Paul vs. The Powers That Be

Languages are slippery things.  Especially when you are translating one to another, and even more so when you are being paid to do it by someone with an agenda.

Language is never limited to simple 'word = word' kinds of formulas.  There are layers of connotations and subtexts, cultural contexts, and individual experience that flavor every part of a language.  Some examples?

In German, there is the word gemuetlichheit (the ue can also be written with an umlaut).  If you look the word up in most dictionaries, it will tell you that the English equivalent is 'cozy'.  This is such a pale translation.  Gemuetlichheit is an emotion for which there is no English word.  It is a feeling of well-being that one has when the environment includes good food, drink, friends, music, and a warmth and camaraderie that is only found in such a setting.  In English, it would take a whole group of words to convey the same content as that single word in German.

How about another?  In Indonesian, there is the word selamat.  Most dictionaries will tell you it means 'good', as in "good morning".  However, the word means much more than that.  Selamat can mean good, happy, fortunate, well, congratulations, and about a half-dozen other English words.  There is no direct, word-for-word translation for selamat.

This is true of every one of the 15 languages that I am proficient in.  Each of them have concepts expressed with single words that do not have equivalents in other languages.  Furthermore, every word you can think of has a vast context that includes every encounter you have had with the word, all your experiences that you self-describe with the word, the etymological origin and cultural baggage of the word.  On top of all that, words evolve over time, growing slang usages and additional cultural baggage.  After all, how would an American English native translate the slang meanings of 'hip' or 'cool'?  What Russian or Mandarin word would your choose to separate 'joint' and 'low temperature' from 'cutting edge' and 'very nice'?

With that said, what about texts written in other languages that are translated into yours?  Add to that a span of hundreds and even thousands of years.  How much is lost when a Babylonian clay tablet is translated into modern Spanish or Turkish?  Worse yet, how much is lost if the original text is ancient Greek, which was then translated into Latin, and from there into English?  Worse yet, suppose the Latin were first translated into older forms of English, and then updated several times over the centuries.

To this already big pile of confusion the fact that punctuation is a relatively modern convention.  Ancient Greek and Latin did not use punctuation.  Instead, they had a complex body of affixes, which combined with syntax and context, told the reader when one thought ended and another began, or indicated a direct quote, or talk the reader that this word was the subject and this other word was the object or a thought.

You have to imagine that huge piles of meaning have been lost, right?  And to complicate matters, we can assume that the translators, or the people paying them, had agendas that 'flavored' the translations, skewing the results in one way or another.  It doesn't take long before the compounding effect takes us far afield from the original intent and meaning of the primary text.

With all of this in mind, I come (at long last) to my point.  I want to examine a brief passage of ancient text that is often mistranslated, often on purpose, and has profound implications for contemporary thinkers.

The passage comes from something called 'Paul's Letter to the Romans'.  We'll bypass the whole 'was Paul a real person' argument and stipulate for the sake of moving along.  The text can be found in any copy, any version of the New Testament, which is a highly controlled and misused set of documents that have profoundly influenced the modern world.

How profoundly?  Well, I'm willing to bet most folks use the term 'powers that be', but few take the time to investigate the origin of the term.  In fact, it comes from the King James translation of the New Testament.  Specifically, it comes from the aforementioned Letter to the Romans, with the common delineation of Chapter 13.

Credible scholarship tells us that Paul's letters were written in ancient Greek (the Gospels probably in Aramaic).  That means we can search the internet for the original text in the original language.  So we click over to Dogpile, type in "original greek text of romans 13", and select what looks to be a fairly authoritative source that even gives tenses, voices, moods, and cases to help us understand what we are seeing.

Searching Romans 13:1, we get:

Πᾶσα ψυχὴ ἐξουσίαις ὑπερεχούσαις ὑποτασσέσθω. οὐ γὰρ ἔστιν ἐξουσία εἰ μὴ ὑπὸ θεοῦ, αἱ δὲ οὖσαι ὑπὸ θεοῦ τεταγμέναι εἰσίν:

Now I know what you are thinking: Hey!  This is all Greek to me!  I know, but I want to make sure that you can't come back and say I cheated.  I'm putting all the info right here.

Now, before we go on, let's take a look at how this passage has been translated.  For this, we click over to biblegateway.com (can you say gateway drugs?) and look up Romans 13:1 in the NIV translation:

Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.

Keep in mind that the 'authorities that exist' is the part we all know as 'the powers that be.'  The word ἐξουσία actually means 'to be at liberty' or 'free', as in what you might tell a house guest when you want them to relax and feel at home.  Already, we've completely shot the standard translation out of the water.


In the 4th century, Jerome was commissioned by Constantine to translate the Greek text into the Latin Vulgate.  In every other instance that I've aware of, Jerome properly translates ἐξουσία as liber, or free.  Yet, in this one instance, he changes it to 'authorities', or the more familiar 'powers that be'.  Why?


Because the line actually reads: let everyone be at liberty and only follow those who are of God and righteous.


In other words, we are told NOT to follow blindly, but that only those who rule in righteousness and godliness are worthy of leadership.  The text goes on to tell us that revolt against evil rulers is a virtue.


Obviously, not something kings and emperors want people thinking.


If it is true that this one little line in the Bible has been maliciously manipulated to conform to the agenda of the PTB, then what other lies fester at the core of our culture and society?  What other 'little' changes have been made, not just to this book, but to all others?  How many other falsehoods have been foisted upon us to make us docile slaves, rather than empowered unique creations with moral duties and obligations to fight evil in all its forms?


We human beings have been played for fools for millennia.  It is morally incumbent on us to take back our power and to clean up our mess.  We owe that to our future, both as individuals and as a species.  It's time to flog the money changers in the temple.


The way to begin is to remove the blinders that were installed on our eyes from earliest childhood.  It is time for us to become adults and take responsibility for our lack of understanding, and our lack of action because of it.  Ignorance can be cured, idiocy can not.  We are left with two clear choices: cure our ignorance, or admit we are idiots.  Frankly, I choose the former.


There is a fictional character that has provided inspiration to me since those long-ago days in high school:  Chief Broom in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."  The first step is to see the fog that clouds our minds, the second step is to clear it away and take back our true power.


It is our birthright.

Warm This, Baby!

When the doctrine of allegiance to party can utterly up-end a man's moral constitution and make a temporary fool of him besides, what excuse are you going to offer for preaching it, teaching it, extending it, perpetuating it? Shall you say, the best good of the country demands allegiance to party? Shall you also say it demands that a man kick his truth and his conscience into the gutter, and become a mouthing lunatic, besides?
-Mark Twain

A frequently overlooked bullet in the head of global warming theories is Mars. The Martian atmosphere is 95% carbon dioxide, yet no one would argue that the planet is in any danger of overheating. By comparason, Venus has around 98% carbon dioxide, while the Earth has only 0.04%.

That's right, look at those numbers again. Our two nearest neighbors have in excess of 90% CO2 in their atmospheres, while Earth has one-half of one percent. If Earth is in any danger of a run-away greenhouse effect, like that found on Venus, then we only need to add SEVERAL HUNDRED TIMES MORE CO2 to achieve it!

In fact, Earth's most dangerous greenhouse gas is...are you ready? Water vapor. So, we need to ban water immediately in order to control the imaginary overheating of the atmosphere!

The overheating is imaginary, since the mean global temperature of Earth has not risen significantly in over 15 years. In fact, in some places it has dropped. If you are currently in the Northern Hemisphere, you are probably shivvering, up to your keister in snow, praying for some global warming about now.

None of these facts even contemplates the events of ClimateGate, which the media have effectively buried. Here in Indonesia, almost no one has heard of it, which is why I take the time to educate anyone who will listen. In fact, the whole thing is a scam, perpetrated by factions who would charge us money to breathe.

The scam is so horrible and so evil that those involved should be tried as traitors to the entire planet and summarily hung, if found guilty of their crime.

The crime has affected the lives and property of people worldwide. It has been used to justify some of the most draconian and pernicious social manipulation ever conceived. It has also been used to create massive financial fraud and has destroyed the integrity and validity of scientific inquiry itself.

Because people have been trained by poor educational systems and media propaganda to accept wholesale the word of 'authorities' and to not pursue their own lines of inquiry, or even believe their own senses, the entire planet has been led down this path without hesitation. To paraphrase Hermann Goebbels, the lie repeated often enough becomes 'truth.'

I've had people argue that global warming may be a myth, but its aims are good and the anticipated results are necessary. To which I reply, NOTHING founded on falsehood can achieve a good result. Once peole awaken to the fact that they have been lied to, they typically react with an even greater swing to the opposite behavior.

If the goal is to reduce pollution and to clean up the environment, then that is sufficient in itself. It does not require the use of enormous lies and legal manipulations to achieve it, because the goal is valid in and of itself. Certainly, the efforts of people to reduce acid rain, lower emissions and prevent toxic wastes from entering the eco-system, begun in the US in the 70s, has resulted in better air quality, cleaner environments and less free toxins (fluoride in the water aside) for all.

However, the extreme to which this initial effort has been carried has resulted in an evil effort to control entire populations and manipulate people into giving away their wealth in order to achieve something that is not true. It is no more valid than snake-oil salesmen or Brooklyn bridge contracts. Under any set of law, fraud invalidates an agreement.

Global warming hysteria is tantamount to 'the boy who cried wolf.' By using the veil of 'science' to perpetrate this fraud, the validity and integrity of all scientific inquiry has been called into question. If this is false, then what else has been manufactured for the same purposes? Should we now throw out all results and begin afresh? Which parts of scientific research has not been manipulated to some occult end?

No apologies have been forthcoming for such rubbish as the British Met office posting on its website back in October that this would be one of the warmest winters on record, and that Britian has seen the 'end of snow,' at least for the memories of those now living.

No apologies for fear mongoring, such as shrinking Himalaian glaciers (false), melting ice caps (false) and austerity measures under the color of law that have caused immeasurable suffering on whole populations.

No apologies from Al Gore, who won Academy Awards and Nobel Peace prizes under false and misleading pretenses. Nor has he aplogized for his own personal enoumous 'carbon footprint' in the name of raising the false alarm. A classic example of 'do as I say,' if there every was one.

We have been had. We have been manipulated and cowed into accepting a falsehood with the promise of a utopia that can not and never will exist. The Earth is more than capable of regulating its temperatures and atmospheric contents, as it has done for eons, without Mankind raising so much as a fuss.

That we, as a species, could possibly have such a massive effect on a planetary scale while pursuing our daily lives is hubris at its most outrageous extreme. While the burning of hydrocarbons can have unpleasant local effects, such as smelly air and environmental toxins, it can not reach the scale of planetary disaster. Yes, the world has 'shrunk' in the past 100 years, but not THAT much.

It seems to me the best thing we, as a species, could do now would be to pause and take inventory. How much of what we think we know has been manipulated for some covert purpose, and how much is real knowledge? It seems that after 200 years of breathless scientific and technological advance, we owe it to ourselves and our progeny to step back for a time and review.

If such a massive fraud as 'global warming' could be perpetrated in such a relatively short time, then how much of physics, history and biology have also been manufactured out of whole cloth? This singlualr incident calls into question that whole thing, and if information is power, then who has the real information, because it belongs to all of us, not the select few.

The Greek mathmatician Eratothenes measured the distance to the Sun and Moon very accurately around 2,500 years ago. He was off precisely 10%, in fact. The reason was he used Egyptian surveys to determine the radius of the Earth, and thus the distances to Sun and Moon. The Egyptian government had manipulated their surveys with a 10% error in order to collect more taxes, thus is wasn't until Lelande nearly 2,000 years later that an accurate measurement was obtained.

In other words, science was set back two millennia by the greed and lies of governments and 'authorities.' Where would our civilization be now had the Egyptians provided true and accurate measurements of their lands? The Catholic church suppressed Galileo's work demonstrating the Earth was not the center of the Universe, but meerly another insignificant rock in space, thus setting back scientific inquiry on the grounds of religious dogma.

How much might was have achieved in the past 25 years, if we had not wasted so much time and effort on a lie? How many advancements were quashed because of misguided grant funding going to a massive fraud? How many more resources will be wasted on perpetuating this fraud, before we can resume real scientific inquiry?

The emails exposed in ClimateGate demonstrate that the actors within this fraud were well aware of what they were doing. Their comments show that they purposefully manipulated data, hid facts and outright lied, in order to obtain funding and support occult purposes.

There needs to be a Nurmberg trial on a global scale to try and punish the perpetrators of this fraud. The punishments must be severe enough to discourage future efforts to repeat this sort of evil. And the inquiries must reach to every level of the fraud, not just the useful idiots at the forefront in the media, but at the highest levels of society.

Myths, legends and religious dogma are fine for those who willfully adhere to them, but to enforce at the point of a gun those fairy tales on every living soul on the planet rises to the level of crime never before seen in history.

We are being charged for water, which covers 75% of the planet. We are being charged for food, which grows just about anywhere. We are being charged for breeding (marriage licenses and taxes). And they are trying to charge us for air through the auspices of 'global warming.' How many more natual and free functions of life will we pay for before we tire of this rubbish?

The time has come to stop believing and adhering to these vile lies. People should throw down their gauntlets and stare down the perveyors of this garbage heap of lies and falsehoods. Its time to take back our birthrights, which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, unhindered and unfettered by the greed and averice of controlling interests.

There are a thousand untried solutions to every problem, but we have been hoodwinked into accepting only those which line the pockets of vested interests. The solutions which keep the power and rights in the hands of the individual have been buried under mountains of steaming lies.

We have only to remove the hood over our eyes. We are complicite in keeping it in place. We are willfully following the false leaders, though we have been manipulated from birth to do so. However, that is no excuse to continue. We have the right and the duty to throw off the yoke of tyranny, no matter in what form it comes. Civilizations will remain intact, even if the paradigm by which we measure it changes.

The only 'authority' we should acknowledge is that of the Universe itself, for it is the immutable Laws of Nature that created all that we know, and which will determine the time when it will cease to exist. All else is a mirage.

'Global warming' and 'climate change' are brands which are sold to us through media and manipulation. Simply by recognizing it for what it is takes its power away. Demand real information and truthful dialogue. There are far more pressing issues to deal with and we should be applying our energy and resources to those things, and not to chasing phantoms.

Think free, be free.