I got that image from Wikipedia, where there is an entry for "Great Architect of the Universe." Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote: "God, Who is the first principle of all things, may be compared to things created as the architect is to things designed (ut artifex ad artificiata)."And John Calvin repeatedly calls God "the Architect of the Universe." The Masons use the initials "G.A.O.T.U., meaning the Great Architect of the Universe."And the term appears in Hermeticism, Rosicrucianism, and Gnosticism.
I'm calling this to your attention not only because it's interesting on its own, but because it helps us think about the arrogance that oozes from the designation "architect." Gruber is an academic, whose work was useful in whatever way it was, either because he designed plausibly workable structures or because he mobilized the reputation of M.I.T. to be exploited to lull and soothe us. Calling him an "architect" is part of the propaganda. It's a powerful word, and when we become aware of its association with God, we may wake up to the magnitude of the flimflammery.
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Who architected the Architect, I wonder?
Gruber is not the Architect. He is the Great Camouflager.
Calvin also stresses that we only know the knowledge of God that God chooses to reveal to us. God being the maker of an artist's greatest work called the earth is obvious to men although they do suppress it. The rest of the revelation that God chooses to tell us is in His Scriptures. Which is why the Muslims and the SCOTUS have outlawed His Bible.
FLW approved of the titular respect given to architects.
What was his line?
"Nothing is higher (pointing to the sky) than architect."
The Architect, the Liar.
More along the lines of the architects that designed those Chinese apartment buildings that completely collapsed in the earthquake a few years back.
Some believe Frank Gehry is the Obamacare of Architects.
As long as we're contemplating medieval images, how about the Wheel of Fortune (that lifts some up while casting others down)?
For example,
http://pre-gebelin.blogspot.com/2013/02/lydgate-mans-lot-in-life.html
we may wake up to the magnitude of the flimflammery.
I was aware of Obama's flimflammery from very early on. How others couldn't see it early on still amazes me.
Wasn't Gruber one of the more conniving sailors on the "McHale's Navy" show? I thought I recognized that name.
What's My Line?
Gruber would like us to think of him as an academic, but if we use IRS guidelines for declaring occupation (majority of income) he must declare himself a "consultant". It appears "academic" is a part-time sideline at best.
The arrogance of the word "architect" goes along with the presumed scientification of things that aren't science. Law is not science, especially law that is designed to organize and manage a far-flung social enterprise like healthcare.
The great medieval cathedrals were erected by master builders, not architects. The master builder was presumed to have first-hand knowledge and experience on building large load-bearing structures. Sometimes they failed. Ceilings collapsed. But much of what was built remains standing.
Politics requires a master builder, not an architect. But we are talking about the Obama and Pelosi theater troop here. First-hand knowledge and experience in building large load-bearing structures was not to be had.
I've always loved this image.
George Costanza who always wanted to pretend to be an architect.
Surgeons and architects are said to have god complexes because our lives are in their hands, although in a building isn't it the engineers who make it safe?
Gruber was also the architect of RomneyCare. It would have been very interesting if this came up in 2012.
I heard that God was mad at us because that coal was "meant to be left in the ground."
I assume they were referring to God, because who else could have created coal with an intention of of how it was to be used or not?
But the person writing the comment assured me he was an atheist.
Gruber addressed RomneyCare, no it wasn't passed by lying. He specifically said he wished the ACA could have been passed the same way.
Another datum:
From Mars there follows a space of 4 + 24 = 28 such parts, but so far no planet was sighted there. But should the Lord Architect have left that space empty? link
Wasn't Gruber one of the more conniving sailors on the "McHale's Navy" show? I thought I recognized that name.
Also, there was the recurring character Special Agent MacGruber on Saturday Night Live. In each episode he was tasked with diffusing a ticking bomb and saving the lives of himself and hiss trapped friends, but fails because he becomes distracted by his own talking.
I'll leave it up to the individual to draw parallels.
@Althouse, my job title says "architect," and I assert that I software architects are necessary because someone has to figure out what code has to be written in order to address the end users' problems. Simply tossing 100 programmers into a cubicle farm and having them code what they want to will not get a working system built.
Witness the Obamacare exchanges.
But I am not God.
The White House is furious because Gruber is proving how easy it was to fool the truly stupid Democrats in Congress by waiving an MIT Professor in their face and saying "trust us."
Obama fears Americans have trusted Obama's Party for the last time. This is endangering the great CO2 is pollution hoax that Obama planned as his last and greatest deception set to destroy the USA.
"architect" is ... a powerful word, and when we become aware of its association with God,
Heh. I associate the word "architect" with people who design the "big buildings downtown that your daddy works in". (Firesign).
SomeoneHasToSayIt said...
Who architected the Architect, I wonder?>
It's architects all the way down.
Architects are more modern than turtles.
I think AA is really reaching. "It's a powerful word, and when we become aware of its association with God, we may wake up to the magnitude of the flimflammery." Architect is a man made word to describe a profession related to construction, alternately someone who creates. Any associate with God is similarly made by man, and man associating words with the character of God does not intrinsically give the words any particular weight. As well say God is truth, and the claims supporting Obamacare are therefore an offense to God.
The man has disgraced my alma mater. Science, engineering and research depend on truthfulness, integrity and open communications - in short, honor - among the people involved. The Institute should publicly condemn him.
Who architected the Architect, I wonder?
Infinite retrograde testudinidae
I notice that Politico calls Gruber the architect of ObamaCare. Cal Thomas, writing for the FoxNews site also uses the term,but puts it within sarcastic quotes. Apparently Mr. Thomas sees the man behind the curtain as clearly as our esteemed hostess does.
Gruber (Goober?) is God of Obamacare.
Nonapod said...
Who architected the Architect, I wonder?
Taxpayers' millions architected the architect.
Since the Scholastics the GAOTU paradigm has been replace by the MGOTM. I wonder how a modern monk would illuminate a page using that concept -- the MGOTM wearing a periodic table tee the size of a galactic cluster?
The moment’s gravity is apogee
Of death and judgment, here where sun and moon
Are beam and pillar of the balance pan
That tips the temple’s peak. But clarity’s
Displaced the weight of time with charity’s
Alacrity: Jerusalem is done
With me. The distant Mediterranean
Ignites in sliver holocaust. I see
Such realms that stretch before me reach for me.
So men have bound up hands, dismantled stone,
And thrown me down. The clumsy club’s amen
Has queered my corners irrevocably;
But square and spirit level resurrect
Equilibrium’s master architect.
Archigeek.
Gruber is not an architect. He's just another of our latter-day mandarins.
Gruber: Architect of lies!
http://www.amazon.com/Architect-Lies-Mercenary/dp/B00140KO1K
Being in the construction industry, I associate the term "architect" with people who want to be artists and are therefore generally incompetent at what's their main job, construction management. It's worse that it sounds, because on large jobs, there is a separate role for construction managers. It's on smaller jobs - houses, small apartments, small commercial buildings, school additions - that the architect doubles as the CM.
Of course, the problem is that architecture schools don't teach construction management, or if they do, it's an elective.
Dustbunny is partially right - engineers make sure the *design* is safe. Contractors are responsible for making sure the building is *built* safely.
So Gruber really does deserve "credit" as an architect of Obamacare - he put together a complicated but aesthetically pleasing (to some) design, with no sanity checks by engineers to make sure it would work, and no oversight of the construction process to make sure that the result would actually work. Just like altogether too many real architects.
Obama fears Americans have trusted Obama's Party for the last time.
Nope, it's his fellow Democrats who fear that Americans have trusted Obama's Party for the last time.
Someone should bring up "The Fountainhead."
God is both an order and architect, of nothing into something, and something into coherent structures. Gruber is an architect, in that he molds an uncreated work, and stupid Americans, into complex structures and taxable entities, respectively. Obama is the cracker who directs the work of stupid and resentful Americans alike.
"Author of the bill" does not do justice to the odious nature of Gruber's participation in the passage of the ACA into law.
What would do justice? Instapundit's suggestion of tar, feathers and a ride out of town on a rail seems a start.
Wisconsin's Democrat Governor paid $400,000 to0 Obamacare fraud Gruber (WaPo)... http://preview.tinyurl.com/pr92brl
I love M.I.T. Professor Gruber. Especially when he speak-o's "off the cuff" at videotaped conferences.
The guy can't seem to not tell the truth. Encore! I say we all pool our resources and pay him half a million to tell us everything he knows.
Or, we could just bring him before Congress and let him testify-o. For free. Also, bring in every stupid critter who voter FOR the bill back in 2010. Invite the guy who signed the bill to sit in. They can all testify too... about just exactly what it was that caused them to vote for it.
If they're not too stupid.
Economists are servants to their political masters. If Gruber is an architect, his project could be this administration's Altgeld Gardens.
Exactly, chillblaine. Altgeld Gardens: "one of the densest concentrations of potentially hazardous pollution sources in North America." Designed and built for for the needs of "Progressive" policymakers. — Chicago Democrats.
More from Wikipedia:
"The residents have a growing concern about the number of deaths annually from cancer and other diseases that may be related to their environment.[2] Altgeld Gardens contained a great deal of asbestos in its construction materials - asbestos that remained there until a grassroots campaign in the 1980s advocated for its removal.
US President Barack Obama, then a local community organizer, participated in this campaign, and wrote about it at length in his book Dreams From My Father. It is one of the densest concentrations of potentially hazardous pollution sources in North America. Many of the landfills that surround them are unregulated, and some of those are still being used. Since most of these landfills as well as many industrial plants are located along the waterways surrounding the area, of the 18 miles (29 km) of rivers and lakes surrounding Altgeld Gardens, 11 miles (18 km) of them are unfit for human consumption and recreation, though many residents still fish in them."
Speaking of architects:
Suppose a new Führer were to appear tomorrow. Perhaps he would need a State architect? You, Herr Speer, are too old for the job. Whom would you pick?
"Well," Speer said with a half-smile, "I hope Philip Johnson will not mind if I mention his name. Johnson understands what the small man thinks of as grandeur. The fine materials, the size of the space."
"what the small man thinks of as grandeur" and "the stupidity of the American voter" -- kissing kin.
Since Romney was mentioned it should be reminded that Romney vetoed Romneycare.
Tom Wolfe's "From Bauhaus to Our House" is really good on the influence of leftist thinking on 20th century architecture; From a review by Janet Malcolm:
.” Tom Wolfe, in his jolly new polemic against modern architecture, attributes the rise of the International Style in America to our chronic inability to say no to the Europeans. If only we had said “Europe be hanged!” when Walter Gropius and his Bauhaus colleagues Marcel Breuer, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, Mies van der Rohe, Joseph Albers, and Herbert Bayer, fleeing Hitler, appeared here in the late Thirties with their Teutonic good looks and their sachlich carpetbags, how differently things might have turned out. We might have been spared the “row after Mies van der row of glass houses,” the “worker housing” that has spread over our land like the elm blight. Instead, as Wolfe writes with delicious malice,
The reception of Gropius and his confreres was like a certain stock scene from the jungle movies of that period. Bruce Cabot and Myrna Loy make a crash landing in the jungle and crawl out of the wreckage in their Abercrombie & Fitch white safari blouses and tan gabardine jodhpurs and stagger into a clearing. They are surrounded by savages with bones through their noses—who immediately bow down and prostrate themselves and commence a strange moaning chant.
The White Gods!
Come from the skies at last!
Since Romney was mentioned it should be reminded that Romney vetoed Romneycare.
Romney did sign into law the final Massachusetts health care bill. He vetoed several provisions during the legislative process, all of which were overridden, I think.
Speaking of Myrna Loy, the other day in another thread I was thinking of Althouse +Mead as a variation on Loy and William Powell in "The Thin Man" a happy married couple who like to trade wisecracks.
"It's a powerful word [architect], and when we become aware of its association with God, we may wake up to the magnitude of the flimflammery."
Yes, and the association of the word with Him is but a small part of the flimflammery used by those who flimflam in the name of God, and who have for lo these many centuries.
You are quite right to note the long pedigree of the word "Architect" as a tool of religious propaganda across the millennia. Be suspicious when the word is applied to a dusty academic committee-sitter like Gruber.
A new Gruber video out, according to Ace. Even more architecturing.
@Meade, I'm aware of Altgeld Gardens as one had to drive past them on the Calumet Expressway (now I-94) back when I was growing up south of the city of Chicago.
They are sandwiched between chemical plants (Sherwin-Williams) and gigantic landfills and just south of an enormous sewage treatment plant. If any part of Illinois needs help, it is there.
Wiki is correct in noting that Barack Obama participated in the negotiation of an asbestos cleanup. It fails to note that the agitation for cleanup was underway when he joined as a fledgling "community organizer" (it helps, you see, if the community is already organized for you) and it further fails to note that the asbestos cleanup petered out after he went off to Harvard Law, and as of 2008 the asbestos still had not been entirely cleaned up. As I tried to convey to your wife when she wrote the McCain lost her, Obama had never demonstrated any ability to follow up on things. And a good argument could be made that he still doesn't.
A dispassionate discussion of Altgeld Gardens and Obama's role as a community organizer go here.
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