My reading today was Exodus 32. Moses has been on the mountain with God, hearing the instructions for the tabernacle & receiving the stone tablets. The people below, who’d seen the smoke above & heard the thunder &, that very morning, filled their bellies with bread from heaven,

decided Moses & that God above were taking too long. They needed a god below who would get with it. Get with them. Get them where they wanted to go. So they gathered around Aaron & said, “Come, make gods for us!” The same Aaron of Ex 24 who’d been invited by God to see the very
pavement beneath God’s feet. Aaron & his sons & the 70 elders, “saw Him and they ate and drank.” That Aaron. So he tells them in Ex 32, Bring me your gold & let’s see what I can do. He fashions it into the image of a calf & they present it to Israel in wording shudderingly
blasphemous. “Israel, these are your gods, who brought you up from the land of Egypt.” Over and over God has reminded them not to forget who had brought them out. Perhaps this started making Aaron a little nervous. Or maybe it didn’t. Maybe he just bought in. But his next move
is particularly telling. “When he saw this (the masses reacting to the gold idol he’d fashioned for them), he built an altar in front of it and made an announcement: ‘there will be a festival to the Lord tomorrow.’ Early the next morning they arose, offered burnt offerings &
fellowship offerings.” Don’t miss the very next statement in the narrative: “The people sat down to eat and drink (sound familiar? Ex 24:11?) and got up to party.”

It’s a story as old as the exodus. God gets us out but He’s too slow taking us where we want to go.
So we demand idols of our leaders and they supply. And then, because we’re supposed to be a religious people, they front it with worship. They (we?) build an altar to the God above in front of the idol below like God either won’t notice or won’t mind then they have a festival
of worship. And the people sit down to eat and drink. Chillingly reminiscent of Aaron and his sons and the elders sitting down to eat and drink at the feet of God.

And it all works well. It’s all been rolled together. The God above and the idol below. The people demanded it.
The leaders supplied it. Surely God is happy that they worked him in.

Only problem is, God saw right through that front. And He was not that happy after all.

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I just finished Eric Adler's The Battle of the Classics, and wanted to say something about Joel Christiansen's review linked below. I am not sure what motivates the review (I speculate a bit below), but it gives a very misleading impression of the book. 1/x


The meat of the criticism is that the history Adler gives is insufficiently critical. Adler describes a few figures who had a great influence on how the modern US university was formed. It's certainly critical: it focuses on the social Darwinism of these figures. 2/x

Other insinuations and suggestions in the review seem wildly off the mark, distorted, or inappropriate-- for example, that the book is clickbaity (it is scholarly) or conservative (hardly) or connected to the events at the Capitol (give me a break). 3/x

The core question: in what sense is classics inherently racist? Classics is old. On Adler's account, it begins in ancient Rome and is revived in the Renaissance. Slavery (Christiansen's primary concern) is also very old. Let's say classics is an education for slaveowners. 4/x

It's worth remembering that literacy itself is elite throughout most of this history. Literacy is, then, also the education of slaveowners. We can honor oral and musical traditions without denying that literacy is, generally, good. 5/x
@bellingcat's attempt in their new book, published by
@BloomsburyBooks, to coverup the @OPCW #Douma controversy, promote US and UK gov. war narratives, and whitewash fraudulent conduct within the OPCW, is an exercise in deception through omission. @BloomsburyPub @Tim_Hayward_


1) 2000 words are devoted to the OPCW controversy regarding the alleged chemical weapon attack in #Douma, Syria in 2018 but critical material is omitted from the book. Reading it, one would never know the following:

2) That the controversy started when the original interim report, drafted and agreed by Douma inspection team members, was secretly modified by an unknown OPCW person who had manipulated the findings to suggest an attack had occurred. https://t.co/QtAAyH9WyX… @RobertF40396660


3) This act of attempted deception was only derailed because an inspector discovered the secret changes. The manipulations were reported by @ClarkeMicah
and can be readily observed in documents now available https://t.co/2BUNlD8ZUv….

4) @bellingcat's book also makes no mention of the @couragefoundation panel, attended by the @opcw's first Director General, Jose Bustani, at which an OPCW official detailed key procedural irregularities and scientific flaws with the Final Douma Report:

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Tip from the Monkey
Pangolins, September 2019 and PLA are the key to this mystery
Stay Tuned!


1. Yang


2. A jacobin capuchin dangling a flagellin pangolin on a javelin while playing a mandolin and strangling a mannequin on a paladin's palanquin, said Saladin
More to come tomorrow!


3. Yigang Tong
https://t.co/CYtqYorhzH
Archived: https://t.co/ncz5ruwE2W


4. YT Interview
Some bats & pangolins carry viruses related with SARS-CoV-2, found in SE Asia and in Yunnan, & the pangolins carrying SARS-CoV-2 related viruses were smuggled from SE Asia, so there is a possibility that SARS-CoV-2 were coming from