>I've ridden across the United States.
A travelogue I've been slowly reading: "Around the World on a Bicycle" by Thomas Stevens.
Vol I, Vol II
He did it on a pennyfarthing. I've only gotten through Germany. There was a lot of walking on muddy roads, and much of the American West was traversed using the railroad tracks, those often being the only/best ways through the mountain passes.
I asked this on tor.com, but thought I should post it here as well.
So let me get this straight. A series (Year's Best SF/Fantasy) which has, for the past 14 years, been published as (currently) $8 mass market paperbacks, is now only available as a $16 POD. Which costs the consumer twice as much, and is more expensive to produce, and thus that much harder to sell (will it be on the New SF racks at Borders and B&N? let alone tiny independents like Penn Books in Penn Station) with perhaps a smaller profit margin. And no e-book versions (yet). And this is a good idea (for the editors/ authors/ consumers/ publisher) ... why?
The Laurell, meed of mightie Conquerours
And Poets sage, the Firre that weepeth still,
The Willow worne of forlorne Paramours,
The Eugh obedient to the benders will,
The Birch for shaftes, the Sallow for the mill,
The Mirrhe sweete bleeding in the bitter wound,
The warlike Beech, the Ash for nothing ill,
The fruitfull Oliue, and the Platane round,
The caruer Holme, the Maple seeldom inward sound.
first book, second canto, ninth stanza of the Faerie Qveene
If you want to compare "health costs", what about the employer's payments for health insurance? It's a net zero sum, but does it mean $5K in income offset by $5K in health costs, or do you want it to not show up at all?
Also, under the current rules in the US, such money doesn't count as taxable income. Some other things are taxable for one thing but not the other. E.g., Social Security is paid as a percentage of income for work, but not for income earned by investments.\
The self-employed often are not part of a group for getting good health insurance rates, so have to pay, say, 2-3x what an employed person's employer would.
There are so many variables, it's hard to make an individual comparison that's meaningful.
I got one of these "16-page analyses" of the health reform bill in the email today. It challenges the reader to check the analysis against the bill.
I went through the first three specific claims, and sho'nuff, all three were simply false when compared with the actual bill. A limitation on copays was being read as "rationing of healthcare". I guess someone saw the word "limited" and, without reading the rest of the sentence, or the definition of "cost-sharing" included in the bill itself, and ass*u*me-d that there was a limitation on payments out. That it was a limitation on payments *in* escaped them utterly.
I'm left with: either these guys are illiterate fools, or they're lying propagandists who take Americans for illiterate fools.
(Either that, or there's an allegorical message here somewhere, but for the life of me, I can't find it - viz. Maimonides on rabbinic tales)
You can find it online, with my response, and pick it apart yourselves.
Xopher:
In Wicca, at least as I learned and taught it for 20 years, there are no required beliefs at all. It's not a faith, just a religion. Of course if you define 'religion' as 'a set of things taken on faith', then you get to reason in a circle and say "all religions involve taking things on faith" and exclude Wicca.
Only, I don't understand - if it doesn't have (even implicitly, if not explicitly) required beliefs, how is it a religion at all? Rather than, say, an ethical system or a folkway?
Take Judaism, for example. As I see it, it's a set of practices based on a set of (at least implied, if not necessarily explicitly stated) required beliefs. Creeds based on the work of Maimonides (13 Principles) and his successors (Albo, etc. who boiled it down to 3 or 4 or 5 basic beliefs) attempted to derive the required beliefs from a lot of moralistic storytelling material, and Biblical narratives, that weren't explicitly theological. Maimonides (12th C. dar-al-Islam) required one to "know" rather than "believe" his principles, though.
As Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (20th C. Poland-US) might have put it, Jewish philosophy derives from a characterization of Jewish law, rather than the other way around. In other words, "spirit of the law" arguments are purely descriptive, not prescriptive.
Geekosaur:
Except that you then exclude much of Judaism, which claims that it is not based on faith but on interpretation and analysis.
Even Mendelssohn (18th C. German), who famously argued that "Judaism has no dogmas" while defending orthodox Judaism (the only kind there was at the time; Reform didn't get started until a generation later), well, a close reading reveals that he means "no dogmas beyond the 2-3 things that completely underlie the entire system of Judaism, such as the existence and unity of God, the former existence of prophecy, and the divine origin of the Pentateuch." There are basic beliefs without which the system makes no sense, has no claim of validity.
(With some circular arguing to "prove" that the giving of the Torah actually happened as documented, so it's not "on faith".)
People who make the latter argument are really treating it as a faith argument, but don't want to admit it. I had an argument with Rabbi Dr. J. Immanuel Schochet over dinner at my old synagogue, about 15 years ago. He's a philosophy professor at a technical college in Toronto, as well as one of the leading lights of Lubavitch, a form of Orthodox Judaism. He was talking about revelation and the Torah.
Now, a basic Orthodox belief is that the revelation at Sinai consisted of two parts, the Written Torah which is the Pentateuch as we have it in printed and ms. Bibles, and the Oral Torah, that set of oral interpretations which are necessary to support an actual lifestyle based on the Written Torah, which explain the various allusions in the Written Torah. The extent to which that original revealed Oral Torah has been faithfully transmitted down the generations, is is a matter of great dispute, whose written records go back all the way through Jewish recorded history. Be that as it may, we should stipulate that there were two parts to the Revelation, and it is believed that at least in part, the Oral Part was faithfully transmitted, as well as the Written.
He maintained that "the Oral Torah supports the validity of the Written Torah, and the Written Torah supports the validity of the Oral Torah." He could not let himself see that he was making a circular argument, no matter how many times I tried to explain it to him. Because to him, the validity and divinity of the Oral Torah, as well as the Written Torah, was a matter of faith, without which Orthodox Judaism makes no sense.
Re "seethe": the word in Hebrew is Mevashel, which is generally "cook". If you're cooking in milk, odds are it's wet cooking, unless, as Earl said, it's yogurty, like Tandoori.
On the other hand, the word can mean "roasting" as well, even if the specific word for roasting is something else. It's used in context of the Passover offering, which is roasted on a spit. So it can mean either wet or dry cooking.
Kate Y @ 231:
The WHY is probably unknowable. People have speculated that local pagan cults specifically seethed a kid in its mother's milk as some kind of fertility/lifecycle rite, but that kind of thing is hard to know absent contemporary inscriptions or writings.
As noted above, the effect is to make it hard to eat with non-Jews or non-religious Jews, thereby minimizing socialization and intermarriage outside the group (Judaism is endogamous), but it that also the *cause*? We don't know. Ultimately we have to fall back on "My thoughts are not your thoughts."
...and to the Republic, for Richard Stans, one nation invisible...
(yes, I know it's "Under God", but when my parents said it in grade school, that phrase hadn't been invented/mandated yet.)
For more on Richard Stans and the Mondegreens...appearing occasionally in a Safire column near you.
Also, I should have noted that the psalm is written in an ambiguous tense that could also be future, not just past. So we tend to read it as a promise of the future final redemption, esp. since it was written allegedly by David c. 1000 BCE, over 400 years before the FIRST exile in 586 BCE, let alone the second in 70 CE.
I prefer the less-redundant traditional Jewish reading of:
then said they among the heathen,
The LORD hath done great things for them.
The LORD hath done great things for us;
whereof we are glad.
as
"then it was said among the other nations,
'is God glorified in working with these [downtrodden, miserable Jews? really?]'
God is glorified in working with us,
and therefore we are happy.
Which is closer, I think, to the Hebrew.
Ken Brown @ 131:
There is a universal code hidden in the Torah: the Seven Laws given to the children of Noah. The Ten Statements (which encode about 15 commands) were given specifically to the Jews. The Sinaitic Revelation was directly to Moses and the Israelites, and meant exclusively for us. Which should come as a relief to the non-Jews: as S. Paul said, non-Jews need not observe the commands given to the Jews if they want to be Christian.
Passover does NOT apply to non-Jews living in Israel, it is only for the Jews, as you said, it creates the community. That the Christians (which started as a Jewish heresy) adapted the forms of Jewish worship for their own use is confusing, but understandable.
There are no sacraments in Judaism, in the sense of something that can only be performed by a priest because he is the intermediary in the channel to God. There are rituals that are only performed by priests, as a reward for their not having participated in the Sin of the Golden Calf; originally all firstborns were to have been the priesthood, but that changed after the Golden Calf. The Christians took the bread and wine of Kiddush, whereby we Jews participate in God’s Creation by sanctifying the holy days, and changed it into a vehicle through which the priest channels sanctity from heaven down to people. (Leaving aside the theophagy aspect, I really don’t want to get into that).
You see, for most observant Jews, sanctity is conferred on an object by use. The Talmud gives an example: can you reuse bricks from a synagogue for a secular purpose? The answer is, it depends: was the synagogue used yet? If it’s still under construction, you can take bricks and reuse them. Once the synagogue has been used by people as a synagogue, that confers holiness on the building and all its parts, and the bricks are now holy. God is Holy because He is One and Unique, but everything else in creation becomes holy because people use it or dedicate it for a holy purpose.
To put a Highlander spin on it, my home is holy ground, because I pray in it, say Kiddush and other blessings over food and actions in it, study in it – use it for a holy purpose, as well as the secular uses such as eating, sleeping, reading, Internetting, watching TV, etc.
I’d also point out that there is a section of the Torah which God tells us is specifically that which makes us a holy nation, and it’s not agricultural rules, or foodways, it’s moral/ethical behavior and attitudes. See Leviticus 19 and 20. Yes, there are some things about sacrifices, mostly ensuring that when done, they be done properly, but mostly it’s about interpersonal relations and avoidance of incest/adultery. The Bible critics extend the “Holiness Code†through ch’s 17-26, which includes a lot more Temple-related stuff, but that’s not the traditional reading. What makes us holy is that we conduct ourselves ethically and honorably.
By the way, “mixed plants†does not apply outside of Israel. It also doesn’t apply in flowerpots detached from the ground. So I can put a bunch of different herbs in the same windowbox. Square foot gardening is fine too, if I owned my own house & yard, which I don’t – my landlady likes her 15-foot square of grass.
Kevin Riggle @ 164:
Peking ravioli … trying to explain…
I was in a kosher Chinese place about 20 years ago, and someone was trying to explain wontons to their elderly mother. “They’re kreplach, Ma, they’re like kreplach.â€
Terry Karney @ 168:
The linen/wool rule also applies to sewing linen & wool together, or using thread made of one to sew the other.
However, there is one exception in contemporary usage: tzitzis, ritual fringes for four-cornered garments. They are generally made of either the same material as the garment, or wool can be used anywhere, even on linen garments. Because a positive command overrides a negative command, but not a negative command coupled with a complementary positive command.
Dcb @ 182:
You shall not plough with an ox or ass together is a literal command, not a metaphor for anything, and we treat it as such. Whatever metaphorical lessons one may base on these things, for laws, “the text cannot be treated totally non-literallyâ€. But yes, it's because of cruelty to the animals - which is an ideal we know of from elsewhere in the Torah.
Terry Karney @ 197:
8/8a aren't provable
You're right about that. Certainly, no reason is given in the text. However, as that and the health explanation are the two main ones that have been postulated, we might want to choose between them.
Consider an evolutionary argument. Which of the two promotes survival of Jews as a distinct group, and of Judaism as the religion they practice? The one that rationalizes people leaving the fold, abandoning the system? Or the one that encourages people to remain in the fold, and ensure the continuity of the system? The "keep us separate" effect/reason seems to be more of a survival trait.
Oh, God, there’s so much Jewish minutia here I hardly know where to begin.
1) The kosher rules (which includes no pig, no meat-and-milk, no shellfish [NOT bottom-feeders] – basically, ungulates for meat, fish with fins & scales, and no to a specific list of birds) are for the most part Biblical. The details are treated as Biblical, because they have been all but universally agreed to since the most ancient post-biblical writings, and thus are considered part of the Oral Torah, the non-written part of the Revelation at Sinai.
2) Linen and wool (and that’s specifically linen and wool, not all blends, or natural/artificial fibers) is biblically forbidden. Why, we don’t know – we treat it as a hoq, a law without reason. Some have speculated that it’s part of priestly garments, which it is, and therefore special to the Temple, not for ordinary people.
3) Meat and milk are forbidden because thrice the Pentateuch (anything Biblically ordained must be either direct from the Pentateuch, or logically derivable from it by the 13 Exegetical Rules of Rabbi Ishmael) says “thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother’s milk.†It was universally accepted from antiquity that this meant “kosher meat and kosher milk which has been cooked together may not be eaten, or used for other benefit (feeding one’s animals, selling it, etc.).†The Midrash and Talmud expend a good deal of time trying to figure out what parts of the rules are implied by the threefold repetition. The rule against fowl and milk is rabbinic; as late as the 2nd century CE, some few were still eating fowl cooked with milk. Some have suggested that local pagans had some ritual about boiling a kid in its mother’s milk, but I don’t think that has ever been proven.
4) Rational vs. irrational signifying divinity: I dunno. Divine revelation must ultimately be taken on faith. However, universal acceptance of a rule, or of an idea as the interpretation of a verse, is treated as biblical. And there is far more agreement on these basic details than one might think, at least until Reform came along c. 1800 and formulated a Judaism that doesn’t require observance. That required radical reinterpretation, since even they regard the Torah (Pentateuch) as the foundational document of Judaism. Similarly the Karaites c. 800 CE, who rejected the Oral Torah out of hand.
5) Kosher Chinese, as some have said, is not a “cultural mixâ€, it’s just Chinese food prepared kosher – no non-kosher oils, Chinese don’t eat much milk anyway, no pork, no shellfish. Kosher is the biblical rules about food, it’s not specific to Eastern European foodways. You can eat non-kosher Eastern European food at any Russian restaurant, which is identical to what you’ll find in “kosher deli†restaurants. Kosher anything tends to be a bit pricey – you have to pay for the rabbi to check the food production and purchasing, so that’s an extra employee; and it’s a captive market – there isn’t as much competition, so they can charge more. There are also a number of Buddhist-veg Chinese places in Queens and Manhattan, where many observant Jews will eat.
6) Cross-cultural restaurants. There used to be a place on 5th Ave and 30th St. in Manhattan called Jimmy’s Deli. It had an Italian deli in the front, and a Thai curry place in the back. The curry place basically made variations on one dish: chix, beef with veg or all veg, over rice, with a sauce, which came in mild, medium, hot, and really hot. I never got past medium.
7) “No Pork Halal Chicken†That’s like at Pacific and Fourth, no? We used to drive past it all the time when we lived in the Slope.
8) Kosher and health:
A)Kosher isn’t for health reasons, it’s solely to keep us apart from non-Jews. Why? So that we don’t date them and marry them, and thus disappear into the dustbin of history.
B)Some have postulated health reasons, but the usual result in the modern period has been “it’s for health, we have modern medicine, we don’t need these outdated rules, we don’t need to keep kosherâ€, and then see point 8(a).
I mean, think about it. Is Eastern European fried starchy food all that healthy? But it can be kosher. Paula Deen's burger-on-a-Krispy-Kreme would be right out, though: Krispy Kremes, while kosher, are dairy.
9) Mother-and-child. No, no, no – there’s no problem with chicken eaten with egg. There is, however, a problem with slaughtering an animal and its offspring on the same day, on the grounds of cruelty to the animal – we don’t want to unnecessarily traumatize them.
And that’s only through about 110, so I’m going to stop here.
#177:
In 1991, my late father-in-law bought an Oldsmobile Cutlass Calais sedan. A couple of years later, when we needed a new car and he needed cash, we bought it from him (he put 40k miles/year on the car, so it had almost 60k on it already). We drove it until we lost it in a snowstorm enroute to Boskone in 2000. So for those 7 years or so, we *WERE* driving her father's Oldsmobile.
lit-fic as/vs genre:
A local bookseller (Penn Books, a hole-in-the-wall in Penn Station with a good buyer for SF) breaks down its fiction into several categories. General Fiction (includes classics, Penguins etc), Quality fiction (lit-fic? Includes Robertson Davies as well as Patrick O'Brian), SF, Mystery, Action (spy novels and whatnot), Romance, and Oprah's Book Club. So lit-fic can be genre, at least for these guys.
definition of fandom:
This trips me up when talking with my wife, who writes fanfic. Yes, that stuff. (Everyone needs to look down on something). Most SF fans seem refer to "fandom" as the collective of all SF fans, whether or not it includes readers, fanzine writers/editors, etc., regardless of sub-genre. However, the fanfic writers refer to fiction about each individual literary/media source as a separate "fandom." So there's Sentinel fandom, and X-files fandom, and Supernatural fandom, and Jane Austen fandom, etc. For some reason, they don't all want to be one collective, even though many of the better writers (such as my lovely wife) write stories about many different shows and sources (including Jane Austen and Patrick O'Brian).
And then there's Media Fandom, which seems to include fans of TV shows and movies, without necessarily feeling motivated to write stories about them. And Filk Fandom, and Costumers, etc. all of whom get more and more sub-specialized, and even run their own cons in addition to the general-purpose regional cons, such that fans of reading even have their own con - Readercon, at which media fandom and filk fandom are not welcome, although individuals who are also still interested in the written word are welcome. We're thinking of going this summer, instead of going to the Floating Northeast Filk Con (how many Boston trips can we take in a month?), haven't been in several years.
Teka Lynn @ 20:
The only Charles Pierce I'm familiar with is the late great drag artist,
Well, there's also Charles Sanders Peirce, the philosopher/logician.
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