My favorite is the prize for medicine, awarded to researchers working on reducing the number of colonoscopy patients who explode. I worry about exploding every time I have a colonoscopy.
Author Archives: Larry Franz
Brian Wilson Is A.L.i.V.E.
Canadian musician Rich Aucoin has released a video that tells the story of Brian Wilson’s career in four minutes. It’s really well-done. (But it’s too bad they didn’t find any striped shirts for the “Beach Boys”.)
Mary, My Wife, My Disciple?
The Smithsonian has a long article with a lot more information about the scrap of papyrus that suggests Jesus had a wife.
Personally, I don’t care whether he was married or not (or what kind of sex life he had, if any). What’s interesting is that Professor Karen King, who is presenting this new information to the world, doesn’t claim that the papyrus provides reliable biographical information about Jesus. She admits that it calls into question the official view that Jesus wasn’t married, but she thinks that its real significance is that it shows yet again that important alternative versions of Christianity were suppressed by church authorities:
“Her scholarship has been a kind of sustained critique of what she calls the ‘master story’ of Christianity: a narrative that casts the canonical texts of the New Testament as divine revelation that passed through Jesus in ‘an unbroken chain’ to the apostles and their successors—church fathers, ministers, priests and bishops who carried these truths into the present day.
According to this ‘myth of origins,’ as she has called it, followers of Jesus who accepted the New Testament—chiefly the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, written roughly between A.D. 65 and A.D. 95 —were true Christians. Followers of Jesus inspired by noncanonical gospels were heretics hornswoggled by the devil.”
In this case, the alternative version is one in which a woman (possibly Mary Magdalene) has a larger role in the history of Christianity, either as the wife of Jesus or as an “apostle to the apostles”.
Final Thoughts on What Romney Said
There’s been a lot of commentary on Romney’s 47% remarks. What I haven’t seen anyone pointing out is how plain dumb his remarks were.
He said that the people who are totally committed to voting for Obama are the same people who don’t pay Federal income tax.Â
He knows, of course, that there are plenty of people with well-paying  jobs who would never consider voting for him. Many of these people live in states like California, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Illinois. These states are home to lots of “liberal elitists” who the Republicans like to complain about. So his claim makes no sense, even from a right-wing perspective.
He also said that the people in this supposed group don’t take responsibility for their own lives. There are some such people, of course, but they are clearly a much smaller group than committed Obama voters and the people who don’t owe Federal income tax.
How could an apparently intelligent person like Romney say something so stupid? My guess is that he was simply engaging in some right-wing stream of consciousness while pandering to his wealthy contributors. If they took a moment to think about it, everyone in the room would understand that, literally speaking, his statements were false. But it would be great fun to hear him insult liberal Democrats, low-income people and welfare cheats by lumping them all together. His absurd remarks reveal as much about his audience as they do about him.
Yet More Background on What Romney Said
From an article by Ramesh Ponnaru in the National Review Online:
“The Tax Foundation has calculated the percentage of filers in each state who pay income tax. The ten states with the highest number of non-payers are a strongly Republican bunch: Eight of them went for John McCain in 2008, and nine of them have Republican governors.”
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/283265/freeloader-myth-ramesh-ponnuru
Obviously, some people are very confused. And some people are making stuff up. The red states below had the highest percentages of people filing Federal income tax returns but not paying any income tax. The blue states had the lowest percentages.Â
Whereof One Can Speak 🇺🇦 
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