MemeMachineGo!

Disinfo’s series of books is reminiscent of a modern-day People’s Almanac series, delivered with the conceit that they’re revealing suppressed information.

I just finished 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know. A lot of the theoretically suppressed information isn’t that obscure. Some of it is obscure only because it’s not all that interesting. The Korean War never ended! …because an armistice isn’t a peace treaty.

But here are some I found interesting.

The US Air Force dropped two atomic bombs on North Carolina.

Just ten days after the Kent State shootings, police killed two students and injured twelve at Jackson State College in Jackson, Mississippi. Jackson State is a historically black school, and the circumstances and handling of the shootings were generally uglier.

The Ten Commandments aren’t the Ten Commandments, arguably. The Ten Commandments we always hear about are what Moses told the Israelites before he received any stone tablets. Exodus 34 is very explicit that the second set of stone tablets, the ones put in the Ark of the Covenant, said the same thing as the first set that Moses smashed, namely:

1. Worship no other god than Yahweh: Make no covenant with the inhabitants of other lands to which you go, do not intermarry with them, destroy their places of worship.
2. Do not cast idols.
3. Observe the Feast of Unleavened Bread for seven days in the month of Abib in remembrance of the Exodus.
4. Sacrifice firstborn male animals to Yahweh. The firstborn of a donkey may be redeemed; redeem firstborn sons.
5. Do no work on the seventh day.
6. Observe the Feast of First Fruits and the Feast of Ingathering: All males are therefore to appear before Yahweh three times each year.
7. Do not offer the blood of a sacrifice with leavened bread.
8. Do not let the Passover sacrifice remain until the following morning.
9. Bring the first fruits of the harvest to the Temple of Yahweh.
10. Do not cook a kid in its mother’s milk.

Those are called the Ritual Decalogue as opposed to the Ethical Decalogue — the familiar Ten Commandments. (Given that no one counts these as the Ten Commandments, this is, perhaps, of a similarly hair-splitting nature as the Korean War not having ended. But this one I found interesting.)