mary magdalene

The more discerning among you may have noticed we have been offline for a moment. A variety of factors came into play. Someone crashed into our cyber-universe and sent seven years worth of posts spinning into the digital universe, un-tethered to here or anything we knew. Our highly trained, and staggeringly good looking, IT support crew was able to piece it all back together again, but it took time. Add in the fact that they, and I, had other stuff to do (i.e., earn a living), and you can see the problem. Nevertheless, we are up and running and all the cool shit that used to be here is back again. If you were worried you could never do your Master’s Thesis on impending robot overlords, think again. It’s all back. If you were terrified you may never be able to shut up that one asshole who keeps insisting aliens built the pyramids, quit worrying. Your main source of useful logic and examples is happily tucked in its cubby hole on this interweb thing.

Plus, as you may have quietly become aware, the site has been redesigned. While all the cool stuff happened behind the scenes, we took a moment to address some issues people had with content clarity. Now, all quoted content is clearly segregated. We thought it was before but, for some people, it seemed difficult to separate what I wrote from what I quoted. That issue is now dead.

Still, while the site may have been down, we weren’t. Almost every Friday, at 9:10 AM (CT/US), I would join Ryan Gatenby on WBIG for an edition of The Big Wake Up Call. And each and every episode was saved for your karmic elucidation.

Don’t Play With Squirrels is our most recent effort and it has almost nothing to do with squirrels. I’ll let Ryan’s highly trained PR staff fill you in.

Bill McCormick from the World News Center joined the show in his weekly Friday segment to talk about a variety of topics, including how not to play with squirrels, why we won’t see a bridge or a chunnel across Lake Michigan, rebooting Spider-Man again, losing one’s mind over Dr. Who, and an update on the Thor & Hulk buddy comedy.

On Ruins Your Weekend, I called in live from the World News Center on what began as a bright and beautiful day but soon turned into a dark day of impending doom. After a brief chat about Spider-Man Homecoming, (listeners) soon learned about self-aware artificial intelligence that is likely to overtake and consume humanity.

One of the things we looked at in that fun episode is why Elon Musk thinks that Artificial Intelligence will overtake humanity and render it extinct. His reasoning is based in real world examples of AI simply creating new languages, and logic pathways, to get around human intervention. MIT has shown that to be the case time, and time, again. On the one hand that has led to programs such as Deep Patient, which is frighteningly accurate at predicting disease in patients (like in a way science can’t even come close to), it has also led to a program that simply removed humans from the decision making process. Yes, you will not be shocked to discover that Facebook was behind that atrocity.

On Live in Person we laid out some solid guidelines about how to be safe on the Internet. If you know someone who might be susceptible to such scams, like paying FBI fines online or settling with the IRS via a gift card or anything like that, have them take a minute to listen to this.

When we got done with that we took a few moments to discuss who Mary Magdalene really was. As noted at the Smithsonian Museum she was a woman who had a servant, Veronica, and there were many issues with the translation from Aramaic, to Greek while taking one set of social mores and trying to make them fit into radically different mind sets, led to some confusion.

Two things of note are implied in this passage. First, these women “provided for” Jesus and the Twelve, which suggests that the women were well-to-do, respectable figures. (It is possible this was an attribution, to Jesus’ time, of a role prosperous women played some years later.) Second, they all had been cured of something, including Mary Magdalene. The “seven demons,” as applied to her, indicates an ailment (not necessarily possession) of a certain severity. Soon enough, as the blurring work of memory continued, and then as the written Gospel was read by Gentiles unfamiliar with such coded language, those “demons” would be taken as a sign of a moral infirmity.

As one last fun tid-bit we tackled the whole “making women dress conservatively.” I have dove into that before when I teed off on the Pope.

The martyring of Peter, which I wrote about, sums it up nicely.

Wives…do not adorn yourselves outwardly by braiding your hair, and by wearing gold ornaments or fine clothing; rather, let your adornment be the inner self with the lasting beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit… It was in this way long ago that the holy women who hoped in God used to adorn themselves by accepting the authority of their husbands. Thus Sarah obeyed Abraham and called him lord.
1 Peter 3:1-7

Before every feminist in the world hits send on that vitriolic email they’ve got t-ed up, remember this; wives could be beaten or killed for not wearing makeup and clothing pleasing to their husbands. Now go read that again in historical context. Peter was telling the entire Roman civilization to fuck off. That is why they killed him.

Yeah, old Pete wasn’t some repressive prick, he was a died in the wool feminist who was willing to die for what he believed. More specifically, he was willing to die for what Jesus taught by example and parable.

Anyway, that’s a brief overview of what you missed. Head on over to my spot on The Big Wake Up Call to catch up on the rest.

Welcome back, ya’ll!

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.