2 Samuel 17:29
Cheese.
Discuss.
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Ahhhh
The Prophet has revealed that King David ate of the kine, their cheese.
Yet, isn’t it odd that when Samuel said “kine” he used his modern words? So why do current translations use archaic terms like “kine” if not to confuse you.
Although I tell you that Faux’s O’Reilly is a false prophet, even form the words of O’Reilly can come MY truth. I tell you:
Do not obfuscate!
Yet, why has the Prophet Goldy taken a single word out of context?
Could it be that he has now decided to come forth and speak for his inly?
Prithee that is his intent.
Is it out of context?
Perhaps he is leading us to a place of wonder and gratitude and humility. After all, some of our most nutritious, most delicious, most culturally significant foods are collaborations with some of the tiniest, least, beings on the planet.
I refer, of course, to our dependence on microbes for bread and cheese and wine and cured meats and pickles and sauerkraut and kim-chi and tofu and miso and I’m sure many many other examples.
Not to mention our very survival via the microbiome in our guts and on our skin.
It’s takes one off the high horse, and makes one look around at what is not obvious, but essential…is this not the act of a prophet, a teacher?
Go home God, you’re drunk.
On a sunday too…
tsk tsk tsk.
North version is best version.
nsfw.
“Cheese it, Oscar!”
Deathfrog
I am always at home … your place is Mine.
As for being drunk, is it bad for a deity to be delusional? Isn’t that why you exist?
@ 7
I ask for rhetoric and you offer existentialism.
You’re no Aristophanes, believe me.
I didn’t think they had a lot of cheese in those areas back then. You learn something every day!
Do you think they were big cheddar fans?
I’m not a Christian. I despise orthodoxy in all its forms. Religion has provided rationales for all sorts of mayhem and shit over the centuries that cannot be fathomed by rational people. I can not, nor will I ever respect a manufactured belief system that is so obviously designed to suppress the advancement of intellect and Liberty as the “Abrahamic” religions. I consider the people who adhere to such belief systems to be be irrational for the most part. It is impossible for an individual raised from birth who has been steeped, indeed drowned in such a belief system their whole life to step outside of that set of cognitive parameters, even if they decide later in life to embrace rationality and forswear that faith. Nearly all the self-professed Atheists I know are from Jewish or Catholic backgrounds. I suspect there are very good reasons for this. Orthodoxy is just another form of slavery.
But y’know, much of the music that has been written around the Abrahamic tradition is just fantastic. It seems that some forms of intellect cannot be suppressed, no matter how violently they are opposed.
I liked the bigotry of Deathfrogg’s rant that I posted it with comments over at TA.
Short form, he may not be a “Cristian” but he sure as hell joins Christendom’s liberals in blaming the bigotry of his culture on Jews and Muslims.
Especially as an Andalusian, there is ng the awesome about not seeing the contributions we … Muslims and Jews . made (and make) to science. I also find Deathfrogg all to willing to dismiss the role of faith ins such heroes as Cesar Chavez, Sitting Bull, or ML King.
Forgive me, as a non Christian, of complimenting Deathfrogg by saying “How Christian of you!”
@ 11
Religious dogma was just a tool for those men. As it was for Hitler, Franco, Somoza, Baptiste, Pope Innocent IV, Ferrand Martinez, Tomás de Torquemada, Ivan IV Vasilyevich, François Duvalier and so many of our own “conservative” politicians.
More murder, destruction and societal collapse has been created in the name of religion than in spite of it, by several orders of magnitude.
@3 Petri dish meat is just around the corner, and just in time because the world is running out of fish, feed, and grazing land.
So, you list an assortment of Christian evil, and want to castigate the rest of us?
Geez .. that is Christian of you!
As far as I can see most religions .. other than Islam and Christianity … are pretty neutral when it comes to atrocities. Even Islam, for the most part, was spread by trade rather than scimitar.
I think you would have to work pretty hard to find examples of Incans, Toltecs, Jews, Buddhists, Taoists, Druids, Mithraites, Zorastrians, or even Scientologists who can be added to your list.
Yeh, yeh .. you are going to blame me for my ancestors coping a hit on the Canaani but they were pretty much just pushing their nationality .. note they onhly killed their enemies .. a much kinder fate than Christians castration and conversion . At worst they rank as a minor version of Ghengis Khan without the forced insemination fo all the beautiful women of the towns he conquered.
I share Deathfrogg’s antipathy toward organized religion and anti-rationality.
But @12 to say faith was “just a tool” for people like King or Chavez (or Gandhi, to use a non-Christian example) is simply wrong. “Tool” implies that if it’s not effective, it can be dropped for another mechanism to achieve their larger goal; it’s a means to an end. But their personal faith was an inseparable part of who they were. At the level of ordinary people, we probably all know people for whom their faith is a positive part of their lives; people for whom it is a malign influence; and, most often, people for whom it’s both.
The real problems (aside from the legitimization of magical thinking) are twofold. First, institutions that rely on their adherents believing impossible things are inherently corrupt; and second, they attract grifters, predators, and thieves even as they groom the victims.
Every major religion has enough history and dogma that all of their adherents pick and choose the parts that they most are drawn to. For Gandhi and King, it was love; for most modern evangelicals, it’s hate and fear. A successful religion tells everyone what they (or their ruler) want to hear. That doesn’t mean the moral teachings are inherently bad. Or good. Life’s more complicated than that.
But then, I’m an atheist who was raised neither a Catholic nor a Jew, so what do I know?
My issue here is that any human institution fulfills Pete’s concerns .. whether that is a corporation or the boy scouts.
As an example, you might want to look at my recent post on New York University.
IKs NYU are religion or just yet another messed up thing humans push?
Finally equating Christianity, with tis unrivalled history of atrocities, with all other religions is too convenient an excuse. All of us (and I do include myself) who live in a Christian society ought to have shame and gult for the horrors “we” have wrought.
re 14 — Actually, atrocities committed by each group are readily found on the internet. My search was simply ‘atrocities committed by _____ — and then paste in a name from the groups you listed.
The crux of deathfrogg’s argument was, I believe, something like: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
Sure.
BUT .. that does not mean one can excuse any human institution that has a horrible record. The Confederacy was not a religion. The Aztecs and the Cherokee were both governments with religions.
Can you find examples of Jews who were bad or Buddhist governments that were bad? Yeh.
BUT ,,, Christianity seconded only by Islam stands out for unrivalled evil. Racial slavery, burning at the stake, genocide, … these are all too Christian.
Actually, I believe the Jews are officially “God’s chosen people.” That means all the rest of ’em are wasting their time with religion.
You can get more out of the Golden Rule than you can from a bunch of religion dogma.
Chosen? for what?
As for the golden rule, what does it tell you of such issues as how humans were created or where heaven is?
Ooops .. seems as if sconce had removed that part of the need for religion.
From 20,
I’m just recalling an old college buddy who had a prof that was a Jew. This prof was always saying the Jew we “God’s chosen people.”
For what the Jews were chosen, I don’t know. Maybe God liked the fact than when you get three Jews involved in a discussion, you get at least four different opinions on the subject at hand.
The Jews were chosen to spread the message of monotheism — and that being doctors, lawyers, jewelers, accountants, etc… were safe and profitable professions.
The last Jewish carpenter was Jesus of Nazareth, who never had a reputation for common sense, anyhow.
What a thread. And all from a single word.
Do you think they were big cheddar fans?
Back then I think they had mostly sheep and goats. No good for cheddar, but great for feta and such.
Cattle were not so popular because of their size. Small villages just can’t eat a half ton or so of beef before it goes bad.
Impressive.
I’m going to jump into the fray here…perhaps ill-advisedly.
I find SJ’s protestation of the singular evil of Christianity to be tiresome and trite. Perhaps it’s personal on my part – though I’ve given up religion, perhaps I can’t fully disavow the Catholicism with which I was raised. I think it’s bigger than that, though.
His recurrent demands that Christianity be held as the ne plus ultra of institutionalized evil is just another iteration of the racism or bigotry of which he so ostentatiously accuses deathfrogg.
The evils of the last 2 thousand years for which SJ would have us believe are the particular consequence of Christianity are part and parcel of the imperialist/conquest/colonial mentality that developed in, and spread out from, Europe. His thesis that Christianity is the continuation of the Roman Empire has merit, I think, but is too simple – elements of Rome continue through the entire sociopolitical structure there, and certainly undergird in part the offensive posture that those societies assumed. I’m not absolving Christianity – the state religion was an essential piece of the control of the citizens at home as well as the subjugated in the colonies abroad – I’m just placing it in a larger context, as an essential facet of a larger imperial enterprise, and as such was complicit in a couple of millenia full of atrocities.
I find SJ’s protestations that no other religion – especially his – has this kind of blood on its hands, to ring hollow. Not because Christianity doesn’t have blood on its hands – it’s soaking in it – but rather our perspective is one in which we sit in the midst of that Imperial/European/Roman/Christian culture, emerging diversity notwithstanding. SJ preemptively dismisses the treatment of neighboring tribes in his Bible by his Jews, but I think that is germane, just as the horrid treatment of the Palestinians by the modern State of Israel is germane.
What I’m getting at – Christianity has been both a power center itself , and a tool of individuals and families and tribes who’ve held power. It has been used to coerce and subjugate. While one can find a message of love and peace in its documents and traditions, it has tended to be a very effective political tool, a ruthless and violent one at that. Its success at this make it the target that SJ is taking aim at. The point I’m making with both Biblical behavior of aggressive Jewish states, and the apartheid regime of the present State of Israel, is that Jews and Judaism are not fundamentally different from Christians and Christianity – or any other state religion – it’s just that it hasn’t been as successful or wide-spread at this role as Christianity – it can be used for just as evil a purpose, however.
I think the loud and recurrent condemnations of Christianity that SJ indulges in would bear a great deal more weight and intellectual persuasiveness if they weren’t accompanied by the self-satisfied conceit that his team/tribe is somehow qualitatively better, somehow more pure and admiration-worthy.
One only has to look at the contemporary State of Israel to see that anyone, Jew included, is capable of evil, and perhaps more to the point, state-sponsored evil. That state has achieved military hegemony over its region, and it has achieved sociopolitical hegemony, in the form of an apartheid regime, over the Palestinian people. The racial hatred directed at them – or look at Max Blumenthal’s reporting on anti-African racism in Israel – is a defining feature of the central government, an organizing principle, a political cudgel. It’s hate-filled and racist and evil.
Moreover, the oft-used term “Jewish Democracy” is an oxymoron. It’s a democracy or it’s not. How about a “White Democracy” or an “Evangelical Democracy” or a “Male Democracy” – you put that qualifier out in front, and you’ve lost your democracy. You want a “Jewish” state – or any other racial/cultural/religious designation? Fine, but then call it what it is – a theocracy or an autocracy or a private club – but it ceases being a democracy when one group can exclude another from the franchise, from full citizenship, from human rights.
I agree with other posters here in that religion is a singularly caustic feature of human society. We haven’t figured it out – how to satisfy a search for something bigger, a set of moral rules to live by – that doesn’t become hijacked by power-seekers and manipulators. How do we have tribes with distinctive and wonderful idiosyncrasies without descending into race-hate, or tribe-hate? How do we celebrate our diversity without it becoming the childish “we’re better than you” that is the genesis for so much cruelty and evil?
I throw up a little every time I read SJ write, “How very Christian of you” – it’s a puerile, self-satisfied, un-self-aware epithet – one that makes my point for me.
Liberal Scientist
Good post but it is very long and since HA scrolls, prolonging this here makes no sense I have taken the liberty of cross posting your missive at TA and will comment there.
You are free to respond and, if you wish to post your responses.
@ 26
I was raised entirely without religion. My parents never went to church, until after they split up and my pop started hanging around with his younger brother who had come back from Nam with a rock-hard dick, short fuse, a quick fist and a bad-ass Oklahoma redneck attitude. He had followed one of his more imbecilic buddies advice and started going to church so he could get laid. It ended up fucking him pretty good. He and his wife had turned into the whitest Bam-and-Jimmy Taker sort of Christian you can imagine; The folks who had no books in their house, but little bronze prayer hands on the coffee table next to a giant leather bound bible and the only conversation they could have was always, without exception, couched in that phony lingo such people always fall into once they’ve been sufficiently instructed. Paul Crouch types. The fact that my grampa’s cousin was on the television every single sunday, preachin the gospel of MONEY (cannageddaAMENTHANKYAJAZUZ) did not help things there at all. My uncle fell into that shit with all the fervor of a dung beetle in a camel stockade.
My Pop experimented around with a lot of shit like that. He went to church, then gave up on that (sorta) and did two years work of the Erhard Seminars shit, dragging myself and my brother to them pretty much one whole summer when we went to visit.
Then he met the Cunt.
Bear in mind, that isn’t a word I use very often. It is as offensive to me as “nigger” is.
The Cunt was into this bullshit, plastic East Indian cult that was loosely based in Hinduism. The Baba Muktananda had come to the United States with a whole bunch of Hindu gospel fervor and dollar signs in his eyes. He knew there were plenty of suckers to be fleeced. Hell, if Paul Crouch and Bobby Grant could get rich on religion, so could he.
So, pop hooked up with the Cunt. They moved in together. Her oldest daughter was the super-fine California hottie type with big tits, a pretty face, the nicest ass in the neighborhood and by the time she was 15 was blowing an eighter a day or more with her various boyfriends. The younger kids were lunatics, the older boy was a bed-wetter until he was 16 and the younger didn’t know the difference between a pillow fight and a knife fight, either would suffice. I once spent 5 hours sitting on the kid, after he’d dropped the pillow that my own brother had thrown at him and had run to the kitchen to grab the biggest knife on the counter to chase my brother around the house with. I think he was about 9 when he did that. I spent a whole afternoon with my arms wrapped around his legs and his arms on the kitchen floor because every time I let go, he’d grab another knife and try to stick me or my brother with it. The Cunt wanted to have ME arrested for that.
I could go on, about her and my pop summarily dropping my brother off at JFK airport one afternoon with $200 and his suitcase after they’d tricked him into going to the big Ananda center in New York and he had freaked out about that (the acolytes or whatever the fuck they called themselves had locked him in his room and spend several days browbeating him and chanting and burning incense and shit) and he called my mom at 2 in the fucking morning. Or the “family camping trip” to Yosemite that turned out to be a big gathering of the Ananda cultists to celebrate the winter solstice or some shit and burn about 150 lbs of frankincense in a bonfire that left everyone choking and got the Ranger truck called in to put out the fire, not to mention a fat citation.
No, religion is all the same. It is designed specifically to skin the marks and grease the palms of the people who profess to be the leaders, as well as the palms of the cops and politicians who protect them. I don’t care about the labels they put on it, be it “Christian” or “Judaism” or “Hinduism” or “Islam”. The Buddhists are just as bad. The Eastern or Russian Orthodoxists. I really don’t give a fuck. Those “faiths” are created specifically to rob people blind and enable the so-called leadership to promote their own agendas, and always, without exception, make themselves very, very wealthy. It’s about controlling peoples minds. As it has been said, to make them believe absurdities.
Take blind faith out of the equation, and humans can start maturing as a sentient species. Until then, we are no different from the illiterate tribesmen we’re all descended from.
The post is now up at http://handbill.us/?p=25952
@ 29
We get it. You despise the Goyem and everything about them. You’re really no different from the “christians” after all.
And furthermore SJ, you taking such posts to Fisk them in another blog that cannot be responded to instead of doing it here shows your cowardice, and demonstrates your own bigotry.
Yes, you certainly have taken liberties. I never consented to have my words reprinted on your blog. Moreover, it doesn’t seem possible to comment there. Besides, every interjection that you punctuated my post with over on your little blog was one more accusation of anti-semitism. *YAWN*
In any case, I prefer discussion here.
I’m working today, and will likely not have time to post much, but I’ll see what I can do.
SJ you dishonest fuck.
I just saw the headline over at your little blog:
I was talking about YOU. You changed it to “Jews”
You stole my words from this blog and put them up without my permission on your blog.
You made a headline by changing my words to something they were not, and used them as a headline – attributing it to me on this blog.
TAKE IT DOWN NOW.
#14 I think the Buddhists of Burma have done their best to slaughter the tribal Moslems in the Eastern part of that country, as well as the countless peasants put to death in Tibet by the monasteries enforcer monks to keep the pre Chinese invasion theocracy in power. The Jews have done a pretty bang up job of incarcerating millions of Palestinians in huge concentration camps. The Aztec, Mayan and Toltec religions built huge temples for the sole purpose of human sacrifice. Scientologists haven’t had enough time to rack up a real body count yet, but just give them a chance. All religions have a pipeline to the local gods and all local gods have all the local prejudices and violent sides that are used on the heretics and infidels.
My whole point with the post above was to argue that PEOPLE use religion as a weapon.
Some of those weapons are more effective than others, for whatever reason. Christianity has been a VERY effective weapon.
I argued that Jews were no better or no worse than Christians, and I offered examples of Jewish state-relgion being used to oppress people.
I also called out your personal wheedling, dishonest attacks on Christianity as an example of toxic, corrosive and misplaced sanctimonious tribalism, not unlike what I call puddibigot out for.
Your response?
Steal my words, rewrite my words, misrepresent my words.
You play the ‘anti-semitism’ victim to any criticism of Israel, even when it comes on the heels of a discussion of state religion and anti-religious, anti-ethnic bigotry – which is manifestly practiced in Israel, just as it is across the globe.
There’s no point talking to you.
You are a dishonest little weasel.
@ SJ
From your self-righteous bullshit post on that blog:
That is a flat out lie, and a total misrepresentation of what was said, and you damn well know it.
From now on, I’ll assume you speak from the same schizoid, bigoted standpoint as SpittlePuddles and will respond to your posts accordingly.
You’re just another bullshit religious fanatic with a tribalistic axe to grind.
That is utter BS AND antisemetic.
First, the term goyem literally means the nations. Do you really think I or any Jew despises the whole non Jewish world?
Yes, whe Jews use the term there is a somewhat derogatory tone .. kinda sorta like the way Fauxies use the word “French” or Japanese use the word “gaijin.” Oh yeh .. kinda sort alike Christians use words like pagans or Americans refer to every one else as foreigners.
To use a form of sarcasm, your remarks deserves the “yes massa: my black friends throw at bossy white folks …. oops I should have called them (you) whieies.
Second, when and where have you seen any Jews steeling Jewish babies to convert them or writing about their religion as some despicable miscarriage of the Deity’s will?
Hell, we did not even blame the Christians for crucifixions of Jesus!
Finally, if you have the need to discuss what I wrote, maybe you should do it on TA. You write well so I would have no issue giving you contributor privileges.
That is utter BS AND antisemetic.
How so? Are you going to tell me that because Jews are Jews, they are somehow exempt from being called out for espousing the same tribalistic bullshit as comes from any other dogmatic belief system?
First, the term goyem literally means the nations. Do you really think I or any Jew despises the whole non Jewish world?
I have met people of all religions that do exactly that, and yes, several of them were Jewish. There is a whole city in New York where non-Jews are not allowed to own property within the city limits and are regularly spat upon and violently attacked in the streets for non-conformance to the Halakha, and the Police Department does nothing except advise the tourists to avoid the conflicts.
Yes, when Jews use the term there is a somewhat derogatory tone .. kinda sorta like the way Fauxies use the word “French” or Japanese use the word “gaijin.” Oh yeh .. kinda sort alike Christians use words like pagans or Americans refer to every one else as foreigners.
So how is Judaism any different? You think you’re somehow special because of the label you choose for yourself? Isn’t that acting exactly the same as the functionally illiterate reactionaries that make up the bulk of EvilAngelical Christians, radical Moslems or Hindus? “Jew” is not an ethnicity, it is just another dogmatism that crosses all ethnicities and national identities. There are Jews in China, India and Tibet, there are Hindus in the United States and South Africa and Great Britain. There are Moslems in every nation. There are Zoroastrians in Africa, England, the US and Australia. National identity has nothing to do with religious belief systems except in the context of political expediencies.
If an individual adhering to the Jewish or Islamic faith tried to run for President of the US, demonstrating the same level of religious fervor being exhibited by Michelle Bachmann or Mike Huckabee, do you think he or she would really have a chance at gaining the office? Hell, John Kennedy was excoriated in the press, especially in the Southern States, simply for being Catholic. There is a damn good reason why “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States” is spelled out in the US Constitution. The Christians regularly violate that rule as a matter of course. Until one has a majority of voters supporting the candidacy, one has no chance of ever holding office in this country, for most places anyway. Religion is just another catspaw to convince the voters. It’s just a tool to be used and disposed of once it has served its function. Ronald Reagan proved that.
To use a form of sarcasm, your remarks deserves the “yes massa: my black friends throw at bossy white folks …. oops I should have called them (you) whieies.
I’m no cracker. I’m a honky. Bobby Seals and Stokley Charmicheal were regulars at my grandmothers dinner table when I was a little kid. They got as much opposition from the Jewish community as they did from the Calvinists, especially in places like New York City and Philadelphia and San Diego. There are plenty of die-hard religious Jews who hate niggers as much as any god-fearing white-trash cracker from southern Louisiana or western Mississippi.
Second, when and where have you seen any Jews steeling Jewish babies to convert them or writing about their religion as some despicable miscarriage of the Deity’s will?
Thats the “blood libel” the Jews themselves have been oppressed with. The government so f the United States, Canada and Australia institutionalized kidnapping non-christian babies and subjecting them to all sorts of horrors. There is a place in Nanaimo on Vancouver Island that once was the site of a military hospital that had been converted after WW1 into an “orphanage” for first-nations children who had been forcibly kidnapped from their parents, and then used for medical experimentation including vivisection and testing of biological and chemical weapons. It wasn’t even closed until the mid-1970s. When people started sniffing around, the Canadian Government built a giant industrial complex on it and sold off the property where the gravesite was located. It’s rumored to have the remains of several thousands of native American people buried there, mostly children.
It was operated as a “christian” institution to “rehabilitate” the “savages”.
When the Catholic church decided that it wanted certain chunks of property or monopoly on the mind control techniques being used to fleece the rubes, they used the same propaganda against the Jews in the particular locale. Thats what the whole goddamn Spanish inquisition was about. Thats what the pogroms in France and England were all about. In 1828, the United States Supreme Court ruled that first-nations people had no rights to, nor title to the lands they lived on, simply because they were not “christian peoples.” How is that any different from the Isreali government arbitrarily confiscating land owned by Palestinians to build Kibbutzes on?
Hell, we did not even blame the Christians for crucifixions of Jesus!
That makes no sense. There were no “christians” at the time Jeshua was executed. All he was, was a street philosopher who had gathered a small following of people who had been fucked over by the Roman Fascists who had control of the government. If he really existed as the legend describes, (which really is still an unanswered question) he really wasn’t any different from any other modern pundit type with a soapbox. The Romans executed hundreds of thousands of people just like him. Agitators, malcontents, dissidents etc. He was nothing special or particularly unusual. Such people have always existed in every society in history. You just cannot make everyone happy with their situation all the time, especially in a mafiosi State like Rome.
Finally, if you have the need to discuss what I wrote, maybe you should do it on TA. You write well so I would have no issue giving you contributor privileges.
I appreciate the compliment. But my choice of forum is this one because this is where the conversation started in the first place. Deliberately misrepresenting what has been said is not a good way to promote your blog.
@22
Well, first of all, “common sense” is
(1.) Highly overrated and;
(2.) in the eye of the beholder.
Secondly, whatever Jesus the man (assuming he really existed) might have advocated, whatever notions might have issued from his own lips (there’s really no mention of he himself having ever written anything) comes to us through the scribblings of others, filtered through their own perceptions and prejudices…one guy in particular. Most of us “Christians” really belong not to the church of Jesus so much as the church of Paul.
@13 This raises the question: If you combine completely synthetic meat with completely synthetic cheese, is the result authentically unclean?
@28 That’s quite a story. I’ve heard and read many, of similar misdeeds by misguided and overzealous followers of virtually all sects and denominations.
I’d say that from your conclusion, as church founders in their own personal sense, L. Ron Hubbard was among the most successful and that carpenter from Nazareth was an abject failure.
@41 Apparently slavery is perfectly legal in America as long as you call yourself a religion, as the people running Scientology’s California concentration camp do.
Rand Paul plans to run for president in 2016 by telling voters he supports workers by being against unemployment benefits and pensions.
http://inplainsight.nbcnews.co.....untry?lite
@ 41
I dunno. It depends on how one would define “successful”. To the Conservative, “success” is how much commerce is done around something. That’s why commercial megachurches are always considered successful. The gold filagree and the $100 million studio setup and the Rolls Royce automobiles and the fucking custom-built land-yachts for the dogs are all signs of a successful church. It’s all based on money, and they pay no taxes whatsoever.
Thats why they cannot recognize anything that is non-commercial in nature to have any particular importance. Often, non-commercial organizations or institutions are not financially successful, and are therefore deemed to be failures by those folks. Michealangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci would be considered failures by that standard, simply because they did not become wealthy. Nikola Tesla is considered to be a failure because he did not protect his work from people like George Westinghouse, whereas George Westinghouse is considered to be successful, even though much of his original wealth was based on engineering advances his company had stolen from Nikola Tesla.
Success as measured by the conservative paradigm is only measurable in terms of commerce and wealth generated from that. One can be a thief, or a facilitator of thieves and can be labeled a success, while the poor slobs who got ripped off are considered to be failures, simply because they didn’t protect themselves.
My great-grandfather invented the machine that became the PowerGlide transmission. He took the guts out of three or four Model-A transmissions, and built the centrifugal clutch and hydraulic gating system that controlled it between the two gears. He sold it to General Motors for $25 back in the late 1940s.
Bonehead.
Was he successful? I would say so. He raised my grandpa and supported a spendaholic wife. He ran a little custom machine shop that made pressure gauges and vacuum gauges and tachometers and custom-order medical instruments and shit. He held patents on snatch-block and pulley system designs that enabled the largest cranes in the world to hoist the largest loads now in existence. It also enabled my grandfather to fund his way through the University of Chicago and earn a Ph.D in Physics, as well as eventually buy him a house in La Jolla back in the mid-1950s. His name is still on those pulleys and snatchblocks, even though his interest in that company was sold off in 1961 or so, for fucking peanuts.
Was he a success? Commercially, no. He died sleeping in his favorite chair, with a full stomach surrounded by people that really loved him. But he was pretty much broke. I never met the guy, I guess he died about 3 months before I was born. But I inherited his toolboxes and his lathes. Too bad I can’t afford to do anything with them. My landlord wouldn’t like me setting those up in my apartment. The big lathe is in storage in Portland, next to the goddamn Steinway that I also have no place for.
44 comments on a cheese thread and no GOATBOY.
Must be some sort of record.
@44 Sounds like your grandfather did just fine. He succeeded in inventing a number of successful things, rather than being a “one-hit wonder”. A little reminiscent of Seattle’s Wayne Quinton, who while working at the UW medical instrument shop created the first shunt catheter for chronic hemodialysis for Dr. Scribner and cobbled a multi-stage exercise treadmill from parts out of the Grainger catalog for my old boss Dr. Bruce in Cardiology. He then went on to build a company to produce those and a whole lot of other “mad-scientist” ideas.
Are sure you’re referring to the Model A or the Model T whose planetary-drive transmission parts your grandfather used as the basis for the full automatic? I thought the Model A used what was by then the pretty-much standard three-speed manual design.
Bringing this up makes me wonder whether a certain episode of the “Foyle’s War” series was based on a true story–it dealt with an Englishman who invented syncromesh while a student at Oxford and had it stolen and patented by an American classmate. The American then went on to become a prominent industrialist who brokered the original “Lend-Lease” deal between the US and British governments while the English guy died a drunken failure.
@46 I made $2154 sitting on my fat rabbit ass in front of a computer today, which I guess makes me “successful” by how Republicans measure things, although I personally think flipping stocks is the least important thing I do with my time.
@ 46
I dunno. Details of family stories get messed up over the telling of decades. The story is that he got the parts from the local junkyard somewhere outside of Portland. The Model-T parts would make sense, he apparently worked on the idea for the better part of 20 years. He never patented it, and sold it the way he did because he didn’t want to mess around with a business deal with some gigantic corporation, which GM was at the time. He probably knew full well what it meant to deal with a company like that.
According to my mom and uncles, he was a die-hard bigot, stubborn as a mule and who could only be described as a bull in a china shop with everything he did. Old-school blacksmith and machinist. He’s apparently the guy that taught my mom and uncles to cuss. His smithy and machine shop still stands in Waldport. It’s a storage shack or something now, dunno who owns it. He closed up shop sometime in ’58 or ’59.
He was my great-grandmothers second husband, my actual great-grandfather got himself killed by a poorly broken horse that hadn’t been gelded, back in 1916 or so when my Grampa was a little kid.
And I don’t know if he liked cheese or not. He apparently had nothing nice to say about christians.
38. Deathfrogg spews: any other dogmatic belief system?
There is a whole city in New York where non-Jews are not allowed to own property within the city limits and are regularly spat upon and violently attacked in the streets for non-conformance to the Halakha, and the Police Department does nothing except advise the tourists to avoid the conflicts.
What BS ,,, you gotta pute? us it and linl to this city.
“Jew” is not an ethnicity, it is just another dogmatism that crosses all ethnicities and national identities.
What is “dogmatic” about being born a Jew. Bist die ein Stuermer?
There are Jews in China,
Actually it is illegal in China to be a Jew. foreigners can be Jewish, Chinese are not allowed ot be.
National identity has nothing to do with religious belief systems except in the context of political expediencies.
Yes, and being a Jew has no implications about belief in anything. Ask Hitler, he can explain it better than I. Or if you want to read about atheism, you might note the huge number of Jews who have been and are atheists … unless you get to define a religion based on my absence of a foreskin!
If an individual adhering to the Jewish faith tried to run for President of the US,
Boychick ..what is this thing you call the Jewish faith? Dou oyu know?
There is a damn good reason why “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States” is spelled out in the US Constitution. The Christians regularly violate that rule as a matter of course.
so this is another issue you want to blame on the Jews?
Until one has a majority of voters supporting the candidacy, one has no chance of ever holding office in this country,
Tell that to Obama
Religion is just another catspaw to convince the voters. It’s just a tool to be used and disposed of once it has served its function. Ronald Reagan proved that.
So? Is “religion” why the Repricans hate Mr. Obama???”
To use a form of sarcasm, your remarks deserves the “yes massa: my black friends throw at bossy white folks …. oops I should have called them (you) whieies.
I’m no cracker. I’m a honky. Bobby Seals and Stokley Charmicheal were regulars at my grandmothers dinner table when I was a little kid. They got as much opposition from the Jewish community as they did from the Calvinists, especially in places like New York City and Philadelphia and San Diego. There are plenty of die-hard religious Jews who hate niggers as much as any god-fearing white-trash cracker from southern Louisiana or western Mississippi.
You rally are a bigot. The huge majority of Jews supported MLK, Every hear about the Mississippi three? Saul Alinsky? The Freed0m Seder?
Second, when and where have you seen any Jews steeling Jewish babies to convert them or writing about their religion as some despicable miscarriage of the Deity’s will?
Thats the “blood libel” the Jews themselves have been oppressed with.
Really .. tell that to Pope Pious IX,
The government so f the United States, Canada and Australia institutionalized kidnapping non-christian babies and subjecting them to all sorts of horrors. There is a place in Nanaimo on Vancouver Island that once was the site of a military hospital that had been converted after WW1 into an “orphanage” for first-nations children who had been forcibly kidnapped from their parents, and then used for medical experimentation including vivisection and testing of biological and chemical weapons. It wasn’t even closed until the mid-1970s. When people started sniffing around, the Canadian Government built a giant industrial complex on it and sold off the property where the gravesite was located. It’s rumored to have the remains of several thousands of native American people buried there, mostly children.
Yep, same thing happened to Jews. Or is this another case where you thihk Christianity needs no special criticism because someone else (Muslims>) have practiced forced conversion.,
BTW, if you still have a comouter, try googling “marrano and jews”
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When the Catholic church decided that it wanted certain chunks of property or monopoly on the mind control techniques being used to fleece the rubes, they used the same propaganda against the Jews in the particular locale.
Yes. Sop did the Catholic church during WWII
Thats what the whole goddamn Spanish inquisition was about. Thats what the pogroms in France and England were all about. In 1828, the United States Supreme Court ruled that first-nations people had no rights to, nor title to the lands they lived on, simply because they were not “christian peoples.” How is that any different from the Isreali government arbitrarily confiscating land owned by Palestinians to build Kibbutzes on?
First, ASIK no kibbutzes have ever gbeen built on what is now being called Palestine. Second, if you want to discuss the history of Jews and Arabs, you ought to do that where we can have a better space (again you are welcome to use TA). Suffice it to say that about 800,000Jews fled the Arab lands to live in Israel. Also suffice it to say that Jews have lived in this place continuously for 3,000 years. the first Palestinians appeared after the Suez war.
Hell, we did not even blame the Christians for crucifixions of Jesus!
That makes no sense. There were no “christians” at the time Jeshua was executed.
Nope, but there were Romans and they and Christians became the same thing.
The Romans executed hundreds of thousands of people just like him. Agitators, malcontents, dissidents etc. He was nothing special or particularly unusual.
Yep. And several hundred thousands of those folks were killed in the Jewish Wars, the first Roman effort tat genocide of Jews ..and one in which there were Christians. What side si they take?
I appreciate the compliment. But my choice of forum is this one because this is where the conversation started in the first place. Deliberately misrepresenting what has been said is not a good way to promote your blog.
Actually, FWIW, TA is pretty widely read … about 1000 folks including a very large part of the UW faculty. I only suggest TA to you because it has a different structure that makes civil discussion a lot more possible. The offer remains open.
I see that SJ has not had the honesty or decency to take down the words he stole from me and pasted up over on his little blog.
He hasn’t changed the libelous bolded headline that he made up himself and is trying to pass off as my words.
And no, I haven’t taken up his “offer” to “respond” over there – the scene of the crime, a place no one reads, controlled by the perp, getting permission to post at his pleasure….it reminds my of pudge over at that other sucky little blog.
You’re a dishonest putz, SJ.
Idiot zionist. Cant even Fisk right.
Or spell worth a shit.