Nice! This looks like it might be pretty cool. I just beat SMB on the original cart this past year so this might be a good complement. Thanks for the find ;)

Beat me to it, damnit

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Twain was such a fucking amazing person. One of my favorite books of all time will always be a Conneticut Yankee in King Aurthur's Court.

Yes! It's a fantastic series. I especially liked that they had Kal going around the globe and helping out various worker struggles in secret at the beginning of the series. It's my favorite current Superman book right now. I just finished reading the latest issue earlier today. I'm excited to see where they'll take it.

Written by a man who famously hates the character and used Batman to make a point of making Superman look bad. It's considered to be one of the worst written versions of Superman of all-time by fans. Superman has, in various incarnations, had some associations with the US government, but usually it's been writers shilling or when he was being explicitly written as a flag-waving patriot in the WWII era comics. The vast majority of his existence has been one that is frequently at odds with the military and US government policy. There are still some writers that will pander to the military, but those are few and far in between and always cringe levels of writing.

I am a big Superman fan and I can't tell you how wrong this take is. Yes, certain comics portray Superman as friend and believer in the "American Way" and as sometimes ally of the US military. However, those takes are far from the normal status quo. Of course you get particularly liberal-minded writers who frequently use that take. However, those writers are the exception rather than the rule. Hell, the most famous instance of Superman being a government shill came from Frank Miller in The Dark Knight which is such a poor take on Superman as to be parody. Miller famously hates Superman and found a way to character assassinate him and have Batman beat the shit out of him (laughable). Frequently the US government and Superman are at odds with each other and Superman regularly defies them even going so far as to directly stop their actions.

Superman got his start as someone that opposed societal oppression in all it's forms. In one golden age story Superman literally tears down a dilapidated tenement building being run by a slumlord who was extorting his tenants and refusing repairs, finding proper housing for the folks and forcing the slumlord to sell to the city to build something suitable. In another story Superman poses as a miner and goes undercover to expose a ruthless businessman exploiting his workers at the mine.

If Superman existed in the real world he definitely would be horrified at the actions of Israel and I have no doubt he'd step in. That's actually a big point in the movie as he causes an international incident by stepping into stop troops from murdering civilians in a nation that is an obvious stand-in for Israel (it even had it's own completely obvious pastiche of Netanyahu who meets a grisly fate at the end). At the end of the day these are American comics, by writers of various political and social backgrounds that will sometimes use Superman as a tool of patriotism and fundamentally misrepresent the essence of the character. It's going to happen from time to time (pretty sure I just read an issue of Action Comics recently that made me cringe with the writer's sucking-off of the military).

Haha, possibly. The early conception of Thomas, throughout the Gnostic writings, Thomas was seen as Jesus' favorite disciple, even drawing the ire of the other disciples because of Jesus' supposed favoritism of Thomas. And interestingly, Thomas was seen as Jesus' "twin", in the Gospel of Thomas he is referred to as such, and John even mentions it in the Gospel of John:

In the Syriac-speaking culture of upper Mesopotamia and Syria the apostle was called Judas Thomas. Thomas (Tau'ma) means twin in Syriac, a form of the Aramaic which was the language of Jesus and his followers. And Didymus, a name by which the apostle is also called in the gospel of John, means twin in Greek. Perhaps some regarded the two as blood brothers. Perhaps the twinship was regarded as spiritual or symbolic. Sometimes, as in the Christian Gnostic systems, Thomas seems to be the this-worldly reflection or image of a divine savior-figure, an earthly body inhabited by a spirit like the savior's. In any event Thomas became a focus of special reverence.

So, Thomas was definitely seen as a special figure in the early Christian writings, which is interesting as he is now commonly remembered as "doubting Thomas", the disciple who doubted the resurrection initially. Seems like there was some in the early church that disliked Thomas' original prominence (perhaps due to the association with being an important figure to the gnostic sects) and basically character assassinated him in retribution.

Yeah, the early Christian development is quite fascinating. I was first exposed to it by Elaine Pagel's book "The Gnostic Gospels", which led to me doing a deeper investigation. It was interesting, since I was also heavily into reading Taoist philosophy at the time, and I could immediately draw the parallels between the Gnostic and some Taoist ideas. The Gnostic version of Christianity seemed to have far more in common with eastern spiritual traditions than other western religious thought. I very much see Gnosticism as a western spiritual kin to eastern systems of thought. It makes a lot of sense too, as I have no doubt that there was a lot of cross-pollination of ideas between the east and west at that time, leading to a synthesis of western thought with the ideas it encountered from the east.

Yeah, I'm of the belief that what was taken as "canonical" was selected through the Romans finally giving in and creating a hollowed-out state religion version of Christianity after they couldn't ignore the popularity of Christianity. The Nicene council was convened and after we got what we consider as the Bible today. The early Christian writing were much more radical and esoteric than what came later (and most likely had fuck all to do with what Jesus actually taught). The early Christians weren't a monolith either, there were literally hundreds of sects, with a lot of crossover with pagan "mystery cults" and neo-platonism. The early Christians didn't all agree on who Jesus was or what exactly was the "true" teaching of Jesus. If you take a look at the Gnostic writings Jesus comes across as more an eastern-style sage figure ala Lao-Tzu or the Buddha, hell there's a few passages in the Gospel of Thomas where he straight up is speaking some esoteric, sage-like stuff:

(3) Jesus says: (1) “If those who lead you say to you: ‘Look, the kingdom is in the sky!’ then the birds of the sky will precede you. (2) If they say to you: ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fishes will precede you. (3) Rather, the kingdom is inside of you and outside of you.” (4) “When you come to know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will realize that you are the children of the living Father. (5) But if you do not come to know yourselves, then you exist in poverty, and you are poverty.”

(22) (1) Jesus saw infants being suckled. (2) He said to his disciples: “These little ones being suckled are like those who enter the kingdom.” (3) They said to him: “Then will we enter the kingdom as little ones?” (4) Jesus said to them: “When you make the two into one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside and the above like the below — (5) that is, to make the male and the female into a single one, so that the male will not be male and the female will not be female — (6) and when you make eyes instead of an eye and a hand instead of a hand and a foot instead of a foot, an image instead of an image, (7) then you will enter [the kingdom].”

In the late 80's a group of scholars actually made a committee and voted on what they considered to be the authentic sayings of Jesus by comparing the four gospels, and using the earliest gospel (Mark, I believe) as a frame of reference. There's also this idea of the "Q" gospel, which was the main document that all the other gospels took their content from, but has been lost to time, but believed to have existed from speculating on various allusions to a central text. The findings of the committee were released in the form of a book "The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus.

Thomas Jefferson (yes, that Jefferson) even wrote his own Bible, referred to as the "Jefferson Bible", because he believed many of the sayings and doings attributed to Jesus in the New Testament to be forgeries, obscuring the true sayings of Jesus.

I'm not a Christian myself, more of a armchair philosopher/spiritual seeker, but it's my view that Jesus was a very real person, that's name was used in an opportunistic way by powerful people to create a system of social/political control. If you look at what is considered to be his original words, he doesn't claim to be "the" son of god, but claims that *we are all sons and daughters of god". There are many times where Jesus actually rebukes those people for holding him up as some type of godly figure.

I think Jesus was an enlightened figure (possibly with far east spiritual training, which has been speculated by some, perhaps venturing to India in his youth) that preached a very, very different spirituality than the one that co-opted his name and popularity. Of course, one can only speculate, but from the available evidence I assume it to be a pretty good chance that was the case. Which, if you are to believe that idea, makes it pretty tragic that such a teacher could have their name and ideas used and twisted into something far different, and worse, than what they were actually teaching.

I'd recommend Giant-Size X-Men #1, which started the Claremont era and is responsible for most of what we would think of as the X-Men today. I recently got Uncanny X-Men Omnibus Vol. 1 on loan from the library, which collects the first 30 or so issues. It's pretty expensive (and rare, I believe) so you might want to look into going through your local library as well. Mine got it through the inter-library loan system, which is nationwide, your library might have inter-library service as well if you ask them about it.

It's a bit hokey, with some mid-70s cheese, but it's fun to see the start of what defines the X-Men even to this day, arguably (I don't think many would object, really) more so than the Lee/Kirby originals. Although, I have been meaning to go back to the beginning when I get the chance, only because it's my least read version of the X-Men (ironic, I know).

Also, there are less...legal means, if you don't mind those avenues: Uncanny X-Men Omnibus Vol. 1-3 Download

I spent years doing that with Morrowind before I wised up. I actually download OpenMW recently just to take a look, and had the most "been there, done that" feeling ever from playing a game. I gave up on Bethesda after Skyrim and never looked back, and my gaming life became all the better for it.

Don't. As was mentioned above, these types of posts are definitely written by his cronies. Trump is neither as coherent or non-rambling as these texts dumps frequently are. Someone should actually make a picture comparing the radically different styles from his account.