Jesus and "The Teacher of RIghteousness"

The story of Jesus recounted in the Christian Gospels could not have happened.  At the time of Jesus, the Romans were in full control of the region, through their prefects and the client king Herod they had elevated to the throne after defeating the Hasmoneans.  The Romans were meticulous record keepers, and they recorded none of the key stories in Gospel, including Massacre of the Innocents, the supposed crowds of Jesus' followers in Jerusalem, the judgement of Pontius Pilate, and the Crucifixion.  If these things had happened, the Romans would have recorded them, and they didn't.  So, these stories are all fiction, and they were likely invented by The Apostle Paul, and his followers, who founded a religion based on Jesus' resurrection.

Paul's inventions came after the historically true assassination of James, the so called "brother of Jesus," who had a popular sect in Jerusalem that came to odds with the High Priest Ananus ben Ananus who ordered James's assassination.  Paul was a hanger in the court of King Herod who intended to marry someone there, and he claimed he witnessed the assassination of James, which is quite possible.  He certainly heard of it not long after.

But Paul's invention of Jesus didn't come from nothing.  He was aware of much that had been happening before the assassination of James.  He was surely aware of key ideas from James's sect, which had been becoming too popular for the likes of Ananus.  He may have talked with James, which is what the Gospels say, and even been a part of James's sect.

Those ideas likely involved the teachings of a figure earlier than Jesus, The Teacher of Righteousness, the key figure in the Dead Sea Scrolls.  The Teacher was a much earlier figure, from either the first or second centuries BCE.  Millennialism was a primary feature of these teachings (also reflected in some of the Gospels) that the coming of God was at hand in about 40 years, and when that didn't happen many turned away his sect but others changed the story.  The Teacher was persecuted by "The Wicked Priest" in Jerusalem who is unnamed and historians can only speculate which one he is.  The Teacher was ultimately put to death by unnamed authorities.  This may or may not have been before the Romans defeated and isplaced the Hasmoneans.

But along with the Millennialism, The Teacher taught some if not many of the virtues which would be familiar to Christians.  The followers of The Teacher, the Essenes, were a communal sect foreshadowing the later communal sects of Christianity.  This brings to mind The Sermon on the Mount, and in fact the Beatitudes have a striking resemblance to some of the teachings in the Dead Sea scrolls (eg, blessed are the poor in spirit), though the caves where they were found is some distance from the site traditionally believed to be where Jesus is said to have given the Sermon.

One historian tried to advance the theory that The Teacher was Jesus, and this has never been very well accepted because the dates are so far apart.  But this is not what I am saying.   I am saying that The Teacher was likely part of the inspiration for the story of Jesus, which was an fictional invention of Paul and his followers.  The Teacher was probably also an inspiration for the sect of James, though James's teaching might have been quite different from Paul's and likely lacked key parts of Christianity like the Resurrection and the notion that Jesus was God.  Jewish Christianity which is said to have been the continuation of James's sect also lacks the idea that Jesus was God, merely an important human teacher, and Islam incorporates that view.

The Herodian court held that the assassination of James was illegal and Ananus was deposed.  Not long afterward, the Revolts were begun with Ananus as a key leader, and lasted for years until the Romans sacked the Temple.  The Romans seem to have sided with the followers of James in that even when Jews were forbidden to enter Jerusalem after the later Bar Kochba revolt, Jewish Christians were not.  Jewish Christians understood themselves to be fundamentally Jewish and followers of the Torah, though they were excluded from both Judaism and Christianity centuries later, and many converted to Islam after that.

Passwords and other securanoia

 My security minded friend sent me another article today on how I should be securing my security cameras from unwanted watchers.  I replied thusly:

I keep inside cameras turned off when I'm not on vacation, and care little about the others.

I do not pay for monthly services and use my own local storage cards on my digital cameras.*

My analog cameras have a local hard drive for storage, and are all outside, but do have internet access except when the app sometimes mysteriously requires a password I can't remember.

My biggest problem is remembering passwords.  

Passwords and endless security measures I do not want cause me more grief than anything else and I hate being forced to change them or use passkeys or other additional security measures.  I can usually deal with two factor identification but sometimes it causes problems too.  I've always been ultimately able to access my credit accounts but always worry that at some critical moment I won't be able to.  I have never been subjected to identity theft and have never lost money to any kind of theft.  Once I lost my physical card and was able to cancel all the charges I didn't make, and another time I was billed for something I didn't order or receive but was able to get that cancelled too.  I have been ordering things online since 1996 and more than anyone else I know and sometimes directly from small companies.  I think more people are taken in by fishing scams that say you are being charged for something you didn't order, than are actually being charged for things they didn't order.

I worry more about losing access to things and quite often I've been unable to access my cameras remotely because the apps for the digital and analog cameras will unexpectedly require me to remember a password.  Keeping track of all my passwords has been very difficult even with a book dedicated to that.

I keep my computer hard drives unencrypted because my final plan is that all my creative works be accessible to my heirs and/or the general public rather than lost forever, but Apple keeps trying to force me, against my wishes, to encrypt them, which would mean they could be lost forever just for that reason.

No matter how many times I tell iCloud that Chrome on my Desktop Mac is a "trusted device" it never remembers that, and forces me to go through the Passkey/Password/2 factor identification dialogs every time I want to access my photos.  I then have to be very careful not to be sent down the Passkey rathole.  I presume this is a form of desktop warfare, and I think much securanoia is just that.  It's not really about keeping me secure, it's about forcing me to use some particular set of apps.

Passkey seems like the most dangerous thing of all because if I were to use Passkey for everything and I lost that, I'd lose access to everything.

*I did once enable monthly services.  That was on my November trip last year to California when I wanted to monitor my cats.  The AI on the monthly service plan never seemed to identify cat presence outside correctly and wasn't useful in finding what happened to my oldest cat a day after I left home that killed him.  I tried using my phone but quickly gave up.  By the time I got home and was prepared to more seriously use check it out from the comfort of my computer with a big screen, the data had 'expired' because it was older than the days allotted.  The only thing I was able to do was remove, save, and download all the data from my SD card on the outside camera which on which the raw video was still available.  But I found it's basically watch 24 hours of video and figure out what happened.  I can hardly do it for 10 minutes at a stretch.  So it was a waste of money to enable the monthly services for online AI, and it's not worth it to me to plug my existing 24 hours of video into a generic AI to figure it out.

Karim Khan

About the only thing we can be fairly certain of is that Karim Khan's replacement will drop the ICC warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant.*  And that will be telling, since it was both Israel and US who have been pushing to get Khan removed ever since his warrant for Netanyahu, and Marco Rubio even said beforehand that the administration had was taking actions to get him removed.

(*And not Putin.)

Here's the most definitive report I've been able to find on the actual acts Khan is accused of actually doing (you have to really dig to find this):

https://apnews.com/article/international-criminal-court-un-misconduct-accusations-a275e676e074c00d34c769c8bbdf69d7

A later report from 2026 reports Khan was cleared by a 3 judge panel of any relevant misconduct:

https://apnews.com/article/icc-prosecutor-karim-khan-investigation-united-nations-4f01c8ce5259dc726a565ce9a7f0a37b

This often gets referred to elsewhere as rape (I don't think it rises to that) or sexual harassment (it could qualify for that, but I generally question the concept and the standard ultimately applied by IOS which is the appearance of impropriety which is a terrible slippery slope, along with the concept imbalance of power which generally ignores the often superior powers that women have).

1.  He is alleged to have asked her to lie with her on a hotel bed (she did so) and ultimately he "touched her sexually" (elsewhere it is clarified: her breasts).

2.  He is alleged to have asked her to go on vacations with her (I'd dismiss this as completely unimportant).  She apparently did not, in this case she would have had to say yes for it to happen.  It was reported she was often reluctant to say no because of the imbalance of power.

3.  He is alleged to have put his hand in her pocket (I would say, this is no big deal, though perhaps not completely unimportant, and we don't know the precise context).

4.  He knocked on her door for 10 minutes at 3 am wanting to talk with her.  (It should be remembered that she was a very close aide who made many work related trips with him). I would call this completely unimportant to the charges.

Two items that are borderline seamy, and two that are completely unimportant.  Of which we know nothing about the antecedents--things she may have said or done.  We more or less know the context: she was his closest aide on important trips.  

And we are not at all talking about what would unequivocally be regarded as sexual acts.

IOW, it is not the Khan stopped doing things when he was told not to (ie no means no).  It is rather that he did not first obtain affirmative permission for doing a couple of things that may have appeared improper and two others that were not unreasonable.

And for these, the warrants against the greatest criminal of our era will be dropped.  And meanwhile, the vast documented rapes by Epstein clients go uninvestigated and the vast documented rapes in Israeli prisons are accepted, demanded and even celebrated by Israelis.  The Gaza genocide and pogroms in the West Bank continue.

Now Khan could NOT be described as any kind of leftist.  He was a Tory from the UK who only issued the warrant against Netanyahu (and failed to do so for many others who might have qualified for conducting genocide) under a lot of pressure, possibly even including the pressure from the initial secret inquiry into his alleged sexual harassment which had already started.  He had previously and more quickly issued a warrant for Putin (which in my mind is specious).

Also, FWIW, Khan is a married Muslim (married to a UN civil rights investigator) with two daughters.  And himself a judge of considerable stature.

The aide who was allegedly harassed did not make these things public (which was when they really took off).  She refrained from doing so possibly because she was in favor of the warrants against Netanyahu.  It was two of her "friends" who heard about the matter who made it public.

This raises many possible ideas as to the context and antecedents of the alleged sexual harassment.  

Nowhere in the public discussion are the things she may have done prior to the alleged acts in question.

Journalist Patrick Lawrence calls this affair (leading to the likely dropping of warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant) a "Descent into Lawlessness"

https://thefloutist.substack.com/p/further-into-lawlessness

Ultimately Khan was sacked not by a judicial process but by a political one, by the Assembly of States Parties, which was no doubt (see Rubio's comment) heavily lobbied, bribed, and or coerced by the US (which has observer status) into making the vote against Khan.  After actual judges had investigated the affair and concluded there was no there there.

Commentator Craig Murray has concerns about the affair but keeps hedging that we don't know the facts.  The problem with this copout is that we do know the allegations and even they are pretty weak tea.

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2026/07/narratives-of-moral-conflict-karim-khan-and-delcy-rodriguez/

Murray's article may be far more interesting in his defense of Delcy Rodriguez who is now often demonized on the left for selling out.  He also uniquely points out that Venezuela is actually getting the money from oil sales, less a relatively small US fee, and of course with no control over where the oil is going, which is a violation of sovereignty.  He has been to Venezuela and talked to top officials.  Ironically, according to Murray, Venezuela is getting the money from oil sales far more quickly than when China was handling the process.

Left to Right Peace and Freedom Coalition

I've been very skeptical of all these Left to Right Coalition proposals.  Sam Husseini's is the best I've seen.  As far as he goes, I'd support it.  He  stands for peace (not defined well here but elsewhere it's clear he would end support for Israel and other wars and imperialism), equal rights for all*, and freedom of speech, universal healthcare, tax the rich, restrain corporations, and protect the environment (also left undefined and I worry about it).

https://husseini.substack.com/p/the-need-for-a-radical-center-party?utm_source=publication-search

He dodges Immigration saying it would not be an issue if we stopped imperial wars and meddling AND the "War on Drugs" (war on poor people and democracy actually).

That being said, there are "far" left orgs I'd support too, the best of these currently is PSL (unmentioned by Husseini, and he laughs at Cornel West who I voted for last time...but wouldn't next time).  PSL even got their Presidential candidates onto the Texas ballot (which West did not).

*He leaves unmentioned sex change bathroom and sports rights and minor sex change rights.

MakePlaylist Version 1.100 now online

I have now uploaded MakePlaylist version 1.100 to SourceForge:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/makeplaylist/

This is the version I have used to demonstrate that MakePlaylist is what I call a Lossless Information Procedure.  Even the smallest increase in data or data quality is reflected in the output data quality.  To do so it needs to generate millions of virtual playlists, which required considerable internal streamlining (what I've called Cyclotron mode) to be practical.  It also has an option to test what I call Paradoxical Information Procedures, for which some increases in data or data quality can cause less output data quality, ie, going backwards.  I discuss these types of information processing in an earlier post (which now needs a bit of updating to include the latest results obtained with 1.100 before it was finally uploaded, not to mention general editing, but the post is still basically correct):

https://verydeepleft.blogspot.com/2026/06/paradoxical-and-other-information.html

I need to get back to making other improvements to MakePlaylist for it's intended purpose of actually making playlists.  But eventually I also plan to add a mode to demonstrate Truncating Information Procedures which curiously requires adding more random numbers.  The Paradoxical type is achieved with simple data loss, which I think has far reaching implications.  And improve on the results and show they hold up for other conditions (which to some degree I have already done but not written up yet).

Sick People Should Stay Home

 I hate it when people go to concerts, movies, other social activities, and work when they are sick with respiratory ailments, carelessly spreading their germs to others.  It happens all too much, and I can trace every respiratory illness I've had (like the flu then pneumonia that almost killed me last month) to one or more such people.  I vowed never to remain near such a sick person, even at the cost of embarrassment.  Yesterday there was a person repetitively coughing and loudly sniffling with rattles right behind me at a concert.  It started just before the music director gave his intro.  I waited that out and as soon as he stopped I made my way out of the very tight row of people to a space in the corner of the hall where there were hardly any people (and nobody apparently sick).  I didn't quite get there before the music started.  I'm also going to remember to bring a mask to every concert etc in case I am delayed or trapped.  And generally not sit in the middle of front sections again because that really makes it hard to escape.  If there had been assigned seats, I'd have to go talk to an usher.  Many people give excuses like "it's just allergies" when they may have low grade infections caused by mycoplasma like walking pneumonia which are easily treated with antibiotics (which some doctors don't do).   I've been to places where nearly everyone was coughing with the chesty cough indicative of walking pneumonia, and sure enough I  caught it there, lasted a couple weeks until I got an antibiotic then went away quickly. Conditions like COPD lead people to easily pick up (and spread) other diseases, and are still disturbing to others.  It may be appropriate for people who cough a lot to wear masks in public as a precaution.  I pay attention to when I cough and rarely do so when I am healthy.  If it happens during social activities I turn away or cover my mouth.

Albert Einstein on Capitalism

Perfect synopsis.

“Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society.

This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population.

Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.”

— Albert Einstein