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Tragic Drowning Of Migrant Toddler Off Turkish Coast
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Romney Is Horrified by Trump — and That’s Restarting "Mitt 2016" Talk
Romney Is Horrified by Trump — and That’s Restarting ‘Mitt 2016’ Talk
As Donald Trump continues to dominate the Republican presidential race, frustration and panic have become high enough to make some inside the party Establishment pine for a candidate they roundly rejected as recently as January: Mitt Romney. Romney himself has become one of Trump’s most vocal detractors inside the party. “He’s someone to whom civility means a lot. The whole Trump thing really bothers him,” a close Romney adviser told me — and some Romney-ites are only too happy to talk up the prospect of their man jumping into the race if the Establishment fails to stop Trump, whose support in Iowa and New Hampshire is currently greater than Jeb Bush's, Scott Walker's, Marco Rubio's, Chris Christie's, and John Kasich's combined.
“Mitt wants to run. He never stopped wanting to run,” a senior member of his 2012 team told me. Other Romney-ites, watching this cycle’s candidates falling short, feel a sense of vindication after all the attacks they endured after Romney's failed 2012 bid. "These guys like Walker and Perry, they were big deals in their states, but you get them onto the national stage and it's a different story," a former Romney adviser told me. "It's like they were in middle school, and now they're freshmen in high school and they're getting their faces slammed in the toilets." Another former Romney adviser complained about Bush's decision not to go all-in on New Hampshire, a state a moderate must win. "Romney did 100 town halls in New Hampshire from announcement to the primary. It's madness. Bush has done only 23."
In reality, the prospect of Romney jumping back into the race at this late date remains exceedingly slim — he’s made no visible signs of reassembling his political operation. But he may be able to influence the race more indirectly from the perch he’s begun carving out for himself as party elder.
It's a role that’s surprising to many Republicans who openly mocked Romney’s loss to Obama. (In his memoir, Unintimidated, Scott Walker wrote, “Reagan did not dismiss 47 percent of the country as a bunch of moochers,” a reference to Romney’s infamous assessment of the electorate.) But Romney's rehabilitation campaign began with his starring role in last year’s documentary Mitt and continued with his charity boxing match against Evander Holyfield this spring. It turns out that Romney the noncandidate connects with the public in a way Romney the gaffe-prone plutocrat candidate never did. So much so that Romney openly flirted with a third White House run this winter. “When people were polling this stuff back in January, what was striking was not his popularity but the breadth of it,” says Stuart Stevens, Romney’s chief 2012 strategist. “Unlike a lot of candidates, his support wasn’t siloed. The non-tea-party folks liked him, and the tea-party folks liked him. It’s unique.”
The new Mitt is a lot more fun than the old Mitt. Photo: George Frey/Getty Images
Today, Romney is the closest thing the Republican Party has to an elder statesman. After the Charleston church massacre in June, he was the first prominent Republican to call for removing the Confederate flag from the South Carolina statehouse. “To many, it is a symbol of racial hatred,” he tweeted. Hours later, Bush and Rubio called for the flag to come down. Another sign of Romney's influence: All summer, Establishment candidates aggressively courted him. Over Fourth of July weekend, Christie and Rubio bunked down at his New Hampshire lakefront mansion. A few days later, Jeb Bush invited Romney to the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport. “He’s like a counselor to these candidates,” says a veteran of Romney's 2012 campaign, who noted that Kasich speaks with Romney as well. “No one has gone wire to wire, beginning to end two cycles in a row. He has a lot of knowledge to share.”
Most important, he has money to share, lots and lots of it. Romney’s vast donor network is a coveted asset, and Romney’s finance wizard, SpencerZwick, who raised $1 billion for him in 2012, remains unaffiliated with any campaign (Zwick now chairs the super-pac America Rising). “Mitt actually attracted new donor groups,” says the Romney veteran. “They’re in the Mormon community, the Bain Capital community, and the private-equity community. Most of them are not going to jump in for anyone else until they get guidance. Romney delivers them.” This is why six GOP presidential contenders went west to prospect for millions at Romney’s three-day Utah summit in June. “With Romney, it’s just so bizarre,” the veteran said, marveling at Romney's power to organize a cattle call. “Imagine Bob Dole. He’s out of office and he says, ‘I want all my donors to come to some hard-to-reach place.' That’s just never going to happen.”
The ultimate prize for winning the Romney primary, of course, is an endorsement. Romney has said he has no plans to throw his weight behind a candidate until the party selects a nominee. In private, he likes Rubio the most on a personal level, a close adviser told me. He’s also said to enjoy Christie’s company. With Bush and Walker, it’s more complicated. While Romney remains friendly with the principals, relations between their camps are frayed. Walker’s decision to slam Romney in his memoir particularly rankled.
But during primary season, a Romney endorsement would likely just rile up the raging anti-Establishment base. Says one Romney-ite, "He's more valuable in a general."
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Trees Outnumber Humans 400 To 1
Scientists have determined the number of trees on Earth: 3.04 trillion
New tally shows the trees outnumber us 400 to 1
Deborah Netburn
Los Angeles Times
How many trees are there on planet Earth?
Los Angeles Times
How many trees are there on planet Earth?
A new study estimates the number at somewhere around 3.04 trillion.
That's about 400 trees for every person.
And while that may seem like a lot, the researchers say that before humans began clearing forests, the Earth was home to nearly twice as many trees.
"The number of trees cut down is almost 3 trillion since the start of human civilization" said Thomas Crowther, a postdoctoral fellow at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies who led the study. "That is an astronomical figure."
Previous estimates of the Earth's current tree population put the number of trees at 400.25 billion -- nearly an order of magnitude less than the new tally.
(And just so we are all on the same page, the authors define "tree" as a plant with a woody stem that
is at least 10 centimeters wide at breast height.)
is at least 10 centimeters wide at breast height.)
Scientists say the discrepancy has to do with how the two estimates were calculated. Earlier studies used satellite data to determine how many trees were living on Earth, but it was tricky because while satellites can accurately detect what areas of the planet are forested, in most cases they cannot see individual trees.
"Satellite images can tell you a lot about the forest area and canopy cover, but what we provide is a more detailed understanding of what is going on beneath the surface," Crowther said.
The new study, published in Nature, incorporates satellite imagery, but it also relies on 429,775 ground-based measurements of tree density, where a physical person counted the number of trees in a given area.
"That is truly an amazing amount of field data," said Marc Simard, a senior scientist in the Radar Science and Engineering section of Jet Propulsion Laboratory who was not involved with the study. "And it enables the discovery of relationships between tree density, remote sensing measurements and environmental factors."
The ground based data mostly came from national forest inventories. The authors were able to track them down from every continent except Antarctica.
Once the researchers had these ground-based data points, they could then use computer models to predict how many trees would be in a given area where only satellite and climate information was available.
Crowther and his colleagues report that more than 40% of the trees on our planet (1.39 trillion) are located in tropical and subtropical forests.
The next largest percentage of trees (24.2%) can be found in the boreal and tundra zones of Canada, Russia and northern China where hearty coniferous trees grow in the densest forests on Earth.
The remaining tree population (21.8%) can be found in more temperate parts of the world including the United States and Europe.
To determine how many trees used to be on the planet, Crowther's team overlaid its new map of tree density on top of the United Nations Environment Program's (UNEP) prediction of where forests used to be based on the climate conditions of the pre-Pleistocene period.
"Using our map, we could then identify how many trees that were within this area," Crowther said.
The team used a similar technique to estimate that the planet is losing 15 billion trees a year, and replacing only 5 billion of them.
"If you do the math the net loss is about 1/3 of a percent of all trees globally," said Harry Glick, a post-doctoral student at Yale who also worked on the study. "That's not insignificant."
Crowther added that one of the most dominant themes of the study is how large an effect humans are having on the tree population on the planet.
"Human activity came out as the strongest control on tree density across all biomes," he said. "It really highlights how big of an impact humans are having on the Earth on a global scale."
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Tom Toles Cartoon: The Relationship Between Money And Ideas In The GOP
The Only Idea
(other than self-terrorization)
Jenny McCarthy: Poster Girl For Self-Terrorization
http://paxonbothhouses.
"Self-Terrorization Is The National Pastime"
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http://paxonbothhouses.
"Ebola Represents A Trivial Threat To Americans' Health"
http://paxonbothhouses.
http://paxonbothhouses.
"Self-Terrorization Is The National Pastime"
http://paxonbothhouses.
http://paxonbothhouses.
http://paxonbothhouses.
http://paxonbothhouses.
http://paxonbothhouses.
http://paxonbothhouses.
http://paxonbothhouses.
http://paxonbothhouses.
http://paxonbothhouses.
http://paxonbothhouses.
"Ebola Represents A Trivial Threat To Americans' Health"
http://paxonbothhouses.
"Shark Attacks Rise Worldwide: Risk Assessment and Aquinas' Criteria For Sin"
"Faulty Risk Assessment And The Epidemic Spread Of Self-Terrorization
"The Death Of Epistemology"
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Seahorse Dads, Human Moms Have a Lot in Common
Seahorses reside in the only family in the animal kingdom, whose males handle pregnancy --Syngnathidae.
The proud fathers carry their future horses in a brood pouch for about 24 days of gestation.
Until now, science has always been a bit foggy on just how much of a role these dads play in providing essential nutrients to their young during pregnancy. But new research just published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution asserts that male seahorses do much more to nourish the young they carry than previously realized -- to the point of being awfully, well, mammalian.
The Quirky Beauty Of Sea Horses: Photos
"Surprisingly, seahorse dads do a lot of the same things human moms do," study co-author Camilla Whittington, of the University of Sydney's School of Biological Sciences, said in a press release.
"Seahorse babies get a lot of nutrients via the egg yolk provided by their mothers," Whittington explained, "but the pouch of the fathers has also evolved to meet the complex challenges of providing additional nutrients and immunological protection, and ensuring gas exchange and waste removal."
Whittington and her team think it's likely that papa seahorses deliver such care by secreting into the brood pouch essential nutrients such as lipids (for energy) and calcium (for skeleton-making). The embryos then absorb those nutrients.
Five Fantastic Animal Fathers: Photos
The researchers also found, via analysis of brood pouch samples, that seahorses switch genes on and off during pregnancy in a manner similar to humans.
"Regardless of your species," said Whittington, "pregnancy presents a number of complex challenges, like ensuring you can provide oxygen and nutrients to your embryos. We have evolved independently to meet these challenges, but our research suggests that even distantly related animals use similar genes to manage pregnancy and produce healthy offspring."
Have a look at the video below, if you're curious to see how the male seahorse sends its young out into the world.
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Weird Genitalia In The Animal Kingdom
Weird Genitalia In The Animal Kingdom
Alan: 35 years ago, an "asexual" friend pointed out that sex acts are funny to observe.
Remove the blind passion and the observable morphology of sexual interaction is just silly.
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The Rare Risk Of "A Good War" And The Ubiquitous Risk Of Crazed Belligerence
The Rare Risk Of Meaningful War
And The Ubiquitous Risk Of Flag-Waving, Hormonally-Driven War With Designated Enemies
"Why of course the people don't want war... Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.... Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought along to do the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." Hermann Goering, Adolf Hitler's Deputy Chief and Luftwaffe Commander, at the Nuremberg trials, 1946.
"Do War's Really Defend America's Freedom?"
(Homage To Marine Commandant, Major General Smedley Butler,
The Most Decorated Marine Of His Time)
"Risk, Perpective And The War On Terror"
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Trump Family Fortune Began With Booze And Prostitution
Donald Trump's Grandfather Friedrich Trump (Drumpf)
Booze Peddler and Whoremonger
The Man Who Made Trump Who He Is
How Grandpa Friedrich, who amassed the first Trump fortune by peddling booze and "sporting ladies," explains The Donald.
One hundred and thirty years ago, in 1885, Friedrich Trump stepped off a boat in lower Manhattan with a single suitcase. Only sixteen years old, he had left a note for his widowed mother on the kitchen table back in Kallstadt, a village in southwestern Germany, and slipped off in the middle of the night. He didn’t want to work in the family vineyard or get a job as a barber, the profession for which he’d been trained. He wanted to become rich, and America was the place to do it.
Friedrich wasted no time, and he did it by pushing the behavioral boundaries of his time, much as his grandson Donald would a century later. By the early 1890s, Friedrich had learned English; morphed from a skinny teenager into an adult man with a handlebar moustache; become a naturalized U.S. citizen, an easy matter at a time when there were no immigration quotas (much less debates about “birthright”); changed the spelling of his name to the more American-sounding Frederick; and made his way to Seattle, a wide-open city filled with single, rootless newcomers who’d arrived expecting to make their fortunes but found themselves facing the same uncertain economic prospects they’d wanted to leave behind.
A quick study, Trump headed for a prime location, the city’s red-light district, known as the Lava Beds. There he leased a tiny storefront restaurant named the Poodle Dog, which had a kitchen and a bar and advertised “private rooms for ladies”–code for prostitutes. It would allow the resourceful Trump, who renamed it the Dairy Restaurant, to offer the restless, frustrated public some right-now satisfaction in the form of food, booze and easily available sex.
A quick study, Trump headed for a prime location, the city’s red-light district, known as the Lava Beds. There he leased a tiny storefront restaurant named the Poodle Dog, which had a kitchen and a bar and advertised “private rooms for ladies”–code for prostitutes. It would allow the resourceful Trump, who renamed it the Dairy Restaurant, to offer the restless, frustrated public some right-now satisfaction in the form of food, booze and easily available sex.
Today the media are busily looking for clues as to what makes Donald Trump, this brash billionaire with the blond comb-over, tick. Was it an Oedipal thing with his father? Sibling rivalries? His mother’s divided attention? Military school?
The short answer is that each of the above played a role. But as I found when I wrote a book about Donald, his father, and his grandfather, what has defined the current candidate for president more than anything else is a family culture of doing whatever it takes to come out on top and never giving up. As I retraced the route taken by his immigrant grandfather, an epic journey that started in Kallstadt and went all the way to the Yukon gold fields, I saw that he was carving a path not just for himself but for generations of Trumps to come. A century later, Donald would use basically the same MO as Friedrich—nabbing the best locations and offering customers an almost cartoon-like version of their heart’s desire—to become a billionaire.
Friedrich Trump's Seattle restaurant flourished, but he kept his ears open—another aspect of the Trump family MO. In 1894, he heard that John D. Rockefeller, the wealthiest man in the world, was bankrolling a mining operation in a small town north of Seattle named Monte Cristo. Without delay, Trump scoped out the best location there, secured it by filing a bogus mineral claim, built a hotel on the parcel even though it didn’t actually belong to him, and began giving the customers, once again, exactly what they wanted: plenty to eat, lots to drink and of course women.
When Monte Cristo proved slow to deliver on its promise, Rockefeller publicly reiterated his support while secretly arranging an exit. In the summer of 1897, Trump also decided to cash out and return to Seattle—making him, along with Rockefeller, one of the few investors in Monte Cristo to end up winners rather than losers.
The reason for Trump’s departure was that steamers filled with Yukon gold had pulled into Puget Sound. Overnight, hordes of what were known as stampeders began heading north to the Yukon, hauling their picks and shovels on a perilous journey by foot across snow-covered mountain passes. But Trump had no intention of either hauling or digging. Instead he opened trailside restaurants—creating his own private gold rush by mining the would-be miners.
In the New Arctic Restaurant and Hotel, which he opened in the raw new town of Bennett in May 1898, he again offered “private boxes” for ladies, facilities that included not only a bed, but a scale for weighing the gold dust used to pay for services. It was the best restaurant in town, one newspaper reported at the time, but added that it “would not advise respectable women to go there to sleep as they are liable to hear that which would be repugnant to their feelings and uttered, too, by the depraved of their own sex.”
By June 1900, he was living in White Horse, a Yukon outpost at the end of the newly built railroad but hundreds of miles south of the gold fields, and he was the proprietor of yet another eatery, the Arctic Restaurant. Once again, he had chosen a prime location, across the street from the railroad depot; once again he had built on land for which he did not have a valid legal claim; and once again he was deploying the Trump formula of giving customers still in search of their first nugget something they could enjoy on the spot—a bar, gambling facilities and separate areas, curtained off with dark velvet, for what were known as “sporting ladies.”
By June 1900, he was living in White Horse, a Yukon outpost at the end of the newly built railroad but hundreds of miles south of the gold fields, and he was the proprietor of yet another eatery, the Arctic Restaurant. Once again, he had chosen a prime location, across the street from the railroad depot; once again he had built on land for which he did not have a valid legal claim; and once again he was deploying the Trump formula of giving customers still in search of their first nugget something they could enjoy on the spot—a bar, gambling facilities and separate areas, curtained off with dark velvet, for what were known as “sporting ladies.”
Trump didn’t know it, but the burst of prosperity in White Horse would be short-lived. Gold deposits in the Yukon were already played out, and the next round of stampeders would head west to newly discovered gold fields in Alaska.
But Trump did know that he was facing a more immediate and urgent problem—what was known at that time as “propriety” but today would be termed “political correctness.” In the spring of 1901, the North West Mounted Police superintendent who oversaw White Horse announced a plan to suppress gambling and liquor sales and to banish “the scarlet women” from the center of town.
Trump didn’t wait to find out whether the Arctic Restaurant could survive such a blow. Like many in the midst of a gold rush, he had made money; more rare, he had hung onto it. After selling off his interests, he left town with a hefty nest egg—once again emerging a winner from a situation where there would be no end of losers.
A year later, on a visit to his mother in Kallstadt, he became engaged to the girl next door, Elizabeth Christ, who had been only five when he left for America. After they wed, Trump brought her to New York and started over, working as a barber and a hotel and restaurant manager while keeping an eye out for the next big thing. But she was desperately homesick, and in 1894 he and Elizabeth returned with their new baby girl to Kallstadt—and to the reckoning he had never expected to face.
The problem was that he’d left when he was too young to do military service, which was compulsory, and he was returning only a few months after his thirty-fifth birthday, which made him too old to serve. Fortunately, there was a solution at hand—or so it seemed. First he would deposit his savings—80,000 marks, a stupendous sum at the time and worth a still-handsome $582,000 today—in the village treasury; then, swearing that he had never intended to cut out on the military but simply to support his mother and describing himself as “a man who avoids bars” and leads “a quiet life,” he would petition to be allowed to stay and to regain his German citizenship.
The problem was that he’d left when he was too young to do military service, which was compulsory, and he was returning only a few months after his thirty-fifth birthday, which made him too old to serve. Fortunately, there was a solution at hand—or so it seemed. First he would deposit his savings—80,000 marks, a stupendous sum at the time and worth a still-handsome $582,000 today—in the village treasury; then, swearing that he had never intended to cut out on the military but simply to support his mother and describing himself as “a man who avoids bars” and leads “a quiet life,” he would petition to be allowed to stay and to regain his German citizenship.
It was a power play—his grandson Donald would call it “using leverage”—and the mayor and town council, keen to keep this wealthy hometown boy and his future taxes in Kallstadt, were eager to add their endorsement. But despite their efforts, the regional authorities refused to let Trump off the hook. Unlike his grandson, who would become too big to fail in business and, more recently, to ignore in politics, Friedrich Trump was not big enough to get away with being a draft-dodger. He and his wife, then pregnant with Fred, Donald’s father, would not be allowed to resume their German citizenship and it would not be extended to their daughter; instead, they were deported—the same fate that Donald would like to impose on undocumented immigrants in the U.S. today.
It was a heavy blow, but Frederick Trump was not about to give up. This was merely a setback; he was a winner, not a loser. He had come to America to be rich, and he would hold to that dream. Over the next few years, he cut hair and managed restaurants and hotels, all the while keeping his eye out for the main chance. By 1910, he’d found it: Queens, an underdeveloped borough with considerable promise. After moving his family there, he opened an office and bought a handful of properties. Had things gone as he expected, he might have been the first Trump to become a real estate titan; instead, he died in 1918, during the Spanish Influenza epidemic, leaving it to his son Fred, 12, to take the embryonic Trump real estate empire to the next level.
At first glance, Fred seemed to be the anti-Frederick. A methodical man—his youngest son, Robert, called him “a plow horse”—Fred held his head down, tended to the details, and kept his nose to the grindstone 24/7.
But he had not forgotten the lessons handed down by his father. Always stay alert; always think creatively, otherwise known as stretching the truth, as Frederick himself had done in Monte Cristo and White Horse and in his efforts at repatriation; and never give up.
Accordingly, during the Great Depression, when Fred Trump’s construction business tanked, he put everything on hold, took a job running a grocery store, and kept his eye on what was going on around him. When he learned of court hearings over what to do with the assets of a local mortgage company, he didn’t hesitate to present himself as a prosperous real estate executive. It was a flat-out lie—but it would set him on the path to becoming one of the largest developers in Brooklyn and Queens.
Later on, when government-backed mortgage guarantees and tax abatements allowed him to construct thousands of housing units, Fred widened his profit margin by adroit use of gaping loopholes in government regulations. Thus, for example, when building apartments financed through the Federal Housing Authority after World War II, he exploited regulations that paid him by the room rather than by the unit, turning out a high proportion of small one-bedrooms and studios rather than the roomy three and four bedroom apartments families needed and FHA architects had intended.
Like his father, he focused not on customers’ long-term goals but on what they wanted right now. Many were returning GIs seeking a roof over their head during a nation-wide housing shortage, and the apartments were rented immediately.
In the mid-50s, when he was building apartments financed by New York state, Fred Trump found more loopholes. He set up shell equipment companies and then rented bulldozers and dump trucks from them at inflated prices; he overestimated the cost of construction and pocketed the difference when he came in remarkably far under budget; and when called to account before a state commission, he made the case that his huge profits were not unethical because that was what he was good at and it was the way it should be.
In the 1970s, when Donald came into the family business, these same lessons from his grandfather and father would provide the template for everything he did. He gave his customers not what they thought they wanted but what they actually wanted, buildings that were big and brassy, full of mirrors and shiny surfaces. Known for being hands-on with every construction project, he cut costs on Trump Tower by using undocumented Polish demolition workers who were paid an under-the-table $5 an hour and slept on the building site, but he later testified in court that he hadn’t noticed them. When construction was stalled on his first Atlantic City casino, he misrepresented this state of affairs to visiting executives from his partner on the project, Holiday Inns, by directing bulldozer drivers to dig pointless holes and pile up dirt—a subterfuge he later bragged about in his first book, The Art Of The Deal. He kept going through setbacks—divorces, corporate bankruptcies and projects that seemed to have run into stone walls—always spinning a positive scenario in which he was coming out on top and everyone else was left in the dust.
And regardless of the circumstances, he insisted that he was a winner, everyone else was a loser, end of story. Whether such a binary approach can carry him through a campaign, with its incessant demand for responses to a wide range of issues, remains to be seen. But as he goes forward, he will be drawing on the tenacious, envelope-pushing legacy of his grandfather. His sister Maryanne, a federal judge in northern New Jersey once summarized it for me. No matter what was going on, she said, her father always told her what he had learned from Friedrich: “You can do it if you try.”
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Are Guns Needed As Defense Against Government? The Soviet Union Collapsed Bloodlessly
Alan: Many Americans have a romantic view of "revolution" just as they romanticize The Second Amendment as protection against tyrannical government.
When the center no longer holds, things fall apart.
Until then, armed conflict is a catastrophic alternative to cultivating popular disaffection to propel implosion.
The 20th century's most sprawling dictatorship of the 20th collapsed -- without a shot being fired -- from its own dead weight.
It is not necessary to explode what is destined to implode.
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Chris Christie Tries To Put Girl Down At Town Hall Meeting. She's Right; He's A Liar
So Chris Christie is stumping around New Hampshire, clinging to his debate slot in the Top Tier of Donald Trump and the Other Republican Losers like it’s the last however many $1500 buys you in hot dogs and beers at the MetLife Stadium concession stand. Here he is in Manchester, saying climate change is real, and of course humans contribute to it:
Lemme tell you, the climate’s been changing forever, and it will always continue to change. Does human activity contribute to it? Of course it does. We all contribute to it in one way or the other. By breathing we contribute to it.
And here he is, about four weeks later, talking to a roomful of olds, insisting to apparently the one person in the room who is not some old — we’ll just call her Young Lady — that he never said that:
YOUNG LADY: On August 4th, here in new Hampshire at one of our town meetings, you said that humans contribute to climate change by breathing.CHRISTIE: No I didn’t.
YOUNG LADY: Do you really believe that humans exhaling carbon dioxide contributes to climate change?CHRISTIE: Listen — give me my microphone back.
Then all the olds laugh — ha ha, that Gov. Christie, he really told her, didn’t he? YA BURNT, Young Lady (but however olds says that). But Young Lady is smarter than a New Jersey governor, and also a roomful of olds, and she knows she is right, and he is wrong, so says she wants a response because she really cares about this issue, and that’s when the governor makes his patented Being An Angry Dick Nubbin move, by being an angry dick nubbin:
I know you really care about this stuff, but you know what? The first thing you need to do is not be wrong and not quote me incorrectly. I never said that humans contribute to climate change by breathing. […] I don’t care what date you said it was, I never said it. What I said was — were you there? Oh yeah, you heard that? Well, you need to clean out your ears then, young lady. Ridiculous statement. I never said it.
Read more at http://wonkette.com/593595/heres-chris-christie-being-a-dick-to-some-girl-because-it-is-a-day#vU5U7thOGQECt3GS.99
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Borowitz: Party That Mocked Obama’s Lack of Experience Favors Candidates with No Experience
Trump Family Fortune Began With Booze And Prostitution
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Republicans, who mercilessly mocked Barack Obama’s lack of government experience before he became President, now favor Presidential candidates with no experience whatsoever, the head of the Republican National Committee has confirmed. Read more at newyorker.com.
"Are Republicans Insane?" Best Pax Posts http://paxonbothhouses.
"American Conservatives And Oppositional-Defiant Disorder" http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/09/arrested-development-american.html
"Republicans For Revolution," A Study In Anarchic Apocalypticism Bill Maher: The Zombie Life Cycle Of Republican Lies. They Never - Ever - Die
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Donald Trump Signs Pledge. Why Would He "Sign" Rather Than Pledge?
Alan: The need for a signature indicates that Republican candidates cannot be taken at their word.
If you can't be taken at your word, a signature won't mean much either.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/donald-trump-run-party-campaign-signed-pledge/story?id=33514485&google_editors_picks=true
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"GOP Presidential Candidates Seek Higher Taxes, Bank Break-Up And End To Corporate Welfare"
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2015/08/republican-candidates-seek-higher-taxes.html
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Is There A Planet X, A "Massive Perturber," Hidden Beyond Pluto?
An image provided by NASA on July 14 shows a region near Pluto's equator with a range of mountains captured by the New Horizons spacecraft.
If you’ve been following our coverage of the New Horizons mission, you know that the NASA probe had a spectacular fly-by of Pluto on July 14 and, if the agency approves the funding, will scrutinize a “cold, classical" Kuiper Belt Object on New Year’s Day, 2019. It’s basically a chunk of ice and rock, maybe about the size of the District of Columbia. [See Rachel Feltman's explanation of why astronomers are interested in these things.]
Astronomers so far have detected about 1,500 icy bodies in the Kuiper Belt, according to Scott Sheppard, an astronomer with the Carnegie Institution of Washington. A few of them are big enough to rank as "dwarf planets." And there may be something much bigger lurking out there in the dark, says Sheppard. There are tantalizing hints of a hidden planet that's bigger than Pluto, perhaps even bigger than the Earth -- potentially Neptune-sized.
“I think there are definitely things out there bigger than Pluto that are yet to be discovered,” Sheppard told us.
Sheppard and Chad Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii published a paper in the journal Nature in 2014 saying that “a massive outer Solar System perturber may exist.” The paper reported discovery of what appears to be a dwarf planet, dubbed 2012 VP113 (nicknamed “Biden”), that's currently about three times farther from the sun than is Pluto -- out beyond Kuiper Belt. In describing this new world, the astronomers noted that a number of large, very remote objects share a similar orbital angle. That's suspicious if you're an astronomer expecting to see a random distribution of objects.
The key orbital feature is known, rather obtusely, as the “argument of perihelion.” We're not shy of complicated orbital concepts (we try to toss around the phrase "obliquity of the ecliptic" whenever possible), but this one is not very easy to explain. "The argument of perihelion is the angle at which an object comes to perihelion with respect to the ecliptic plane," Sheppard said in an e-mail. Mike Brown, the Caltech astronomer who discovered the dwarf planet Eris, tells us by e-mail, "Scott's claim is that all of these objects come to perihelion at the ecliptic, and all are going from below the plane to above the plane at perihelion."
So there's something seemingly non-random, indeed a striking pattern, in how these extremely distant objects move around the sun. And that suggests that there's something out there influencing them -- or, more precisely, making other types of orbits unstable.
Sheppard explains by e-mail the concept of the "disturber":
A massive object or great disturber would perturb or disturb anything that came close to it. So objects that stay away from the great disturber would be the most stable objects. Thus the great disturber can “shepherd” objects into similar types of orbits with similar arguments of perihelion which are the orbits which constantly keep the smaller objects away from the bigger object. This is seen in the Near Earth asteroids, where there is a preference for Near Earth Asteroids to have certain orbital angles to keep them away from close encounters with the Earth.
There might be some other explanation for the observed phenomenon. Hypotheses welcome.
“It’s at the level right now where we are banging our heads on the wall seeing if there’s another explanation," Brown said.
Sometimes patterns involving small numbers of objects or events disappear upon further investigation. The 2014 paper was based on just a dozen objects. But Sheppard is preparing a new paper based on more recent discoveries: "We found a few more extreme Kuiper Belt objects and they continue to follow the trend," he said in an e-mail.
This simulated flyover of Pluto's Norgay Mountains and Sputnik Plain was created from New Horizons' closest-approach images.
Video: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2015/09/03/is-there-a-planet-x-a-massive-perturber-hidden-beyond-pluto/
So then, how would such a big planet get way out there? Brown hypothesizes that, long ago, the planet formed closer to the sun, and might have been the core of what would have become a giant planet like Jupiter or Saturn. But then it could have been ejected toward the outer solar system through gravitational interactions with other giant planets.
If this Planet X is out there, why can't we see it directly? Because it's very far away and commensurately faint. It could be at least 200 Astronomical Units from the sun -- meaning 200 times farther from the sun than is the Earth. These hypothetical planets, dwarf or otherwise, don't generate their own light, and can only be seen through the feeble reflected light of the sun.
Sheppard notes that much of the sky hasn't been searched with extremely sensitive instruments capable of finding such a world.
“We have not covered the whole sky to the faint depths needed to find distant planets,” Sheppard said.
If you could visit this gloomy, cold world, what would it be like?
“It’d be quite different than anything we know now. It would be very big and it would be quite frozen. It would resemble a giant frozen snowball,” Sheppard said.
Obviously this falls into the category of We'll Believe It When We See It. But this is not a fringe idea, nor should it be confused with the pseudo-scientific notion that there's some scary planet out there called Nibiru.
The solar system is not completely explored. As Brown puts it: "There is a not insignificant chance that there are Earth-mass or larger objects yet to be discovered in the outer solar system."
Further Reading:
Joel Achenbach writes on science and politics for the Post's national desk and on the "Achenblog."
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Police Officer Confesses Having Shot His Own Cruiser, Spinning Larger Yarn
Millis, Massachusetts Police Say Officer Shot Own Cruiser, Fabricated Story
http://boston.cbslocal.com/2015/09/03/millis-police-shooting-search-for-suspect/
American Cops Fire More Bullets At One NYC Man Than All German Cops Fire In A Yearhttp://paxonbothhouses.
American Cops Fire More Bullets At One NYC Man Than All German Cops Fire In A Year
1 Small Town's Cops Have Killed More People Than Combined Police Of Germany And U.K.
http://paxonbothhouses.
Why Police Don't Pull Guns In Many Countries Whereas U.S. Cops Are Trained To Kill
There's Never Been A Safer Time For Cops Nor A More Dangerous Time For Criminals
http://paxonbothhouses.
http://paxonbothhouses.
50 Police Officers Shot & Killed In 2014. Huge, Steady Decline Since 1970s
http://paxonbothhouses.
Diane Rehm Guest Gets To The Nub Of Police Violence And How Easily It's Prevented
"After My Mugging C. 1970, The Police Pressured Me To Give False Testimony"
"After My Mugging C. 1970, The Police Pressured Me To Give False Testimony"
Compendium Of Pax Posts: What's Wrong With Race Relations?
Hatred, Cops And The Law
http://paxonbothhouses.
We Coddle Bad Cops And Vilify Good Teachers
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/09/we-coddle-bad-cops-and-vilify-good.html
Compendium Of Pax Posts On Violent Criminals And Violent Police
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Parents Shocked After Boy, 4, Dies From Chicken Pox
4 Year Old, Euan Harbottle
Dead From Chicken Pox
Dead From Chicken Pox
"Roald Dahl Lost His Daughter To Measles In 1962Here Is His Advice Letter"http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2015/02/roald-dahl-lost-his-daughter-to-measles.html
"The Death Of Epistemology: Anti-Vaccine Epert (And Playboy Model) Jenny McCarthy"
http://paxonbothhouses.
http://paxonbothhouses.
http://paxonbothhouses.
"Roald Dahl Lost His Daughter To Measles In 1962
Here Is His Advice Letter"
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2015/02/roald-dahl-lost-his-daughter-to-measles.html"The Death Of Epistemology: Anti-Vaccine Epert (And Playboy Model) Jenny McCarthy"
http://paxonbothhouses.
http://paxonbothhouses.
http://paxonbothhouses.
http://paxonbothhouses.
http://paxonbothhouses.
http://paxonbothhouses.
The Anti-Vaccination Epidemic Is Fueled By "Education," Wealth And Privilegehttp://paxonbothhouses.
Jenny McCarthy: Poster Girl For Self-Terrorization
http://paxonbothhouses.
The Anti-Vaccination Epidemic Is Fueled By "Education," Wealth And Privilege
http://paxonbothhouses.
Jenny McCarthy: Poster Girl For Self-Terrorization
http://paxonbothhouses.
Jenny McCarthy: Poster Girl For Self-Terrorization
http://paxonbothhouses.
Parents shocked after boy, 4, dies from chicken pox
Parents of a four-year-old boy who died from chicken pox said they had no idea the disease "could lead to this."
When Euan Harbottle from Dumfriesand Galloway, UK, came down with the chicken pox earlier this year, his parents Harry Harbottle and Sian Roberts thought their son would have some spots and a high temperature.
Instead, doctors told the parents Euan had developed blood poisoning, sepsis, as a result of his weakened immune system.
"He was never a sickly wee boy," Euan's dad Harry Harbottle, 66, told the Daily Record. "He was such a healthy, happy, bright, lively, fit four-and-a-half-year-old."
"For him to be taken away from us and his brother and sister as the result of a complication from a normal childhood illness is not something that is easy to come to terms with. We're heartbroken by his loss."
In January, Euan contracted the chicken pox, a highly contagious viral disease. Less than 24 hours after seeing their GP, Euan's condition deteriorated and he was rushed to hospital.
Hours later, Euan died.
"Everything happened very quickly," said Harry. "When Euan got it, we had him checked out by our doctor but we weren't worried that anything was overly wrong."
"He went to bed that night but in the morning things had changed and we could see how ill he was.
"He hadn't been wanting to drink much but suddenly he was drinking a lot of water.
"We rushed him to hospital thinking they would maybe put him on a drip, get some fluid into him and he would be fine – but that's not how things worked out."
Euan has two siblings, an older brother, Rowan, 8, and a younger sister, 18 months.
Mum, Sian Roberts, 41, said, "His older brother Rowan fell ill with chicken pox the day I brought Euan home from hospital as a newborn.
"At the time, we had been worried about our newborn baby getting chicken pox so young but now I wonder if we might still have him if he had got chicken pox then.
"Our daughter Erin got chicken pox on the day of Euan's funeral but thankfully she was fine."
In memory of their son, the family are fundraising for an £80,000 (AUD$175, 347) play space in his favourite park by the harbour.
Harry said: "Although Euan's life was very, very short, he packed a lot of fun into it.
"He loved playing outdoors, running along the beach, watching the stormy waves come crashing in, climbing rocks and looking out to the sea while swinging on a swing."
Dr Helen Webberley, the dedicated GP for Oxford Online Pharmacy told the Huffington Post that parents should always trust their instincts when it comes to their children and see a doctor.
"This is a really tragic case which highlights how important it is not to become complacent about common childhood illnesses," she says.
"I would always recommend that any parent who is concerned about their child's health see a doctor as soon as possible. Sadly, even in the case of a routine childhood illness there will always be a tiny proportion of fatalities."
Harry said, "We have to accept that what happened to Euan was very rare and very unlucky.
"He was such a lovely, clever and generous boy and we are so proud of him."
- essentialkids.com.au
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More Police Officers Were Shot Dead In 1955 When U.S. Population Was Half What It Is Now
Alan: One killed cop is one too many.
One killed civilian (who did not represent a mortal threat to anyone) is one too many.
But facts are intractable things and both civilian killings -- and cop killings -- are way down.
Right-wing alarmism tells us otherwise.
But it isn't so.
Lists Of Americans Killed By Cops In 2013, 2014, 2015
http://paxonbothhouses.
http://paxonbothhouses.
Compendium Of Pax Posts: What's Wrong With Race Relations?
Harvard's Steve Pinker Notes Slight Uptick In Violence In A Much More Peaceful World
America's Real Criminal Element: Lead
Lists Of Americans Killed By Cops In 2013, 2014, 2015
http://www.killedbypolice.net/
American Cops Fire More Bullets At One NYC Man Than All German Cops Fire In A Yearhttp://paxonbothhouses.
American Cops Fire More Bullets At One NYC Man Than All German Cops Fire In A Year
1 Small Town's Cops Have Killed More People Than Combined Police Of Germany And U.K.
http://paxonbothhouses.
Why Police Don't Pull Guns In Many Countries Whereas U.S. Cops Are Trained To Kill
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2015/07/why-police-dont-pull-guns-in-many.htmlThere's Never Been A Safer Time For Cops Nor A More Dangerous Time For Criminals
http://paxonbothhouses.
http://paxonbothhouses.
50 Police Officers Shot & Killed In 2014. Huge, Steady Decline Since 1970s
http://paxonbothhouses.
Diane Rehm Guest Gets To The Nub Of Police Violence And How Easily It's Prevented
"After My Mugging C. 1970, The Police Pressured Me To Give False Testimony"
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/07/after-my-mugging-in-1970-police.html
"After My Mugging C. 1970, The Police Pressured Me To Give False Testimony"
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/07/after-my-mugging-in-1970-police.html
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/07/after-my-mugging-in-1970-police.html
Compendium Of Pax Posts: What's Wrong With Race Relations?
Hatred, Cops And The Law
http://paxonbothhouses.
We Coddle Bad Cops And Vilify Good Teachers
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/09/we-coddle-bad-cops-and-vilify-good.html
Compendium Of Pax Posts On Violent Criminals And Violent Police
Compendium Of Pax Posts On Violent Criminals And Violent Police
Officers Shot: Data Analysis Of How Often It Happens
By Jonathon Berlin, Alex Bordens, Ryan Marx, Kori Rumore
The shooting death Monday of police Lt. Charles Joseph Gliniewicz in Fox Lake brings increased attention to the safety of law enforcement and comes at a time when the national discussion of police tactics and treatment of minorities has spawned sometimes violent protests. The tragedy in Lake County comes on the heels of an officer who was killed in Houston in late August. From 2005 through 2014, gunfire was the top cause of death for law enforcement, accounting for nearly 40 percent of more than 1,400 deaths. The second leading cause is car accidents, which account for 26 percent of fatalities.
The data show that shootings in the U.S. and Illinois have remained relatively stable since 2000. In Illinois, the large majority of slain law enforcement officers were from the Chicago Police Department. According to Lake County State's Attorney Mike Nerheim, Gliniewicz's death was the first case of an officer fatally shot in Lake County since 1980.
Richard Beary, president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, said an uptick in violence can be attributed to a combination of reasons including anti-government rhetoric, unfettered access to firearms and unaddressed mental illness issues.
"None of these things need new legislation," Beary said. "They just need focus and understanding."
What can be done? To start, Beary said, enforce the gun laws that are already in place. "Unfortunately, these are not being followed. There's ambiguity from state to state on how mental health data is collected and made available for firearms purchasing decisions. We don't need to pass new legislation, we need to enforce what we have," Beary said. Also, he said, mental health problems need to be addressed as a medical issue. "Why is it law enforcement's job to deal with medical issues? You don't call police when you have a brain tumor. It's time we as a community say, 'We shouldn't be sending cops to deal with people who are sick.'" Beary said.
As far as an officer's perspective, training is important, he said. "Our message to our people is that they have to be ready to react at any time. You have to go from being Officer Friendly to Superman in a split second," he said. "What I'm worried about are extended periods of hypervigilance taking their toll on the law enforcement officers and their families emotionally."
U.S. law enforcement shooting deaths since 1950
Nationwide the number of law enforcement officers killed by gunfire peaked in the 1970s and has been slowly declining since. The total has remained around 30 killed in the last 15 years, a similar level to the decades leading up to the spike in the 1970s and early 1980s.![]()
802015, throughSept.1: 2660402019501960197019801990200020102015
Nationwide the number of law enforcement officers killed by gunfire peaked in the 1970s and has been slowly declining since. The total has remained around 30 killed in the last 15 years, a similar level to the decades leading up to the spike in the 1970s and early 1980s.
80
2015, through
Sept.1: 26
60
40
20
1950
1960
1970
1980
1990
2000
2010
2015
Illinois law enforcement shooting deaths since 1985
Of the 58 officers in Illinois killed by gunfire since 1985, nearly two thirds of the victims are Chicago Police Department. In two years since 2005, there have been four Chicago officers killed in a single year, while in the same time period there have been three years in which no officers were shot to death in the entire year.![]()
5ChicagoOther Illinois departments4322015: 111985199019952000200520102015
Of the 58 officers in Illinois killed by gunfire since 1985, nearly two thirds of the victims are Chicago Police Department. In two years since 2005, there have been four Chicago officers killed in a single year, while in the same time period there have been three years in which no officers were shot to death in the entire year.
5
Chicago
Other Illinois departments
4
3
2
2015: 1
1
1985
1990
1995
2000
2005
2010
2015
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Gospel Of Mark: Why Doesn't Kim Davis Deny Marriage Licenses To The Previously Divorced?
Kim Davis
Wikipedia
Mark 10
International Standard Version
Teaching about Divorce
10 Then Jesus[a] left that place and went into the territory of Judea on the other side[b] of the Jordan. Crowds gathered around him as usual, and he began to teach them again as was his custom. 2 Some Pharisees came to test him. They asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?”
3 “What did Moses command you?” he responded.
4 They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce and to divorce her.”[c]
5 But Jesus told them, “It was because of your hardness of heart that he wrote this command for you. 6 But from the beginning of creation, ‘God[d] made them male and female.’[e] 7 That’s why ‘a man will leave his father and mother and be united with his wife, 8 and the two will become one flesh.’[f] So they’re no longer two, but one flesh. 9 Therefore, what God has joined together, man must never separate.”
10 Back in the house, the disciples asked him about this again. 11 So he told them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her. 12 And if a woman[g] divorces her husband and marries another man, she commits adultery.”
Alan: Mark was the earliest of the four canonical evangelists.
He probably wrote between 66 and 70 A.D. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Mark
Twenty years after Mark recorded Jesus' absolute proscription of divorce (above), the evangelist Matthew wrote his account below which mirrors Mark EXCEPT for The Exception. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Matthew
I doubt any accomplished exegete would argue that Mark did not mean exactly what he said and that Matthew added The Exception because Mark's moral burden proved impossibly difficult and it became necessary to accommodate reality no matter what Jesus was recorded to have said in the earliest gospel.
He probably wrote between 66 and 70 A.D. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Mark
Twenty years after Mark recorded Jesus' absolute proscription of divorce (above), the evangelist Matthew wrote his account below which mirrors Mark EXCEPT for The Exception. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Matthew
I doubt any accomplished exegete would argue that Mark did not mean exactly what he said and that Matthew added The Exception because Mark's moral burden proved impossibly difficult and it became necessary to accommodate reality no matter what Jesus was recorded to have said in the earliest gospel.
Matthew 19
International Standard Version
Teaching about Divorce
19 When Jesus had finished saying these things,[a] he left Galilee and went to the territory of Judea on the other side[b] of the Jordan. 2 Large crowds followed him, and he healed them there.
3 Some Pharisees came to him in order to test him. They asked, “Is it lawful for a man[c] to divorce his wife for any reason?”
4 He answered them, “Haven’t you read that the one who made[d] them at the beginning ‘made them male and female’[e] 5 and said, ‘That is why a man will leave his father and mother and be united with his wife, and the two will become one flesh’?[f] 6 So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, man must never separate.”
7 They asked him, “Why, then, did Moses order us ‘to give a certificate of divorce and divorce her’?”[g]
8 He told them, “It was because of your hardness of heart that Moses allowed you to divorce your wives. But from the beginning it was not this way. 9 I tell you that whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery.”[h]
Alan: Any Christian with enough courage to probe the irreconcilable complexities (contradictions?) that abound in sacred scripture may wish to read the following links.
Mistakes In Scripture: When The Bible Gets The Bible Wrong
Mistakes In Scripture: When The Bible Gets The Bible Wrong
"Is The Bible More Violent Than The Quran?"
Biblical Literalism And The Cultivation Of Hatred
Biblical Literalism And The Cultivation Of Hatred
"God Enjoys The 10 Plagues Way Too Much"
Biblical Literalism: Not Only Impossible But Destructive Of Meaning And Souls
Biblical Literalism: Not Only Impossible But Destructive Of Meaning And Souls
UNC-CH Professor Bart D. Ehrman:Biblical Exegete And Former Christian EvangelicalThe Bible and Textual Analysis
UNC-CH Professor Bart D. Ehrman:
Biblical Exegete And Former Christian Evangelical
The Bible and Textual Analysis
Seldom Sermonized Bible Quotes
Seldom Sermonized Bible Quotes
Time To Expunge Catholicism Of Traditions & Texts That Represent God As A Terrorist
http://paxonbothhouses.
"Trial By Ordeal: The Bloody Old Testamental Roots Of Modern Justice"
"Trial By Ordeal: Alive And Well Into The 17th Century"
ISIS And The Inquisition: The Shadow Side Of Religion. Why Does Belief Do This?"What ISIS Really Wants" And How The Patriarch Abraham Appears To Be The Instigator
Christianity's Bedrock Commitment To Torture: Remaking "The Faithful" In God's Image
Christianity's Bedrock Commitment To Torture: Remaking "The Faithful" In God's Image
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The Cheerful Upside Of Absolutism... And Its Deadly Downside Under Stress
Dear Ed,
Thanks for your email.
It is a persistent irony that simple, uncomplicated people who subscribe to absolutist belief systems are often extremely sweet.
Absolutism so simplifies Life that implicit faith in an orderly, meaningful universe whose providential over-Lord guides believers to happy ends (even when those ends are painfully "mysterious") simultaneously disables them from understanding "random chance" and the role chance plays in the underpinnings of Rationality and Science.
"No, It's Not Your Opinion. You're Just Wrong"
Taken together, Rationality and Science provide the only Matrix of Meaning that avoids The Swamp of Superstition and the apotheosis of personal opinion as ultimate arbiter of Truth. (I will mention in passing that there is a world of difference between the non-rational and the irrational.)
There is much to be said for the simple joys of absolutism.
Nothing but blue sky. (Until it turns red.)
However, when these same sweet people -- think Hutu and Tutsi (90% of whom were "good Catholics") -- perceive themselves threatened by another value system (as any massive wave of Islamic immigrants to Europe will almost certainly construe threat) then simplification's shadow manifests with vengeance.
I do not know how many Islamics advocate Sharia Law but I am profoundly suspicious of any value system that does not prioritize the primary importance of scientific finding, at least as our "point of departure" in human affairs.
Aquinas supplied penetrating insight to the proper, primary role of Reason.
But there are few devout Christians - and few devout Islamics - who undertake this prioritization.
Dear Ed,
Thanks for your email.
It is a persistent irony that simple, uncomplicated people who subscribe to absolutist belief systems are often extremely sweet.
Absolutism so simplifies Life that implicit faith in an orderly, meaningful universe whose providential over-Lord guides believers to happy ends (even when those ends are painfully "mysterious") simultaneously disables them from understanding "random chance" and the role chance plays in the underpinnings of Rationality and Science.
"No, It's Not Your Opinion. You're Just Wrong"
Taken together, Rationality and Science provide the only Matrix of Meaning that avoids The Swamp of Superstition and the apotheosis of personal opinion as ultimate arbiter of Truth. (I will mention in passing that there is a world of difference between the non-rational and the irrational.)
There is much to be said for the simple joys of absolutism.
Nothing but blue sky. (Until it turns red.)
However, when these same sweet people -- think Hutu and Tutsi (90% of whom were "good Catholics") -- perceive themselves threatened by another value system (as any massive wave of Islamic immigrants to Europe will almost certainly construe threat) then simplification's shadow manifests with vengeance.
I do not know how many Islamics advocate Sharia Law but I am profoundly suspicious of any value system that does not prioritize the primary importance of scientific finding, at least as our "point of departure" in human affairs.
Aquinas supplied penetrating insight to the proper, primary role of Reason.
But there are few devout Christians - and few devout Islamics - who undertake this prioritization.
St. Thomas Aquinas, Natural Law, and the Common Good /// Aquinas Quotations
http://paxonbothhouses.
Absent this a priori trust in The Rule of Reason, religion can -- and does -- devolve to the ugliest set of diabolical justifications the human mind can conjure.
![]()
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction." Devout Christian, Blaise Pascal
Absent this a priori trust in The Rule of Reason, religion can -- and does -- devolve to the ugliest set of diabolical justifications the human mind can conjure.
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."
Devout Christian, Blaise Pascal
"You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out God hates all the same people you do."
Fr. Tom Weston S. J.
"You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image
when it turns out God hates all the same people you do."
Fr. Tom Weston S. J.
Fr. Tom Weston S. J.
Dorothy Day: “I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.”
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/02/dorothy-day-i-really-only-love-god-as.html
Remember.
The "religious" don't just "do evil."
They do it cheerfully.
And completely.
Pax tecum,
Alan
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/02/dorothy-day-i-really-only-love-god-as.html
Remember.
The "religious" don't just "do evil."
They do it cheerfully.
And completely.
Pax tecum,
Alan
On Thu, Sep 3, 2015 at 6:14 PM, RM wrote:
Alan, RE: Fred's commentary below your missive ...
While I TOTALLY agree with "organized massive relief to Jordan and Turkey" who are taking ENORMOUS numbers of Syrian refugees, as a best option, I must say that in ALL my travels I have I not met/seen a warmer, kinder, gentler people (!) as those who welcomed (an unknown) me in Hama, Palmyra, Aleppo, Damascus ...(1995)Cheers, E
Sent from my iPhone
On Sep 3, 2015, at 1:15 PM, Alan Archibald <alanarchibaldo@gmail.com> wrote:Dear Fred,Thanks for your email.The Islamic migration to Europe is ominous.Jordan has already pushed its limits.It seems Turkey and Saudi Arabia might do more.I just had lunch with shrewd Air Force general friend, AWC.Looking out from this moment, he thinks Ben Carson will win the GOP nomination.Part of his rationale is that Carson is already running strong, gathering momentum and is the only GOP presidential candidate who will take at least some votes from Hillary.Interesting view.Pax tecum
AlanOn Thu, Sep 3, 2015 at 11:47 AM, Fred Owens <froghospital911@gmail.com> wrote:Turkey where the Syrians can reside with their fellow Muslims.Also watching the Syrian invasion of Europe. These are not nice people. They hate Europe. They hate the independence of women and the public consumption of alcohol. They appear grateful and humble now, but by next year they will be screaming for sharia. I would not let them in my country if I could help it. Instead, I would organized massive relief in Jordan and inI feel comforted by my endorsement of HC. It gives me a centrally located perch for watching the show, watching Trump smack the Mexicans without myself facing accusation of being an angry white man, and watching Bernie thunder against Wall Street.Received $75 in subscription revenue so far this week.My enthusiasm is renewed. Spread the joy.
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Do Chinese Drivers Intentionally Kill The Pedestrians They Hit?
Driven to Kill
Why drivers in China intentionally kill the pedestrians they hit.
In April a BMW racing through a fruit market in Foshan in China’s Guangdong province knocked down a 2-year-old girl and rolled over her head. As the girl’s grandmother shouted, “Stop! You’ve hit a child!” the BMW’s driver paused, then switched into reverse and backed up over the girl. The woman at the wheel drove forward once more, crushing the girl for a third time. When she finally got out from the BMW, the unlicensed driver immediately offered the horrified family a deal: “Don’t say that I was driving the car,” she said. “Say it was my husband. We can give you money.”
It seems like a crazy urban legend: In China, drivers who have injured pedestrians will sometimes then try to kill them. And yet not only is it true, it’s fairly common; securitycameras have regularly captured drivers driving back and forth on top of victims to make sure that they are dead. The Chinese language even has an adage for the phenomenon: “It is better to hit to kill than to hit and injure.”
This 2008 television report features security camera footage of a dusty white Passat reversing at high speed and smashing into a 64-year-old grandmother. The Passat’s back wheels bounce up over her head and body. The driver, Zhao Xiao Cheng, stops the car for a moment then hits the gas, causing his front wheels to roll over the woman. Then Zhao shifts into drive, wheels grinding the woman into the pavement. Zhao is not done. Twice more he shifts back and forth between drive and reverse, each time thudding over the grandmother’s body. He then speeds away from her corpse.
This 2008 television report features security camera footage of a dusty white Passat reversing at high speed and smashing into a 64-year-old grandmother. The Passat’s back wheels bounce up over her head and body. The driver, Zhao Xiao Cheng, stops the car for a moment then hits the gas, causing his front wheels to roll over the woman. Then Zhao shifts into drive, wheels grinding the woman into the pavement. Zhao is not done. Twice more he shifts back and forth between drive and reverse, each time thudding over the grandmother’s body. He then speeds away from her corpse.
Incredibly, Zhao was found not guilty of intentional homicide. Accepting Zhao’s claim that he thought he was driving over a trash bag, the court of Taizhou in Zhejiang province sentenced him to just three years in prison for “negligence.” Zhao’s case was unusual only in that it was caught on video. As the television anchor noted, “You can see online an endless stream of stories talking about cases similar to this one.”
“Double-hit cases” have been around for decades. I first heard of the “hit-to-kill” phenomenon in Taiwan in the mid-1990s when I was working there as an English teacher. A fellow teacher would drive us to classes. After one near-miss of a motorcyclist, he said, “If I hit someone, I’ll hit him again and make sure he’s dead.” Enjoying my shock, he explained that in Taiwan, if you cripple a man, you pay for the injured person’s care for a lifetime. But if you kill the person, you “only have to pay once, like a burial fee.” He insisted he was serious—and that this was common.
Most people agree that the hit-to-kill phenomenon stems at least in part from perverse laws on victim compensation. In China the compensation for killing a victim in a traffic accident is relatively small—amounts typically range from $30,000 to $50,000—and once payment is made, the matter is over. By contrast, paying for lifetime care for a disabled survivor can run into the millions. The Chinese press recently described how one disabled man received about $400,000 for the first 23 years of his care. Drivers who decide to hit-and-kill do so because killing is far more economical. Indeed, Zhao Xiao Cheng—the man caught on a security camera video driving over a grandmother five times—ended up paying only about $70,000 in compensation.
In 2010 in Xinyi, video captured a wealthy young man reversing his BMW X6 out of a parking spot. He hits a 3-year-old boy, knocking the child to the ground and rolling over his skull. The driver then shifts his BMW into drive and crushes the child again. Remarkably, the driver then gets out of the BMW, puts the vehicle in reverse, and guides it with his hand as he walks the vehicle backward over the boy’s crumpled body. The man’s foot is so close to the toddler’s head that, if alive, the boy could have reached out and touched him. The driver then puts the BMW in drive again, running over the boy one last time as he drives away.
Here too, the driver was charged only with accidentally causing a person’s death. (He claimed to have confused the boy with a cardboard box or trash bag.) Police rejected charges of murder and even of fleeing the scene of the crime, ignoring the fact that the driver ran over the boy’s head as he sped away.
These drivers are willing to kill not only because it is cheaper, but also because they expect to escape murder charges. In the days before video cameras became widespread, it was rare to have evidence that a driver hit the victim twice. Even in today’s age of cellphone cameras, drivers seem confident that they can either bribe local officials or hire a lawyer to evade murder charges.
Perhaps the most horrific of these hit-to-kill cases are the ones in which the initial collision didn’t injure the victim seriously, and yet the driver came back and killed the victim anyway. In Sichuan province, an enormous, dirt-encrusted truck knocked down a 2-year-old boy. The toddler was only dazed by the initial blow, and immediately climbed to his feet. Eyewitnesses said that the boy went to fetch his umbrella, which had been thrown across the street by the impact, when the truck reversed and crushed him, this time killing him.
Despite the eyewitness testimony, the county chief of police declared that the truck had never reversed, never hit the boy a second time, and that the wheels never rolled over the child. Meanwhile, one outraged website posted photographs appearing to show the child’s body under the truck’s front wheel.
In each of these cases, despite video and photographs showing that the driver hit the victim a second, and often even a third, fourth, and fifth time, the drivers ended up paying the same or less in compensation and jail time than they would have if they had merely injured the victim.
With so many hit-to-kill drivers escaping serious punishment, the Chinese public has sometimes taken matters into its own hands. In 2013 a crowd in Zhengzhou in Henan province beat a wealthy driver who killed a 6-year-old after allegedly running him over twice. (A television report claims the crowd had acted on “false rumors.” However, at least five witnesses assert on camera that the man had run over the child a second time.)
Of course, not every hit-to-kill driver escapes serious punishment. A man named Yao Jiaxin who in 2010 hit a bicyclist in Xian and returned to make sure she was dead—even stabbing the injured woman with a knife—was convicted and executed. In 2014 a driver named Zhang Qingda who had hit an elderly man in Jiayu Pass in Gansu province with his pickup truck and circled around to crush the man again was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
Both China and Taiwan have passed laws attempting to eradicate hit-to-kill cases. Taiwan’s legislature reformed Article 6 of its Civil Code, which had long restricted the ability to bring civil lawsuits on behalf of others (such as a person killed in a traffic accident). Meanwhile, China’s legislature has emphasized that multiple-hit cases should be treated as murders. Yet even when a driver hits a victim multiple times, it can be hard to prove intent and causation—at least to the satisfaction of China’s courts. Judges, police, and media often seem to accept rather unbelievable claims that the drivers hit the victims multiple times accidentally, or that the drivers confused the victims with inanimate objects.
Hit-to-kill cases continue, and hit-to-kill drivers regularly escape serious punishment. In January a woman was caught on video repeatedly driving over an old man who had slipped in the snow. In April a school bus driver in Shuangcheng was accused of driving over a 5-year-old girl again and again. In May a security camera filmed a truck driver running over a young boy four times; the driver claimed that he had never noticed the child.
And last month the unlicensed woman who had killed the 2-year-old in the fruit market with her BMW—and then offered to bribe the family—was brought to court. She claimed the killing was an accident. Prosecutors accepted her assertion, and recommended that the court reduce her sentence to two to four years in prison.
This light sentence would still be more of a punishment than many drivers have received for similar crimes. But it probably won’t be enough to keep the next driver from putting his car in reverse and hitting the gas.
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"Jesus In The Talmud" By Peter Schafer... Brought To You By "The Thinking Housewife"
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Alan: I am grateful to The Thinking Housewife for drawing my attention to "Jesus in the Talmud" by Peter Schafer.
It has long been an open secret that the Talmud's 6000 pages set forth views of Jesus that are not just unfavorable but degrading.
In so-called "honor cultures," a standard method for vilifying opponents is to shame them and - either directly or indirectly - their families.
Thus, when the Talmud categorizes The Virgin Mary as a prostitute who gave birth to a bastard (one of many) in her licentious relationship with a Roman soldier named Pandera (or Panthera), it is not surprising that The Thinking Housewife, a traditionalist Catholic, is so outraged by the sacrilegious indignity of Talmudic views that she resorts to the endorsement of white supremacist, David Duke, who also probed the Talmud's denigrating treatment of Yeshua and his family.
The "Radical Traditionalist Catholic" Movement
As always, "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" and clearly The Thinking Housewife shoots from the hip without prior exegesis or literary criticism.
"Any text without a context is a pretext."
To be clear, Jesus of Nazareth was a practicing Jew -- from start to finish.
And as such, it is appropriate - indeed necessary - that Jewish authorities pronounce on Yeshua's teaching and practice.
In the context of "constituted authority" -- wherein the Talmud provides authoritative commentary in much the same way that Christian epistles provide authoritative commentary on The Gospels -- ancient Jewish leadership held two postulates to be self-evident:
1.) One day the messiah will come and live among the people of Israel.
2.) When the messiah came he would come as a human being and NOT as a "god" or as God himself.
In the settled view of ancient Jewry, it was beyond blasphemous to even suggest that the messiah would come as God in human form.
Without re-opening the debate -- a very real one -- whether Jesus saw himself as coterminous with almighty God (or perhaps as a human being mystically united with God) the point of departure in any analysis of the Talmud's views of Jesus is that this self-apotheosizing unwashed Galilean upstart had committed an Unforgivable Sin: a human being had declared himself God.
Against this backdrop, the writers of the Talmud discharged their duty as faithful Jews, circumscribing this ersatz "messiah" with a firewall of lacerating contempt.
Today's Christians, also given to authoritarian pronouncement, might wisely consider how "authority and condemnation" play out within any belief system that sees itself as "guardian and guide" so that orthodox devotees are not mislead by egregious falsehood.
"Any text without a context is a pretext."
Mashiach: The Messiah ![Mashiach (in Hebrew)]( "Mashiach (in Hebrew)")
If a contemporary "miracle worker" were - suddenly - to conduct a mission of healing and messianic proclamation so that hundreds of millions quit Christianity to adhere to this "second coming," The Thinking Housewife would be the first to vilify him (her?). (This begs a thorny question: "How will Christians recognize Jesus at The Second Coming when it was so very hard to recognize him at The First?")
I doubt The Thinking Housewife herself would use the vile rhetorical style that was standard operating procedure among ancient Jewish authors but I readily see the task of vicious vilification "taken up" by her followers.
The overarching shame of the three Abrahamic religions is irrepressible passion for mutual cannibalization, a murderous habit so deeply ingrained that we will not see change in the forseeable future.
"Jesus in the Talmud"
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Jesus in the Talmud
The Thinking Housewife
September 2, 2015
MANY Americans are of the opinion that Orthodox Judaism, the official belief system of the state of Israel, is the religion of the Old Testament, the faith of the patriarchs and prophets. We often hear it said that both Christians and believers in Judaism are “People of the Book,” the book being the Bible. Certainly the patriarchs and the prophets are the sacred originators of the religion of the ancient Israelites but it is the rabbinic discourses known as the Talmud, not the Bible, that have been, since the close of the fifth century, the foundational texts of Orthodox Judaism, which has its offshoots in Reform and Conservative Judaism. The Talmud, as one rabbi put it, is the “starting point and the ending point, the alpha and omega of truth.”* The Talmud teaches Orthodox Judaics how to think about Torah, or the Mosaic law.
The Talmud, meaning “instruction” or “learning” in Hebrew, consists of more than 6,000 pages of rabbinic commentaries on biblical texts. These commentaries were written after the crucifixion of Christ and the destruction of the Temple and constitute a religious, political and social code regulating the life of the Orthodox Judaic. Oral, not revealed, traditions called Mischna, Gemara, Halaka and Hagada make up these discourses. The first and lesser part of these commentaries originated in Palestine and the second part, much more important and influential, in Babylon.
Since the 13th century when the Jewish apostate Nicholas Donin came forward and revealed the contents of the Talmud to Pope Gregory IX, the descriptions of Jesus, his family and followers included in these rabbinic commentaries have alarmed Christians.
They have alarmed Christians for good reason. The Talmud contains, in intermittent descriptions, an ugly portrait of Jesus Christ, who is not the long-awaited Messiah but the sexually promiscuous son of a whore. He is the idolator, poor student and magician who fully deserves what he has coming to him. It is for this reason that the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages ordered the Talmud burned, an order that was not enforced in much of Europe, and also censored its descriptions of Christ.
Again, the state of knowledge of the talmudic view of Jesus and of gentiles is generally poor among Christians today though critiques of the Talmud from a Christian perspective and also from a blisteringly anti-Jewish perspective can be readily found on the Internet. Most Jewish people in America are also unaware of much of what the Talmud contains.
Peter Schäfer is currently the director of the Jewish Museum in Berlin and the former Perelman Professor of Jewish Studies and Professsor of Religion at Princeton University. His 2009 book Jesus in the Talmud, published by Princeton University Press, is an excellent place for the contemporary reader to acquaint himself with the Talmud’s perspective on Jesus Christ. An expert guide to the dense talmudic books, in which Jesus is referred to by different names and in unclear language, is essential.
Schäfer covers all the basics, offering interpretations of the snippets and tales that are interspersed throughout the rabbinic tractates. He refers to the composite material on Jesus as a “counter-narrative” to the New Testament. This is a charitable formulation of the ridicule and insults the Talmud contains. The Jesus anecdotes “are not told as an independent and coherent narrative but are scattered all over the large corpus of literature left to us by the rabbis.” Some of these stories and discussions are disguised in code and decoy texts, possibly to throw off critics.
I include here not so much a review of Schäfer’s book as highlights and some lengthy quotations, with the hope of inspiring the reader’s further interest in this important subject.
The “most prominent characteristic that dominates quite a number of the rabbinic stories,” Schäfer writes, “is sex, more precisely sexual promiscuity. Sexual promiscuity is … presented as the foundation story of the Christian sect.” Indeed, the Babylonian Talmud describes Jesus’s mother, Miriam (Mary), as a hairdresser and an adulterer. Jesus is the illegitimate son of her adulterous liaison with a Roman soldier, Pandera (also sometimes referred to as Panthera). No story of a Virgin birth here. Jesus is a bastard:
The most pungent counterargument against the evangelists’ narrative is, of course, the assertion of Jesus’ illegitimate birth from an adulterous mother and some insignificant lover. It parries the claim of Jesus’ noble Davidic lineage to which the New Testament attaches such great value: Matthew starts with his genealogy (Mt. 1) which leads back directly to David and calls him, as well as his “father” Joseph, “son of David” (Mt. 1: 1, 20; Lk. 1: 27, 2: 4); he is born in Bethlehem, the city of David (Mt. 2: 5f.; Lk. 2: 4), and hence is the Davidic Messiah (Mt. 2: 4; Lk. 2: 11). No, the Jewish counternarrative argues, this is all nonsense; he is anything but of noble origins. His father was by no means a descendant of David but the otherwise unknown Panthera/ Pandera ( just a Roman soldier, according to Celsus, in other words a non-Jew and a member of the hated Roman Empire that so visibly and horribly oppressed the Jews). Much worse, in turning Jesus into a bastard, the counternarrative takes up the contradictions within the New Testament story about Jesus’ origins and ridicules the claim that he was born from a virgin (parthenogenesis).
….
The bizarre idea of having the Holy Spirit intervene to make him the father of Mary’s child is nothing but a cover-up of the truth, it maintains, namely that Mary, Joseph’s legal wife, had a secret lover and that her child was just a bastard like any other bastard. Joseph’s suspicion, whether he was Mary’s husband or her betrothed, was absolutely warranted: Mary had indeed been unfaithful to him. He should have dismissed her immediately as was customary according to Jewish law.
Schäfer continues:
This powerful counternarrative shakes the foundations of the Christian message. It is not just a malicious distortion of the birth story (any such moralizing categories are completely out of place here); rather, it posits that the whole idea of Jesus’ Davidic descent, his claim to be the Messiah, and ultimately his claim to be the son of God, are based on fraud. His mother, his alleged father (insofar as he helped covering up the truth), his real father, and not least Jesus himself (the would-be magician) are all impostors that deceived the Jewish people and deserve to be unmasked, exposed to ridicule, and thereby neutralized.
The Babylonian discourses include another tale on the same subject of the phony Virgin birth:
There was this mule which gave birth, and [round its neck] was hanging a document upon which was written, “there is a claim against my father’s house of one hundred thousand Zuz. Zuz.” They [the Athenian Sages] asked him: “Can a mule give birth”? He [R. Yehoshua] answered them: “This is one of these fiction stories”.
[Again, the Athenian Sages asked:] “When salt becomes unsavory, wherewith is it salted”? He replied: “With the afterbirth of a mule.”—“ And is there an afterbirth of a mule”?—“ And can salt become unsavory”?
This is a play on both the Sermon on the Mount’s reference to Christians as the “salt of the earth” and the Virgin birth.
On this background, the miraculous offspring of the mule in the first story (and the afterbirth in the second one) gets an even more significant meaning. It can well be understood as a parody of Jesus’ miraculous birth from a virgin: an offspring from a virgin is as likely as an offspring from a mule. 47 The Christians’ claim of Jesus’ birth from a virgin and without a father belongs to the category of fiction stories, fairy tales just for fun. Moreover, this is the punch line of the second story: Jesus’ followers, who claim to be the new salt of the earth, are nothing but the afterbirth of that imagined offspring of the mule, a fiction of a fiction. Read this way, our two little Bavli [Babylonian Talmud] stories become indeed much more than an amusing exchange between the rabbis and the Greek Sages; rather, they offer another biting ridicule of one of the cornerstones of Christian theology.
Under Jewish law, Miriam was a woman worthy of stoning:
His adulterous mother deserves— according to biblical and rabbinical law— the death penalty of stoning or strangulation, as the Bible decrees for our case, the adultery between a married woman and her lover: “If a man is found lying with another man’s wife, both of them shall die, the man who lay with the woman as well as the woman; so you shall purge the evil from Israel” (Deut. 22: 22). 5 Hence, under strict application of biblical law, Jesus’ mother should have been stoned. The Talmud does not seem to be interested in her subsequent fate, but her son does fall under the other provision of the Mishna (idolatry) and will indeed be stoned. So in a highly ironical sense, Jesus’ birth from an adulterous mother points to his own violent death. As we have seen, this story of the adulterous mother and her bastard son is the perfect counternarrative to the New Testament’s claim that Jesus was born from a virgin betrothed to a descendant of the house of David.
There is nothing comparable in the Bible to the Talmud’s preoccupation in these passages with sexual matters and perversion. Christianity, in the Talmud, is an orgiastic cult.
The sexual misconduct brought up here is not that of an individual (Jesus) but, much worse, that of his followers who indulge in sexual mass orgies: the adherents of Jesus’ sect follow his advice to such an extreme that sexual orgies have become, so to speak, the “trademark” of the believers in Jesus.
Tertullian, the Christian apologist, refers in the second century, before much of the Talmud was written, of Jewish slanders along these lines:
In his Apology, written 197 C.E., he writes: We are said to be the most criminal of men (sceleratissimi), on the score of our sacramental baby-killing and the baby-eating that goes with it (sacramento infanticidii et pabulo inde) and the incest that follows the banquet, where the dogs are our pimps in the dark, forsooth, and make a sort of decency for guilty lusts by overturning the lamps. That, at all events, is what you always say about us; and yet you take no pains to bring into the daylight what you have been saying about us all this long time. Then, I say, either bring it out, if you believe all this, or refuse to believe it after leaving it uninvestigated. 20
Jesus is described by the rabbis as having inherited his mother’s inclinations:
The talmudic story about the wicked son/ disciple is preserved in two different contexts. The first, in Bavli Sanhedrin 103a, presents itself as an exegesis of Psalm 91: 10:
Rav Hisda said in the name of R. Yirmeya bar Abba: What is meant by the verse: No evil (ra`ah) will befall you, no plague (nega`) will approach your tent (Ps. 91: 10)?
[…]
No evil will befall you (ibid.): that bad dreams and bad thoughts will not frighten you. No plague will approach your tent (ibid.): that you will not have a son or a disciple who publicly spoils his food/ dish tavshilo) like Jesus the Nazarene 4
The “spoiled dish” is the promiscuous son. Shäfer explains:
It is hardly by coincidence that this interpretation comes from the same Rav Hisda who told us that Jesus’ mother had a husband as well as a lover and that Jesus was the son of her lover. Now we learn: this Jesus isn’t any better than his mother— it’s in his blood. He is so spoiled that he has become the proverbial son or disciple who is unfaithful to his wife and a disgrace to his parents or his teachers. 11 This is quite an unexpected turn in Jesus’ life that goes far beyond the New Testament narrative— unless one wants to follow the later identification of Mary Magdalene with the unknown “immoral woman” in Luke (7: 36– 50), 12 who wets Jesus’ feet with her tears, wipes them with her hair, kisses them, and anoints them with myrrh (7: 38). The Pharisees, who observe this scene, know her as a prostitute (7: 39) and want to use this fact as proof that Jesus is no real prophet as he claims (because he did not seem to know what kind of woman she was), but Jesus, seeing through their bad intentions, publicly forgives the woman her sins and thus reveals that he did know of her bad reputation. The Talmud could again have inverted this New Testament story and insinuated that Jesus indeed knew her— but not in order to forgive her her sins and to unmask the Pharisees; rather, he knew her for what she really was (a prostitute) because he had an affair with her.
Jesus is also a bad student who is excommunicated by his teacher for his “frivolous thoughts.”
The framework plot of our narrative, in both the Bavli and in the Yerushalmi versions, does not help much to understand and to locate historically the core of the story: the strange incident between a teacher (Yehoshua b. Perahya/ Yehuda b. Tabbai) and his favorite student (anonymous/ Jesus). The incident occurs in an inn on their way back to Jerusalem. 14 Satisfied with how they are received, the master praises the inn, but his student, misunderstanding him as praising the (female) innkeeper, 15 makes a disparaging remark about the less than beautiful appearance of the lady. The master is horrified by his student’s frivolous thoughts and immediately excommunicates him. The poor student tries to appease his master but initially in vain. When the master finally is ready to forgive him, the student misunderstands his body language, leaves the master in despair and becomes an idolater. Now the master begs him to repent, but the student is convinced that he has committed a capital sin, which forever excludes penitence and forgiveness.
Jesus exhibits idolatry in this tale by worshipping a brick, in keeping with an ancient Babylonian custom.
How does the Talmud explain the miracles of Christ?
[I]t presents an ironical critique of Jesus’ and his followers’ belief in their magical power. True, it argues, their magical power is undeniable: it works, and one cannot do anything against its effectiveness. But it is an unauthorized and misused power. It is just shegaga— a mistake, an unfortunate error.Hence, our story ultimately conveys the message: this Jesus and his followers claim to have the keys to heaven, to use their magical power with divine authorization— but they are dead wrong! The fact that heaven accepts what they do does not mean that it approves of it. On the contrary, they are tricksters and impostors who abuse their power. The real power and authority still rest with their opponents, the rabbis.
Jesus is executed because he engaged in sorcery and has led Israel into idolatry, which is far more serious than his sexual misconduct. He is not crucified by the Romans, but is stoned and then hanged in accordance with Jewish law.
Yes indeed, the Bavli admits, Jesus was a Jewish heretic, who was quite successful in seducing many of us. But he was taken care of according to the Jewish law, got what he deserved— and that’s the end of the story.
Schäfer writes:
What we then have here in the Bavli is a powerful confirmation of the New Testament Passion narrative, a creative rereading, however, that not only knows some of its distinct details but proudly proclaims Jewish responsibility for Jesus’ execution. Ultimately and more precisely, therefore, it turns out to be a complete reversal of the New Testament’s message of shame and guilt: we do accept, it argues, responsibility for this heretic’s death, but there is no reason to be ashamed of it and feel guilty for it. We are not the murderers of the Messiah and Son of God, nor of the king of the Jews as Pilate wanted to have it. Rather, we are the rightful executioners of a blasphemer and idolater, who was sentenced according to the full weight, but also the fair procedure, of our law.
When Jesus dies he goes to hell where he sits in his own boiling excrement, which Schäfer views as an inversion of the Eucharist with Jesus becoming the opposite of divine food.
Jesus incited Israel to eating— and hence is punished by sitting in what eating produces: excrement. And what is the “eating” that Jesus imposed upon his followers? No less a food than himself— his flesh and blood. 32 As he has told his disciples during the Last Supper: (26) While they were eating, Jesus took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it he broke it, gave it to the disciples, and said: “Take, eat; this is my body.” (27) Then he took a cup, and after giving thanks he gave it to them, saying: “Drink from it, all of you; (28) for this is my blood of the (new) covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.” 33 What we have, then, in our Bavli narrative is a devastating and quite malicious polemic against the Gospels’ message of Jesus’ claim that whoever follows him and, literally, eats him becomes a member of the new covenant that superseded the old covenant with the Jews.
A similar fate in hell awaits the followers of Christ.
Schäfer, who has also written Judeophobia: Attitudes toward the Jews in the Ancient World and The Jewish Jesus: How Judaism and Christianity shaped each other, delves into other aspects of the talmudic counter-narrative in this very readable 232-page book. He focuses only on the portrayals of Jesus and his family, without going into the other controversial issue of the Talmudic view of gentiles, a subject I will discuss in a future post here.
*Rabbi Jacob Neusner, Rabbinic Judaism: Structure and System (Augsburg Fortress, 1995), as quoted in Michael Hoffman’s Judaism’s Strange Gods (Independent History and Research, 2012.)
— Comments —
— Comments —
Alex writes:
My experience with Israelis in the U.S., in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, has shown me that they think Christianity is B.S. with a capital B. They view American women as objects to be used and then discarded like unwanted tissue. They view American Christians as suckers and a source of money. They are especially happy to destroy white Christian societies in the name of diversity: South Africa anyone? American Jews dislike Republicans because they tend to have Christian values and actually believe in Christ: Hollywood anyone? American Jews also tend to be socialist or Communist. There is real animosity between the two religions which is mostly ignored by the press, even the Church tries to gloss over the differences. They also feel the Old Testament is their book and Christians have no real understanding of its meaning; it’s for the Jews. “Thou shalt not kill” is a misunderstanding of what is meant: ” Thou shall not murder” is the correct meaning and is meant for Jews only. For Jews, killing is okay and there is no handwringing if someone deserved it. Jews are the fifth column in the U.S. This reality has yet to dawn on most Americans, it is a reality they don’t want to face which would mean doing something about it. Lastly, our multicultural problems are being brought to us by Christian clergy who have ruined two thousand years of Christian history and we are only starting to see the outcome.
Bill R. writes:
Thank you for a fascinating and informative posting on the Talmud. For me, it was not only fascinating but timely, as it happens to be a subject I have become interested in lately owing to a book I’ve been reading by David Duke called Jewish Supremacism: My Awakening to the Jewish Question. I have been so astonished by the degree of anti-Christian viciousness displayed in some passages of the Talmud which Duke mentions, that I have been interested in additional commentary about the Talmud.
You note that, “Some of these stories and discussions are disguised in code and decoy texts, possibly to throw off critics.” Indeed. According to Duke, there is a passage in the Talmud (which I see you have also noted) in which it is said that Jesus is boiling in hot semen and excrement (Gittin 57a). But the word for Jesus in the passage is “Balaam.” Duke writes, “When I asked my Jewish friend’s rabbi about the passage, he told me that Balaam was not Jesus. He sounded very convincing, but that very evening, I looked up Balaam in The Jewish Encyclopedia and was shocked to read that Balaam was a pseudonym for Jesus.” Duke goes on to note that the Talmud similarly employs various pseudonyms for Gentiles and Christians, and that footnotes to the most popular English-language translation of the Talmud, known as the Soncino edition, as well as passages in The Jewish Encyclopedia, “blatantly mention this intentional artifice.”
Duke summarizes his early impression of the Talmud thus: “As an idealistic teenager, I was totally unprepared for this dark side of a faith that I had always respected. My impression had been that the Jewish faith had no animosity toward Jesus Christ. I was always told that they had much respect for him as a prophet or at least as a great teacher but simply did not accept Him as the Messiah. It disturbed me to have come across violently obscene descriptions of the Savior and of Christians in the Talmud.”
I found it especially intriguing to learn from your Schafer quote that the Talmud actually admits that the Jews were responsible for executing Jesus, indeed, that it proudly proclaims it. Think of that! One of the Jews’ most sacred texts, the “alpha and omega of truth” for them, proudly proclaims of this central event in Christian history what, for a Gentile to even suggest, is considered anti-Semitic.
I know when I mentioned Duke to you once before (I had not read him at the time), in response to my noting that he had been marginalized, you asked if he did not deserve to be marginalized. Having now read some of what he has to say (I’m about 70 pages into the book), I am of the opinion that he has been unfairly and unjustly maligned. Given how quickly Jews fire off the accusation of anti-Semitism in the face of any criticism of themselves at all as Jews, I am not at all surprised to find that the man’s own words, once given a chance, do not at all match the hysterical hate-mongering one would expect to find given the popular impression of him which has been created. He says that his book is “ultimately about lessening both the dangers and hatreds between our peoples” and asserts that “all peoples have the right to preserve their unique identities, including Jews.” For myself, I see no good reason not to take the man at his word. On the other hand, having read what he has to say about Jews, and knowing how hypersensitive, if not pathologically intolerant, they are of any criticism directed toward them as a group, I can readily see why they would use their considerable power and influence to demonize this man and malign his reputation, which they have had enormous success in doing. (I think the slash-and-burn job that was done on Duke was made extra thorough because of the fact that, at one time, it looked as though his political star might be very seriously on the rise, and this is surely one reason his name has become imbedded more deeply into the popular culture than other alleged “anti-Semites.”) Also, he is not a pagan brand of white advocate. Given his very positive and affectionate references to Christianity, particularly when comparing it with Judaism, I was pleased but not surprised to learn that he identifies himself as a Christian. By the way, he also has an impressive list of what various past Popes had to say (and do) about the Talmud. (For us Protestants :-), he also has a powerful quote from Martin Luther excoriating the Talmud, which Luther had thoroughly studied in its original Hebrew.)
Laura writes:
Thank you.
I have not read Duke’s works so I cannot comment on them and whatever I said before about him was based on hearsay.
Regarding the admission in the Babylonian Talmud that the Jews did put Christ to death, it is a quite proud admission. Christ, the promiscuous sexpot and sorcerer, was guilty of heresy and that was his greatest offense, according to Schäfer’s reading of the rabbinic sources. From his introduction:
Most remarkably, they [the Talmudic rabbis] counter the New Testament Passion story with its message of the Jews’ guilt and shame as Christ killers. Instead, they reverse it completely: yes, they maintain, we accept responsibility for it, but there is no reason to feel ashamed because we rightfully executed a blasphemer and idolater. Jesus deserved death, and he got what he deserved. Accordingly, they subvert the Christian idea of Jesus’ resurrection by having him punished forever in hell and by making clear that this fate awaits his followers as well, who believe in this impostor. There is no resurrection, they insist, not for him and not for his followers; in other words, there is no justification whatsoever for this Christian sect that impudently claims to be the new covenant and that is on its way to establish itself as a new religion (not least as a “Church” with political power). (Location 217, Kindle edition)
Of course, it is not surprising that the rabbis would reject Christian theology once they rejected the divinity of Christ. But the degree to which they repudiate and demonize Jesus is surprising. These scathing indictments have arguably very effectively immunized Jews, even, I believe, those who have never read any portion of the Talmud and even those who are not Orthodox Jews, against the Christian narrative. When an Orthodox Jew walks through a major European museum and sees all the madonnas, he sees paintings of a whore, or at least of an adulteress who conned her fiancé into marrying her even though she was pregnant with another man’s child. Think of how that view alienates him, the Orthodox Jew, psychologically from the society around him. Think of how this alienation might harden and spread within his subculture with the passage of years, so that centuries later vestiges of it might remain even in those whose ancestors long ago rejected the Talmud.
The conditions of relative freedom for the Jews in Babylon intensified the talmudic critique of Christ. Schäfer continues in his introduction:
I will demonstrate that this message [that the Jews were proud to kill Christ] was possible only under the specific historical circumstances in Sasanian Babylonia, with a Jewish community that lived in relative freedom, at least with regard to Christians— quite different from conditions in Roman and Byzantine Palestine, with Christianity becoming an ever more visible and aggressive political power. This is not to say that the Palestinian sources are devoid of any knowledge of Christianity and Jesus. On the contrary, they are vividly and painfully aware of the spread of Christianity. They are not simply denying or ignoring it (in a kind Freudian mechanism of denial and repression), as has often been suggested; rather they are acknowledging Christianity and engaged in a remarkably intense exchange with it. But still, Jesus as a person, his life, and his fate are much less prominent in the Palestinian sources. So my claim is that it is not so much the distinction between earlier and later sources that matters but the distinction between Palestinian and Babylonian sources, between the two major centers of Jewish life in antiquity. As we shall see, the different political and religious conditions under which the Jews lived created very different attitudes toward Christianity and its founder. (Kindle location, 218)
Schäfer explains that Balaam sometimes refers to Jesus. The name also refers at times to a pagan magician, who is punished in hell by sitting in boiling semen, so the rabbi Duke spoke to could have said with some honesty that Jesus is not Balaam.
Laura writes:
By the way, I do not know whether Schäfer himself is of Jewish background. I presume that he is as he studied at Hebrew University and, cynically, I presume that Princeton would not have published this book if he were not. But I may be wrong.
Bill R. writes:
You write, “But the degree to which they repudiate and demonize Jesus is surprising.” And as if that were not enough, one is then confronted by the degree to which they conceal this repudiation and demonization (at least from non-Jews), and then repudiate and demonize you should you discover and reveal it anyway.
[Laura writes: Actually, there is a passage in the Talmud that refers to the death penalty for gentiles who critique the Talmud. BT Sanderin 59a: “Rabbi Yohanan said: A non-Jew who engages in the study of Torah is liable for execution, for the verse states (Deuteronomy 33:4): ‘Moses commanded us a Torah, an inheritance for the congregation of Jacob’ — to us, the Jewish people, the Torah was given as an inheritance, but not to them, the other nations. — Quoted in Michael Hoffman’sJudaism’s Strange Gods, p. 9. This may be why — I am not sure — I.B. Pranaitis, the Latvian priest and scholar who translated the Talmud, was murdered by the Soviet Cheka police.]
You write, “The name also refers at times to a pagan magician, who is punished in hell by sitting in boiling semen.” I looked up Gittin 57a in the Soncino edition online, and footnote 2 suggests that the significance of semen is because “he enticed Israel to go astray after the daughters of Moab.” Wouldn’t that seem to suggest Jesus as opposed to a magician? Or is it possible that the pagan magician reference itself could be another pseudonym for Jesus?
Also, Duke notes specifically that, “In The Jewish Encyclopedia, under the heading ‘Balaam,’ it says ‘…the pseudonym “Balaam” given to Jesus in Sanhedrin 106b and Gittin 57a.” Gitten 57a is where it is said that Balaam is punished with boiling hot semen. So at least we know in that one case, as far as The Jewish Encyclopedia is concerned, at any rate, there does not appear to be any equivocation; Balaam is Jesus.
This is a bit off the subject and I don’t mean to put too much focus on Duke, but since I wrote you earlier I’ve come across a paragraph in his book that I think better describes his philosophy than I was able convey earlier, and the central point he’s trying to get across with his book, and I’d like to quote it.
Even as I write these provocative words, I harbor no hatred toward the Jewish people. There are intolerant Jews just as there are intolerant Gentiles. It is also true that there are many Jews who respect our Christian heritage. But unless the nonchauvinist Jews are willing to work hard to bring to their own faith and community the same kind of love and reconciliation that Christ taught, the cycle of hatred between Jew and Gentile could fester. Unless they temper their supremacism with acceptance and love, they could suffer a replay of the terrible excesses of the past.
Laura writes:
I’m not sure about the different Balaam references, except that I know Schäfer refers to passages in which Balaam is not Jesus. He writes:
Balaam incited Israel to sexual orgies— and hence is punished by sitting in semen. Jesus incited Israel to eating— and hence is punished by sitting in what eating produces: excrement. And what is the “eating” that Jesus imposed upon his followers? No less a food than himself— his flesh and blood. (Kindle location, 1717]
Laura writes:
Regarding the last statement by Duke you quoted: Judaism, which is distinct from the religion of the ancient Israelites, entails certain beliefs and a certain view of the role of the Jewish people in salvational history. He might just as well ask them to give up their religion because to cover over what they believe with hugs and kisses would not make it substantially different.
David J. writes:
This is in response to Bill R.:
What a coincidence! Only last night, I finished viewing two lengthy interviews of David Duke concerning Jewish influences on the West, including those deriving from the Talmud. The interviews, totaling six to seven hours, were hosted by Tommy Sotomayor on one of his YouTube channels.
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