Suddenly Clarity Clarence

Spotted in Seattle

Children of the High Fructose Corn Syrup

Free Society

The more and more I learn about Ron Paul, the more and more I like him. He's not perfect, but he is a step in the right direction.

Rent is Too Damn High

Jimmy Mcmillan represents the Rent Is Too Damn High Party in the race for Governor of New York.



Making a mockery of the system, or a legitimate candidate? This man is a Vietnam vet with three bronze stars. He has a website too: http://www.rentistoodamnhigh.org/

Here's a longer, actual interview. [Here] "I look like a clown show... they didn't know that I was a private investigator... and find out that I'm real."

I'll only add that if Jimmy is taking the piss, he is knocking out the legitimate 'other' party options. Green, Libertarian and Independents. These three parties were locked out of Illinois and California's 'official' debates.

Little Electric Lie

It seems that GM wasn't exactly truthy about the 'all electric' Jesus Car that was being called, well, the Jesus Car.

According to JALOPNIK.com...

The Chevy Volt has been hailed as General Motors’ electric savior. Now, as GM officially rolls out the Volt this week for public consumption, we’re told the much-touted fuel economy was misstated and GM “lied” about the car being all-electric.

In the past, and based on GM’s claims, we’ve gone so far as to call the Volt GM’s “Jesus Car.” And why wouldn’t we call it that? We were told the Volt would achieve 230 MPG fuel economy and would always use the electric drivetrain to motivate the wheels — only using the onboard gasoline engine as a “range extender” for charging the batteries. It now turns out that not only were those fuel economy claims misleading, but the gasoline engine is actually used to motivate the wheels — making the Volt potentially nothing more than a very advanced hybrid car and pushing some automotive journalists like Scott Oldham at Edmunds.com to claim “GM lied to the world” about it.

Of course General Motors has made a response to these revelations... which can be found here.

But it begs the question - can it be called the Jesus Car anymore? How about we call it John the Baptist car?

The only real solution to get off the electric car is obvious - nuclear. Okay, it's a joke, but I'm not kidding... what, like bicycles and trolleys or a robust rail option aren't just as preposterous a suggestion?

The Secret News

George Carlin presents, the Secret News...

Sums it up

That pretty well sums it up, I'd say?

No Vacancy at the Inn

Mary and Joseph traveled from Nazareth to Bethlehem for the census or to be taxed, or taxed and counted, but were turned away from the village inn by the innkeeper. They took refuge in a barn, where baby Jesus was born and laid in a manger. A very early church tradition says the site of the nativity was a cave near Bethlehem.

The Biblical story of the birth of Jesus is found primarily in Luke 2. Luke neither quotes nor mentions an innkeeper. We suggest the story does not refer to an inn, a cave or even a barn, but rather a house. Probably.

The text of Luke 2 notes there was no room for Mary and Joseph in the “inn.” Unfortunately, the Greek term translated inn (kataluma) had multiple meanings, among them inn or caravansary. Used only one other time in the New Testament (Luke 22:11 and the parallel passage, Mark 14:14), it was the place where Jesus observed the Last Supper with His disciples. Here, Luke gave additional information about the kataluma. He said it was a furnished large upper story room within a private Jerusalem house. The kataluma of the last night of Jesus' earthly ministry was the “upper room.”

We suggest the kataluma of Jesus' first night was a similar room in Bethlehem. Mary and Joseph came into town with Mary ready to deliver. Arriving at Joseph's ancestral home, they found it already full of other family members who had arrived earlier. While the exact reason space was not made for a pregnant woman is unknown, but one can only assume that Joseph's uncles and brothers were just dicks.

Just to be clear, Mary and Joseph (probably) never went to the barn. The Biblical account mentions neither barn nor cave—it is assumed because of the manger. Mangers are animal feeding troughs, and barns are where one would expect to find them. But in the ancient world, as well as in primitive modern cultures, mangers are also found within the house itself. Animals are regularly kept in homes at night. I will remind you that there could have been wolves, bandits, or just lack of internet porn... Hey, for whatever reason, that's their deal!

Excavations in Israel have uncovered numerous installations within domestic structures which probably represent ancient mangers. Some are carved, but most are stone built.

Consequently, Mary and Joseph did not find space in the living quarters of the ancestral family home. Instead, they stayed downstairs in the domestic stable, still within the ancestral home, where a manger or two was located.

If, however, it was a Travelodge that denied a pregnant Jewish woman to stay there, I can assure you that you would not want to be on the other end of the customer service discussion.

Faith and Reason

Now who can argue with that?

Truth In Advertising

This gem was found on Fark.com Photoshop contest. Created and or submitted by ScubaDude1960

Van Jones Gone

White House "green jobs" adviser Van Jones resigned in the middle of the Labor Day weekend following persistent controversy over his past remarks and associations.

Jones, who served as an adviser to the White House Council on Environmental Quality, which has got to be the most made-up job in the Obama Administration so far, had generated mounting criticism over the past week. He had issued back-to-back apologies -- first, for calling Republicans "assholes" during a videotaped address earlier in the year, and second for signing a petition in 2004 supporting the "9/11 truther" movement, which believes the Bush administration may have been involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

The latter development, which came on top of several others, was perhaps the most devastating and led to calls for his resignation. The left has truthers, the right has birthers. You just can't be a vocal truther when you work for the government. That's a feedback loop.

Jones stepped down late Saturday.

Jones, I guess, has been part of and in the middle of this Glen Beck back and forth fighting, and whatnot - and I don't care one bit about it. They're both whining idiots who have zero talent except for using their tongues to get phoney-balonie jobs. Yeah, I said that. But what I do care about is that if some government appointee is going to let his lips flap around outloud without any political regard, and when there's a microphone involved (Jebus, people!) there should be appropriate countermeasures. There are. And he's gone. Well, bye. (Beck is just about out of advertisers too, btw.)

What will be interesting to see is how it will be spun into a positive - you know, 'his resignation will deflect distractions from the Health Care Debate, or from scorn on the Obama Administration. what a hero' - or if the whole affair will just be broomed under the rug because it is Labor Day Weekend? Stay tuned.

Bush Lite

Campaign Obama: I'll stop torture, abide by the Geneva Conventions and roll back NSA wiretapping programs.

President Obama: Torture will continue, we will hold detainees even after they're found Innocent, and you bet we're going to keep spying on Americans.

I didn't even mention that he is now encouraging failed banks and companies receiving government bailouts to hand out large bonuses to their executives, staffed his entire Treasury Department with Goldman Sachs alumni, has refused to prosecute Americans who committed torture, and held private meetings with coal executives and continued to push for mythical ‘clean coal’.

And he has committed to a Surge in Afghanistan that he was against in Iraq.

He's Bush-Lite.

Discuss.

How to Win a Religious Debate

William Tyndale (sometimes spelled Tindall or Tyndall) (c. 1494 – 1536) was a 16th-century Protestant reformer and scholar who, influenced by the work of Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther, translated the Bible into the Early Modern English of his day. Tyndale was the first English translation to draw directly from Hebrew and Greek texts, and the first to take advantage of the new medium of print, which allowed for its wide distribution. In 1535, Tyndale was arrested on the orders of King Henry VIII, jailed in the castle of Vilvoorde outside Brussels for over a year, tried for heresy and burned at the stake. He was strangled before his body was burnt.

He's the guy who wrote the English Bible.

Much of Tyndale's work eventually found its way into the King James Version (or "Authorised Version") of the Bible, published in 1611, which, as the work of 54 independent scholars revising the existing English versions, drew significantly on Tyndale's translations.

In translating the Bible, Tyndale introduced new words into the English language, and many were subsequently used in the King James Bible:

• Jehovah (from a transliterated Hebrew construction in the Old Testament; composed from the Tetragrammaton YHWH.
• Passover (as the name for the Jewish holiday, Pesach or Pesah),
• Atonement (= at + onement), which goes beyond mere "reconciliation" to mean "to unite" or "to cover", which springs from the Hebrew kippur, the Old Testament version of kippur being the covering of doorposts with blood, or "Day of Atonement".
• scapegoat (the goat that bears the sins and iniquities of the people in Leviticus, Chapter 16)

He also coined such familiar phrases as:

• let there be light
• the powers that be
• my brother's keeper
• the salt of the earth
• a law unto themselves
• filthy lucre
• it came to pass
• gave up the ghost
• the signs of the times
• the spirit is willing
• live and move and have our being
• fight the good fight

That's right - he was the Quentin Tarantino of the English Bible. "Let there be light" was his "Royal with Cheese."

Some of the new words and phrases introduced by Tyndale did not sit well with the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, using words like 'Overseer' rather than 'Bishop' and 'Elder' rather than 'Priest', and (very controversially), 'congregation' rather than 'Church' and 'love' rather than 'charity'. Tyndale contended (citing Erasmus) that the Greek New Testament did not support the traditional Roman Catholic readings.

Contention from Roman Catholics came from real or perceived errors in translation. Thomas More commented that searching for errors in the Tyndale Bible was similar to searching for water in the sea, and charged Tyndale's translation of Obedience of a Christian Man with having about a thousand falsely translated errors. Bishop Cuthbert Tunstall of London declared that there were upwards of 2,000 errors in Tyndale's Bible. Tunstall in 1523 had denied Tyndale the permission required under the Constitutions of Oxford (1409), that were still in force, to translate the Bible into English.

In response to allegations of inaccuracies in his translation in the New Testament, Tyndale wrote that he never intentionally altered or misrepresented any of the Bible in his translation, and would never do so.

While translating, Tyndale followed Erasmus' (1522) Greek edition of the New Testament. In his Preface to his 1534 New Testament ("WT unto the Reader") he not only goes into some detail about the Greek tenses but also points out that there is often a Hebrew idiom underlying the Greek. The Tyndale Society adduces much further evidence to show that his translations were made directly from the original Hebrew and Greek sources he had at his disposal. For example, the Prolegomena in Mombert's William Tyndale's Five Books of Moses show that Tyndale's Pentateuch is a translation of the Hebrew original.

Meaning, his is the closest to the original text from all the other authors... except that he added some much needed flair.

Be sure to break this article out for your next Jehovah's Witnesses - they really like to tell you that the Bible is directly from God's lips to the page. You tell 'em, nope - Bill Tyndale's.