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.
Timothy Patrick Butler
Mr. Butler is an artist with a slightly different view of our favorite fictional character:
http://www.weirdart.com/pages/_gallery/vermiform.html
Not for the faithful. You have been warned.
http://www.weirdart.com/pages/_gallery/vermiform.html
Not for the faithful. You have been warned.
It Gets Worse From Here
Edgar Steele is always condemning the Jews for, among other perfidious things, hating Christians.
Well, let's think about that. What are they SUPPOSED to do? Today's Jews are Talmudites, and the Talmud hates JoN ("Jesus Christ" to use the popular but errant title) because JoN cursed and abjured the Talmud. Of course, the Talmudic authors mostly realized JoN had to be fictional, but they realized that their Deity, who is the Father part of the triune God Christians worship and pretty much Allah of the Muslims, is a fictional one too, and they had to be a little careful. YHVH is a G-d designed for a purpose, and JoN subverts that purpose to some extent.
www.ConspiracyPenPal.com
"Yet Still More Old Whine in New Battles
by Edgar J. Steele
September 14, 2007
[In light of Israel now bombing the hell out of Syria, a fact that our media seems to be suppressing, and America readying the invasion of Iran, this column assumes even more importance than when I first wrote it, over a year ago. See if you don't agree. -ed]
"Its (the Mearsheimer-Walt paper on anti-Semitism) basic point -- that Israel's American supporters have immense influence over U.S. foreign policy -- is inarguable. After all, President Bush has just recently given Israel NATO-like status without so much as a murmur from Congress. "I made it clear, I'll make it clear again, that we will use military might to protect our ally Israel," Bush said. This was the second or third time he's made this pledge, crossing a line that previous administrations would not -- in effect, promulgating a treaty seemingly on the spot. No other country gets this sort of treatment."
--- Richard Cohen, American Jewish reporter, "No, It's Not Anti-Semitic" (Washington Post, 4/25/06, pg. A23)
Do you see now?
Why...what I've been telling you all along, that's what: Iraq and Afghanistan have been about Israel.
See for yourself. Go here ... and here ... and here ... and here ... and here ... and here ... and here ... and here ... and here ... and here ... and here ... and here ... and here ... and here ... and here ... and here ... and here ... and here ... and here ... and ... well, you get the idea. And that list is up through just the middle of 2003. I've had three more years in which I've gotten even more worked up, even to the point of writing a book about the real problem - check through my archives and see for yourself.
Iraq and Afghanistan have been about Israel. Not oil. Not Weapons of Mass Destruction. Not Saddam Hussein. Not Osama bin Laden. Not Al Qaeda. Not 9/11. Israel. Always Israel. Just Israel.
<< snip >>
Onward, Christian Terrorists
But, then, killing Arabs to hasten the Second Coming isn't mentioned in the Bible, either, yet fundamentalists wildly support that, as well, even to the extent of offering up their own sons and daughters to die in Middle Eastern hellholes to advance Israeli interests. "To stand against Israel is to stand against God," is the way that another TV preacher, Jerry Falwell, put it in his book, The Fundamentalist Phenomenon. Onward, Christian terrorists.
I do recall something that is mentioned in the Bible, though: Thou Shalt Not Kill. What part of "Thou Shalt Not Kill" do you suppose it is that Hagee, Falwell, other fundamentalist preachers and their many followers not seem to understand?
On the left, Israeli schoolchildren write clever sayings like "Love, Israel" on shells destined for Lebanese civilians (note the schoolteacher in the background). On the right, Lebanese children after receiving one of those shells.
The current Middle-Eastern genocide against Arabs has American fundamentalists as giddy as Jewish schoolgirls who write to Israeli reservists now on duty, imploring, "Dear soldier, please kill a lot of Arabs."
Christian Arabs, don't forget. Somebody should go back and redo all those old "Spy-vs-Spy" cartoons. Amazing. Not in a million years would it occur to me to make up something like this. Jews actually have Christians rooting for the death of other Christians. Of course, they had us doing that in Bosnia-Herzogovina not so long ago, too, didn't they? What's that? You didn't notice the irony of Christians killing Christians then? Will you notice it now?
Call it "Pre-emptive Self Defense"
Oh, so you believe that Israel simply is defending itself with its current war against rock-throwing children in Palestine?
Do you still think that America simply is defending herself against Iraq, too? Not even George Bush buys that anymore, though he has yet to give up his Administration's doctrine of Pre-emptive Self Defense. Bush's latest excuse: We have to keep killing Iraqis because we have invested so much in our current war in that country. In other words, now my son has to die there, simply because your son already died there.
Am I the only one who fails to see the logic in Bush's current revelation? If you want my son to die just because you lost yours, why don't you simply cut to the chase? Come to my home and kill him yourself. Be warned, however: I have a cannon and a backhoe and I know how to use them. Why kill a bunch more innocent Iraqis to prove a nonexistent point? Never mind that my son is innocent, as well.
Of course, you have heard the justification for America expanding its aggression to Syria and, especially, Iran. Quick now...exactly what is that justification? Did you manage to come up with anything other than, "They hate our freedom?" What freedom, by the way?
Blame Israel
Face it. You know it's true. America is in the Middle East because of Israel. You know now that the oil was just a cynical excuse. After all, we could have bought the oil outright for a whole lot less than we're spending on this obscene war.
You now know that Al Qaeda never had anything to do with Iraq and that, in fact, Saddam Hussein was Al Qaeda's enemy. You now know that there never were any "Weapons of Mass Destruction" in Iraq. You now know that this war was planned by the Neocons (a euphemism, mainly, for American Jews) long before 9/11 and, if you are even vaguely awake, you know now that 9/11 was not carried out by Arabs with box cutters - and certainly not Iraqi Arabs (the fall guys almost all were Saudi Arabian, by the way).
Blame Israel. As always. Come on, say it right out loud. It will make you feel better and you know it: Blame Israel.
Old Whine in New Battles
Oy vey! Foist Egypt, den Goimany. Vhy, oh vhy, are dey alvays peeking on us? Now dose nasty little Arab kids are t'rowing rocks. Make dem stop, America. Make dem stop peeking on us. Bomb Afghanistan. Bomb Iraq. Bomb Syria. Bomb Iran. Kill 'em, kill 'em all!
We've heard it all before. Old whine in new battles, that's all it is.
Now comes the setup: Israel's military leaders today say that they believed their air superiority would be enough to subdue Lebanon, but now they admit they were wrong. It's going to take ground troops. Lots of them. Sound familiar? It should. It is pretty much the same thing that the Neocons said about Iraq when America's current effort there first bogged down. And Syria is next, of course ... then Iran. The die is cast.
Here's the problem: Israel simply doesn't have the manpower to pull off a house-to-house, even in Lebanon. What's more, Israel cannot afford to lose any of the forces that it does have available, else shortly Israel would find itself overrun by the vastly numerically-superior Arabs - really pissed-off Arabs, too - who live all around them. That's why you hear so many Jewish Americans, particularly the media bosses (you know, the ones who own every single last little scrap of media in America today and use it to reprogram all of us) and their lickspittle lackeys calling for American intervention, first in Syria, then in Iran. The House voted 410 to 8, don't forget - 410 to 8! Oy vey! Make dem stop peeking on us. Old whine in new battles.
Of course, Israel is used to getting America to fight its fights. Actually, I should say the world's Jews are used to it, because we've been fighting their fights ever since World War I, the first time we intervened on behalf of Jews where none of our interests were at stake.
Now Israel has picked yet another fight that it cannot win by itself, just as Jews did when they declared economic war on Germany several years before the actual outbreak of WWII hostilities. Of course, they never let us forget about World War II, which we also won for them, yet insist that, somehow, we owe them, rather than it being the other way around, as logic might dictate. Never forget de Holocaust. You never prevented it. Oy vey! Save us now. Save us. Make dem stop peeking on us. Bomb Afghanistan. Bomb Iraq. Bomb Syria. Bomb Iran. Und don't forget to pay for all uff eet. Pay us, too, just like alvays. Like I said: Old whine in new battles.
And we will do it for them yet again, of course (410 to 8!!!).
Yes, That is a Draft You Feel
Conveniently, America has a lot of fighting-age youngsters available. First, of course, are the increasingly unemployed (and unemployable, thanks to the breakdown of America's education system) young American citizens - your kids and mine. Second, all those illegal aliens ("Guest Workers," as Bush calls them), who are welcomed with open arms by all three American branches of government - Administration, Legislative and Judicial - despite the clearly-expressed wishes of almost all Americans.
Already, aliens are doing the jobs of Americans sent overseas to die for Israeli hegemony, while a great many more of those jobs are about to come open, as their current occupants go off to war. Undoubtedly, a great many illegals will go, as well, lured by the promise of instant citizenship. Come on, you didn't really think all this illegal immigration was about picking fruit, did you? Give me a better reason. I dare you.
If you go away from this column with just one thought, let it be this one: All modern immigration since passage of the 1965 Immigration Act likely has been designed from the beginning to provide American cannon fodder for World War III. As I said: Give me a better reason.
Remember that 1963 marked the beginning of the slow, rolling coup that has been taking place in America and only recently come to a full boil, with Americans no longer in charge of any of America's destiny, foreign or domestic.
Here's another perfectly-valid reason for all the illegal immigration that is being allowed, but you probably haven't believed it when I have told you about it, either: massive illegal alien immigration dilutes the native European-American population base, thereby making us much easier to control.
Also convenient: America's draft now is ready to go, with the Selective Service System reactivated, local draft boards repopulated, forms and procedures all updated and, finally, all youngsters forcibly being registered for the draft by high schools and DMV offices.
Just prior to America's entry into WWII, one of the Chosen, Julius Adler, agitated for and helped draft legislation which conveniently was just in time to respond to Pearl Harbor a few weeks later. That resulted in the draft of thousands upon thousands of America's best and brightest young men (and over a million American casualties, 405,000 of which were deaths).
In light of Israel's impending need, having just picked a fight with the entire Arab world, if not the entire world altogether, what a coincidence it is that the only thing now necessary to force America's sons and daughters into uniform is an Executive Order!
Of course, Bush has proven that he no longer need consult with Congress about making war. It would be pointless to ask Congress anyway, since virtually every member has been bought and paid for by Israel's minions (your tax dollars at work, but that is a story for another day). Some things never change anymore. Old whine in new battles.
A Proposed Solution
> waynemadsenreport.com has "reported that the Israeli military is using poison gas on villages in south Lebanon. According to a former U.S. weapons expert who served in Iraq, the artillery shell in a photo taken in Lebanon (left) is a chemical weapon delivery device. It is being handled by an Israeli Defense Force soldier and Hebrew lettering can be clearly seen on the armored vehicle. Another chemical weapons shell of the same type can be seen lying on the ground to the right. It is not known what type of chemical is in the chemical canister, however, gas dropped by the Israelis in villages in southern Lebanon has resulted in severe vomiting among the civilian population."
Never one simply to complain without offering a better way, I have a modest proposal for fixing things. Not fixed right, but a good start, at any rate:
1. Either take away all of Israel's Weapons of Mass Destruction, including its 400 nuclear warheads, or allow Arabs to acquire an equivalently deadly deterrent. To be perfectly fair, since America armed Israel for free, America should be forced now to provide equivalent arms to the Arabs, also for free.
2. Give Israel a choice: Withdraw immediately to the lines originally drawn for it by the UN after WWII and stay there or move to a new Israel, located elsewhere (there are lots of places possible for this, most of them much nicer than the Middle East). The cost of this is to be borne by Israel and the world's Jewish community. In either case, Israel must pay substantial reparations to Palestine and Lebanon for the death and destruction caused to their nations.
3. Withdraw American forces from the Middle East immediately, in total and forever. America to pay reparations to both Afghanistan and Iraq for the death and destruction caused to their nations.
4. Declare all American Zionists, both Jewish and Christian, to be traitors, strip them of American citizenship and exile them to Israel. Since they love Israel so much as to subvert America to Israeli interests and desires, they should be required to live in Israel. This simultaneously will solve America's massive media disinformation problem, too.
We Can Dream, Can't We?
None of the foregoing stands a prayer of taking place, of course, but the alternative truly is horrible: World War III. Maybe not right away. Maybe not even in connection with the current Middle Eastern crisis, but soon. You know it. I know it. Why pretend otherwise? We've seen it all before, time and again. We know how this must play out. All that is going on today is old whine in new battles.
Again, soon will come the scenario laid out in the latter half of my book, Defensive Racism. Also again: This would be a good time to leave the cities, boys and girls.
My name is Edgar J. Steele. Thanks for listening. Please visit my web site, www.ConspiracyPenPal.com, for other messages just like this one.
New America. An idea whose time has come."
http://www.conspiracypenpal.com/columns/whine.htm
Well, let's think about that. What are they SUPPOSED to do? Today's Jews are Talmudites, and the Talmud hates JoN ("Jesus Christ" to use the popular but errant title) because JoN cursed and abjured the Talmud. Of course, the Talmudic authors mostly realized JoN had to be fictional, but they realized that their Deity, who is the Father part of the triune God Christians worship and pretty much Allah of the Muslims, is a fictional one too, and they had to be a little careful. YHVH is a G-d designed for a purpose, and JoN subverts that purpose to some extent.
www.ConspiracyPenPal.com
"Yet Still More Old Whine in New Battles
by Edgar J. Steele
September 14, 2007
[In light of Israel now bombing the hell out of Syria, a fact that our media seems to be suppressing, and America readying the invasion of Iran, this column assumes even more importance than when I first wrote it, over a year ago. See if you don't agree. -ed]
"Its (the Mearsheimer-Walt paper on anti-Semitism) basic point -- that Israel's American supporters have immense influence over U.S. foreign policy -- is inarguable. After all, President Bush has just recently given Israel NATO-like status without so much as a murmur from Congress. "I made it clear, I'll make it clear again, that we will use military might to protect our ally Israel," Bush said. This was the second or third time he's made this pledge, crossing a line that previous administrations would not -- in effect, promulgating a treaty seemingly on the spot. No other country gets this sort of treatment."
--- Richard Cohen, American Jewish reporter, "No, It's Not Anti-Semitic" (Washington Post, 4/25/06, pg. A23)
Do you see now?
Why...what I've been telling you all along, that's what: Iraq and Afghanistan have been about Israel.
See for yourself. Go here ... and here ... and here ... and here ... and here ... and here ... and here ... and here ... and here ... and here ... and here ... and here ... and here ... and here ... and here ... and here ... and here ... and here ... and here ... and ... well, you get the idea. And that list is up through just the middle of 2003. I've had three more years in which I've gotten even more worked up, even to the point of writing a book about the real problem - check through my archives and see for yourself.
Iraq and Afghanistan have been about Israel. Not oil. Not Weapons of Mass Destruction. Not Saddam Hussein. Not Osama bin Laden. Not Al Qaeda. Not 9/11. Israel. Always Israel. Just Israel.
<< snip >>
Onward, Christian Terrorists
But, then, killing Arabs to hasten the Second Coming isn't mentioned in the Bible, either, yet fundamentalists wildly support that, as well, even to the extent of offering up their own sons and daughters to die in Middle Eastern hellholes to advance Israeli interests. "To stand against Israel is to stand against God," is the way that another TV preacher, Jerry Falwell, put it in his book, The Fundamentalist Phenomenon. Onward, Christian terrorists.
I do recall something that is mentioned in the Bible, though: Thou Shalt Not Kill. What part of "Thou Shalt Not Kill" do you suppose it is that Hagee, Falwell, other fundamentalist preachers and their many followers not seem to understand?
On the left, Israeli schoolchildren write clever sayings like "Love, Israel" on shells destined for Lebanese civilians (note the schoolteacher in the background). On the right, Lebanese children after receiving one of those shells.
The current Middle-Eastern genocide against Arabs has American fundamentalists as giddy as Jewish schoolgirls who write to Israeli reservists now on duty, imploring, "Dear soldier, please kill a lot of Arabs."
Christian Arabs, don't forget. Somebody should go back and redo all those old "Spy-vs-Spy" cartoons. Amazing. Not in a million years would it occur to me to make up something like this. Jews actually have Christians rooting for the death of other Christians. Of course, they had us doing that in Bosnia-Herzogovina not so long ago, too, didn't they? What's that? You didn't notice the irony of Christians killing Christians then? Will you notice it now?
Call it "Pre-emptive Self Defense"
Oh, so you believe that Israel simply is defending itself with its current war against rock-throwing children in Palestine?
Do you still think that America simply is defending herself against Iraq, too? Not even George Bush buys that anymore, though he has yet to give up his Administration's doctrine of Pre-emptive Self Defense. Bush's latest excuse: We have to keep killing Iraqis because we have invested so much in our current war in that country. In other words, now my son has to die there, simply because your son already died there.
Am I the only one who fails to see the logic in Bush's current revelation? If you want my son to die just because you lost yours, why don't you simply cut to the chase? Come to my home and kill him yourself. Be warned, however: I have a cannon and a backhoe and I know how to use them. Why kill a bunch more innocent Iraqis to prove a nonexistent point? Never mind that my son is innocent, as well.
Of course, you have heard the justification for America expanding its aggression to Syria and, especially, Iran. Quick now...exactly what is that justification? Did you manage to come up with anything other than, "They hate our freedom?" What freedom, by the way?
Blame Israel
Face it. You know it's true. America is in the Middle East because of Israel. You know now that the oil was just a cynical excuse. After all, we could have bought the oil outright for a whole lot less than we're spending on this obscene war.
You now know that Al Qaeda never had anything to do with Iraq and that, in fact, Saddam Hussein was Al Qaeda's enemy. You now know that there never were any "Weapons of Mass Destruction" in Iraq. You now know that this war was planned by the Neocons (a euphemism, mainly, for American Jews) long before 9/11 and, if you are even vaguely awake, you know now that 9/11 was not carried out by Arabs with box cutters - and certainly not Iraqi Arabs (the fall guys almost all were Saudi Arabian, by the way).
Blame Israel. As always. Come on, say it right out loud. It will make you feel better and you know it: Blame Israel.
Old Whine in New Battles
Oy vey! Foist Egypt, den Goimany. Vhy, oh vhy, are dey alvays peeking on us? Now dose nasty little Arab kids are t'rowing rocks. Make dem stop, America. Make dem stop peeking on us. Bomb Afghanistan. Bomb Iraq. Bomb Syria. Bomb Iran. Kill 'em, kill 'em all!
We've heard it all before. Old whine in new battles, that's all it is.
Now comes the setup: Israel's military leaders today say that they believed their air superiority would be enough to subdue Lebanon, but now they admit they were wrong. It's going to take ground troops. Lots of them. Sound familiar? It should. It is pretty much the same thing that the Neocons said about Iraq when America's current effort there first bogged down. And Syria is next, of course ... then Iran. The die is cast.
Here's the problem: Israel simply doesn't have the manpower to pull off a house-to-house, even in Lebanon. What's more, Israel cannot afford to lose any of the forces that it does have available, else shortly Israel would find itself overrun by the vastly numerically-superior Arabs - really pissed-off Arabs, too - who live all around them. That's why you hear so many Jewish Americans, particularly the media bosses (you know, the ones who own every single last little scrap of media in America today and use it to reprogram all of us) and their lickspittle lackeys calling for American intervention, first in Syria, then in Iran. The House voted 410 to 8, don't forget - 410 to 8! Oy vey! Make dem stop peeking on us. Old whine in new battles.
Of course, Israel is used to getting America to fight its fights. Actually, I should say the world's Jews are used to it, because we've been fighting their fights ever since World War I, the first time we intervened on behalf of Jews where none of our interests were at stake.
Now Israel has picked yet another fight that it cannot win by itself, just as Jews did when they declared economic war on Germany several years before the actual outbreak of WWII hostilities. Of course, they never let us forget about World War II, which we also won for them, yet insist that, somehow, we owe them, rather than it being the other way around, as logic might dictate. Never forget de Holocaust. You never prevented it. Oy vey! Save us now. Save us. Make dem stop peeking on us. Bomb Afghanistan. Bomb Iraq. Bomb Syria. Bomb Iran. Und don't forget to pay for all uff eet. Pay us, too, just like alvays. Like I said: Old whine in new battles.
And we will do it for them yet again, of course (410 to 8!!!).
Yes, That is a Draft You Feel
Conveniently, America has a lot of fighting-age youngsters available. First, of course, are the increasingly unemployed (and unemployable, thanks to the breakdown of America's education system) young American citizens - your kids and mine. Second, all those illegal aliens ("Guest Workers," as Bush calls them), who are welcomed with open arms by all three American branches of government - Administration, Legislative and Judicial - despite the clearly-expressed wishes of almost all Americans.
Already, aliens are doing the jobs of Americans sent overseas to die for Israeli hegemony, while a great many more of those jobs are about to come open, as their current occupants go off to war. Undoubtedly, a great many illegals will go, as well, lured by the promise of instant citizenship. Come on, you didn't really think all this illegal immigration was about picking fruit, did you? Give me a better reason. I dare you.
If you go away from this column with just one thought, let it be this one: All modern immigration since passage of the 1965 Immigration Act likely has been designed from the beginning to provide American cannon fodder for World War III. As I said: Give me a better reason.
Remember that 1963 marked the beginning of the slow, rolling coup that has been taking place in America and only recently come to a full boil, with Americans no longer in charge of any of America's destiny, foreign or domestic.
Here's another perfectly-valid reason for all the illegal immigration that is being allowed, but you probably haven't believed it when I have told you about it, either: massive illegal alien immigration dilutes the native European-American population base, thereby making us much easier to control.
Also convenient: America's draft now is ready to go, with the Selective Service System reactivated, local draft boards repopulated, forms and procedures all updated and, finally, all youngsters forcibly being registered for the draft by high schools and DMV offices.
Just prior to America's entry into WWII, one of the Chosen, Julius Adler, agitated for and helped draft legislation which conveniently was just in time to respond to Pearl Harbor a few weeks later. That resulted in the draft of thousands upon thousands of America's best and brightest young men (and over a million American casualties, 405,000 of which were deaths).
In light of Israel's impending need, having just picked a fight with the entire Arab world, if not the entire world altogether, what a coincidence it is that the only thing now necessary to force America's sons and daughters into uniform is an Executive Order!
Of course, Bush has proven that he no longer need consult with Congress about making war. It would be pointless to ask Congress anyway, since virtually every member has been bought and paid for by Israel's minions (your tax dollars at work, but that is a story for another day). Some things never change anymore. Old whine in new battles.
A Proposed Solution
> waynemadsenreport.com has "reported that the Israeli military is using poison gas on villages in south Lebanon. According to a former U.S. weapons expert who served in Iraq, the artillery shell in a photo taken in Lebanon (left) is a chemical weapon delivery device. It is being handled by an Israeli Defense Force soldier and Hebrew lettering can be clearly seen on the armored vehicle. Another chemical weapons shell of the same type can be seen lying on the ground to the right. It is not known what type of chemical is in the chemical canister, however, gas dropped by the Israelis in villages in southern Lebanon has resulted in severe vomiting among the civilian population."
Never one simply to complain without offering a better way, I have a modest proposal for fixing things. Not fixed right, but a good start, at any rate:
1. Either take away all of Israel's Weapons of Mass Destruction, including its 400 nuclear warheads, or allow Arabs to acquire an equivalently deadly deterrent. To be perfectly fair, since America armed Israel for free, America should be forced now to provide equivalent arms to the Arabs, also for free.
2. Give Israel a choice: Withdraw immediately to the lines originally drawn for it by the UN after WWII and stay there or move to a new Israel, located elsewhere (there are lots of places possible for this, most of them much nicer than the Middle East). The cost of this is to be borne by Israel and the world's Jewish community. In either case, Israel must pay substantial reparations to Palestine and Lebanon for the death and destruction caused to their nations.
3. Withdraw American forces from the Middle East immediately, in total and forever. America to pay reparations to both Afghanistan and Iraq for the death and destruction caused to their nations.
4. Declare all American Zionists, both Jewish and Christian, to be traitors, strip them of American citizenship and exile them to Israel. Since they love Israel so much as to subvert America to Israeli interests and desires, they should be required to live in Israel. This simultaneously will solve America's massive media disinformation problem, too.
We Can Dream, Can't We?
None of the foregoing stands a prayer of taking place, of course, but the alternative truly is horrible: World War III. Maybe not right away. Maybe not even in connection with the current Middle Eastern crisis, but soon. You know it. I know it. Why pretend otherwise? We've seen it all before, time and again. We know how this must play out. All that is going on today is old whine in new battles.
Again, soon will come the scenario laid out in the latter half of my book, Defensive Racism. Also again: This would be a good time to leave the cities, boys and girls.
My name is Edgar J. Steele. Thanks for listening. Please visit my web site, www.ConspiracyPenPal.com, for other messages just like this one.
New America. An idea whose time has come."
http://www.conspiracypenpal.com/columns/whine.htm
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Jesus, Hater of Talmud. Talmud reciprocates.
A most interesting Publisher's Weekly piece:
What the Talmud Really Says About Jesus
by David Klinghoffer, Religion BookLine -- Publishers Weekly, 1/31/2007
Will Peter Schaefer's new book, Jesus in the Talmud (Mar.), be controversial? "I'm afraid so," Schaefer told RBL. "That's why I'm nervous."
His editor at Princeton University Press, Brigitta van Rheinberg, laughed but agreed: "You think, oh, whoa, this is not going to go over well in certain circles."
Schaefer, who heads up Princeton's Judaic studies program, has collected and analyzed all the passages in the Talmud that apparently refer to the founder of Christianity, texts that were previously censored from Talmud editions for centuries. In his book he argues—against other scholars—that the scandalous passages indeed refer not to some other figure of ancient times but to the famous Jesus of Nazareth.
What exactly is so scandalous? How about Jesus punished in Hell for eternity by being made to sit in a cauldron of boiling excrement? That image appears in early manuscripts of the Babylonian Talmud, as does a brief account of Jesus' trial and execution—not by the Romans but by the Jewish high court, the Sanhedrin. The Jewish community, to the extent Jews were even aware of these excised texts, has been content to let them remain obscure and unknown.
Schaefer, a distinguished German-born Christian scholar who describes classical rabbinic literature as "my first love," has now definitively let the cat out of the bag. This undermines a widespread assumption that, of Judaism's and Christianity's respective sacred texts, only the Christian Gospels go out of their way to assail the rival faith, whereas Judaism's classical texts refrain from similar attacks.
It seems fair to say now, however, that the Talmud is every bit as offensive to Christians as the Gospels are to Jews.
The Talmud's scattered portrait of Jesus unapologetically mocks Christian doctrines including the virgin birth and the resurrection. Which isn't to say that the rabbinic invective is meant simply to insult. In his book, the author calls the Talmud's assault on Christian claims "devastating."
"It is a very serious argument," said Schaefer, who emphasizes that the rabbis' stories about Jesus were never intended as an attempt at historically accurate narrative. Rather, in the classic Talmudic style, they encode legal and theological argumentation in the form of sometimes-imaginative storytelling.
One naturally wonders, when Jesus in the Talmud is published, what the results will be for Jewish-Christian relations. "I certainly don't want to harm Jewish-Christian dialogue. God forbid," Schaefer said. But dialogue requires honesty, and "I'm trying to be honest."
http://www.publishersweekly.com/index.asp?layout=articlePrint&articleID=CA6411679
Up until a hundred or so years ago, Christianity and Judaism were mutually pretty much at odds. But in the 1800s, a number of people with ulterior motives started the process of re-Judaizing Christianity. Rather than alter the Christian Bible, they attacked the traditional attitude via commentary. (The irony will be apparent later.)
From Wikipedia (excerpt):
The Scofield Reference Bible promoted dispensationalism, the belief that between creation and the final judgment there were seven distinct eras of God's dealing with man and that these eras were a framework for synthesizing the message of the Bible. It was largely through the influence of Scofield's notes that dispensationalism grew in influence among fundamentalist Christians in the United States. Scofield's notes on Revelation are a major source for the various timetables, judgments, and plagues elaborated by such popular religious writers as Hal Lindsey; and in part because of the success of the Scofield Reference Bible, twentieth-century American fundamentalists placed greater stress on eschatological speculation. Opponents of biblical fundamentalism have criticized the Scofield Bible for its air of total authority in biblical interpretation, for what they consider its glossing over of biblical contradictions, and for its focus on eschatology.[2].
((http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scofield_Reference_Bible ))
There you have it: the injection point for the thousands of gallons of hog slurry filling the Jeboo-neocon swimming pool.
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. In that sense, Christianity is nothing more nor less than anti-Talmudism, and modern Judaism-Judaism in any sense but, perhaps, a few and much detested splinter groups like Samaritans and Karaites-is Talmudism. The Judeo-Christianity that permits "Messianic Judaism" and "Christian Zionism" and the manifold re-Judaization of Christianity in all its forms is itself, a bastard and self-contradictory system.
And like all self-contradictory systems it will implode. The problem is that given its hold on American society, if we do not kill it, it will take us with it in a thousand pieces.
What the Talmud Really Says About Jesus
by David Klinghoffer, Religion BookLine -- Publishers Weekly, 1/31/2007
Will Peter Schaefer's new book, Jesus in the Talmud (Mar.), be controversial? "I'm afraid so," Schaefer told RBL. "That's why I'm nervous."
His editor at Princeton University Press, Brigitta van Rheinberg, laughed but agreed: "You think, oh, whoa, this is not going to go over well in certain circles."
Schaefer, who heads up Princeton's Judaic studies program, has collected and analyzed all the passages in the Talmud that apparently refer to the founder of Christianity, texts that were previously censored from Talmud editions for centuries. In his book he argues—against other scholars—that the scandalous passages indeed refer not to some other figure of ancient times but to the famous Jesus of Nazareth.
What exactly is so scandalous? How about Jesus punished in Hell for eternity by being made to sit in a cauldron of boiling excrement? That image appears in early manuscripts of the Babylonian Talmud, as does a brief account of Jesus' trial and execution—not by the Romans but by the Jewish high court, the Sanhedrin. The Jewish community, to the extent Jews were even aware of these excised texts, has been content to let them remain obscure and unknown.
Schaefer, a distinguished German-born Christian scholar who describes classical rabbinic literature as "my first love," has now definitively let the cat out of the bag. This undermines a widespread assumption that, of Judaism's and Christianity's respective sacred texts, only the Christian Gospels go out of their way to assail the rival faith, whereas Judaism's classical texts refrain from similar attacks.
It seems fair to say now, however, that the Talmud is every bit as offensive to Christians as the Gospels are to Jews.
The Talmud's scattered portrait of Jesus unapologetically mocks Christian doctrines including the virgin birth and the resurrection. Which isn't to say that the rabbinic invective is meant simply to insult. In his book, the author calls the Talmud's assault on Christian claims "devastating."
"It is a very serious argument," said Schaefer, who emphasizes that the rabbis' stories about Jesus were never intended as an attempt at historically accurate narrative. Rather, in the classic Talmudic style, they encode legal and theological argumentation in the form of sometimes-imaginative storytelling.
One naturally wonders, when Jesus in the Talmud is published, what the results will be for Jewish-Christian relations. "I certainly don't want to harm Jewish-Christian dialogue. God forbid," Schaefer said. But dialogue requires honesty, and "I'm trying to be honest."
http://www.publishersweekly.com/index.asp?layout=articlePrint&articleID=CA6411679
Up until a hundred or so years ago, Christianity and Judaism were mutually pretty much at odds. But in the 1800s, a number of people with ulterior motives started the process of re-Judaizing Christianity. Rather than alter the Christian Bible, they attacked the traditional attitude via commentary. (The irony will be apparent later.)
From Wikipedia (excerpt):
The Scofield Reference Bible promoted dispensationalism, the belief that between creation and the final judgment there were seven distinct eras of God's dealing with man and that these eras were a framework for synthesizing the message of the Bible. It was largely through the influence of Scofield's notes that dispensationalism grew in influence among fundamentalist Christians in the United States. Scofield's notes on Revelation are a major source for the various timetables, judgments, and plagues elaborated by such popular religious writers as Hal Lindsey; and in part because of the success of the Scofield Reference Bible, twentieth-century American fundamentalists placed greater stress on eschatological speculation. Opponents of biblical fundamentalism have criticized the Scofield Bible for its air of total authority in biblical interpretation, for what they consider its glossing over of biblical contradictions, and for its focus on eschatology.[2].
((http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scofield_Reference_Bible ))
There you have it: the injection point for the thousands of gallons of hog slurry filling the Jeboo-neocon swimming pool.
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. In that sense, Christianity is nothing more nor less than anti-Talmudism, and modern Judaism-Judaism in any sense but, perhaps, a few and much detested splinter groups like Samaritans and Karaites-is Talmudism. The Judeo-Christianity that permits "Messianic Judaism" and "Christian Zionism" and the manifold re-Judaization of Christianity in all its forms is itself, a bastard and self-contradictory system.
And like all self-contradictory systems it will implode. The problem is that given its hold on American society, if we do not kill it, it will take us with it in a thousand pieces.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
The Cursum Perficio of Jesus
Zoroastrianism had a certain fascination for me at a young age. The Mazda car with its rotary engine and old references in vintage electronics books to "Ahura-Mazda" GE Mazda lights, inspired me to look up the reference. But I never seriously considered believing in it in the sense I was told I had to believe in God by my parents and authorities as a kid.
There are still a few Zoroastrians, but they are nearly extinct. They don't proselytize, and don't welcome converts much. But Zoroastrianism is the key predecessor of Christianity, and perhaps of all creedal religions.
Dr. Oliver had quite a bit to say about it. I'll provide a brief quote:
"WHEN A RESIDENCE is sold these days, the new owner almost always makes changes: he has it painted another color, he has the interior redecorated and installs new furniture, he may remove a partition between small rooms or divide a very large room, he may have the kitchen remodelled, and he may make other alterations to suit his taste or convenience; but the fabric of the house, its foundations, its beams, and its walls, remain unchanged.
The foregoing description, condensed and summary as it was, will have sufficed to show that the Christians today are living in Zoroaster’s old house. It has been remodelled here and there, but the fabric remains as it was built, twenty-six centuries ago.
The essentials of the newer cult are all in Zoroaster’s invention: the Good God and the Bad God; their armies of angels and devils; the contested partition of the universe between Good and Evil; the Holy War for One World of Righteousness; Heaven and Hell and even Purgatory (Misvan Gatu); and the apocalyptic vision of cosmic strife that will end only in a decisive last battle between the hosts of the Lord and the hosts of Satan, which will be followed by the Last Judgement and the end of Time, after which nothing can ever change again. All human beings sprang from a divinely-created original pair, whose descendants, equal in ancestry are made equal by Faith in the Good God, who fathered and sent into the world a Virgin-born Saviour to reveal his will to mortals, whose sins and merits are accurately recorded by the celestial bookkeeping system in preparation for the Last Judgement, when, incredible as it seems, they will be resurrected, so that, so to speak, they can enjoy the life everlasting in their own persons. The Zoroastrians, by the way, explain that when the time comes, Ahura Mazda’s zealous agents will find and reassemble every particle of the man’s flesh, which was eaten and digested by birds of prey centuries or millennia before; Christians attempt no explanation, but in most churches they still recite the Apostles’ Creed (forged at the end of the Fourth Century and subsequently revised), affirming that they believe in "the Resurrection of the Flesh," but they probably never think of what they are saying.
We could add numerous details of Christian doctrine that were devised by the Magi in the various Zoroastrian sects: confession of sins (paitita), penance and absolution (barasnom), ceremonial Last Suppers of bread and wine, observance of the twenty-fifth of December as a divine birthday, and many others, including even terminology, such as use of the title ‘Father’ to designate a priest.1
Zoroastrianism and Christianity, however, are not identical, with only a change of names and a few minor details. The remodelling has introduced two really striking differences. When Zoroaster emerged from the Virgin’s womb, he laughed to signify that life is good and should be enjoyed, and although the Magi, with the normal concern of holy men for their professional emoluments, devised all sorts of sacraments, rites, ceremonies, and religious obligations to keep their customers at work for them, the religion never lost a decent respect for human nature. The first woman had been the twin sister of the first man, and no Zoroastrian ever thought of a woman as an "imperfect animal" with an insatiable lust for sexual intercourse, "an inescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil of nature, painted with fair colors.’2 No Zoroastrian ever had the Christians’ morbid obsession with sex or thought he or she would conciliate a ferocious god by thwarting and perverting their own nature and natural instincts or, for that matter, by inflicting discomfort and pain on themselves in an orgy of masochism. No Zoroastrian ever thought that it would be holy to stop the reproduction of our species and leave the world uninhabited. No Zoroastrian was ever infected with the insanity that, for example, made Jerome run out into a desert so that he wouldn’t see any of the "evils of nature," and made Origen castrate himself to appease a god’s hatred of mankind. No Zoroastrian’s mind was ever haunted and distracted by an incubus of imaginary guilt, an Original Sin inherited from a man and woman who had discovered that their creator had equipped them with sexual organs he forbade them to use.3 No Zoroastrian intelligence was ever so perverted that he felt guilty for living, maddened by morbid obsessions that are sexual in origin, but, by an even fouler perversion, may be diverted into a maudlin guilt because he does not share the squalor of the lowest strata of society or does not sufficiently degrade himself to satisfy the enemies of his race and of his own progeny.
Equally startling is the Christian remodelling of the Good God. Ahura Mazda is a strictly just, honest, and impartial deity: he has ordained certain rules of righteousness for all mankind, and his servants keep a strict account of each individuals obedience or disobedience. Yahweh, on the other hand, is a god who early conceived an inexplicable partiality for a miserable tribe of swindlers and robbers, who pleased him by observing strange taboos, sexually mutilating their male children, and defecating and urinating in the ways he likes to watch. Having created the world, he spent the greater part of its existence in abetting his barbarous pets as they preyed on more civilized people, and he was their confederate as they swindled and robbed their victims or stole a country they wanted by massacring all the men, women, and children, and even their domestic animals. He even tampered with the minds of kings so that he would have an excuse for inflicting on their subjects every sadistic torture he could devise for the delectation of his favorites. And having been the accomplice of the world’s parasites for centuries, he unaccountably changed his mind and sent them his only begotten son so that they would kill him and thus give him an excuse for breaking his bargain with them. It is no wonder that Christians so constantly talk of their "fear of God" who wouldn’t fear a deity so capricious, ruthless, and unscrupulous?
No unprejudiced observer could fail to conclude that Zoroastrianism was not changed for the better when it was remodelled by its new owners.
It remains for us to account for the spiritual deterioration in the subsequent chapters of this booklet.
A judicious reader may inquire why the Zoroastrian religion, if so markedly superior to its successor, so declined that it now engages the faith of only a small colony of about 120,000 Parsees whose ancestors found in India a refuge from Islam. That is one of the historical questions that can be answered without qualification or uncertainty. The primary cause is obvious: in heaven, as on earth, nothing succeeds like success, and failure is the cause of failure.
Although Zoroaster’s invention was a "universal" religion and sent out missionaries to preach its gospel to all the world, it became the official religion of the vast and mighty Persian Empire and Ahura Mazda’s fate became inextricably entwined with the fate of the Persian King of Kings. Had Xerxes’ huge navy and army been victorious at Salamis and Plataea, the True Faith would have followed the Persian warriors over Europe, much as Christianity later followed the British regiments throughout the world. It is even possible, I suppose, that we should be Zoroastrians today, worshipping a god represented by an eternal flame on the altar of each community, and pestered by "creation scientists," who would try to prove to us that Darwin was wicked to doubt that Ahura Mazda created Gayamart so that he could engender Masi and Masanl, the ancestors of all mankind. But I doubt it: gods, like men, become senescent, and even if they are immortal, if they are too busy or slothful to answer their votaries’ prayers and supplications for a few centuries, they have only themselves to blame when they are supplanted by younger and yet untried immortals."
http://www.revilo-oliver.com/rpo/RPO_NewChrist/chap11.htm
There are still a few Zoroastrians, but they are nearly extinct. They don't proselytize, and don't welcome converts much. But Zoroastrianism is the key predecessor of Christianity, and perhaps of all creedal religions.
Dr. Oliver had quite a bit to say about it. I'll provide a brief quote:
"WHEN A RESIDENCE is sold these days, the new owner almost always makes changes: he has it painted another color, he has the interior redecorated and installs new furniture, he may remove a partition between small rooms or divide a very large room, he may have the kitchen remodelled, and he may make other alterations to suit his taste or convenience; but the fabric of the house, its foundations, its beams, and its walls, remain unchanged.
The foregoing description, condensed and summary as it was, will have sufficed to show that the Christians today are living in Zoroaster’s old house. It has been remodelled here and there, but the fabric remains as it was built, twenty-six centuries ago.
The essentials of the newer cult are all in Zoroaster’s invention: the Good God and the Bad God; their armies of angels and devils; the contested partition of the universe between Good and Evil; the Holy War for One World of Righteousness; Heaven and Hell and even Purgatory (Misvan Gatu); and the apocalyptic vision of cosmic strife that will end only in a decisive last battle between the hosts of the Lord and the hosts of Satan, which will be followed by the Last Judgement and the end of Time, after which nothing can ever change again. All human beings sprang from a divinely-created original pair, whose descendants, equal in ancestry are made equal by Faith in the Good God, who fathered and sent into the world a Virgin-born Saviour to reveal his will to mortals, whose sins and merits are accurately recorded by the celestial bookkeeping system in preparation for the Last Judgement, when, incredible as it seems, they will be resurrected, so that, so to speak, they can enjoy the life everlasting in their own persons. The Zoroastrians, by the way, explain that when the time comes, Ahura Mazda’s zealous agents will find and reassemble every particle of the man’s flesh, which was eaten and digested by birds of prey centuries or millennia before; Christians attempt no explanation, but in most churches they still recite the Apostles’ Creed (forged at the end of the Fourth Century and subsequently revised), affirming that they believe in "the Resurrection of the Flesh," but they probably never think of what they are saying.
We could add numerous details of Christian doctrine that were devised by the Magi in the various Zoroastrian sects: confession of sins (paitita), penance and absolution (barasnom), ceremonial Last Suppers of bread and wine, observance of the twenty-fifth of December as a divine birthday, and many others, including even terminology, such as use of the title ‘Father’ to designate a priest.1
Zoroastrianism and Christianity, however, are not identical, with only a change of names and a few minor details. The remodelling has introduced two really striking differences. When Zoroaster emerged from the Virgin’s womb, he laughed to signify that life is good and should be enjoyed, and although the Magi, with the normal concern of holy men for their professional emoluments, devised all sorts of sacraments, rites, ceremonies, and religious obligations to keep their customers at work for them, the religion never lost a decent respect for human nature. The first woman had been the twin sister of the first man, and no Zoroastrian ever thought of a woman as an "imperfect animal" with an insatiable lust for sexual intercourse, "an inescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil of nature, painted with fair colors.’2 No Zoroastrian ever had the Christians’ morbid obsession with sex or thought he or she would conciliate a ferocious god by thwarting and perverting their own nature and natural instincts or, for that matter, by inflicting discomfort and pain on themselves in an orgy of masochism. No Zoroastrian ever thought that it would be holy to stop the reproduction of our species and leave the world uninhabited. No Zoroastrian was ever infected with the insanity that, for example, made Jerome run out into a desert so that he wouldn’t see any of the "evils of nature," and made Origen castrate himself to appease a god’s hatred of mankind. No Zoroastrian’s mind was ever haunted and distracted by an incubus of imaginary guilt, an Original Sin inherited from a man and woman who had discovered that their creator had equipped them with sexual organs he forbade them to use.3 No Zoroastrian intelligence was ever so perverted that he felt guilty for living, maddened by morbid obsessions that are sexual in origin, but, by an even fouler perversion, may be diverted into a maudlin guilt because he does not share the squalor of the lowest strata of society or does not sufficiently degrade himself to satisfy the enemies of his race and of his own progeny.
Equally startling is the Christian remodelling of the Good God. Ahura Mazda is a strictly just, honest, and impartial deity: he has ordained certain rules of righteousness for all mankind, and his servants keep a strict account of each individuals obedience or disobedience. Yahweh, on the other hand, is a god who early conceived an inexplicable partiality for a miserable tribe of swindlers and robbers, who pleased him by observing strange taboos, sexually mutilating their male children, and defecating and urinating in the ways he likes to watch. Having created the world, he spent the greater part of its existence in abetting his barbarous pets as they preyed on more civilized people, and he was their confederate as they swindled and robbed their victims or stole a country they wanted by massacring all the men, women, and children, and even their domestic animals. He even tampered with the minds of kings so that he would have an excuse for inflicting on their subjects every sadistic torture he could devise for the delectation of his favorites. And having been the accomplice of the world’s parasites for centuries, he unaccountably changed his mind and sent them his only begotten son so that they would kill him and thus give him an excuse for breaking his bargain with them. It is no wonder that Christians so constantly talk of their "fear of God" who wouldn’t fear a deity so capricious, ruthless, and unscrupulous?
No unprejudiced observer could fail to conclude that Zoroastrianism was not changed for the better when it was remodelled by its new owners.
It remains for us to account for the spiritual deterioration in the subsequent chapters of this booklet.
A judicious reader may inquire why the Zoroastrian religion, if so markedly superior to its successor, so declined that it now engages the faith of only a small colony of about 120,000 Parsees whose ancestors found in India a refuge from Islam. That is one of the historical questions that can be answered without qualification or uncertainty. The primary cause is obvious: in heaven, as on earth, nothing succeeds like success, and failure is the cause of failure.
Although Zoroaster’s invention was a "universal" religion and sent out missionaries to preach its gospel to all the world, it became the official religion of the vast and mighty Persian Empire and Ahura Mazda’s fate became inextricably entwined with the fate of the Persian King of Kings. Had Xerxes’ huge navy and army been victorious at Salamis and Plataea, the True Faith would have followed the Persian warriors over Europe, much as Christianity later followed the British regiments throughout the world. It is even possible, I suppose, that we should be Zoroastrians today, worshipping a god represented by an eternal flame on the altar of each community, and pestered by "creation scientists," who would try to prove to us that Darwin was wicked to doubt that Ahura Mazda created Gayamart so that he could engender Masi and Masanl, the ancestors of all mankind. But I doubt it: gods, like men, become senescent, and even if they are immortal, if they are too busy or slothful to answer their votaries’ prayers and supplications for a few centuries, they have only themselves to blame when they are supplanted by younger and yet untried immortals."
http://www.revilo-oliver.com/rpo/RPO_NewChrist/chap11.htm
Liza Minnelli
Watching Liza Minnelli open the U.S. Open Final tennis tournament was one of the most jarring experiences I've seen on TV since, well, maybe since watching the towers come down live six years ago. For one thing, although the National Anthem (you know, our little parody of 'To Anacreon in Heaven') is customary, she sang "God Bless America", a substitute used when the honored vocalist can't manage the musically awkward official score. But more to the point, her "stylism" killed whatever merit the song has.
Minnelli is famous for being famous, and for being the daughter of Judy Garland. She is a dreadful actress-a friend calls her "William Shatner with a vagina", in public, and even women seem to agree-and while she has a set of pipes she does not now nor has she ever known what to do with them.
Yet-yet-when she's on the screen, you are paying attention to her, no matter what. I guess that's what a star is.
Heresy.
Minnelli is famous for being famous, and for being the daughter of Judy Garland. She is a dreadful actress-a friend calls her "William Shatner with a vagina", in public, and even women seem to agree-and while she has a set of pipes she does not now nor has she ever known what to do with them.
Yet-yet-when she's on the screen, you are paying attention to her, no matter what. I guess that's what a star is.
Heresy.
Does Jesus love buttinski's?
I was explaining my view of the ahistoricity of Jesus today, when a kibbitzer across the aisle walked up to me and quietly told all present I was "a hater of Jesus" and walked away. While I thought that was being a buttinski, he did bring up an interesting thing.
As I've said, I'm 100% sure the character we know as "Jesus of Nazareth" or more popularly, "Jesus Christ", is a fictional character. One question that then comes up is, was there a person or persons in reality that he was based on?
Yes and no.
All fictional characters are based on someone else, to some extent, either real or fictional themselves. The fundamentalist and Catholic Jesus-a literal man, born of a virgin, crucified and resurrected-I'm sure never existed, in the sense that no man, especially, was ever or could ever be born of a woman without sperm somewhere, and no man (or woman) was ever resurrected bodily after rotting for two or three days in a Middle Eastern desert cave.
Frank Zindler and others have done a superb job of rooting out the pagan predecessors of Jesus of Nazareth. ( I refuse to use "Jesus Christ" as a name per se: "Christ" is a title, or honorific, meaning "anointed".) Rather than my going over their writing, here's a link:
http://www.atheists.org/christianity/jesuslife.html
I think you will find in it, and in other pertinent material on that site, all that needs to be said on the issue.
That's not to say Jesus of Nazareth is necessarily a bad fictional character. In him there is nobility, generosity, dedication to a cause: and there is, moreover, in his fight against the Pharisees and Sadducees and temple moneychangers, a lesson for us today. The lone fighter against the status quo is a theme that, like so much of Western Christianity, resonates with Western peoples, and that is one reason it has lasted as long as it has.
Man needs truth-and fantasy. Perhaps, especially, Western man. But each must be recognized for what it is-and the time to uphold the fantasy that is Christianity as anything but what it is is past.
As I've said, I'm 100% sure the character we know as "Jesus of Nazareth" or more popularly, "Jesus Christ", is a fictional character. One question that then comes up is, was there a person or persons in reality that he was based on?
Yes and no.
All fictional characters are based on someone else, to some extent, either real or fictional themselves. The fundamentalist and Catholic Jesus-a literal man, born of a virgin, crucified and resurrected-I'm sure never existed, in the sense that no man, especially, was ever or could ever be born of a woman without sperm somewhere, and no man (or woman) was ever resurrected bodily after rotting for two or three days in a Middle Eastern desert cave.
Frank Zindler and others have done a superb job of rooting out the pagan predecessors of Jesus of Nazareth. ( I refuse to use "Jesus Christ" as a name per se: "Christ" is a title, or honorific, meaning "anointed".) Rather than my going over their writing, here's a link:
http://www.atheists.org/christianity/jesuslife.html
I think you will find in it, and in other pertinent material on that site, all that needs to be said on the issue.
That's not to say Jesus of Nazareth is necessarily a bad fictional character. In him there is nobility, generosity, dedication to a cause: and there is, moreover, in his fight against the Pharisees and Sadducees and temple moneychangers, a lesson for us today. The lone fighter against the status quo is a theme that, like so much of Western Christianity, resonates with Western peoples, and that is one reason it has lasted as long as it has.
Man needs truth-and fantasy. Perhaps, especially, Western man. But each must be recognized for what it is-and the time to uphold the fantasy that is Christianity as anything but what it is is past.
Saturday, September 8, 2007
The Joys of Travel
I'm in a motel room in the middle of nowhere, travelling for a business run by Christian fundamentalists who know I'm an unbeliever, an unsaved, even (surely they suspect) a willful one. I can't complain about my job: I do a good job for them and the paychecks are on time, they clear, and the pay isn't bad. I don't dislike the company, even though they do things I don't agree with: they don't proselytize to me and I don't make any wayward comments to them. But at the core of things, though I think (maybe from self-delusion, I concede) they like me personally, I think they consider me an outsider. In fact I'm sure of it.
One of the things about leaving Christianity behind intellectually is that if you were raised in it from an early age, part of the thinking of it stays with you always on an emotional, animal level. So I'm feeling deliciously naughty right now, but on the other hand, I have no guilt.
When I came into the motel-a former Holiday Inn 70s expansion Holidome property replete with indoor putt putt course and pool in the lobby-I walked past the outside rooms with secondary doors and bay windows looking out to a scenic parking lot. Sure enough, in one lit room. I saw a rhythmic motion and stopped to look, ensconsed in the parking lot by a small tree.
It was the world's oldest scene: a man and a woman. I'll spare the details, but it was just what you'd expect, and I watched them for the better part of five or ten minutes.
I did nothing wrong: I was in a public place and watched an act where the participants, had they had any expectation of privacy, could and should simply have closed the inner drapes. Still, had they spotted me, there would have been problems. That, I suppose, made it more interesting.
Porn isn't my thing, because, among other things, the participants are on camera knowingly and are acting. Even amateur stuff with couples is not the same as seeing people do what they do for their own reasons, because they know they're being watched.
One of the things about leaving Christianity behind intellectually is that if you were raised in it from an early age, part of the thinking of it stays with you always on an emotional, animal level. So I'm feeling deliciously naughty right now, but on the other hand, I have no guilt.
When I came into the motel-a former Holiday Inn 70s expansion Holidome property replete with indoor putt putt course and pool in the lobby-I walked past the outside rooms with secondary doors and bay windows looking out to a scenic parking lot. Sure enough, in one lit room. I saw a rhythmic motion and stopped to look, ensconsed in the parking lot by a small tree.
It was the world's oldest scene: a man and a woman. I'll spare the details, but it was just what you'd expect, and I watched them for the better part of five or ten minutes.
I did nothing wrong: I was in a public place and watched an act where the participants, had they had any expectation of privacy, could and should simply have closed the inner drapes. Still, had they spotted me, there would have been problems. That, I suppose, made it more interesting.
Porn isn't my thing, because, among other things, the participants are on camera knowingly and are acting. Even amateur stuff with couples is not the same as seeing people do what they do for their own reasons, because they know they're being watched.
The False Trilemma
"Liar, Lord, or Lunatic".
How many times have you heard that phrase boom out from your radio while going through the dial? It's become a staple of televangelists and radio "ministries" in the last decade or two.
One could as easily ask that question of any fictional protagonist- John Galt, Horatio Hornblower, Michael Corleone or Holly Golightly. Because it makes an assumption: that the person about whom it is asked is able to be any of the above. In none of the above cases is it a sensible question because those people don't exist, and never did.
And neither did Jesus of Nazareth.
I got the following from a friend yesterday: (Ellipses mine;)
" I'm now convinced that Jesus was fictional, because the process by which the gospels were generated makes perfect sense if you follow Star Trek.... The key is the period in between the end of the show (TOS) in '69 and the next ten years before Paramount decided it had a franchise on its hands. People started writing independent fiction of various types regarding the world of Star Trek: it all went a different way based on the 'facts' of the series, and it evolved its own conventions so powerfully Paramount and Roddenberry had to "do it Frank's way" when they started writing new Star Trek. There were these fanzines-"zines"-and in fact the Star Trek community probably invented the zine as it came to be known, which ended with Jim Goad and the general Internet migration...the K/S ones, for Kirk/Spock, were written by fat females, housewives, had them buggering each other and later other "slash" fiction with Starsky and Hutch, came out...other types as well, see a 1974 book by Marshak and Culbreath, very jewy, Rand discussed a lot.
..... If Mark the first gospel, the others came in afterward and were compliant to it but not each other, like Vulcans having pointed penises in one story and two small ones in another, and they were trimmed or redacted by monks in antiquity to fit. But not all the way, which is why there are ludicrously incongruent genealogies in Matthew and Luke."
How many times have you heard that phrase boom out from your radio while going through the dial? It's become a staple of televangelists and radio "ministries" in the last decade or two.
One could as easily ask that question of any fictional protagonist- John Galt, Horatio Hornblower, Michael Corleone or Holly Golightly. Because it makes an assumption: that the person about whom it is asked is able to be any of the above. In none of the above cases is it a sensible question because those people don't exist, and never did.
And neither did Jesus of Nazareth.
I got the following from a friend yesterday: (Ellipses mine;)
" I'm now convinced that Jesus was fictional, because the process by which the gospels were generated makes perfect sense if you follow Star Trek.... The key is the period in between the end of the show (TOS) in '69 and the next ten years before Paramount decided it had a franchise on its hands. People started writing independent fiction of various types regarding the world of Star Trek: it all went a different way based on the 'facts' of the series, and it evolved its own conventions so powerfully Paramount and Roddenberry had to "do it Frank's way" when they started writing new Star Trek. There were these fanzines-"zines"-and in fact the Star Trek community probably invented the zine as it came to be known, which ended with Jim Goad and the general Internet migration...the K/S ones, for Kirk/Spock, were written by fat females, housewives, had them buggering each other and later other "slash" fiction with Starsky and Hutch, came out...other types as well, see a 1974 book by Marshak and Culbreath, very jewy, Rand discussed a lot.
..... If Mark the first gospel, the others came in afterward and were compliant to it but not each other, like Vulcans having pointed penises in one story and two small ones in another, and they were trimmed or redacted by monks in antiquity to fit. But not all the way, which is why there are ludicrously incongruent genealogies in Matthew and Luke."
Dr. Revy on the All Time Best Seller
It was so in 1992, it was so in 1792, and it will be ever thus. I love this crotchety ole sumbitch:
by Professor Revilo P. Oliver (April 1992)
MOVING JESUS
by Professor Revilo P. Oliver (April 1992)
I learn from the *Wall Street Journal*, 2 March 1992, that the American Bible Society, one of the foremost publishers of the world's most widely distributed work of fiction, are coping with a falling market.
Bibles are still printed and sold in large numbers, but, as several dervishes cited in the article complain, the book is treated as a talisman or fetish, put on a table or shelf, seldom opened, never read. Even the pious do not read the bulky collection of dreary tales. A Gallup poll found that out of persons who claimed to believe the book to be the Word of God, only half could name even one of the four synoptic gospels.
It is true that although that bag of grotesque tales has endowed English with innumerable phrases, aphorisms, and pregnant allusions, it has little literary quality. It lacks both the dignity and the charm of Classical mythology. Its historical value is virtually nil. And for what is called 'human interest' it cannot vie with Flaubert or Thackery or Dickens or Agatha Christie. But persons who think a god the author should overlook their god's awkwardness.
It is true that many Americans do not know enough English to understand the King James Version and are too indolent to remedy the inadequacy of their education. I discovered this some thirty years ago, when I discovered with horror that some of my colleagues were translating the English of Milton's *Areopagitica* into 'contemporary' English in the hope that it could then be understood by graduate students in "Political Science" (i.e., Marxist propaganda). There are said to be some forty English translations of the Bible, most of which try to jazz up the stories by vulgarizing the English in which they are told. But these versions are equally unread.
There remains the question whether True Believers could read their Holy Book if they wanted to. I remember having seem some years ago an estimate that no more that 27% of adult Americans (1) were mentally capable of reading a book--any book. Most of the others, of course, could recognize the letters of the alphabet, read road signs (although I note that these are being replaced by 'international symbols'), and understand headlines and short paragraphs in newspapers. The limiting factor was power of attention. A newspaper called *USA Today* is said to have ascertained by investigation that most of its readers could not keep in mind more than a short paragraph. Their feeble intellects, palsied and spasmodic, could not remain in focus on a longer text. That is probably correct, although no one noticed that the fact made idiocy of our ochlocracy, and proved that a society that permits more than the 27% to vote is simply committing suicide.
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