my contribution:
‘breaking news: Assange fights back‘, 10/10/2018, wd, caucus99percent.com
WikiLeaks' lawyer Judge Baltasar Garzón arrives in Ecuador to file case today over @JulianAssange's isolation and g… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…—
WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 19, 2018
Statement on TwitLonger: Julian Assange launches case over his continued gagging, threat:Fri Oct 19 14:55:41 UTC 2018
‘LEAKED: Here Are the Demands Ecuador Has Given Julian Assange in Order to End His Isolation’ gatewaypundit.com
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
I just had someone quote to me, but Jesus said, ‘the poor you have with you always”! one of those types claiming to “believe” the bible.
They have been at a great feast
of languages, and stolen the scraps….
O, they have lived long on the alms-basket of words…Loves Labor Lost
JOHN OF GAUNT….I may never lift
An angry arm against His minister.
Duchess: Where then, alas, may I complain myself?
JOHN OF GAUNT
To God, the widow’s champion and defence-Richard 2.
has there ever been a better book than the bible at getting people to rationalize their own monotonous indifference to the status quo? John is not there to defend the Duchess; here’s there to mouth off about God defending widows & orphans. a long life of thievery, incl from the alms-basket of words.
“those who don’t work shouldn’t eat!” as Paul says somewhere. see? workhouses for all the children! and if the behavioral modification regime doesn’t get the schizos working at Wal Mart or Amazon, they can’t eat either.
but they can’t go off their meds. cuz then they might do something.
fat people are lazy. perhaps. but isn’t it curious that, for the 1st time in history, the fat people are all grossly malnourished? a person just looking at fat distribution in this society might just assume we are all very prosperous. “would he were fatter!” Caesar says of Cassius. no one worries about the revolts & revolutions of fat people, as Hal jokes to Falstaff. what if they are fat, morbidly obese, diabetic, with cardiac disease, and can barely operate the clicker on their TV? what if their food doesn’t get them energy to follow even “are you dumber than a 5th grader?”
yeah, as to fat people and malnutrition, i believe it. not minimizing food ghettoes and buying cartloads of soft drinks, but i also believe that gen modified foods acting as bug factories killing the (95% beneficial) bacteria on our guts is a major part of ‘fatness’ in the ‘developed’ world. not so in third world nations like yemen and others where dying of starvation is a whole different thing.
paul said ‘those who don’t work shouldn’t eat’? well that tallies w/ receiving what’s left of the safety net being dependent on the same in far too many states. useless eaters not welcome.
but then wasn’t paul the disciple that against christ’s express desires..formed a church around him?
there are multiple vectors for the delivery of malnutrition. does 7-11 exist to make us healthy?
one thing I do w/my students is study some “proverbs.” like, Confucius say, “easier to find light switch after light turned on.” that’s a good one. one student replied to the early bird proverb, “the early bird gets the early worm.” nice. talk about what they mean and their limitations as guides to life, etc. which student likes, e.g., “the ends justify the means” and says, oh of course that’s true?
anyway, the two sayings about work & poverty that anyone knows from the bible are those two by Jesus & Paul. I mean they know how to use those verses, no others, to argue against my commie bullshit.
that’s one reason why the bible is so interesting. it really functions like a big rorschack test. what is light upon the world that one pulls from this great big complicated mess? other texts also work but hey, go w/what you know.
“people who don’t work should starve.” “Arbeit Macht Fries” can be the sign over our workhouses. (get it? arbeit macht freedom fries.)
and didn’t you know that “the poor you have with you always” is a commandment? it’s a commandment against welfare programs. from the guy handing out food in the desert.
we all take from the alms-basket of words, which is infinite or might as well be. some of us drive our words so obviously into certain directions. we’ve got 6 very woolly sheep or so worth of words that we can only herd into two pens (like democrat and republican). and we have a hard time with that, despite how dumb sheep are. their wool looks so alike and it’s so hard to tell donkey sheep from elephant sheep!
what are we looking for when we pull out certain word tools & start mining & hacking away at reality? how do people come to look around at words for the purpose of finding ways to deny other people food? (maybe it’s not that different from looking at stars in order to figure out how to nuke Moscow?)
yeah, I think of Narcissus, looking at himself, in the ocean of words. resentful at some people who might be eating who didn’t “work” for it.
none of these objects of their resentment reside, let us say, at Windsor Castle. more so in gutters. leeches at the trash cans are so much harder to bear than leeches who have peerage. or leeches who can count, like the board of Berkshire Hathaway. these tapeworm factories are perfectly acceptable.
how grubby to call up your partner to tell him & apologize that you overspent by $1.20 on your food budget and money will now be even tighter till end of month (no joke.) ugh. they might infect me w/their breath at this bus stop.
but it is these who are “the cankers of a calm world and a
long peace”. “great feeders,” all. haven’t you noticed how fat these sponges on others’ labor have become????? if they were only budgeting properly and eating properly….
and that’s about as far as thought & words take us. but when about 90% of one’s waking life is spent at work and any reference to, you know, a dream life is madness, yeah, there’s lots of resentment out there.
b/c we’ve all been robbed of our youth. the old stealing from the young (& men from women, generally speaking.) by work.
part of murka’s plan to continue the “recovery” is to pump up the export of its own unending supply of resentment. Burger King just opened in Burma.
“but then wasn’t paul the disciple that against christ’s express desires..formed a church around him?”
Hah, you got me, wendye. No, he wasn’t.
which one was, then? i’d done a quick bingle, and this at least says paul had traveled widely creating churches, but it gets a bit in the weeds as to who he’d sought as members. and here i’d thought you might have been keenly interested in the nato #tridentjuncture war games on russia’s borders. ; )
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Paul-the-Apostle
Well, first of all, Paul was not a disciple. He was indeed an apostle, and finally accepted as such by Christ’s disciples, but he had persecuted Christians before on the road to Damascus being struck by a blinding light and hearing a voice questioning him about that persecution.
He did strike out on his own after that personal revelation, not returning to Jerusalem for three years. And as he says in his letter to the Galatians, those remaining there did wonder that he who had formerly persecuted was now supporting the churches. As he says there, “he who worked through Peter for the mission to the circumcised worked through me also for the Gentiles.”
The union of the two ways didn’t come easily, but is verified by Peter in his second letter:
“…So also our beloved brother Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, speaking of this [new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells] as he does in all his letters. There are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures…”
And I’ll add that when Paul is describing having to work to eat, he is saying that to one of the churches in his own defense, that he does work as a tent maker in order not to be classed as one who profits off the generosity of the churches, so the message is a bit different from that of some of today’s mega church ones. Again in Galatians:
“…James and Cephas and John, who were reputed to be pillars, gave to me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship, that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised; only they would have us remember the poor, which very thing I was eager to do.”
Well, first of all, Paul was not a disciple. He was indeed an apostle, and finally accepted as such by Christ’s disciples, but he had persecuted Christians before on the road to Damascus being struck by a blinding light and hearing a voice questioning him about that persecution.
He did strike out on his own after that personal revelation, not returning to Jerusalem for three years. And as he says in his letter to the Galatians, those remaining there did wonder that he who had formerly persecuted was now supporting the churches. As he says there, “he who worked through Peter for the mission to the circumcised worked through me also for the Gentiles.”
The union of the two ways didn’t come easily, but is verified by Peter in his second letter:
“…So also our beloved brother Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, speaking of this [new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells] as he does in all his letters. There are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures…”
And I’ll add that when Paul is describing having to work to eat, he is saying that to one of the churches in his own defense, that he does work as a tent maker in order not to be classed as one who profits off the generosity of the churches, so the message is a bit different from that of some of today’s mega church ones. Again in Galatians:
“…James and Cephas and John, who were reputed to be pillars, gave to me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship, that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised; only they would have us remember the poor, which very thing I was eager to do.”
Of course, my church isn’t the Encyclopedia Brittanica and doesn’t adhere to their assumptions about who wrote what, scholarly assertions notwithstanding. The simplest answer is the best one, that the letters are authentic. To suppose otherwise is to suppose mendacity, which of course all are free to do.
Have a lovely Sunday; it is beautiful here.
how odd that your comments went to trash; it seems to happen to j often, too. yes, mr. wd told me paul was an apostle, not a disciple, but many now use the term interchangeably, if irreverently. and yes, the histories at various sources will and are different, even many versions of the 10 commandments vary bible to bible, thus the various meanings are vastly different in a few.
i’ll read one of those i freed in a bit; right now i’m on a roll w/ a new paul kagame génocidaire (ptui) diary. good sunday to you, as well, juliania; it’s gorgeous here as well, and the scent of fallen leaves is heady, but poignant.
Thanks, wendye. I only made the distinction because ‘disciple’ to me means a follower during the life of, whereas Paul only became a follower after the death of Christ, is not among those who lived with and wrote about his life.
iirc, i’d said that mr. wd had explained the distinction to me. and i do see the reason why you give more props to paul post-conversion to ‘christianity’. i’ll say that although mr. wd was steeped in the bible, he’s instead read the urantia book, which followers have already schismed in to two discrete camps.
i’d only read the book’s lengthy part on the life of jesus, so…there’s that ringing in my head, if fuzzily, of course. never got back to your longer comment, which might have been meant fo j of nine as well.
too much paul kagame, and commenting in another venue. maybe tomorrow.
I’ll just add this final comment, lest my assertion about Britannica be misinterpreted. It pertains to those whom Christ did condemn.
“…The spiritual life is a paradox. The excellence of the Pharisees was met with condemnation from Christ; they could not see their own emptiness…” [Father Stephen Freeman]
Paul had been a Pharisee, one of their leaders. For his path to be changed so radically as it was, he deserves more respect than he currently gets.
I went to a Tibetan healing service on Friday, held in a very nice chiropractic/Asian medicine practice. knowing hardly nothing of Tibetan Buddhism (beside the Dalai Lama is a CIA stooge), it all seemed “authentic” to me.
and I went to this church this a.m. my place is 10 minutes walk from here
https://www.livingwater.com/
starbucks/euro internet café on all kinds of jeebusy steroids. you can imagine. very choreographed, like a Britney Spears dance video w/the same quality of pop music, powered by all the latest mod cons.
as I sat in that two hour long Tibetan service, the question, “what is the mystery?” is real easy: since 85% of the service is in traditional Tibetan chant, w/English only in brief intros or explanations to different sections of the service, the mystery is easy to see. plus the ritual is foreign, though mostly understandable.
it’s exotic & funky. like at the church, everyone’s real friendly, though no one could match the fake sincerity of evangelicals. the importance of being ernst, about *everything*. anyway, it’s obvious the “mystery” of evangelicalism is the Bible. and this church did not fail.
snoooooooooooooooooooooze.
however, both the Tibetans and Evangelicals give ample testimony that there is a fatted calf. lots & lots of ’em. (WD, the fatted calf from the story of the Prodigal Son, Luke 15. indeed, fat, abattoir-bound cattle on thousands of hills. thanks to evangelical eating habits, cattle now outweigh all other vertebrate animals on the planet by an order of 5. see St. Clair on this weekend’s CP. beef herds by themselves aren’t gonna kill the Amazon. they need help chopping those jungles down. maybe Amazon can soon drone deliver all over the world Amazon-fresh beef?)
and at least the Buddhists have some nuance in their views on the relation b/n ego & desire. they are not even at a 5th grade level of psychology at these evangie Disneyfied temples to suburbia.
both groups claim the ability to heal, if one does this or that & sticks to it & really believes and all that. to the churchy people’s credit, the class bias was a little less obvious than at the rather more well-heeled Buddhist service. shockingly, to me, anyway, there was less meat, beef, at the church too.
none of my housemates or people I hang out with are Xian, though one is ex-Mormon. well do they all say that ‘the bible means whatever you want’, at least in hands of the gang at “living water.” they also all assume that there *must* be more to the bible, something esoteric, Kabbalistic, or something, that Xians are hiding from them. cuz all these Xians do is use the bible to justify their trips to the shopping mall. and after even a cursory look at “western society” w/the fresh eyes of youth, many are ready to toss the west’s “foundational text” in the trash.
can’t say I blame ’em.
one of the main Buddhist guys there at the healing thing, a serious student of all things Tibet, is a computer programming engineer who’s just started his own business whose goal is both to implement & to measure the tangible benefits from introducing “spirituality” (Tibetan buddhist practice) into the workplace. After 5 minutes of meditation, your secretary will type 3% faster, that kind of thing. nice to see that his Buddhism hasn’t freed him from most of the brutally silly straitjackets of “spirituality” that us Merkins have. his being Canadian seems to be no defense either.
why do people go to these things? I ask, “what is the mystery” cuz both places claim to offer what a person can’t find w/o their help. they offer some adventure of discovery of the unknown and the possibility of “miracles.” they also offer a place where people can find others like themselves where they all at least try to be nice & accepting of each other (I know, unless one is gay or whatever; at least the Buddhists aren’t so hung up on that). They go there for some semblance of community & then try to convince themselves that they are really deep seekers of spiritual truths, rather than just simple people in need of some acceptance they don’t get from family, work, etc.
they also offer music. there are enormous differences in how they offer music, & one could talk about how differences of spirituality are reflected in musical practice, but, you know, Justin Bieber vs something going back millennia? it’d be a short conversation.
Thanks for this, j of 9. (Sorry to be late commenting, and Halloween and all too.) I found this a gentle, and loving illustration of the two faiths – soothed my soul in light of friction on the international stage between the leaders of my Orthodox faith. You hit the nail on the head commenting last about music, the importance it has as well as its different use in each, plus the importance of healing as a concept, a need. I know for my older children who are Buddhist, that is the key.
I can only say for myself though I came to Orthodoxy late, it was simply a corroboration of dimly held beliefs from my childhood on, so just more or less saying yes, this is why I thought that, and ah, now I understand better – more the way good teaching should be. I hadn’t had the nasty experiences many have had with those I will simply call bad teachers. I was very fortunate in that. But I often think, wasn’t that a reason not to say this is the one and only path? It is for me, but how I got here is my way, exclusively mine.
I’m happy to say there are other Orthodox teachers who think this way, so it isn’t just me.
j homeless in oly, j of 9, emailed a bit ago to say he’s under a bit more deranged duress; dunno when he might be back to answer your comment.
stay well,
wd
I will just add that yes, all the reasons for being a member of a church or a temple are as you say, to be among others that are friendly and having good will – there is that. But also, the faith is more important, and when, as happened in my little church, the elements of that became disrupted, I could not stay there. So, the way became a solitary one for me – not entirely, because I still have connections, but more so than before. Because ‘deeply seeking spiritual truths’ – that’s still a thing with me.