Open Thread For July 6, 2017
Hobby Lobby Busted! For smuggling Iraqi artifacts into America. You may remember Hobby Lobby for refusing to provide contraceptive coverage b/c of the devout religious beliefs of its owners. We now know that said beliefs don’t apply to “Thou Shalt Not Steal”.
Here’s Where The Artifacts Were Headed. A ‘Bible Museum’ that Hobby Lobby is building in DC. I just can’t make this stuff up.
How Trump Avoided Taxes. ‘Sold’ condos to son Eric at reduced rates.
States Step In To Combat End To Broadband Protections. Are Delaware legislators doing this? The AG? If not, they should. Action items for 2018.
Johnny Depp Is Screwed. Some people hoard balls of yarn. Depp hoards islands. Guess which one gets you in deeper financial doo-doo.
UD Raises Tuition. Three times as much for out-of-state students.
What do you want to talk about?
The artifacts originally belonged to Christendom. The saints at Hobby Lobby were only saving the artifacts from the history destroying monsters in IsIs….. is the argument that will likely be used by the right.
Funding ISIS is okay provided you are taking the money away from contraception.
Apparently it’s just a curated book of legends and myths from antiquity that were meant as metaphor. Roman Emperor Constantine arranged the compilation and decided what to include in it c. 330 CE. Like a 1700 year-old internet aggregator. Wild stuff. Who knew?* I wonder if the Roman process of canonizing these particular works while rejecting other contemporaneous books will be part of this Bible museum? Could be interesting.
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(*Everyone who cares to know already knows.)
While ISIS does destroy antiquities, they are usually representations of human or animal forms, which Islam — an even sillier, more primitive religion than Christianity — forbids.
The biggest problem with following the philosophies of illiterate desert dwellers is that they’ve been corrupted through “interpretation” by their barely-literate fan clubs.
I also wonder about the provenance of these artifacts and what some of those cuneiform tablets actually are.
From Wikipedia: Between half a million and two million cuneiform tablets are estimated to have been excavated in modern times, of which only approximately 30,000 – 100,000 have been read or published. The British Museum holds the largest collection (c. 130,000), followed by the Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin, the Louvre, the Istanbul Archaeology Museums, the National Museum of Iraq, Hobby Lobby, the Yale Babylonian Collection (c. 40,000) and Penn Museum. Most of these have “lain in these collections for a century without being translated, studied or published,” as there are only a few hundred qualified cuneiformists in the world.”
Most of those that have been translated are receipts.
This might be a topic for tomorrow’s open thread, but good to see Matt Denn among the AG’s suing Betsy Devos over her plans to harm college students who are trying to pay off their loans.
Interesting: It appears that Dave Anderson has wrested control of the once-useful Delaware Politics blog back from Wolfgang and Don. The last time either of them posted was in late May.