Happy Birthday, Mr President!

Abraham Lincoln
(February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865)
16th President of the United States of America
(March 4, 1861 – April 15, 1865)

History in the Making

Barack H. Obama
44th President of the United States of America

An interesting historical note: Obama is the 3rd US President from Illinois. The first two: Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses Grant.

Pinstripes!

On this Day in Baseball History:

27 February 1912: The Yankees announce they will begin wearing pinstripes on their uniforms. It will take a few seasons (April 22, 1915) before it becomes a reality.

Glory?

Sadly these words are as appropriate now as when first written...

"I confess, without shame, that I am sick and tired of fighting—its glory is all moonshine; even success the most brilliant is over dead and mangled bodies, with the anguish and lamentations of distant families, appealing to me for sons, husbands, and fathers ... it is only those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shriek and groans of the wounded and lacerated ... that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation."

--Major General William Tecumseh Sherman, May 1865

War, what's it good for?

A couple quotes I ran across recently:

"Although a soldier by profession, I have never felt any sort of fondness for war, and I have never advocated it, except as a means of peace."

-- General Ulysses S. Grant

"There never was a time when, in my opinion, some way could not be found to prevent the drawing of the sword."

-- General Ulysses S. Grant

"Jesus Family Tomb" ID Refuted

I found an interesting article about the so-called "Jesus Family Tomb" and James Cameron's documentary about it over at the Jerusalem Post site. Apparently, in addition to the widely noted criticism of scholars and theological concerns voiced by Christian groups, some of the experts involved in the documentary are calling some of the claims in the film into question:

Several prominent scholars who were interviewed in a bitterly contested documentary that suggests that Jesus and his family members were buried in a nondescript ancient Jerusalem burial cave have now revised their conclusions, including the statistician who claimed that the odds were 600:1 in favor of the tomb being the family burial cave of Jesus of Nazareth...
The dramatic clarifications, compiled by epigrapher Stephen Pfann of the University of the Holy Land in Jerusalem in a paper titled "Cracks in the Foundation: How the Lost Tomb of Jesus story is losing its scholarly support," come two months after the screening of The Lost Tomb of Christ that attracted widespread public interest, despite the concomitant scholarly ridicule.

...

Some of the scholars who were interviewed for and appeared in the film are questioning some of its basic claims.

The most startling change of opinion featured in the 16-page paper is that of University of Toronto statistician Professor Andrey Feuerverger, who stated those 600 to one odds in the film. Feuerverger now says that these referred to the probability of a cluster of such names appearing together... Israeli archeologists have said that the similarity of the names found inscribed on the ossuaries in the cave to the members of Jesus's family was coincidental, since many of those names were commonplace in the first century CE... Shimon Gibson, who was part of the team that excavated the tomb two and half decades ago and who appeared in the film, is quoted in Pfann's report as saying he doubted the site was the tomb of Jesus and his family.

...

In the film, renowned epigrapher Prof. Frank Moore Cross, professor emeritus of Hebrew and oriental languages at Harvard University, is seen reading one of the ossuaries and stating that he has "no real doubt" that it reads "Jesus son of Joseph." But according to Pfann, Cross said in an e-mail that he was skeptical about the film's claims, not because of a misreading of the ossuary, but because of the ubiquity of Biblical names in that period in Jerusalem.

"It has been reckoned that 25 percent of feminine names in this period were Maria/Miriam, etc. - that is, variants of 'Mary.' So the cited statistics are unpersuasive. You know the saying: lies, damned lies, and statistics," Cross is quoted as saying

...

Furthermore, Pfann also says that a specialist in ancient apocryphal text, Professor Francois Bovon, who is quoted in the film as saying the enigmatic ossuary inscription "Mariamne" is the same woman known as Mary Magdalene - one of the filmmakers' critical arguments - issued a disclaimer stating that he did not believe that "Mariamne" stood for Mary of Magdalene at all.

Read the full story HERE.

I can't say that I'm at all surprised by this turn of events. Just sad that the refutations likely won't get the same publicity as the misinformation spread by Cameron's documentary. But such is life, I suppose...

An Apology

As regular readers know, I've been in a bit of a nostalgic mood on and off for the past few months. Thinking about the "good ol' days" quite a lot. This has been partially due to the re-entrance of an old friend into my life. A few months ago this old friend posted an very sweet and unexpected apology to me on her blog (The specifics of that apology aren't necessary to understand what I'm posting here, so I'm not going to reiterate them here. If you'd like to know what she said, you can read the post at her blog). As I said, I've been thinking a lot about my past recently, and thinking that perhaps I owe my friend an apology as well. The things I'm about to apologize likely have never actually effected my friend personally, she is likely not even aware of them, but they are things for which I feel more than a little guilty about and feel the need to clear the air between us. This probably would have been more appropriate during the High Holidays than during Hanukkah, but timing has never been my strong suit.



Once upon a time, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was a senior in high school, my friend was trucking on down the path of self destruction and I was following (almost gleefully at times) close behind. We did all the typical stuff: drank too much, smoked too much, didn't look both ways when crossing the street and just generally seemed to have little regard for our own well being. Its from this period that my first bout of guilt comes from. You see, I didn't take full ownership of my own bad behavior. It was my friend who was a "bad influence" on me. And while I did admit to having a few problems, I would often measure them against my friend's--often massive--problems and dismiss them out of hand. I used her as a scapegoat and a crutch: I didn't have issues, she did. Sure, I was behaving badly too, but not as bad as she was. I was only partaking in the bad behavior because I was sticking close to her, to keep her out of trouble (A brilliant plan, which NEVER worked). In short, I never fully accepted my own culpability in the creation of and ownership of this freight train to self destruction. A few years later, after I'd left home to join the circus (or the US Army as it is more popularly known), I fell into what has thus far been the darkest period in my life. This was caused by a variety of things--including a severe case of chronic depression that wouldn't be diagnosed until nearly 15 years later. Among the causes was the fact that I could no longer deny ownership of my own substance abuse problems. Not only was I still on the road to self-destruction, but I actually picked up steam. I could no longer ignore my own screwed-upness. And as often happens my depression latched onto my problems and went bungy-jumping in Hell. But even then, I tended to blame my friend: She had "driven me" to this, which is--to say the least--complete bullshit. Anything I did was my choice and my responsability. And, while it is true that she did a number of less than wonderful things, I was not as innocent of guilt as I would have liked to have thought.

When she and I started hanging out together I knew that there would be risk involved. I knew the life she lead and what often happened to those close to her. I knew this and accepted the risk. I thought--and still do--that she was worth that risk. If I got hurt along the way it was--in part--due to the fact that I had chosen to put myself in situations where getting hurt was a possibility. It is true that--as she admits--she did many things that were just not right and resulted in me getting hurt, but if I hadn't continued putting myself in harms way she never would have had the chance to do so. Its hard to get hit by a truck if you don't choose to play on the highway.

Fortunately, we both managed to survive those dark years and pull our respective lives together. Despite all that happened we're still friends. More than a few have asked how I can still be friends with her after the things that happened between us. Well, a lot of it has to do with the fact that I now accept that none of what happened would have been possible had I not allowed it to happen. I have to take at least partial responsibility for what happened, so how can I possibly lay all the blame on my friend. And besides, everything that happened is in the past now. We both survived and grew past all of that crap. Living in the past only serves to destroy the future. I'd rather live in the present and look forward to a future with my friend in it.

So that, for what its worth, is my apology. I am very sincerely sorry for using her as a scapegoat for my own bad behavior and for blaming her for things that she either had no part in or for which I was partially culpable as well. It may seem silly or trivial to some, but its something I felt I needed to get off my chest.

!שלום

Remember Pearl Harbor, 7 December 1941

Information on Pearl Harbor @ the Dept of the Navy-Naval Historical Center