Posts

Posted on

Epic Baltimore

What the hell is going on in Baltimore? They tried to convict 6 innocent cops over a petty drug thug, who broke his own damn neck by slamming his own head against the inside of a police van. Then they paid Freddie Gray’s family $6M. The Mayor’s been arrested. The city records locked-down by “ransomware”. Baltimore is Elijah Cumming’s shithole and it’s epic.

Posted on

Saying 21 In The Gospel of Thomas

Some considerable time ago I wrote about how I thought that the transcribers, a couple of thousand years ago, jumbled up phrases within the sayings in the Gospel of Thomas. My earlier writing on Sayings 5, 6, and 14 are here, and it explains how I thought the author intended on presenting the material.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is wallpaper-light-blue-and-pink-nebula-768x480.jpg

This week I was reading through other sayings in that gospel and became unsettled on Saying 21. While each of the sentences and each of the phrases makes sense when they stand alone, they fall flat when taken as a whole. It occurs to me that we have the same problem in Saying 21 as we did in Saying 6. Some material extraneous to 21 has wandered over to it. Here is the saying (Layton translation from the Coptic)

Mary said to Jesus, “What do your disciples resemble?” He said, “What they resemble is children living in a plot of land that is not theirs. When the owners of the land come they will say, ‘Surrender our land to us.’ They, for their part, strip naked in their presence in order to give it back to them, and they give them their land. Thus I say that the owner of an estate, knowing that a bandit is coming, will keep watch before the bandit comes and not let the bandit break into the house of the estate and steal the possessions. You (plur.) , then, be on your guard against the world. Arm yourselves with great power lest the brigands find a way to get to you; for the trouble that you expect will come. Let an experienced person dwell in your midst! When the crop had matured, that person came in haste, sickle in hand, and harvested it. Whoever has ears to hear should listen!”

When I break it down to ‘bite size chunks’ I get what is below. I think the first paragraph ONLY belongs to Saying 21. The balance belongs somewhere else.

Mary said to Jesus, “What do your disciples resemble?” He said, “What they resemble is children living in a plot of land that is not theirs. When the owners of the land come they will say, ‘Surrender our land to us.’ They, for their part, strip naked in their presence in order to give it back to them, and they give them their land.

(This question and answer are congruent)

Thus I say that the owner of an estate, knowing that a bandit is coming, will keep watch before the bandit comes and not let the bandit break into the house of the estate and steal the possessions.

You (plur.) , then, be on your guard against the world. Arm yourselves with great power lest the brigands find a way to get to you; for the trouble that you expect will come.

(Incongruent: These two paragraphs are of a different topic that the original Q&A)

Let an experienced person dwell in your midst! When the crop had matured, that person came in haste, sickle in hand, and harvested it. Whoever has ears to hear should listen!”

(Incongruent: The paragraph is a different topic than both previous topics)

Posted on

Let’s Quit Playing Around and Take Bold Action

If the USA, you and I, is/are responsible for Mexicans and borders don’t matter, let’s just go ahead and annex Mexico.

I mean, apparently we’re responsible for their well being and they have it so badly there, and according to liberals borders don’t exist… So let’s just annex Mexico and make it better for them there?

Posted on

WSJ | What Were Robespierre’s Pronouns?

There is a very readable article over at the Wall Street Journal that compares the French Revolution to the ‘wokeness’ that is America today.

It begins with:

We often make historical parallels here. History doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme, as clever people say. And sometimes it hiccups. Here is a hiccup.

We start with the moral and political catastrophe that was the French Revolution. It was more a nationwide psychotic break than a revolt—a great nation at its own throat, swept by a spirit not only of regicide but suicide. For 10 years they simply enjoyed killing each other. They could have done what England was doing—a long nonviolent revolution, a gradual diminution of the power of king and court, an establishment of the rights of the people and their legislators so that the regent ended up a lovely person on a stamp. Instead they chose blood. Scholars like to make a distinction between the Revolution and the Terror that followed, but “the Terror was merely 1789 with a higher body count.” From the Storming of the Bastille onward, “it was apparent that violence was not just an unfortunate side effect. . . . It was the Revolution’s source of collective energy. It was what made the Revolution revolutionary.”

That is from Simon Schama’s masterpiece “Citizens,” his history of the revolution published in 1989, its 200th anniversary. It is erudite, elegant and heroically nonideological.

John Adams, across the sea in America, quickly understood what was happening in France and voiced alarm. In contrast his old friend Thomas Jefferson egged on the revolution and lent it his moral prestige. Faced with news of the guillotines, he reverted to abstractions. He was a genius with a true if hidden seam of malice, and rarely overconcerned with the suffering of others.

Full article