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A Thread for Random Musings


Old Man

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Re: A Thread for Random Musings

 

RANT WARNING

 

I am so angry my vision is grainy and my chest hurts.

 

I'm a Torah Jew. I believe in God. I believe in the Torah. And I follow in the path of the sages laid down in the Talmudim and other works.

 

I take these things, along with epistemology, with a dead serious attitude and careful attention to detail.

 

But I am ready to burn the frum world to the ground and walk out smoking a cigar.

 

Frum, for those who don't know, is yiddish for "pious." It is used, arrogantly and incorrectly, in lieu of terms like 'religious' and 'observant.'

 

In fact, it only represents an insular, off-kilter, increasingly ultra-orthodox Ashkenazi perspective.

 

But if the rest of us don't share it we aren't good Jews.

 

This alone wouldn't set me off. Its human nature denuded of pretense in all its gory splendor. Its a given.

 

No, what led me to stand up, roard in fury, and slam my palms into the wall was that it has crippled my work.

 

I wrote an article last night about an Egyptian-American reporter who was brutally sexually assaulted by police during her detention in Cairo.

 

I described it as sexual assault and quoted her description of what happened.

 

It was edited to say she was "assaulted" and suffered "abuse," her quotes were ellipsed to death, and I was put on notice that my article was "immodest."

 

Immodest? Really?

 

What about the Truth? You know, folks, that great word the sages say "is the seal of the Holy One, blessed be He."

 

This woman was sexually assaulted. Her pants were pulled down and her breasts and genitals were gropes until they bruised. Her arm was broken.

 

Even without the details, which could be left out, we have an obligation to call it what it is! Sexual assault. Offended yet?

 

The assault was SEXUAL.

 

What kind of anemic loser is so afraid of the big bad world that the truth must suffer because he can't hack it.

 

And don't get me started on the russian achorwoman who flipped the bird during a story about Obama.

 

I said "she used an obscene gestrure." And guess what.... it was edited to say unacceptable. Appaerently the word obscene is offensive, too.

 

And its not just that.

 

My dauther Bati saw a picture of a dinosaur and tells me that dinousaurs were nonsense and it was a "sippur shtut." (idiocy).

 

Oh, really? I showed her photos of dinousaur bones. She scratched her head and shrugged. "Wait, Abba.. that means they were real."

 

You see, she knows evidence is evidence. She's 9 and one hell of a lot smarter than the ignoramous grown-up who told her this.

 

I mean, come on. Are people this weak minded, weak hearted, and weak spirited that they have to stick their heads in the sand and talk garbage.

 

The God of Israel is not a trickster God running around hiding bones in the dirt to trick you and test your faith!

 

The torah doesn't say how old the universe is and doesn't care. Its utterly irrelevant! Both the fundies and scientists arguing with them are nincompoops.

 

Its not a history book or science manual. Really. My 9 year old got that as soon as I said it. Her brain is fixed. Its not a shocking revelation so get the perdition over it already.

 

Even a semi-literate buffoon can read the first two chapters of Genesis and recognize the deeply allegorical nature of the language.

 

Indeed, two-thousand years ago the sages taught "do not worry about what is above you, do not worry about what is below you, and do not worry about what came before you... only go forward into the Torah and learn."

 

Heaven? Irrelevant. Hell? Irrelevant. The age of the universe? Evolution? Irrelevant. How you live your life and treat people? Extremely relevant.

 

Its a book about the here and now. Its a book about ordering society. Its a book about how we live our lives. Its truth is qualitative - and has to do with making quality people. The age of the universe? Leave that to God and His scientists.

 

Indeed, at one point the sages of the Talmud conceded - in dealing with quantities (ergo, science) - that there were times where the philosophers "seem to understand this better than we do." This is rank heresy to say today, but they - who are greater than those who refuse to hear it - said it outright.

 

I don't see evolution or a billions of years old universe as being a problem for the Torah. They seem like plausible theories. Great. So what?

 

The fact that some anonymous Jew living in the highlands of Samaria around 200 BCE authored a dubious apochrypha trying to create a poorly developed historical timeline back to "creation" because it was in hellenic vogue doesn't suddenly make this weird midrash Seder Olam inviolate TRUTH.

 

Who told him to? What basis did he do so on? How do people handwave the significant epistemological problems with his method? And why does anyone take him seriously? I don't see a commandment to insert shoddy thinking that will create faux crises of faith into the religious world.

 

Fundies (and their scientific foils) HEAR ME. The truth does not involve bad thinking, childlike readings of deep works, or fighting wars with armies of straw men on the plains of contextomy.

 

Figure out the point and stick to it. If not for His sake, for my sake - because you people are making me gray and turning me apoplectic.

 

EXPLETIVE DELETED IDIOTS!

 

And, with that said, what next? Shall we edit Hillary Clinton out of the photo of the cabinet watching the Bin Laden hit because its "immodest?"

 

Perhaps that would shore up our frum credentials at the expense of our journalistic integrity.

 

There was a time - not so long ago - that A7 was news from a nationalist, mainstream religious perspective and wasn't pandering to streimel, langerhosen, buckle-shoe, zaydene bekishe wearing Mullahs who want to impose their extremist views on the rest of us.

 

And when the national religious (since saying Modern Orthodox is appaerently a perjorative now - WTH?) was willing to stand up for what it believed and tell the hareidim no.

 

Guess what folks. My daughters will not be wearing burqas anytime soon. Nor will they be slandering their God by calling him a joker leaving bones in the dirt.

 

Nor will I be working at A7 for more than a year or two more.

 

Its time to put my feelers out and find somewhere else I can write for a living.

 

Somewhere that isn't afraid to call a spade a spade.

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Re: A Thread for Random Musings

 

Warning: extreme counter-example follows. But it's a helluva way to make a point.

 

In this video:

 

 

FOX contributor Megan Kelly describes pepper spray as "...a derivative of actual pepper; it's a food product, essentially." (Her exact words.)

 

A food product! People eat food, so how could that be dangerous, or harmful?

 

Hey, Ms. Kelly... would you like to try some concentrated almond extract? It's 100% natural. People eat almonds all the time, they're completely harmless, this won't hurt a bit.

 

The wild form of domesticated almond grows in parts of the Levant; almonds must first have been taken into cultivation in this region. The fruit of the wild forms contains the glycoside amygdalin, "which becomes transformed into deadly prussic acid (hydrogen cyanide) after crushing, chewing, or any other injury to the seed.

 

Oh, I'm sorry. That "almond derivative" that was only a "food product" turned out to be fatal. Whoops.

 

You see what I did there? You know what they call that? It's called LYING. Stupid b!+ch.

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Re: A Thread for Random Musings

 

Amusement.

 

Normally I watch actors from Hollywood butcher everyone else's accents.

 

Not just foreign accents, but even accents from other US regions.

 

But tonight I watched an episode of Spooks and watched a British actor butcher a US accent.

 

It was the most hackneyed, stilted, tight-lipped Chicago I've seen in a good long while.

 

Ha!

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Re: A Thread for Random Musings

 

In this video

 

FOX contributor Megan Kelly describes pepper spray as "...a derivative of actual pepper; it's a food product, essentially." (Her exact words.)

 

A food product! People eat food, so how could that be dangerous, or harmful?

 

Hey, Ms. Kelly... would you like to try some concentrated almond extract? It's 100% natural. People eat almonds all the time, they're completely harmless, this won't hurt a bit.

 

 

 

Oh, I'm sorry. That "almond derivative" that was only a "food product" turned out to be fatal. Whoops.

 

You see what I did there? You know what they call that? It's called LYING. Stupid b!+ch.

 

Mustard gas... it's a condiment, essentially.

 

JG

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Re: A Thread for Random Musings

 

Today, when I pulled up my Comcast home page, one of the offered video clips was news about the discovery of a "twin" of Earth. I watched the video, and thought, That's really neat! I should post that in the More Space News thread!" So I went looking for an actual article or YouTube video to link, and much to my surprise, this news happens to be *a freakin' year old!*.

 

:thumbup: for the Astronomers who made the discovery

 

:thumbdown: for whoever at Comcast put this video up "1 hour, 30 minutes" ago.

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Re: A Thread for Random Musings

 

Today' date=' when I pulled up my Comcast home page, one of the offered video clips was news about the discovery of a "twin" of Earth. I watched the video, and thought, That's really neat! I should post that in the More Space News thread!" So I went looking for an actual article or YouTube video to link, and much to my surprise, this news happens to be [b']*a freakin' year old!*.[/b]

 

:thumbup: for the Astronomers who made the discovery

 

:thumbdown: for whoever at Comcast put this video up "1 hour, 30 minutes" ago.

...They discovered a water-bearing planet in a stars' habitable zone that's about the size of Earth? How is this not well-known?

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Re: A Thread for Random Musings

 

I hope you grasp my material defused as it is in the stream of unfocused dogma. The mindless minions of Orthodoxy are battling the brainless slaves of nonconformity in a tumultuous conflicting clash of irrelevance but I have already mastered the inconsequentialism they so long for. The intangible benefits of my blather are opaque for all to see.

 

Class is in season.

I suggest you breed it.

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Re: A Thread for Random Musings

 

So I'm having this wierd dream about how a comic book writer tries to defeat another comic book writer. The latter is a misogynist and would have female heroes murdered in foul ways or just not used at all. Reaching those that disagree with this is easy but it is the others that need to be reached and persuaded. The first writer works out that the people he needs to reach are people who may be swayed by the other writer's opinion. And so comes the master stroke. He and his friends come up with something blatently sexist. A girl in a very small white costume and the killer slogan, 'Could you kill Poor Little Lamby ?'

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Re: A Thread for Random Musings

 

We cleared some stuff out of my uncle's uncle's apartment down to the storage locker this afternoon. When that postapocalyptic morning dawns, I'm going to know where to get me some kicker analog speakers and a near-new 1955 black and white TV, and I will have the heppest bachelor pad on the whole darn block.

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