Symposium

Symposium - a drinking party that usually includes entertainment and conversation

Welcome, I'm drinking coffee myself, but feel free to drink what you feel comfortable with.

I read somewhere recently about Oliver Stone being compared with Mel Gibson regarding anti-semitism. Stone voiced his opinions based on his observations. Gibson co-wrote and directed a movie relaesed 25 February 2004, called The Passion of the Christ which some people, specifically the Anti-Defamation League, considered anti-semitic based on a reading of the script. They had these questions:

Will the final version of The Passion continue to portray Jews as blood-thirsty, sadistic and money-hungry enemies of Jesus?
Will it correct the unambiguous depiction of Jews as the ones responsible for the suffering and crucifixion of Jesus? Will it show the power of the rule of imperial Rome-including its frequent use of crucifixion-in first-century Palestine?
Will the film reject exploiting New Testament passages selectively to weave a narrative that does injustice to the gospels, that oversimplifies history, and that is hostile to Jews and Judaism?
www.adl.org...

I have a hard time understanding what the ADL expected. "Correct the unambiguous depiction..."? What, make it ambiguous? And of course, leave out any reference to imperial Rome, and give a miss to those new testament passages that oversimplify history. So what we're left with, after edit, is a guy named Yeshua is arrested by an ambiguous group of people, who hand him over to a nondescript party, that somehow causes him to die. I doubt that the American Evangelicals would have bothered to see such a film.

Which brings me to my subject, a very destructive manifestation of anti-semitism which is mentioned so rarely that I feel a need to mention it now.

Shortly after the first anniversary of the march 2003 American invasion of Iraq, I was engaged in conversation with a typical American Fundamentalist Christian who was of the opinion that it was part of some god's plan for the U.S. to dominate the whole middle east. Didn't matter what lying excuse was made by the Americans, it was ordained. Lies, crimes against humanity, didn't matter. In the midst of our discussion he says, "Hey, have you seen The Passion of the Christ yet?"

"No," says I, "And I don't plan on it either." (I don't particularly want to watch torture inflicted upon any one, especially some one I think rather highly of.)

"Well let me tell you about it", says he, getting a bit excited and breathless. "They whipped him so bad that you could see his bared ribs. Really terrible!" And I kid you not, at that point, he elevated his head a bit, assumed a rather beatific expression, sighed gently, and said reverentially, "and he went through it all for me."

Some time later, after gaining control of my gag reflex, we got back to discussing what expectations he had for the future of the middle east. After he explained how all the Jews will end up in Israel and get killed, except for 144,000, I asked him about the Muslims. He responded quite casually, "Don't worry about them, they're going to die."

He said this just as casually as some one would respond to a question about the fate of mosquito larvae in a pond with an oil slick on it. Isn't this the very worst sort of anti-semitism imaginable? To brush aside 1.57 billion Semitic language speaking people, for even non-Arab Muslims learn Arabic so as to recite the Qur'an. They are every bit as Semitic as mostly European, African, and Eastasian Jews who learn Hebrew.

Some people get all bent out of shape when they hear angry name-calling, yet don't give it a second thought when millions of people are casually ignored as if they don't matter, as if they are no more than an inconvenience to be waved aside.

What was it Jesus said? Something about straining out gnats and swallowing camels?

I don't mean to imply that only American Zionist Christians exhibit this extreme anti-semitism, Zionist Jews do too.

[edit on 1-8-2010 by pthena]

On Remembering

In 1975, while I was in college, I took German language class for one semester. The teacher was about 75 years old, which would put him at about age 15 in 1915. He was asked once by a student what nationality he was.

"I am Armenian." he said. Then a look of pain crossed his face, "Have any of you heard of Armenia?" Nothing but blank looks from the students.

"We used to have a large area, but that changed. Have you heard of what Germany did to the Jews?"

Oh yes, everyone in the class knew about that.

"Has any one in this class heard what happened to the Armenians?"

Once again, the blank look. The teacher's deflation, dropping of the shoulders and sigh.

The Armenian Genocide was carried out by the "Young Turk" government of the Ottoman Empire in 1915-1916 (with subsidiaries to 1922-23). One and a half million Armenians were killed, out of a total of two and a half million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire.
www.umd.umich.edu...

The word genocide hadn't even been coined yet. I did a search once to see how the genocide was being reported in the western media at the time. It was called Holocaust

In 1944, a Polish-Jewish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959) sought to describe Nazi policies of systematic murder, including the destruction of the European Jews. He formed the word "genocide" by combining geno-, from the Greek word for race or tribe, with -cide, from the Latin word for killing.
The United States Holocaust Museum

In answering the question as to why the Ottoman's saw the Armenians as a problem, Peter Balakian answered thus:

they really pushed the political envelope by asking a question that was quite daring in a theocratic, Islamic empire, and the question was: Can a Christian be the equal of a Muslim in the Ottoman empire; and that question was answered in a decidedly negative fashion by the Sultan Abdul Hamid II in the 1890s, and the Sultan began slaughtering Armenians in enormous numbers.
Interview with Peter Balakian

Memory is a good thing, it really helps when it comes to comparing past events to what we see shaping up today. Let us compare the Ottoman/Armenian situation of then with the so-called Jewish State of Israel/non-Jew residents of "greater Israel". The problem boils down to equal citizenship and equal rights. Think loyalty oaths to "Jewish state of Israel" for non Jews. Think Israeli Arab and Palestinian home demolitions for building of Jewish only homes and settlements.

Remember! Think!

"Who after all speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?" - Hitler, August 22, 1939

"Who, after all speaks today about Palestinians?" - anon, April 20, 2034.


[edit on 1-8-2010 by pthena]

I'm having coffee too.
I somehow missed this thread.
You mentioned it in another thread so that alerted me.
Today I was thinking about Mohammed Atta.
Now this guy lived very close to me and I know people who were very familiar with him.
He was a CIA asset on loan to a coc aine smuggling operation run out of the Venice Airport, which is this tiny place I used to drive by to go to the beach.
So what was this guy's job? Let me tell you. He deposited the money in the bank. He had this icy stare and unfriendly demeanour and aversion to small talk, so he would be ideal to be making transactions without anyone getting anything from him as a hint to where this money was coming from.
I was thinking about this today because I was bugged by people ridiculing 911 truthers like they are from another planet. Well they are living in the planet TV and that is reality to them.
This has nothing to do with what you were talking about but I took this as an invitation to vent, so there you go. it is about time the truth about Atta came out and I doubt that I will be killed for it but I am kind of past the point of caring. Not that I want to die but keeping secrets is equally unhealthy. It could be the only people who read this will be paid informants but I really don't have a better way to reach an audience.
So what difference does this info make? Well he was doing his work as normal just before the plane crashes in Lower Manhattan, and not like the official story about driving his car to Portland Maine. No way, no how and the FBI is fully aware of this since they have the deposit records that show he was here in Florida.

I brought a gift for the host. It's a wall hanging that says "May love abound for all people." I hope it matches the decor.

I'd love some tea if you have some around. I can fix it if you show me where it is.

The weather today was not oppressively hot so after giving a friend a ride I went for a nice long ride in the country side. ....laughing...just like the old folks do on Sunday afternoons. Oh wait- I AM one of those old people now! I drove to a lake and enjoyed the fresh air and solitude and gave my mind a break. Having spent a good part of
yesterday with a houseful of family and children it was a welcome and relaxing day.


Nice comfy chairs ya got here!

reply to post by jmdewey60


I was dozing off in my chair but fully awoke when I heard you whisper that to Pthena.

Do you think Atta wasn't on the plane but is just being used as a scapegoat?

reply to post by LAinhabitant

Somebody liked the picture of him and thought it would look good on a magazine cover.
I have two things to go on from personal experience about 911. One is for some reason I caught the feed that was running live from Battery Park, south of the second WTC tower and watched the plane fly up the lower NY bay from a long distance, with the camera operator obviously knowing in advance to look in that particular direction. Second, what I wrote about in the above post. So that puts me ahead of 99.999% of everyone else as far as knowing something for sure and not just an opinion or belief.
So no, the No-planers are dead wrong, and no there were no hijackers.
Somewhere in the middle of that is the truth about 911, but definitely it was an inside job and there is another JFK assassination type cover-up.

At the risk of wrecking any credibility for my above posts, there is something else that bugs me. People who come on radio shows like Coast to Coast who say that Bigfoot is just something that is mentally brought into existence and somehow are not real, like that they are always here.
There is a guy on the radio right now who is talking the right way, having investigated it by studying the American Indian's lore about them. I spent a lot of time alone in the woods at night and actually lived like that for years, so I had encounters with them including having one standing four feet in front of me. I would say that Bigfoot, when running into a person in this way, they make a point of demonstrating their reality by doing things that take great strength and size and speed. People who make up theories about the incorporeal nature of Bigfoot have never met one.

Maybe Pthena has some stories from being a wolf, and has done his fair amount of woods walking, I imagine.

[edit on 30-8-2010 by jmdewey60]

reply to post by jmdewey60

Maybe Pthena has some stories from being a wolf, and has done his fair amount of woods walking, I imagine.

I don't think I've done as much time in the woods as you. Mostly, while living in my car back in '96 '97. I'd take off for 8 day stretches. Wolf walking was mostly in privacy of apartment previous to that.

I did have a pissing contest with something in a clearing in about August of '96. I was sleeping in my car and awoken by loud huffing and puffing outside. I just assumed it to be a buck deer calling me out. After considering whether I wanted to go out and fight or not, I declined the offer and went back to sleep.

In the morning I discovered my latrine spot all torn up and pissed on. So I pissed over it, "that 'll show 'im". I suppose maybe I shouldn't have assumed it was a deer, and maybe done a bit of investigating.

So, if that had been some bigfoot, big if, I wouldn't assume it to be a non-physical character.

This has nothing to do with what you were talking about but I took this as an invitation to vent, so there you go. it is about time the truth about Atta came out and I doubt that I will be killed for it but I am kind of past the point of caring. Not that I want to die but keeping secrets is equally unhealthy. It could be the only people who read this will be paid informants but I really don't have a better way to reach an audience.

It is sort of a place not just for venting, but for thoughts not quite on topic elsewhere. Speaking of paid informants, I remember a few years ago, after the fall of iron curtain, the East Germans wanted to root out the Stasi that had made life less than pleasant for them. After a few years of investigating and prosecuting who they could they offered amnesty to informers so as to actually get a clear picture of the extent. So they conducted anonymous interviews and came up with a full 1/3 of East Germans had informed on someone to the Stasi.

en.wikipedia.org...
Between 1950 and 1989, the Stasi employed a total of 274,000 persons in an effort to root out the class enemy[5][6]. In 1989, the Stasi employed 91,015 persons full time, including 2,000 fully employed unofficial collaborators, 13,073 soldiers and 2,232 officers of GDR army[7], along with 173,081 unofficial informants inside GDR[8] and 1,553 informants in West Germany.[9] In terms of the identity of inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (IMs) Stasi informants, by 1995, 174,000 had been identified, which approximated 2.5% of East Germany's population between the ages of 18 and 60.[5] 10,000 IMs were under 18 years of age.[5]

While these calculations were from official records, according to the federal commissioner in charge of the Stasi archives in Berlin, because many such records were destroyed, there were likely closer to 500,000 Stasi informers.[5] A former Stasi colonel who served in the counterintelligence directorate estimated that the figure could be as high as 2 million if occasional informants were included.[5]

With the revelation of how deep and out of control the domestic surveillance and data gathering is, it sure seems like we're turning into East Germany, that and the militarization of the border, iron curtain.


[edit on 30-8-2010 by pthena]

reply to post by LAinhabitant

I brought a gift for the host. It's a wall hanging that says "May love abound for all people." I hope it matches the decor.

I'd love some tea if you have some around. I can fix it if you show me where it is.

Thanks, we'll just put that over by the "and Care" hanging. You have to bring your own tea I'm afraid, this place mostly has coffee.

reply to post by pthena
I remember talk of a "peace dividend" which would be the money we would save because of the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.
I think we need to talk about a freedom dividend, which would be the money we could save by not paying to have the people spied on.
What is the purpose? It can't be to have a better government or a safer society. It has to be only one thing, which is for a group to commit crimes against the people and to be able to get away with it by stifling dissent and to make everyone afraid to say something which may be considered "subversive".
Jesus was a subversive and when he said pick up your cross it meant do not be afraid of being punished for speaking the truth.

Not getting out of your car was a good decision and that is what I decided myself the last time I was given the opportunity. There was an irate something big, down at the creek in this very remote place I was living. I slept on a ridge to take advantage of the early morning sun but got water below that I would carry up in bags. So it was down there stirring up a ruckus and woke me up. I decided to stay up on the ridge.

reply to post by jmdewey60
Yeah, freedom dividend. The Dana Priest et al story paints a picture of no oversight or control, I'm sure truckloads of money are disappearing into this morass.

which is for a group to commit crimes against the people and to be able to get away with it by stifling dissent and to make everyone afraid to say something which may be considered "subversive".
Jesus was a subversive and when he said pick up your cross it meant do not be afraid of being punished for speaking the truth.

Make people keep their heads down and voices low, including email and forum posts, and book orders. Jesus said also to not be concerned about the 'morrow since there's enough evil today. That's part of what bums me out about Revelation prognosticating, which is what got me depressed in the first place last night. Waste of time and energy thinking about what might happen a few years from now, and ignore what's right in front of our faces. Which just may be the "purpose" of Revelation, along with mucking about in the OT trying to "decode" it.

You mentioned some writers intending for their works to last as long as the existing scriptures. Revelation is the prime example with it's blessings and curses at the end.

Not getting out of your car was a good decision and that is what I decided myself the last time I was given the opportunity. There was an irate something big, down at the creek in this very remote place I was living.

From the tonation, of the huffing and puffing, if it had been a deer, it would have been as big as an elk. I was 30 miles from the nearest elk route. It did sound irate though.

reply to post by pthena

Waste of time and energy thinking about what might happen a few years from now, and ignore what's right in front of our faces.

I just put up a post addressing that very thing over on that other forum I should probably not name but is the sceptics forum.
I am not too happy lately and that has been for a while since I told you I was freaking out over the language of the New Testament. The Bible as we know it has to be looked at through a sceptical eye and it is a good thing to examine it closely to see what is reliable or not. Mucking around would be a lot of conjecture based on obscure verses like the one we were examining where the writer says things like, " that stuff I was telling you about when I was with you." Who knows what that was or if such a thing really existed.
Revelations was another thing that got me onto this road, where he supposedly had visions but had no idea what to think of them, then I guess angels came to him to verify them and to say they are true and they mean this and that but he does not let us into those conversations but are left to wild speculation. So, somehow it was good enough for one person to understand it? Well what a great book we have! Somewhere at one time, someone understood it all and we should feel confident that there is really something real behind this religion and we just follow the scraps deemed disposable for the masses. What?

reply to post by pthena


Java and real men. I'm coming here when the shtf!
Survival skills will be a great thing to possess.

reply to post by pthena

Symposium - a drinking party that usually includes entertainment and conversation

Sounds good.
I used to go to sea kayaking symposiums and they were like that, with conversations sharing knowledge important for surviving the sport, and meals shared and some night time entertainment. Lots of fun.
It's nice to not have the constraints of staying on topic since I am not very good at that and have a tendency to go all over the place.
This thing that Jeffrey Grupp has going has this symposium feel to it and though I may not agree with everything, there is an atmosphere conducive to free debate. So I continue to listen and to contribute some.
This thread could be something like that where people have the same sort of mindset for throwing out old conventionality and looking for the truth of things to where we do not need to shun anyone who is honest but has differing opinions at the moment. I know I don't like to be too dogmatic and am open to suggestion.

edit to add some weirdness: if you want to feel a little paranoid, here's one.
I went to Youtube and number one on my suggested videos was called Seakayaking Fundamentals, so do you see a surveillance grid in place?


[edit on 30-8-2010 by jmdewey60]

reply to post by jmdewey60

Mucking around would be a lot of conjecture based on obscure verses like the one we were examining where the writer says things like, " that stuff I was telling you about when I was with you."

"But mr. writer, I was absent that day, missed that talk. Could you clarify please?"

Somewhere at one time, someone understood it all and we should feel confident that there is really something real behind this religion and we just follow the scraps deemed disposable for the masses. What?

"Don't worry about that. The Official Empire Church decided what scraps were worthy."
I just posted some views on Patriotism over here: Christian Preacher denied entry to USA - for life!
I don't know if I ever listened to Jeffrey Grupp, unless he's the big inside man talking about strange stuff like colonies already on the moon and such.

edit to add some weirdness: if you want to feel a little paranoid, here's one.
I went to Youtube and number one on my suggested videos was called Seakayaking Fundamentals, so do you see a surveillance grid in place?

Do you mean, like, record the ISP and address of whoever watches the video? make a list of all known sea kayakers?

reply to post by pthena
I mean, make a forum post mentioning seakayaking and a half hour later, having youtube offering me to a seakayaking video to watch.
OK, so it does not sound sinister, but everyone has a data base connected to them that records everything you do.
Grupp today is talking about '___' and '___' and the pineal gland and consciousness. That's on his subscription show. His free show in on Monday nights on Antimatter Radio or you can catch it at his web site as a recording.
His being an insider has to do with being on the inside of college academics, as a college lecturer.



[edit on 30-8-2010 by jmdewey60]

reply to post by LAinhabitant

Java and real men. I'm coming here when the shtf!
Survival skills will be a great thing to possess.

I don't know about Jmdewey, but my greatest survival skill is getting by with little or nothing when need be. I can usually start a fire when I want.

reply to post by jmdewey60

I mean, make a forum post mentioning seakayaking and a half hour later, having youtube offering me to a seakayaking video to watch.
OK, so it does not sound sinister, but everyone has a data base connected to them that records everything you do.

If you saw that movie Minority Report, the guy couldn't go anywhere without custom tailored advertising following him, think when everyone has cell phones on them, no need for chip implants.

One of the motives for privatising surveillance is to get around legal restrictions against government surveillance. Private outfits say it's just for customized personal advertising. Then, the government just gets it from the commercial outfit because all those lists are for sale.

reply to post by pthena
You mentioned Dana Priest earlier and his Undercover America I think brings that up some. I haven't read it myself. I get a lot of my info from internet radio. Speaking of which, Grupp's show last night was good. He had two of his contributers on talking about psychological war on us from the NWO. Playing on the R complex which is what is called the reptilian mind, to condition us to war by making us like a NAZI style death cult.


[edit on 31-8-2010 by jmdewey60]

reply to post by jmdewey60


Thanks for mentioning Jeffrey Grupp. I'd never heard of him before but I found an interesting article on his website LOGOS, MATHEMATICS, AND SACRED GEOMETRY that caught my eye.

antimatterradio.com...