NY Times- Tablet Ignites Debate on Messiah and Resurrection

Now I know this will come as a great shock to those of you who haven’t seen (or don’t believe) Zeitgeist, but it seems as though there might have been a Judaic history of “dead for three days and resurrected” which predates Christianity.

Tablet Ignites Debate on Messiah and Resurrection

The slaying of Simon, or any case of the suffering messiah, is seen as a necessary step toward national salvation, he says, pointing to lines 19 through 21 of the tablet — “In three days you will know that evil will be defeated by justice” — and other lines that speak of blood and slaughter as pathways to justice.

To make his case about the importance of the stone, Mr. Knohl focuses especially on line 80, which begins clearly with the words “L’shloshet yamin,” meaning “in three days.” The next word of the line was deemed partially illegible by Ms. Yardeni and Mr. Elitzur, but Mr. Knohl, who is an expert on the language of the Bible and Talmud, says the word is “hayeh,” or “live” in the imperative. It has an unusual spelling, but it is one in keeping with the era.

Two more hard-to-read words come later, and Mr. Knohl said he believed that he had deciphered them as well, so that the line reads, “In three days you shall live, I, Gabriel, command you.”

US and EU close to sharing their datamines, Wall Street wants to continue oil speculation

I wanted to make a new post in honor of my stat counter being about to rolling over the 50K mark. Basically, it’s just the same old story, though. Greed and an increasingly Big Brotherlike world. I wish I had something more heartening to post at the moment. I’ll keep looking.

U.S. and EU near deal on sharing data

The United States and the European Union are nearing completion of an agreement that would allow law enforcement and security agencies to obtain private information - including credit card transactions, travel histories and Internet browsing habits - about people on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

and Sweden, a member nation of the EU has just passed its new law allowing

all cross-border internet and telephone traffic to be monitored

.

Wall Street

Lobbies to Protect Speculative Oil Trades
(E)xecutives from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, two of Wall Street’s largest investment banks, made the case that their multibillion-dollar investments in energy contracts have not led to higher oil prices.

I made up a little NNDB map of some of the top oil, securities and banking board interlocks. It’s nowhere near as big as some of the other board interlock maps I’ve worked on in the past since it is focused on a few narrow segments rather than the bigger picture.

Separately, lobbyists for the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) and other financial entities such as hedge funds roamed through congressional office buildings this month and, in the Senate, left behind short policy statements that defended the current state of regulation. “Blaming speculation for the increase in energy prices is to confuse causation and correlation,” one of the documents said.

A second document, or “talker,” asserted: “Congress and regulators have acted to strengthen oversight of the energy markets. Give the new authorities time to work.”

But time is running short. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the federal agency that regulates oil trading, has drawn the increasing ire of lawmakers for exempting financial firms from rules that limit speculative buying, a prerogative usually reserved for airlines and trucking companies that need to lock in future fuel costs. The CFTC has also waived regulations on U.S. investors who trade commodities on some overseas markets, allowing them to accumulate large quantities of the future oil supply by making purchases on lightly regulated foreign exchanges.

ETA:
So, I went looking for posts about solutions to add a bit on to this post; here’s what I’ve got…
The World’s Worst Problems Can Be Solved
The Orion Project: Energy. Humanity. Hope.
Private surfing
Lawns To Gardens Episode 5: Worm Poop

RIP George Carlin- dead of a heart attack at age 71

I just saw a news story about this and wanted to give him a tip of the hat. Those of you who’ve watched Zeitgeist: The Movie will at least be familiar with the following piece of George Carlin’s brand of humor:

When it comes to bullshit, big-time, major league bullshit, you have to stand in awe of the all-time champion of false promises and exaggerated claims, religion. No contest. No contest. Religion. Religion easily has the greatest bullshit story ever told. Think about it. Religion has actually convinced people that there’s an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever ’til the end of time!

But He loves you. He loves you, and He needs money! He always needs money! He’s all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, somehow just can’t handle money! Religion takes in billions of dollars, they pay no taxes, and they always need a little more. Now, you talk about a good bullshit story. Holy Shit!

copied from Rense

Also noted as George Carlin’s humor- Seven Dirty Words

Tips on finding information using search engines

Sure, there are no doubt classes you can take to learn this type of information. But this post is for those of us who haven’t taken them, didn’t pay attention when we were taking them and/or need a refresher. I’ll share a few tips which I use and perhaps others will leave helpful comments. Hopefully, these tips will help you improve the results you get when searching, and help you find what you are looking for more quickly and easily.

1.) Google isn’t everything-
Sure, it’s the best single non meta search engine around. But limiting oneself to that, when one can easily use a metasearch engine which improves on Google (I know of one so far, polymeta.com) is like tying one hand behind your back while searching. You may find that you don’t always agree with Google’s “relevance” for certain topics. Also, the other search engines pick up on things that Google misses, even outside of “certain topics”.

2.) tips for common words-
search engines are apparently now including common words which they used to neglect such as the, and, etc. However, most of the time when one is looking for such common words in a search one is looking for a specific phrase “this and that” “the little mermaid”, etc. so why not use quotes if one is going to include the very common words. Sure, you can find lots of results for a search of- and not or the - but will the most relevant results specific to what you are actually looking for pop up first?

Only two of the top ten results for searching (not in quotes) “and not or the” relate to Boolean searching or Boolean operators. In this case, if that is what one is searching for, one actually gets improved results by leaving off the extraneous the. On the other hand, searching the string (AND NOT OR the) (no quotes or parentheses) returns completely different results which are even less relevant to Boolean logic. Sometimes, it’s still better to leave out those common words, in other words, despite the fact that search engines will now search them.

3.) parentheses really help, but can be too specific-
Let’s take an example using a fairly common name, say Bob Jones, for example. Depending on the search engine you are using, putting quotes around “Bob Jones” will cut your results at least in half and sometimes by considerably more. The downside to this is that you’ll be missing out on anything which puts Bob’s last name first. Or calls him Robert or Mr. Or Bob A. Jones. Or Bob Arthur Jones. You get the idea. But if you are looking for someone very specific, you can include all of those possibilities. You just need to string them together with a whole lot of ORs. Which in this case will leave you with far too many results to be useful, but with a less common name can be helpful.
Quotation marks can also be especially helpful when one is searching for either a quoted passage or for a word pair or phrase- “now then” say, for example. Getting too specific on a not quite correctly remembered quote, on the other hand won’t be helpful or quick. So, use quotes, but know their limitations. Putting quotes around a single word, on the other hand, doesn’t do a whole lot. Yes, people do arrive at my blog via things like city “maps” of the wheel of time (hint- try searching “wheel of time” maps and/or look here) OR “kill the messenger” and “edmunds”, but I doubt the single words in quotes are helping much.

4.) Asking a search engine a specific question (or attempting to engage it in conversation) as one would a human being isn’t always the best approach. I’ll give you a specific example or two here:
I got two hits to this blog for the phrase (searched without quotes) “can i be fired for bebo comment” yesterday. I don’t know anything about bebo. If I had to guess, I’d say the answer is yes, depending on what one writes, who one works for, etc. But, I’d never written about or even read about Deena Pawson, who was indeed fired for writing Bebo comments “work sux” and working until midnight was “gay like the management”. Nonetheless, I ranked pretty well (second page) for that search because (I think) my blog has the word can in the title and I have a Bebo category for this blog. Admittedly, the single entry (so far) in that category is pretty relevant to the overall question; nonetheless it doesn’t address the fairly specific specific question asked, except perhaps in general terms- what you post on social networking sites can indeed get you fired, fined, suspended or be used in a court case against you.

Second example on search engine queries- (which just goes to show you, searchers may know something I don’t)
(no quotes) “how popular relatively is the movie zeit(geist)” (I’m assuming they finished the word zeitgeist). Personally, I’d have tried something like this: (”Zeitgeist the movie” popularity). Or (popularity Zeitgeist movie) or maybe (popular Zeitgeist movie). None of these return my blog on the front page, however, unlike the first query. And I think I did, to some degree give a fair answer to that question. And so far, I haven’t seen too many other places in the relevant results which do.
Peter Joseph’s site itself gave a figure of 70,000+/- views per day a few months back. Some say it claims the title of the most watched internet movie ever, though it’s a bit difficult to verify that claim, what with google censorship and all…

Anyway, I may add a few more search tips here when/as I think of them. Got some good ones of your own? Feel free to share them in a comment.

Beware the Ides of April (that would be today). Are you paying for war with your taxes this year?

Though the Ides of March is the 15th of the month, the Ides comes earlier in most months (including April), landing on the 13th. Tax day follows soon after, depending on the year…

So, anyway, instead of working on my taxes I thought I’d procrastinate by posting to this blog. That way all my fellow procrastinators can put off doing their own taxes to read this post.

Most Americans dutifully pony up to foot the bills for endless wars and to pay the bills on past wars (that’s where most of the federal debt gets racked up, dontchaknow- that’s where a good deal of your tax dollars go). Anyway, fans of Zeitgeist will be at least somewhat aware of all this. You can check out Peter Joseph’s Q & A section on part 3 of the movie to see a brief blurb of his take on it.

Some people take the route of war tax resistance. See for example some of the resources and publications @ http://www.nwtrcc.org/publications.htm

The pamplet Low Income/Simple Living as War Tax Resistance is one I find particularly interesting. Here’s a quote:

At What Level is Income Taxable?
If you are considering resisting taxes by maintaining an income below the tax line, your first question is probably going to be: “Where is this tax line?”

The answer depends on many factors, such as your age, how many dependents you have, and what you do with your money. The factor you have the most control over is what you do with your money. If you make the right choices, you can double or triple the amount of income that you can keep below the tax line. If you ignore those choices entirely, your tax line is the sum of your exemptions and your standard deduction.

In 2006, if you were a single, non-blind person, under 65 with no dependents, your standard deduction was $5,150 and your personal exemption was $3,300. This means that you could have earned up to $8,450 without having to pay any federal income tax — no question about it. However, you could earn two or three times as much and not owe U.S. federal income tax if you learn a bit about the tax laws and about significant credits and deductions, such as those given for tax-advantaged retirement savings accounts and health savings accounts. For example, the hypothetical person from the previous paragraph (single, non-blind, under 65, with no children) could earn $21,700 and by putting $4,000 of that into an IRA and $2,700 into a health savings account would still be below the income tax line.

Next year that hypothetical taxpayer will be able to put even more per year into an IRA and there’s also the fairly blatantly stupid political manouver designed to help the failing economy- the “economic stimulus payment” which may also play a part in how much one can earn per year without being liable for federal income tax.

The pamplet is filled with lots of interesting links, resources and tips on different topics relating to simple living; Barter, Gleaning, Freecycling, Freeganism, and Freeware, Slugging, Frugal Eating, etc. Rather than reproduce all of them here, I’ll simply recommend that you go check out the pamplet. One book which I’ve mentioned on this blog before which I was somewhat surprised not to see on the list was Charles Long’s “How to Survive Without a Salary” which the author himself recommends you check out from the library (keeping in mind, of course, that the unpatriotic idiotic act now means that the government knows you’re reading it…).

So… paying for war this year? How about next year and the year after that?

How many Americans aren’t, do you think? I don’t have current statistics for you, but that document has some information which you might find interesting:

Many People Live under the Tax Line
You may be surprised to learn that about a third of those people who file tax returns in the United States already live under the income tax line. In 2004, 42.5 million Americans filed tax returns showing that they owed no federal income tax all year — either they paid none at all to begin with, or they got back a refund for every cent they paid.

The percentage of tax returns that show zero federal income tax liability has jumped in recent years (data from the Tax Foundation):

Year Number of Zero-Tax Filers Zero-Tax Filers as a Percent of All Filers
1980 20,000,000 21.3%
1985 18,800,000 18.5%
1990 23,900,000 21.0%
1995 29,000,000 24.5%
2000 32,600,000 25.2%
2004 42,500,000 32.6%

The Tax Foundation adds, “In addition to these non-payers, roughly 15 million individuals and families earned some income [in 2004] but not enough to be required to file a tax return. When these non-filers are added to the non-payers, they add up to 57.5 million income-earning people who will be paying no income taxes.”

So becoming a low-income income tax resister does not mean living in a cave, renouncing the world, and living off grubs and berries. On the contrary, it just means joining the more than one in three Americans who do not pay federal income tax.