used English translations differ enormously in content."
The Book of Daniel-Bogus
Many of the canonical New Testament books are bogus, in all likelihood. But in the Old Testament, we have the law-the Pentateuch, the Torah-and the prophets, and everyone from UFO contactees and ancient astronauts charioteers to secular Jews regards them as "the straight stuff".
The Book of Daniel, the bulwark for so much of the end-times prophesy howling in our day, falls short, too. Frank Zindler reports:
"But could they? Or was their "prophecy" actually prophetia ex eventu — prophecy written after the event? Space does not permit an analysis of all the prophets of the Bible. But one may learn a great deal about prophecy in general by examining carefully a specific example: the Book of Daniel. In particular, one will want to consider whether or not the book could possibly have been written at the time the prophet Daniel is supposed to have lived — the period of the Babylonian Captivity or Exile — or whether it was composed centuries later, after most of the events "predicted" in the book had already occurred.
Evidence Against Exilic Composition
There is very solid evidence 1 which indicates that the Book of Daniel was written much later than the Babylonian Captivity (597-538 B.C.). the "Exile" period to which Christian tradition has assigned the composition of the work. Scientific scholarship has shown that the Book of Daniel was actually written around 165 B.C. — long after the Exile — at a time when the Seleucid king of Syria, Antiochus Epiphanes, was trying to stamp out the Jewish religion. Daniel was not writing predictive prophecy, we now know, but rather history — and rather sloppy history at that!
Error In Verse One
The main line of evidence against composition around the time of the Babylonian Captivity involves the great number of factual errors in the book which concern the time of the Exile — errors which are in glaring contrast to the considerable precision with which the later Greek period is described (the period allegedly in the future, but actually the period in which the book was written).
The errors begin with Verse 1:
In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim king of Judah. Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came to Jerusalem and laid siege to it. The Lord delivered Jehoiakim king of Judah into his power, together with all that was left of the vessels of the house of God; and he carried them off to the land of Shinar... (Dan. 1:1-2).
Isaac Asimov sums up the Daniel-dating problem very well:
Where Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel make no anachronistic mistakes concerning the times supposed to be theirs, the Book of Daniel is replete with anachronisms as far as it deals with the period of the Exile. It treats, however, of the Greek period with easy correctness and while this might be explained by those dedicated to the literal acceptance of the Bible as a case of prophetic insight, it is odd that Daniel should be so correct in his view on what was to him the "future" and so hazy about his view of what was to him the "present." It is easier to believe that the writer was a man of Greek times, to whom the Exile was an event that had taken place four centuries earlier and concerning the fine details of which he was a bit uncertain.
Implications Of The Fraud
The Book of Daniel has, since ancient times, been considered to be an important Old Testament source of Messianic doctrines. The use of the expression "Son of Man," the prediction of "an anointed one" (priest or messiah) who will be "cut off (Dan 9:26), and other passages have been thought by many to presage the coming of Jesus. How embarrassing for true believers, therefore, is the fact that Jesus himself seems to have been unaware of the fraudulent nature of the book. On at least one occasion — when forecasting the end of his world -- he referred to the Book of Daniel:
So when you see "the abomination of desolation," of which the prophet Daniel spoke, standing in the holy place ... then those who are in Judea must take to the hills (Matt. 24: 15-16).
The fact that Jesus not only did not recognize the fraud, but was also unaware that the "abomination of desolation" had already appeared nearly two centuries earlier, does not reflect favorably either on Jesus's wisdom or his knowledge of history. If Jesus was mistaken in regard to the Book of Daniel, we may well ask, "What other mistakes did he make?"
http://www.atheists.org/christianity/daniel.html
The Book of Daniel, the bulwark for so much of the end-times prophesy howling in our day, falls short, too. Frank Zindler reports:
"But could they? Or was their "prophecy" actually prophetia ex eventu — prophecy written after the event? Space does not permit an analysis of all the prophets of the Bible. But one may learn a great deal about prophecy in general by examining carefully a specific example: the Book of Daniel. In particular, one will want to consider whether or not the book could possibly have been written at the time the prophet Daniel is supposed to have lived — the period of the Babylonian Captivity or Exile — or whether it was composed centuries later, after most of the events "predicted" in the book had already occurred.
Evidence Against Exilic Composition
There is very solid evidence 1 which indicates that the Book of Daniel was written much later than the Babylonian Captivity (597-538 B.C.). the "Exile" period to which Christian tradition has assigned the composition of the work. Scientific scholarship has shown that the Book of Daniel was actually written around 165 B.C. — long after the Exile — at a time when the Seleucid king of Syria, Antiochus Epiphanes, was trying to stamp out the Jewish religion. Daniel was not writing predictive prophecy, we now know, but rather history — and rather sloppy history at that!
Error In Verse One
The main line of evidence against composition around the time of the Babylonian Captivity involves the great number of factual errors in the book which concern the time of the Exile — errors which are in glaring contrast to the considerable precision with which the later Greek period is described (the period allegedly in the future, but actually the period in which the book was written).
The errors begin with Verse 1:
In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim king of Judah. Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came to Jerusalem and laid siege to it. The Lord delivered Jehoiakim king of Judah into his power, together with all that was left of the vessels of the house of God; and he carried them off to the land of Shinar... (Dan. 1:1-2).
Isaac Asimov sums up the Daniel-dating problem very well:
Where Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel make no anachronistic mistakes concerning the times supposed to be theirs, the Book of Daniel is replete with anachronisms as far as it deals with the period of the Exile. It treats, however, of the Greek period with easy correctness and while this might be explained by those dedicated to the literal acceptance of the Bible as a case of prophetic insight, it is odd that Daniel should be so correct in his view on what was to him the "future" and so hazy about his view of what was to him the "present." It is easier to believe that the writer was a man of Greek times, to whom the Exile was an event that had taken place four centuries earlier and concerning the fine details of which he was a bit uncertain.
Implications Of The Fraud
The Book of Daniel has, since ancient times, been considered to be an important Old Testament source of Messianic doctrines. The use of the expression "Son of Man," the prediction of "an anointed one" (priest or messiah) who will be "cut off (Dan 9:26), and other passages have been thought by many to presage the coming of Jesus. How embarrassing for true believers, therefore, is the fact that Jesus himself seems to have been unaware of the fraudulent nature of the book. On at least one occasion — when forecasting the end of his world -- he referred to the Book of Daniel:
So when you see "the abomination of desolation," of which the prophet Daniel spoke, standing in the holy place ... then those who are in Judea must take to the hills (Matt. 24: 15-16).
The fact that Jesus not only did not recognize the fraud, but was also unaware that the "abomination of desolation" had already appeared nearly two centuries earlier, does not reflect favorably either on Jesus's wisdom or his knowledge of history. If Jesus was mistaken in regard to the Book of Daniel, we may well ask, "What other mistakes did he make?"
http://www.atheists.org/christianity/daniel.html
Saturday, September 15, 2007
All dressed up and no where to go.
Edwin Kagin's website offers a great perspective:
ON THE DISPOSAL OF HUMAN REMAINS
Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.
Humorous tombstone
Today's cheery topic treats what to do with your carcass when you are dead. Like it or not, one day you will have to be disposed of. Animals don't make a fuss of this fact; they go off and die. Humans, believing they are better than animals, invent religions. The prime motive of most religions is to create a myth about some kind of individual continuance after all electrical activity in the brain stops and the organism starts to rot. As the old preacher put it, "Brothers and sisters, this is only the shell; the poor nut has gone." Where the nut has gone is a matter of much debate, as is the problem of what to do with the shell. Some religions believe the body must be buried, others hold it must be burned. Take your choice.
Traditional Christian human remains disposal involves burying the corpse in a box in the ground. Bodies were to be laid East to West, so the dead flesh could rise to great Christ who is coming from the East. No kidding. Christianity teaches a bodily resurrection and an ascent of the reanimated cadaver to heaven. The Bible says nothing about humans possessing an "immortal soul." You can win bets with believers on this point. Them bones are to rise again. The ghoulish, and those who have witnessed autopsies, may wonder how those who slept in the graves will get by with the brain, heart, lungs, intestines and other really important stuff removed and thrown away. And mystical indeed will be the rebirth of the decapitated -- say a saint like Sir Thomas More whose body is in one place and whose head was stuck on Traitor's Gate. Ah, the mysteries of faith. What of those who died in Christ in explosions or carnage that converted living flesh to mangled roadkill? What of the woman whose murderer husband ran her dismembered body through the wood chipper? Will those whose bodies are cremated to ashes in a fiery furnace yet in the flesh see God? So goes the belief. The Book of "Job" says yes, even if the carcass is eaten up by worms, you will see God in your bodily form. The age you will be isn't revealed. Maybe you get to choose.
Persons planning to be buried should understand that no grave on earth is anything other than a present or future crime scene or archaeological site. Eventually, someone will dig you up for saleable goodies or for information your burial stuff and postmortem analysis can reveal about your time. Or your grave can be scooped away to make room for a subdivision to house the children of the "life what a beautiful choice" movement. The greatest tombs of the greatest kings, designed to be secure for eternity, were magnets for thieves who weren't fooled by myths of
curses. You can stroll through the burial chamber of a pharaoh, stripped by tomb robbers centuries before archaeologists put the living god's remains in a glass case in a museum. Native American sacred burial grounds, and even Civil War graves, are being plundered by the irreverent, who sell the honored dead's tools and belt buckles at flea markets. One third of all the people who ever lived on earth are alive today. If everyone is buried, eventually there will not be space available for both the living and the dead. Guess who wins that argument." (Snip).
There's more at his website:
http://www.edwinkagin.com/columns/human-remains.htm
ON THE DISPOSAL OF HUMAN REMAINS
Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.
Humorous tombstone
Today's cheery topic treats what to do with your carcass when you are dead. Like it or not, one day you will have to be disposed of. Animals don't make a fuss of this fact; they go off and die. Humans, believing they are better than animals, invent religions. The prime motive of most religions is to create a myth about some kind of individual continuance after all electrical activity in the brain stops and the organism starts to rot. As the old preacher put it, "Brothers and sisters, this is only the shell; the poor nut has gone." Where the nut has gone is a matter of much debate, as is the problem of what to do with the shell. Some religions believe the body must be buried, others hold it must be burned. Take your choice.
Traditional Christian human remains disposal involves burying the corpse in a box in the ground. Bodies were to be laid East to West, so the dead flesh could rise to great Christ who is coming from the East. No kidding. Christianity teaches a bodily resurrection and an ascent of the reanimated cadaver to heaven. The Bible says nothing about humans possessing an "immortal soul." You can win bets with believers on this point. Them bones are to rise again. The ghoulish, and those who have witnessed autopsies, may wonder how those who slept in the graves will get by with the brain, heart, lungs, intestines and other really important stuff removed and thrown away. And mystical indeed will be the rebirth of the decapitated -- say a saint like Sir Thomas More whose body is in one place and whose head was stuck on Traitor's Gate. Ah, the mysteries of faith. What of those who died in Christ in explosions or carnage that converted living flesh to mangled roadkill? What of the woman whose murderer husband ran her dismembered body through the wood chipper? Will those whose bodies are cremated to ashes in a fiery furnace yet in the flesh see God? So goes the belief. The Book of "Job" says yes, even if the carcass is eaten up by worms, you will see God in your bodily form. The age you will be isn't revealed. Maybe you get to choose.
Persons planning to be buried should understand that no grave on earth is anything other than a present or future crime scene or archaeological site. Eventually, someone will dig you up for saleable goodies or for information your burial stuff and postmortem analysis can reveal about your time. Or your grave can be scooped away to make room for a subdivision to house the children of the "life what a beautiful choice" movement. The greatest tombs of the greatest kings, designed to be secure for eternity, were magnets for thieves who weren't fooled by myths of
curses. You can stroll through the burial chamber of a pharaoh, stripped by tomb robbers centuries before archaeologists put the living god's remains in a glass case in a museum. Native American sacred burial grounds, and even Civil War graves, are being plundered by the irreverent, who sell the honored dead's tools and belt buckles at flea markets. One third of all the people who ever lived on earth are alive today. If everyone is buried, eventually there will not be space available for both the living and the dead. Guess who wins that argument." (Snip).
There's more at his website:
http://www.edwinkagin.com/columns/human-remains.htm
Enyart to Americans: Jesus Says F*** You!
Bob Enyart is the kind of Christian that anyone seeking to prove Christianity ridiculous would love. He believes the earth is literally only a few thousand years old, was created in six days, dinosaurs lived alongside humans at one time, and that the Garden of Eden had a literal tree-bigger than a giant redwood. It would be easy enough to dismiss Enyart as a fringe kook, but while in 1967 even a fundamentalist bible college would have looked at him in embarrassment, he and his ilk can no longer be dismissed. They are gaining real power and therefore represent a threat.
Decades ago, Dr. Revilo Oliver pointed out that despite the "secular humanist" cant of do-gooders and enturbulators, their nonsense would have gone nowhere without Christianity. It was for that very reason he felt that Christianity, the religion of the European peoples for twenty decades, had become and would remain "a spiritual syphilis".
Enyart fulfills this prophecy with a fairly recent sermon endorsing any and all manner of outsourcing and just about any amount of immigration, from anywhere in the world, of any and all comers.
http://www.kgov.com/bel_56kbps/20060308
Christian Argument for OUTsourcing and IMmigrants
Summary:
* India's economy soars, and Americans should be generous in sharing our wealth by hiring foreigners and welcoming foreign workers, all within the bounds of good law, and apart from welfare, which itself is theft, and makes millions suspicious of immigrants' motives.
* Newsweek (3-6-06) celebrates the sexual immorality that often comes with prosperity, "as young people make more money... they're less wiling to obey rules about sex..." and "Living Free... Taboos against premarital sex are falling away... and dissatisfied wives are increasingly... having affairs."
I downloaded and listened to this filthy piece of dreck. I'm not going to transcribe this load of tommyrot, but essentially, Enyart first tells us that outsourcing is good because, people with the tech skills and "people skills" and patience to do top-flight PC tech support would cost corporations $25 an hour, and that would be bad. Evidently Enyart feels it's terrible that the people with both the PC tech skills and ability and willingness to burp, change and feed ignorant consumers and small businesses through problems they should learn to fix themselves or pay a fair wage to a specialist to have done, won't work for minimum wage.
God damn your eyes, Bob Enyart.
Phone tech support is a difficult job, and people who can do it should be able to earn at least the average wage in the United States. The average wage in the US is probably, still, close to $20 an hour, and that doesn't count health insurance, 401k matching , or other benefits. Perhaps if the PC industry finds that onerous, it should take other steps, such as possibly charging enough for the PC with support in the first place, or even selling PCs with software that is more robust and more easily supportable than Microsoft Windows and Office, which are by any professional standard of computer science pure garbageware.
Enyart's assault on the living standard of technical support people is bad enough, but what comes next is an assault on every American, because it's an assault on the continued existence of America. Enyart feels that virtually unlimited immigration is good, and Christian, because-get this- the single primary determinant of whether a person "accepts real, fundamentalist Christianity"-"gets saved"-is whether he or she lives in the United States!
Well, let's think about this. Are the Mexicans becoming Christians? Well, of course, most of them already are Christians, of a sort, and by that I don't mean Catholic instead of fundie. I mean they talk about Jesus and the Virgin Mary one minute and get into knife fights, drive drunk, knock up fifteen-year old girls (theirs and ours) and generally live like the undesireable mestizos they are, which is why the corrupt White elite of Mexico cordially invites them to sneak into El Norte. (Of course, it's why Mexico is mostly a dungpit: the Mexicans are getting the society they want and deserve, to a great extent, although making them-all of them-live in their own zoo by stopping US immigration would cause some level of change, probably for the better.)
Okay, the Indians? Nope, they're resolutely sticking with their extant religions and castes. In fact, they take it to extremes. Bob Baer, in his new book describing his career as a CIA agent, talks about how a CIA employee-presumably then a US citizen, to be given a highly classified job-of Indian ethnicity (which region or language-group or caste unmentioned) had to be cashiered after admitting on a polygraph exam that he was regularly boffing his mother and his sister, because he could not find a wife of his subcaste! Gee Bob, how Christian is that? How much you want to bet that that kind of thing is going to get more rather than less common over here?
The Muslims? How many Muslims convert to Christianity? Well, to be fair, it happens. But it's very rare. Because for one thing, even in a liberal Muslim family, it means being a total outcast. In a more conservative one it means being dead. How much does Bob wanna bet me against this: more Muslims means more Americans, nominally Christian, convert to Islam than they convert to our dominant religion?
Good thing Bob doesn't gamble.
Dr. Oliver, that sage of American academe, predicted this:
The Writings of Revilo P Oliver 1908-1994
CONFESSION OF GUILT
by Professor Revilo P. Oliver (Liberty Bell, July 1989)
I have occasionally cited in these pages the Chalcedon Report, the journal of the hard-line Calvinist sect which its head, Dr. Rousas J. Rushdoony, calls Christian Reconstruction, although observers think it should be called the Puritan Revival. It is intellectually and morally far above the level of the babbling crowds that are lumped together as the "Moral Majority" or the "Christian Right." A good summary of the movement and its purposes by Anson Shupe appeared in the Wall Street Journal, 17 April 1989.
The issue for February 1989 contains an article by the journal's most distinguished writer, Otto Scott, an American historian to whom we must all be grateful for the meticulous and courageous research that is set forth in his admirable book, The Secret Six, which traces the bloody spoor of America's most admired homicidal maniac, John Brown.
Mr. Scott begins his article by quoting the "darling of the intellectual left," Susan Sontag: "The white race is the cancer of humanity." He notes that his god punished the woman by afflicting her with cancer. But he makes the astonishing blunder of supposing that the Sontag woman thought of herself as a Caucasian. She is a (non-White female) and would no more think of calling herself Caucasian than she would of calling herself a bitch or a sow. She belongs to Yahweh's Master Race, the race that now openly boasts in its own publications, "WE are the purpose of Creation."
Mr. Scott comments on the nasty punks who called themselves "Liberal intellectuals" and are forever yapping about our race's "injustice" toward (nonwhites), mongrels, and other waste products of biological evolution. And he correctly observes that our race is precisely the only race that worries about the welfare of other races and even makes enormous sacrifices to help them.
He attributes our race's morbid concern for other (and necessarily enemy) races, not to innate imbecility, but precisely and specifically to its belief in Christianity. That is what I have so frequently argued, and I am pleased to have my view confirmed by so eminent an historian.
Mr. Scott's conclusion is one that I shall here quote in italics:
"Without Christians, there would be no chance for long-range survival of minorities in our midst."
Remember, please, that that is not an accusation that I have made: it is a confession made by an eminent Christian authority on behalf of one of the very few Christian sects that writes honestly and mean what they say.
Nothing that I have written about Christianity is half so categorial and drastic as that damning confession of guilt--guilt for our ever multiplying misfortunes, guilt for our lunatic folly, guilt for our impending doom."
http://www.revilo-oliver.com/rpo/Confession_of_Guilt.html
Decades ago, Dr. Revilo Oliver pointed out that despite the "secular humanist" cant of do-gooders and enturbulators, their nonsense would have gone nowhere without Christianity. It was for that very reason he felt that Christianity, the religion of the European peoples for twenty decades, had become and would remain "a spiritual syphilis".
Enyart fulfills this prophecy with a fairly recent sermon endorsing any and all manner of outsourcing and just about any amount of immigration, from anywhere in the world, of any and all comers.
http://www.kgov.com/bel_56kbps/20060308
Christian Argument for OUTsourcing and IMmigrants
Summary:
* India's economy soars, and Americans should be generous in sharing our wealth by hiring foreigners and welcoming foreign workers, all within the bounds of good law, and apart from welfare, which itself is theft, and makes millions suspicious of immigrants' motives.
* Newsweek (3-6-06) celebrates the sexual immorality that often comes with prosperity, "as young people make more money... they're less wiling to obey rules about sex..." and "Living Free... Taboos against premarital sex are falling away... and dissatisfied wives are increasingly... having affairs."
I downloaded and listened to this filthy piece of dreck. I'm not going to transcribe this load of tommyrot, but essentially, Enyart first tells us that outsourcing is good because, people with the tech skills and "people skills" and patience to do top-flight PC tech support would cost corporations $25 an hour, and that would be bad. Evidently Enyart feels it's terrible that the people with both the PC tech skills and ability and willingness to burp, change and feed ignorant consumers and small businesses through problems they should learn to fix themselves or pay a fair wage to a specialist to have done, won't work for minimum wage.
God damn your eyes, Bob Enyart.
Phone tech support is a difficult job, and people who can do it should be able to earn at least the average wage in the United States. The average wage in the US is probably, still, close to $20 an hour, and that doesn't count health insurance, 401k matching , or other benefits. Perhaps if the PC industry finds that onerous, it should take other steps, such as possibly charging enough for the PC with support in the first place, or even selling PCs with software that is more robust and more easily supportable than Microsoft Windows and Office, which are by any professional standard of computer science pure garbageware.
Enyart's assault on the living standard of technical support people is bad enough, but what comes next is an assault on every American, because it's an assault on the continued existence of America. Enyart feels that virtually unlimited immigration is good, and Christian, because-get this- the single primary determinant of whether a person "accepts real, fundamentalist Christianity"-"gets saved"
Well, let's think about this. Are the Mexicans becoming Christians? Well, of course, most of them already are Christians, of a sort, and by that I don't mean Catholic instead of fundie. I mean they talk about Jesus and the Virgin Mary one minute and get into knife fights, drive drunk, knock up fifteen-year old girls (theirs and ours) and generally live like the undesireable mestizos they are, which is why the corrupt White elite of Mexico cordially invites them to sneak into El Norte. (Of course, it's why Mexico is mostly a dungpit: the Mexicans are getting the society they want and deserve, to a great extent, although making them-all of them-live in their own zoo by stopping US immigration would cause some level of change, probably for the better.)
Okay, the Indians? Nope, they're resolutely sticking with their extant religions and castes. In fact, they take it to extremes. Bob Baer, in his new book describing his career as a CIA agent, talks about how a CIA employee-presumably then a US citizen, to be given a highly classified job-of Indian ethnicity (which region or language-group or caste unmentioned) had to be cashiered after admitting on a polygraph exam that he was regularly boffing his mother and his sister, because he could not find a wife of his subcaste! Gee Bob, how Christian is that? How much you want to bet that that kind of thing is going to get more rather than less common over here?
The Muslims? How many Muslims convert to Christianity? Well, to be fair, it happens. But it's very rare. Because for one thing, even in a liberal Muslim family, it means being a total outcast. In a more conservative one it means being dead. How much does Bob wanna bet me against this: more Muslims means more Americans, nominally Christian, convert to Islam than they convert to our dominant religion?
Good thing Bob doesn't gamble.
Dr. Oliver, that sage of American academe, predicted this:
The Writings of Revilo P Oliver 1908-1994
CONFESSION OF GUILT
by Professor Revilo P. Oliver (Liberty Bell, July 1989)
I have occasionally cited in these pages the Chalcedon Report, the journal of the hard-line Calvinist sect which its head, Dr. Rousas J. Rushdoony, calls Christian Reconstruction, although observers think it should be called the Puritan Revival. It is intellectually and morally far above the level of the babbling crowds that are lumped together as the "Moral Majority" or the "Christian Right." A good summary of the movement and its purposes by Anson Shupe appeared in the Wall Street Journal, 17 April 1989.
The issue for February 1989 contains an article by the journal's most distinguished writer, Otto Scott, an American historian to whom we must all be grateful for the meticulous and courageous research that is set forth in his admirable book, The Secret Six, which traces the bloody spoor of America's most admired homicidal maniac, John Brown.
Mr. Scott begins his article by quoting the "darling of the intellectual left," Susan Sontag: "The white race is the cancer of humanity." He notes that his god punished the woman by afflicting her with cancer. But he makes the astonishing blunder of supposing that the Sontag woman thought of herself as a Caucasian. She is a (non-White female) and would no more think of calling herself Caucasian than she would of calling herself a bitch or a sow. She belongs to Yahweh's Master Race, the race that now openly boasts in its own publications, "WE are the purpose of Creation."
Mr. Scott comments on the nasty punks who called themselves "Liberal intellectuals" and are forever yapping about our race's "injustice" toward (nonwhites), mongrels, and other waste products of biological evolution. And he correctly observes that our race is precisely the only race that worries about the welfare of other races and even makes enormous sacrifices to help them.
He attributes our race's morbid concern for other (and necessarily enemy) races, not to innate imbecility, but precisely and specifically to its belief in Christianity. That is what I have so frequently argued, and I am pleased to have my view confirmed by so eminent an historian.
Mr. Scott's conclusion is one that I shall here quote in italics:
"Without Christians, there would be no chance for long-range survival of minorities in our midst."
Remember, please, that that is not an accusation that I have made: it is a confession made by an eminent Christian authority on behalf of one of the very few Christian sects that writes honestly and mean what they say.
Nothing that I have written about Christianity is half so categorial and drastic as that damning confession of guilt--guilt for our ever multiplying misfortunes, guilt for our lunatic folly, guilt for our impending doom."
http://www.revilo-oliver.com/rpo/Confession_of_Guilt.html
Friday, September 14, 2007
The Camel Bible-Canonized By Committee
Earlier I wrote:
...."Jesus of Nazareth (hereinafter JoN) was a character in a novel, of sorts, written in the manner of Atlas Shrugged or The Turner Diaries (I'd say Hunter, Pierce's later and far better novel, but it's far less famous) as a broadside against Pharasaism and Sadducceesm. Pharasaism, of course, is in essence nothing more than Ur-Talmudism: the Talmud is the congealed legalism already present in the Jewish intellectualism, but not then so codified....."
I want to go in some detail on this.
The Gospel of Mark-probably in a much larger form, "Secret Mark", lost to us now, and likely a fairly salacious document-is the core of what became a major literary franchise over centuries. It is that broadside, a work which like many pieces of literature that are fiction, intended to make a point, that rival factions or pretenders wrote Matthew and Luke from. Each had Mark but neither knew of the other. The Gospel of John is a work of fantasy, nothing more or less, and many faith-holding Christians of unquestionable piety but relaxed orthodoxy have advocated it be simply decanonized. (You may remember the unorthodox TV preacher Gene Scott, for one.) It does not meet the Sesame Street test: it does not belong with the other three. Likewise the Book of Revelation is of even greater dubiousness.
Zindler addresses this fairly well: the most obvious thing is of course the two genealogies of JoN, which divert substantially.
Any of the major science fiction TV shows have generated a volume of books, short stories, comic books, animated shorts, and other texts and materials that expand on their "canon"-always in different ways. If the volume of them is big enough, they generate their own "consensus of extension" that the official franchise cannot contradict too badly when they go forward. On the other hand, there are missteps that are "excised from the canon" from time to time. Star Wars, for example, simply ignored the embarrassing "Christmas special", which George Lucas has never quite lived down.
http://www.starwarsholidayspecial.com/
In the case of Christianity, the canon has been constant for a long time. But the fact is, at one time it was different, and it is the arbitrary judgment of man in committee and nothing else.
...."Jesus of Nazareth (hereinafter JoN) was a character in a novel, of sorts, written in the manner of Atlas Shrugged or The Turner Diaries (I'd say Hunter, Pierce's later and far better novel, but it's far less famous) as a broadside against Pharasaism and Sadducceesm. Pharasaism, of course, is in essence nothing more than Ur-Talmudism: the Talmud is the congealed legalism already present in the Jewish intellectualism, but not then so codified....."
I want to go in some detail on this.
The Gospel of Mark-probably in a much larger form, "Secret Mark", lost to us now, and likely a fairly salacious document-is the core of what became a major literary franchise over centuries. It is that broadside, a work which like many pieces of literature that are fiction, intended to make a point, that rival factions or pretenders wrote Matthew and Luke from. Each had Mark but neither knew of the other. The Gospel of John is a work of fantasy, nothing more or less, and many faith-holding Christians of unquestionable piety but relaxed orthodoxy have advocated it be simply decanonized. (You may remember the unorthodox TV preacher Gene Scott, for one.) It does not meet the Sesame Street test: it does not belong with the other three. Likewise the Book of Revelation is of even greater dubiousness.
Zindler addresses this fairly well: the most obvious thing is of course the two genealogies of JoN, which divert substantially.
Any of the major science fiction TV shows have generated a volume of books, short stories, comic books, animated shorts, and other texts and materials that expand on their "canon"-always in different ways. If the volume of them is big enough, they generate their own "consensus of extension" that the official franchise cannot contradict too badly when they go forward. On the other hand, there are missteps that are "excised from the canon" from time to time. Star Wars, for example, simply ignored the embarrassing "Christmas special", which George Lucas has never quite lived down.
http://www.starwarsholidayspecial.com/
In the case of Christianity, the canon has been constant for a long time. But the fact is, at one time it was different, and it is the arbitrary judgment of man in committee and nothing else.
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