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Talmud Manuscript Copyist’s Sick Acrostic Burn Of Teacher Ruined By Print Edition

What other brilliant or scathing pranks by manuscript copyists are forever lost?

Venice, April 20 – The painstaking work of a disgruntled disciple tasked with reproducing an additional page of ancient lore was lost to history today when a publishing house reformatted his content in a way that removed the insults he had embedded in the initial letters of each line on the parchment.

An anonymous copyist toiled for most of an afternoon to plan the layout of a page from the Babylonian Talmud’s Tractate Sotah during the thirteenth century in one of the flourishing Jewish communities of Alsace: his calibrated the letter sizes and word spacing on the vellum with his quill and ink to arrange them to spell out “Asher Ben David Is A Git With Foul Odor” in the Aramaic and Hebrew text, referring to the man who assigned him the work. However, the printing house workers, unaware of the import of the subversive formatting, condensed several manuscript sheets’ worth of text into a single side of a page and instituted new line breaks to fit it such that the acrostic insult disappeared, effectively forever.

None of the three men working on the printing press – not the copy arranger, nor the man who reviewed his work before pressing, nor the one who scanned the printed page one more time to catch any possible errors before pressing more copies – picked up on the barb, which analysts believe the unknown, youthful manuscript copyist showed to a maximum of one other person before the page got rolled up and stowed with other copies. Most of the other pages in the collection wound up confiscated by French government officials a year later and burned publicly with 24 wagonloads of other priceless Talmud manuscripts.

Scholars acknowledged it will remain forever a mystery which and how many acrostic insults those precious manuscripts contained. “Aside from the loss of all that lore – the printing press didn’t reach Europe for another two centuries,” explained Professor of Jewish History Joshua Karlip of Yeshiva University. “We have no idea what irreplaceable works disappeared in that conflagration. Also, what other brilliant or scathing pranks by manuscript copyists are forever lost. Did other disciples feel the same way about Asher Ben David? Who was he? Did his mother really wear chain-mail boots?”

“What other gems still exist in the manuscripts we still have at our fingertips?” he continued. “There’s a master’s degree, perhaps a doctorate, waiting for whoever deciphers such barbs.”

“It could be the new Bible Codes.”

From PreOcccupied Territory, here.

How Many People Do We Need To Convince? Not Many!

Minority rules: Scientists discover tipping point for the spread of ideas

Date: July 26, 2011
Source: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Summary: Scientists have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society. The scientists used computational and analytical methods to discover the tipping point where a minority belief becomes the majority opinion.
FULL STORY

Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society. The scientists, who are members of the Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center (SCNARC) at Rensselaer, used computational and analytical methods to discover the tipping point where a minority belief becomes the majority opinion. The finding has implications for the study and influence of societal interactions ranging from the spread of innovations to the movement of political ideals.

“When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority,” said SCNARC Director Boleslaw Szymanski, the Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor at Rensselaer. “Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame.”

From Science Daily, here.

From Shooting JFK to Shooting Trump: The Paw Prints of the Deep State

Bookends: JFK to Trump

July 18, 2024

By John Wood

Oliver Stone must be overwhelmed with a sense of déjà vu these days. I am one of those unfortunate souls who, smelling the proverbial rat regarding John F. Kennedy’s assassination, went down the rabbit hole of assassination research, reading and amassing a small library on the subject. I dove deep and came up with no solid conclusions, but a severe case of the bends. I did, however, gain a healthy mistrust of our intelligence community, an awareness of the incompetence and/or complicity of the FBI, and the strong suspicion that, though undiscovered, the rat was bigger and stinkier than I had first imagined.

Stone’s movie JFK used Eisenhower’s farewell address as a mode to frame the leviathan-like culprit as the military-industrial complex. Over time, those with eyes to see and ears to hear have given the beast other names, more inclusive names: the administrative state, the bureaucratic state, the deep state. Whatever name, it is a group of non-elected bureaucrats and their affiliated oligarchs, billionaires and elitists who see the unsophisticated masses who do all of the working and creating and living and dying in this country as cattle to be corralled and then consumed.

Donald Trump wasn’t afraid to speak for those unsophisticated masses, and the deep state trembled. They couldn’t start with something so archaic as an assassination, as these days everyone carries a camera in their pocket — we are millions of potential Abraham Zapruders. So the assassination would have to be of his character; when that didn’t work, they went for his political power, and when that didn’t work they went for his wealth and his freedom through illegitimate lawfare, which needless to say, didn’t stop him.

Finally, exhausted and frightened after all their various attempts at figurative assassination had failed, they would have to fall back on the method that has persisted since probably even before March 15, 44 B.C. Actual, old-fashioned murder of their political rival.

And so, on July 13, 2024 at a Trump rally, a 20-year-old media-indoctrinated loner somehow breached the Secret Service’s security zone (our nation’s elite multi-billion dollar unit tasked with one job on that day) and slipped past local and state police units, climbed on top of a building that was unguarded and provided a perfect sniper’s perch in broad daylight with a rifle. Somehow, though the assassin had been noticed as the suspect and was observed with range-finder field glasses up to 30 minutes before the speech, the president was still allowed to go on stage.  In those last fateful minutes as attendees screamed about a man with a gun on the roof and police confronted the shooter ineffectively and counter-sniper teams began to attempt to sight-in on the killer, no one thought to get on the communication channels and get the president off the stage. Somehow, during all those minutes of screaming “gun” at a presidential rally the secret service sat there frozen. Somehow.

Continue reading…

From American Thinker, here.

Ron Paul on the Assassination Attempt: Malice or Massive Incompetence?

Why We’ll Never Know What Really Happened in Butler, PA

by  | Jul 15, 2024

 

Just days after the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, theories are flying from all directions. Many who ridiculed the “conspiracy theories” of conservatives are now suggesting the whole event was a set-up to boost Trump in the polls ahead of the election. Others suggest it was the “deep state” or even foreign actors who organized it.

Former US Navy Seal and founder of Blackwater, Erik Prince, claims that “The fact that [the Secret Service] allowed a rifle armed shooter within 150 yds to a preplanned event is either malice or massive incompetence.” He went on to observe that, “unaccountable bloated bureaucracies continue to fail us as Americans,” adding that “unserious and unworthy people in positions of authority got us to this near disaster. Merit and execution must be the only deciding factors in hiring and leadership, not the social engineering priority of the day.”

Video has emerged showing that for at least two minutes law enforcement knew someone with a gun was on a roof aiming at the former President and no one communicated the need to pull Trump from the stage. You can clearly hear the crowd warning law enforcement that someone was on the roof. Yet he was unhindered until the first shots rang out.

Considering this fact, Erik Prince has a point.

If this is like any previous governmental foul-ups, we can expect hearings, investigations, and commissions that will actually serve to hide the official errors or even malicious intent by some in the government. That’s what government does no matter who is in office: protect itself from actual scrutiny and resist being exposed as incompetent or worse.

But what if there was a genuine investigation that actually revealed the truth about what happened at the Trump rally over the weekend? Could we rely on the mainstream media to even report it? This is the same media that, after Trump was clearly shot on live television, reported “Trump escorted away after loud noises at PA rally.” (Washington Post). And “Secret Service rushes Trump offstage after he falls at rally.” (CNN).

This is the same mainstream media that has been comparing Donald Trump to Hitler for years, and now pretends to be shocked that their vile rhetoric ended up in violence. There is a good reason why the mainstream media is regarded by the American public with record levels of contempt.

The current Director of the Secret Service has been interviewed expressing her dedication to “diversity” in hiring agents. What if her dedication to DEI goals led to an agency that is more “diverse” but fails at its core mission? Can we rely on the media to inform us of this? Or will they, as usual, just blame it all on the Second Amendment?

What if the problem with the Secret Service is that it was moved into the bloated, incompetent, and menacing Department  of Homeland Security, the creation of which I strongly opposed when I was in Congress?

We shouldn’t count on hearing the truth about the attempted assassination from the mainstream media. No wonder the elites remain determined to censor social media sites like Twitter/X and TikTok. We live in an empire of lies, propped up by the mainstream media. And seeking the truth in this empire of lies is the greatest challenge for us in the moral bankruptcy in which we live.

From RPI, here.