THE SORCERER

GARDEN of the GODS

The Sorcerer lived like a well-to-do scholar. He said:

“You admit with credulity and abhorrence the reality of the infernal art of magic, which is able to control the eternal order of the planets and the voluntary operations of the human mind. You dread the mysterious power of spells and incantations, of potent herbs, and execrable rites; which can extinguish or recall life, inflame passions of the soul, blast the works of creation, and extort from the demons the secrets of futurity. You believe, with the wildest inconsistency, that this preternatural dominion of the air, of earth, and of hell, is exercised from the vilest motives of malice or gain, by some wrinkled hags and itinerant sorcerers, who pass their obscure lives in penury and contempt. The arts of magic are equally condemned by public opinion and the law; but, as they tend to gratify the most imperious passions of the heart of man, they are continually proscribed and continually practiced.”

“An imaginary cause is capable of producing the most serious and mischievous effects. The dark predictions of the death of an emperor, or the success of a conspiracy, are calculated only to stimulate the hopes of ambition and to dissolve the ties of fidelity; and the intentional guilt of magic is aggravated by the actual crimes of treason and sacrilege.”

“Antiochians claim Chrestos was invented there, and they content themselves with disobeying the moral precepts, but they were scrupulously attached to the speculative doctrines of their religion.”

So said the Sorcerer on that occasion.

 

Ancient Color

SPECULATIONS ON THE LATE HERETIC PHARAOH

They called you heretic, mad, megalomaniac, monotheist,
And you were probably all of those,
And perhaps a hermaphrodite, or a woman,
And you married your sister, daughter, mother,
And had an affair with your son.

You set up your own city in the friendless desert,
And gathered together friends and families,
Commoners as queens, Hebiru as bureaucrats,
Raised temples and children, palaces and stele,
To mark your City of the Sun.

The old priests said you were evil, cursed by the gods,
When you closed their doors and temples,
Took away their goods and pride,
And canceled their services “forever,”
To be replaced by the one true One.

It took time for the people to feel the old gods’ wrath,
Their old priests had to wait many poisoned years,
While your Aten-god sun-disk grew remote,
And lost the hearts of your bewildered people,
Who looked for one true god and found none.

Would you still stand, if the old priests had let you be?
Probably not, heretic pharaoh Akhenaten,
With your hymns of praise to the Aten,
With your golden god of love, blinding you
With a power too great for your simple human mind.

For gods are renewable, replaceable, and to be forgotten,
Trooping in their legion down the corridors of time,
Leading the way to salvation or perdition,
They’re really all the same in endless ordinary lives,
Amused by the heretic’s deepest, most ordinary crimes.

jl:2-14

 

 

PAY FREAKIN’ ATTENTION, G’DAMMIT!

I have always had this desire to reach out and grab a person and shake the living bejazzus out of him or her, and yell, “What the hell’s the matter with ya, fer chris’sakes?  Are you nuts?  Wake up, for gawd’s sake!  Wake up, dammit!”

Just like that, with all the histrionic emphasis and shouting.

When I have their attention, and they’re scared witless, I will say, “Sorry to bother you.  I got a little excited.”  And walk away.

“So how about those Mets? Hear about the Big Meteor? Size of a refrigerator, they say!”

MY STORY BEGINS reprise

MY STORY BEGINS

My story begins where the Old Testament ends.  It does not pick up with the New Testament – that painful detour for so many who entered its twisting maze to become helplessly lost. We tend to forget that the reader, not the character in the story, is the one being educated about the nature of the divine.  The best that can be said of the Old Testament is that it kept god god, and did not try to make a man out of him; and, more importantly, all men became gods when Job did his ju-jitsu. Practically, the Story of Job is liberating revolutionary dynamite.

God shows growth and development throughout the compendium called the Holy Bible.  He starts off as an insane and dysfunctional parent, up to and including infanticide en mass, but “mellows” by the time of Jesus (“You bleed for them, kid, and we’ll call it good this time”). However, in the Story of Job – essentially the end of the original First Five books – God lets the Devil torment Job, mainly for reasons of vanity, and exposes His own “feet of clay.”

“I bet ya ten bucks I can shake this guy,” Satan says.

“You’re on!” God replies.

Job, however, refuses to forsake his faith in the face of overwhelming personal bodily and mental torture, including the loss of his entire family.

Since God created man in his own image, allowing Satan to do violence to Job, without giving Job relief or reason, makes God complicit in evil.

Job has shown God his true self (which is man’s function): man is in God’s image and God is both good and evil. As man sees himself in God, God sees himself in man.

God finally feels guilty enough to declare Job right and almost admits Himself wrong (Big Guy has real responsibility issues). He admits and fixes His mischief (close enough). This is the end of God’s growth into a mature deity.

It is the end of Man’s growth into maturity too; from here on out, for good or evil, he is able to be a free self-directing agent.

Worried learned men wanted to leave Job out of the Bible; their “Jobs” were on the line.
“Down with equality!” They cried. “The Invisible Cloud Being (ICB) rules; we’ll tell you what he wants you to do! You can’t be fully responsible for yourselves!”

Viewed in Job, God and man cancel each other out and merge as one. One can see why the learned men wanted Job out of town as fast as humanly possible. It was a real career-ender for them. But the story got in anyway. Probably because Job “took a licking and kept on ticking,” like a good old American-built Timex watch.

Ever since then, this whole business has been called a “Mystery of the Bible.” And, small wonder.

BUTTERFLY BUD

A Bit More About Adult Responsibility:

When Buddhists recognize the human being, or other in one another, they similarly acknowledge that everyone is under the authority of their own individual adult responsibility for their own thoughts and actions.

Christians, however, seem content as perpetual children, forever dutiful to a paternal authority, oddly manifested in an Invisible Cloud Being (ICB) – as fantastic as Santa Claus, or any other unproven fantasy figure – who, in this mythology, had adulterous sexual relations with an earthly teenaged virgin.  Christian desire for god is not nonsense, but their invention is a surrogate, crutch and dangerous doppelganger for the real deal.  It is the cop-out of every irresponsible dependent Christian soul.  It is also a handy tool that makes it easier for the unscrupulous to take advantage of the gullible and foolish, and even move them to fiendish deeds in the name of the deity.

The world will not improve while great numbers believe in an Invisible Cloud Being; it’s too easy to pass the buck, alibi, excuse, or harm others in the Big Poobah’s name.  Yet, if the act is one’s own, by will or grace, who is finally to fully praise or blame?  Does this argue that man is divine and divorced from the rest of creation?  Such a disconnect is a purely self-destructive insanity.  Like it or not, we are biologically nailed to this earth. Christians, and other religionists, seeking to escape life for imagined perfection in an impossible airborne Disneyland are a survival liability for the rest of us.

“Let us cross ovah the rivah and rest undah the shade of the great oak tree.”

One must be specific and particular, scientific and rational when addressing this volatile subject, because all religions are fundamentally intolerant and flawed.  My own prejudice is obvious in the few paragraphs above. However, Buddhism (for those who do not know) is not a religion, but a methodology for successful living; Buddha recommended shopping around if his tools didn’t fit the job, and asked his followers not to make him a god, which many of them obviously ignored.  Yet, somehow Buddhism admits the mystery without trying to explain it, remains open to new information and the next scientific revelation, and answers questions with more questions.  Other religious systems seem primarily fixed and inflexible, imposing absurd limits on the infinite, and providing definite answers to inherently ambiguous questions about inherently unknowable things.

It is, therefore, advisable IMO to be knowledgeable about all religions, and to select tools from each as they may best fulfill a specific need.  Critics say that this relativistic approach to philosophy and religion defies their true wisdom, which is intrinsic and whole, to be specifically and fully obeyed. One has to spend a lifetime proving only one point, which eliminates making a discovery that may be better, or being able to avoid a false conclusion before having wasted one’s entire life upon it.

Perfectly good lives are wasted with trivia, nonsense, and utterly worthless self-hobbling concepts, such as, sin, guilt, heaven, and hell.

• The ancient Sumerians had no concept of guilt or sin, yet managed to build the world’s first true high civilization.
• Ancient Greeks: To sin = “to miss the mark” – can be high or low.  Sin is not living up to, or being who you are.

People allow themselves to be kept in check with threats of eternal fire and damnation after death!  As soon believe on Santa’s list of good and bad boys and girls, and lumps of coal in your Christmas stocking; or rabbits hiding eggs at Easter time – he is risen, have an egg.  What kind of garbled mash is that?

Those sure of eternal life, are usually obsessed with and afraid of death.  One had better have a pretty good alternative at hand to mollify the despairing crowd, bemoaning their fallen faith, if they ever decide their emperor has no clothes, and god vanishes in a single weak puff of doubt.  Without faith, they might invent something truly harmful and ridiculous as a substitute.

Self-deception is apparently a core human behavior – I would now say gene; its use permits all sorts of mindless or mad adventures.  Self-deception enables otherwise perfectly decent people to burn disbelievers at the stake, or to bring guns to a town hall meeting; or to sit on the end of a big bullet and get fired at the Moon!  Self-deception allows us to feel perfectly safe when we are in fact balanced on a knife’s edge above a raging inferno – and no, not hell, something real, like Mona Loa.

Did you know, Amen, Amun, or Amon was the chief god of Egypt in the New Kingdom?  The Hebrews (Habiru) took his name into the desert with them in the Exodus.  They literally call on the Great God of the Pharaohs at the end of all their prayers when they intone “Amen.”  And so do Christians and Moslems.  The three great religions unwittingly – for the most part – believe in the same god and pronounce His name every day: Yahweh-Jehovah, Jesus and Allah are tribal manifestations of the one great god: AMUN.

Pharaoh and the Lion Goddess

ALL OF A KEY

Alice said:

“There was a lad in there with a great polished shield of tin or brass, reflecting the yellow-white Egyptian sun back into the tomb recesses so that the paintings were clearly visible in all their profound beauty.  There’s a sadness about it, for their discovery and exhibition are destroying them.  They were intended as funerary decoration to be shut from sun and air and water for the rest of eternity, not to be displayed like some Messrs. Barnum & Bailey amusement.  The academics from all over the world are exposing their fragility to the rough outside world and the great legacy of ancient Egypt is crumbling to sand.  I think that those academics are searching as much for themselves as for the remnants of an ancient past.  Who and how and what and why mean nothing really except for context.  These modern grave robbers are trying to discover how they – the searchers – are somehow more profound, more intelligent, more advanced than the ancient people they are studying.  How arrogant it sounds when some fifty-year-old archaeologist marvels over the similarities of modern and ancient man!  It is a burlesque of the young judging the old – the foolish criticizing the wise.  In the end, it isn’t our technology, which defines our humanity; it is our relation to life and death.  In that, the ancient Egyptians were far ahead of the majority of we modern fools.”

ANCIENT WISDOM

Later, the Renaissance considered a life unencumbered by revealed religion.

I MET JESUS

I met Jesus walking down the road with Buddha the other day.  They were discussing the oddity that, by eschewing things of the world, and accepting and giving unto Caesar that which is his, one re-arrives at a destination that is also a point of departure called acceptance or rejection.  It’s an endless loop, coming from nowhere and going nowhere; and, the leader is the guy who can be seen going by on the merry-go-round at any particular moment.  Nothing is fixed, and nothing ever changes; or, to put it another way, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

   Philosophy will do that to one, and that’s why I was so delighted, because any argument that begins and ends in chaos, with a lot of confusion, bafflement, and befuddlement in between is bound to be as fraught with opportunity as with risk, and holds as much potential good, as it does evil.  Having said so, they looked at me and said loudly and in unison,

“Go away!”

AGE OF REASON

“That which is now called natural philosophy, embracing the whole circle of science, of which astronomy occupies the chief place, is the study of the works of God, and of the power and wisdom of God in his works, and is the true theology.

“As to the theology that is now studied in its place, it is the study of human opinions and of human fancies concerning God.  It is not the study of God himself in the works that he has made, but in the writings that man has made; and it is not among the least of the mischiefs that man has made; and it is not among the least of mischiefs that the Christian system has done to the world, that it has abandoned the original and beautiful system of theology, like a beautiful innocent, to distress and reproach, to make room for the hag of superstition.”  – Tom Paine, Age of Reason, p. 37

Stephen Hawkings

GOD RESTED reprise

Islands w/ apple.

AND GOD CREATED THE UNIVERSE (Humor):

And God created the universe in the wink of an eye.  And the wink was a billion billion years long, and a trillion, trillion years wide.  When it was done, everybody wondered what He had done, for it was all new and different, and nobody knew where anything was, and nobody knew what to make of it.

Everybody in those days was the angels, archangels, seraphim and cherubim, and they only knew what they knew, which wasn’t much, but mostly concerned with telling God how great He was, and God was getting to the point where He didn’t know if what they said counted for very much.  He knew what it would be before they said it, because that’s just the way they were, and He should know because He made them that way.  Which was “Catch 22” because how do you get an unbiased review from palace courtiers and the pep squad?

No brainer, god had to create somebody absolutely ignorant about how he or she got here.  It would behoove everybody already present to become invisible to maintain the mystery.  This new somebody would receive skills and abilities sufficient to pose ultimate questions, and to invent answers to them.  They were to be guided by various natural clues and signposts, wandering know-it-alls, and ambiguous events anonymously reported.  The new somebodies would arrive naked in the world, and cobble together reasons and whys from the smorgasbord laid before them, with an occasional stick up the ass to keep them moving.

ODD SHOTS and IDLE PENSEES #5

Gene Kelley danced past Joe’s in “Singing in the Rain.”

OLD BLACK MAGIC:

“Separateness is a useful illusion.”  – The Big Kahuna.

Separateness is a youthful illusion.  Jl.

“God, the original Tony Soprano.” – church sign, Simpsons.

The ancient Sumerians had no concept of guilt or sin.  Later, the Renaissance considered a life unencumbered by revealed religion.  Religionists study “The Book” in preference to studying themselves; they put enormous energy into it, which if applied to the exploration of self, might produce a more fulfilling result.

“Monotheism is the flip side of intolerance.” – TV Travel Channel on sacred sites, explaining Amarna, Egypt.

Note: In the typical Christian, Moslem, Jewish life, Life is a pain.  One must suffer and hopefully endure until the bitter pill of death is administered.  Within that pain is the typically human drive to pursue happiness.  Happiness is fleeting, of course, but its pursuit keeps us busy, which alleviates the pain, and the fear we have of death.  Pursuing happiness is an attempt to overcome and/or keep the pain at bay as long as humanly possible; but it is just a pastime after all, not a destination.

“[When I die] all these moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.” – Rutger Hauer, Bladerunner.

INAPPROPRIATE BEHAVIORS:

“What is it like to feel a stranger?” – – PBS question.  Senator Craig?

I wrote: “Ryan’s wagon was parked by the curb with its tailgate down.”  Spell check gave me: “The curb with its tailgate down parked Ryan’s wagon.”  Typed: “Ryan’s tailgate was parked with its wagon down at the curb.”  Speel check not trubled.  Glow figger.

“Monte Markham as the voice of Plutarch.” – credit, Cleopatra, A&E Classroom. Get central casting!  He doesn’t even sound like Plutarch.

She boasted she could shoot and manage a horse as well as a man.  (Duck, guys!).

“There’s never been ANYTHING like it.” – Shaq, for Icy Hot.

We have different views of art.  He draws a stick.  I struggle for “stickness.”  8/97

Creative people routinely demonstrate how to get from here to there.  10/97

Q: “Just when are you coming down to earth, young man?”  A: “When it’s all over, I hope.” – Fred Astaire, The Sky’s the Limit.

“No doesn’t mean no.  It means you gotta cut a corner, work harder, and beat the system.”  – Baloo, Disney’s Tailspin, 1/94.  Walt Disney, always a powerful force for strong evangelistic coporatist morality.

“We want to talk about reducing nuclear weapons, particularly the kind that kill people.” – Casper Weinberger, Nixon’s Secretary of Defense, CBS News.

“Mr. Begin has offered to let each member of the PLO to leave Lebanon carrying an arm.”  Dianne Sawyer, 6/30/82.  But leave the other arm and both legs behind.

“On a farm with no watch dog, the fox rules the roost.” – Ancient Sumerian proverb.

“NEVAH GO THIRSTY AGAIN!”

“Don’t drink alone, Scarlet.  People always find out, and it ruins the reputation.” – Rhett Butler (Clark Gable), Gone With the Wind.

DAMN LIBERAL CONSERVATIVES:

Against “tax and spend bleeding heart liberal socialist democrats,” place “rob, rape, and ruin selfish warmongering radical conservative republicans.”

Said of the Congress:  “They have to find a way to institutionalize the existing situation, so they don’t have to fix it.”

“It’s the lie you tell yourself that matters.” – Inspector Morse, ’95.

“No sensible man would allow himself to be sent to war to defend a politician.” – Minister, The Dreyfus Affair.

Q:  Why do we serve the system?  A:  Because it’s comforting in its routines and, like any abused child, we’d rather keep the horror we’ve got than deal with fear of the unknown and the uncertainty of change.

Our national debate has become timid.  The Neville Brothers sing, “You can tell the truth, as long as you don’t tell too much.” So what can one do about it?  Here’s a starter list:

• Stick up for your rights – your own integrity matters more than loyalty to a negative cause.
• Stimulate sympathy – there are social and political reasons for what we do. The social reasons create the greatest measure of self-identification and response.
• Speak only from fact – listen, especially when you don’t agree.
• Use a variety of sources of information; try to understand the other view.
• Act. Do something positive everyday.

Thomas Jefferson wrote, “I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves.”

LAST COMMENT:

Pain is an itch we can’t scratch.  All life is pain in the Buddhistic sense.  Its temporal fleeting nature is a constant bitter sweetness, forever a tear on the edge of beauty, a sigh on the cusp of grief.  We only get it for a moment, and sitting in silence, alone, we can feel its presence somewhere, always within, always informing, if we will it so.

Peace and Love,  brothers and sisters.  Keep on keepin’ on, and don’t forget to salute the Man in the Moon!

JUST KEEPS GETTING BETTER:

Published on Tuesday, July 28, 2009 by The Guardian/UK

Human Activity Is Driving Earth’s ‘Sixth Great Extinction Event’.  Population growth, pollution, and invasive species are having a disastrous effect on species in the southern hemisphere, a major review by conservationists warns, by Ian Sample.  Earth is experiencing its “sixth great extinction event” with disease and human activity taking a devastating toll on vulnerable species, according to a major review by conservationists.

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/07/28-11

ODD SHOTS and IDLE PENSEES Nr. 6

YES, it’s the Sixth Edition of ODD SHOTS and IDLE PENSEES!

So, kick back, here are MORE ACTUAL Analogies and Metaphors Found in High School Essays:

• The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.
• The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.
• The knife was as sharp as the tone used by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.) in her first several points of parliamentary procedure made to Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) in the House Judiciary Committee hearings on the impeachment of President William Jefferson Clinton.
• The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.
• It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.
• He was deeply in love.  When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.
• She was as easy as the T.V. Guide crossword.
• Her eyes were like limpid pools, only they had forgotten to put in any pH cleanser.
• She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.
• Her voice had that tense, grating quality, like a generation thermal paper fax machine that needed a band tightened.
• It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall.

Not to be Outdone, College freshmen contribute the following (misspellings and all):

• There was Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt.  Lower Egypt was actually farther up than Upper Egypt, which was, of course, lower down than the upper part.  This is why we learn geography as a factor in history.
• Babylon was similar to Egypt because of the differences they had apart from each other.  Egypt, for example, had only Egyptians, but Babylon had Summarians, Acadians and Canadians, to name just a few.
• Moses was told by Jesus Christ to lead the people out of Egypt into the Sahaira Desert.  The Book of Exodus describes this trip and the amazing things that happened on it, including the Ten Commandments, various special effects, and the building of the Suez Canal.
• The warmth and friendship of the mystery cults attracted many, who came to feel better through dancing and mutilation.
• Eventually Christian started the new religion with sayings like, “The mice shall inherit the earth.”  Later Christians fortunately abandoned this idea.
• The Sophists justified themselves by changing relatives whenever this needed to be done.
• Roman upperclass men demanded to be known as Patricia.
• During the Middle Ages everyone was middle aged.
• In the 1400 hundreds most Englishmen were perpendicular.
• The plague also helped the emergance of the English language as the national language of England, France and Italy.
• Man was determined to civilize himself and his brothers, even if heads had to roll!
• Traditions had become so oppressive they too were crushed in the wake of man’s quest for ressurection above the not-just-social beast he had become.
• The Popes, of course, were usually Catholic.
• The German Emperor’s lower passage was blocked by the French for years and years.
• Russian nobles wore clothes only to humour Peter the Great.
• Problems were so complexicated that in Paris, out of a city population of one million people, two million able bodies were on the loose.
• Voting was done by ballad.
• Richard Strauss, who was violent but methodical like his wife made him, plunged into vicious and perverse plays.
• At war, people get killed, and then they aren’t people anymore, but friends.
• According to Fromm, individuation began historically in medieval times.  This is a period of small childhood.  There is increasing experience as adolescence experiences its life development.  The last stage is us.

Gobbledy-Gook Accomplished After High School and College:

• “They were absent in the past, or not as present as they might have been.”
• “The British Admiral said the cruiser provided a threat to the fleet, as did Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.”
• “Mr. Begin has offered to let each member of the PLO to leave Lebanon carrying an arm.”  They had to leave the other one and both legs.
• “It was a terrible thing when our family lost its absolute sovereignty over the Iranian people.” – Shah of Iran’s wife, Mrs. Pahlavi, 2004, PBS.
• “When Quanah Parker passed, it was said that his passing was not just his passing, but the passing of the past – as well.”  Pass the peas, please.
• “We work with predators, uh, creditors nationwide.” – Local T.V. ad.
• “The gnawing question of the Donner Party is, what would I have done?”

A Little More High Hilarity:  ALEXANDER THE GREAT  by Will Cuppy.

Serious Notes:

Marijuana Papers:

Going on four generations now, propaganda and lies have relentlessly drained taxpayer’s money to build government’s anti-drug machine and the conditions of a police state.  Virtually every state is in the midst of the biggest prison expansion ever in America’s and the world’s history, creating political vultures only concerned for the growth of their prison-related crime-fighting industry and job security.  They demand more prisons and more money to pursue this “law and order” madness against an invented crime.

We can moderate society’s problems and reject the police state by simply legalizing marijuana.  We can clear the jails, and re-employ police, court, prison and rehabilitation staff to deal with real crime and hard drug abuse.  We can put money into our schools and health care without raising anyone’s taxes.  We can also stop lying to ourselves, and end a terrible multi-generational injustice.  READ MORE:  MARIJUANA PAPERS

Honest Abe, Dishonest Republicans:

The contrast between Abraham Lincoln and the modern Republican Party is glaring. Lincoln fought for democracy and union.  Modern Republicans fight for money and self-interest.  Lincoln was (by report) an unassuming and humble man; name one modern Republican who is not awash in arrogance and hubris.  Lincoln built the Transcontinental Railroad and won the Civil War; the present crop created the second Great Republican Recession and mired us in two unwinnable wars.  Lincoln worked for “One Nation Indivisible”, freedom and justice; modern Republicans work to divide, oppress and reject.  Lincoln had hope for our country; the moderns have only fears for, and of it.  This comparison can continue a long way – Think of “Abe-Them” pairs in your own experience.  Disgusting, ain’t it?

The fact that they are uncritical boosters of unscrupulous transnational corporations clearly reveals them as against the people of the United States.  It is better to vote Independent than to cast one more ballot for these reactionary, oppressive, authoritarian Republican control freaks.  “One Nation Indivisible.”  Period.  Support freedom, justice and equality.

READ MORE: CORPORATIONS + PARALLEL UNIVERSES

For more political images, TheAttic Gallery: POLITICAL MEMORABILIA

Last bits:

TELL THE TRUTH AND RUN

Resurrection Machines

LOOTING THE TOMBS OF EGYPT:

“These people who have the crazy theories of the origin of the pyramids, I call, ‘pyramidiots.’” – Dr. Zahi Hawass, 1^st Minister of Antiquities, Head Archeologist, Egypt.

VERY SAD BREAKING NEWS March 18, 2011: Why Dr Hawass Resigned

Q: Dr. Hawass, for many years you have been the image of modern Egyptology. Why are you leaving now?

A: “I am leaving because …during the Revolution of January 25th, the Egyptian Army protected our heritage sites and the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. However, in the last 10 days the army has left these posts because it has other tasks to do. The group now in charge of the protection of these sites is the Tourist Police, but there are no Tourist Police to do this either. Therefore, what happens? Egyptian criminals, thieves (you know, in every revolution bad people always appear…), have begun to destroy tombs. …They attacked a storage magazine at Saqqara and we do not yet know how many artifacts are missing; they opened two storage magazines at Giza; one tomb dated to the 19th Dynasty, the only one in the Delta in fact, was damaged…; and a store …has been broken into and looted for antiquities. People have begun to build houses and to excavate at night, everywhere, putting heritage sites all over the country at risk. I had to write a report …to the Director of UNESCO. That is why I said: “I cannot stay in Egypt and see antiquities being stolen when I cannot do anything to stop it!” This situation is not for me! I have always fought to return stolen artifacts to Egypt. I did fight Ahmed Ezz as well, the man in the Parliament, who was the most powerful man, because he wanted to allow antiquities to be sold in Egypt again….I will never be able to protect the antiquities I love and I will never be able to work during this mess. All my life, I have been excavating, discovering, writing books and giving lectures all over the world. My work is responsible for bringing many tourists to Egypt, which helps our economy. But now I cannot do this! Therefore, I decided to resign”. READ MORE: http://www.drhawass.com/blog/why-dr-hawass-resigned

Canon Fodder

LOOKING FOR RELIGION: Odd Shots and Idle Pensees Nr. 7

I don’t know how people can choose between one idiocy and another, but they obviously do, in the billions. They will defend their chosen idiocy to the death against all other idiocies naturally, but most importantly, as the Truth in whatever form it takes, for losing one’s faith in one’s chosen idiocy is the same awful shock as discovering that Santa Claus isn’t real. We call this phenomenon Santa Trauma.

Just when you think Homo sapiens can’t get any dumber, science discovers that our image of the Neanderthal was based upon sloppy scientific interpretation of the bones of a single arthritic Alzheimer geriatric. For all these years, we’ve maligned the Neanderthal as a stooped, bow-legged moron. He wasn’t, but you still wouldn’t want your daughter to marry one.

Why do the innocent suffer? Because shit happens. Nature and human nature are indifferent to collateral damage, accidental or intended.

“Even if you’re a born loser, you can and should be holy.”– Mother Angelica, cable TV nun

“Only fools and priests do squander life with thoughts of death.” — The Green Knight (Sean Connery), Sword of the Valiant.

Dean Martin: “You saved my life, parson. What can I do for you? Robert Mitchum: “Come to God’s house every Sunday for a month. Dean Martin: “That’s a steep price for just my life.”

I’m looking for a piece of the divine pizza pie.

“Nothing is impenetrable or incorruptible!” — Swede, Zulu Chief.

“Blame is for God and small children!” — Dustin Hoffman, Papillon.

The most direct anagram of “Heal Thyself,” is “Healthy Self.”

Islands w/ apple.

Lately, I’ve narrowed my philosophy to a small set of ideas:

From the Tao – The Way: Center in the now. Guilt is a burden, don’t carry it. Learn from the mistakes of the past and add them to your toolbox of experiences. Don’t worry about the future. Do what you can to prepare for it, but take pleasure in the moment. Live now, fully and completely and with joy. Go with the flow.

From the Buddha: Go forth in joyful participation in the sorrows of the world. The world is inherently unjust. It has its absurdities, which we cannot understand and which defy understanding. Accept this and do what you can to improve things. There are only two responses: one is negative and the other positive. Choose the positive, for it brightens the world, fills you up with energy, and prepares the way.  Others may learn from your example and so the brightness shall be extended.

From Joseph Campbell: Follow your bliss. If it makes you happy and can be done without harming yourself and others, do it.

From the Christian tradition: The Golden Rule. Nothing else. Nothing more is needed.

From Ghandi: Act. “Without action there is no result. You may not see the result in your lifetime, but if you do not act, there will be no result at all.”

From Jacques Cousteau: Hope for the best. “I hope for the best, although I can’t say why.”

From FatLemon: “Keep on keepin’ on, and don’t forget to salute the Man in the Moon!”

That is my concise philosophical grab bag for a successful life. JPL, 1-2000

Peaceable Kingdom

ODD SHOTS and IDLE PENSEES Nr. 7

When we die in America, we go to Disneyland!

Martin Luther was a coarse German monk given to self-flagellation in place of normal human contact. Because he had horrible chronic constipation, he composed most of his philosophy while sitting on the toilet. [True].

“Call now and start your personal relationship with God!” — t.v. Bible salesman.

Be right, not righteous.

Of course I believe in God! Every time I fear for my life, my job, or my sanity, I pray for divine deliverance! Seriously, though…

“I am bored by people who keep returning life to a moral plane, as if we were reducible, now, to some Biblical concept or its opposite, as if all our history and prehistory had not conditioned us for what we’ve become. It’s enough to make a moral nigger out of a man. The niggers are down there, no doubt about it. But Jack didn’t put them there and neither did I. When we get off the moral gold standard, when the man of enormous wealth is of no more importance to anybody than the man in rags, then maybe we’ll look back to our own day as a day of justifiable social wrath. Meantime, the game is rising, not leveling. Jack taught me that. Cured me. (Brother Wolf, are you listening?)” — William Kennedy, Legs.

Freedom from Religion Foundation

How confusing as a child to know the truth, to see that which is real, but not to touch, or look at or even think about it because it’s socially proscribed by similarly conditioned adults.

“Paradise is a far promise; fame is a food for dead men – take the cash and let the credit go.”

“Instead of argument that frets the soul and spoils digestion, share good food with good friends. Abandon a life sick with brooding on unhappy cares; do not count on dubious treasures in some inaccessible heaven. All that we know of life is that it is an enigma, and that it is short, and that, nevertheless, it can be made not only bearable but also pleasurable.

“Thus, fill your life as you would a cup. Do not torture yourself with a forbidding future; ignore “the rumble of a distant drum.” Let what may be Beyond remain beyond. Tomorrow has not come – tomorrow may never come – at the moment tomorrow does not exist. There is only today, and today is ours.

“Having failed of finding any Providence but Destiny and any world but this, Omar set about making the most of it; preferring rather to soothe the Soul through the Senses into acquiescence with things as he saw them, than to perplex it with vain disquietude after what they might be.”

Omar Khayyám, The Rubáiyát; Louis Untermeyer, editor, 1947 ed.; Edward Fitzgerald, editor/translator, 1859.

“Their fear shrinks the world down to the size of their own lives!” – Millennium.

“The world is a dragon of incredible size. We only see pieces of it for to see it whole is to have it burn you. The dragon is everywhere. These trees, these rocks are its scales. Its poison strikes like lightning. Be comfortable in the arms of the dragon. You have no choice. Sleep. Dream.” — Nigel Terry, Excalibur.

We must say it in full knowledge that others may wish us to be silent, but with the conviction that the Truth is more precious than their regard.

“Why so many questions? Can’t we just have a little blind faith around here?” – Sunday School Teacher, The Simpsons.

Astrology, advertising, politics and religion are all purposefully ambiguous, in order to encourage the consumer to see whatever it is that they wish to see, and to ascribe all failure to achieve success to personal inadequacy.

All the different tribes built a pillar to the sky. Each was a work of wonder and delight and they were all dedicated to the same god, although they did not see it.

“That seems to be the peculiar legacy of Jesus: to be adopted by others.” – Old Jewish man, Shaka Zulu.

“Separateness is a useful illusion.” – The Big Kahuna. Separateness is a youthful illusion. JL.

The biggest difference between Phil Knight and August Schindler is that Schindler had to work for the Nazis, so that any kindness he extended to his slave labor may be regarded as courageous resistance to slavery, and not just a way to save a nickel.

“It never ceases to amaze me: one second you’re alive, the next, you’re dead – no fanfare, no lights, nothing. You’re just dead.” – Loretta Switt, Mash.

“[By] nature man is more afraid of the truth than of death. For man is a social animal – only in the herd is he happy. It is all one to him whether it is the profoundest nonsense or the greatest villainy – he feels completely at ease with it, so long as it is the view of the herd, or the action of the herd, and he is able to join the herd.” – Kierkegaard.

“Tell the truth and run.” – Andrew Seltser.

Buddha Swirl

PEASANTS and MASTERS

Image and Ambition

ORGANIZED IRRESPONSIBILITY

We need to chase the money lenders and other riff-raff from the temple again.  The corruption in Washington resonates through our whole society.  Political corruption is one aspect of a more general immorality. If we want to tackle it, we have to understand how it works.

Sober, personal virtues of honesty, willpower, honor, and high-mindedness have given way to “the most important single factor, the effective personality,” which “commands attention by charm,” and “radiates self-confidence.” George W. Bush is a prime example of the phenomenon; Sarah Palin is another. Personal relations – image, in short – have become part of public relations, a sacrifice of selfhood on a personality market, to the sole end of individual success in the corporate way of life.

In the corporate era, economic relations are impersonal – and executives feel little personal responsibility (witness NAFTA, GATT and the WTO). Within the corporate worlds of business, war making and politics, the private conscience is attenuated and immorality is institutionalized. Many of the problems of white-collar crime and of relaxed public morality, of high-priced vice and fading personal integrity, are problems of this structural immorality. Its acceptance is an essential feature of our mass society.

In economic and political institutions the corporate rich now wield enormous power, but they have never had to win the moral consent of those over whom they hold this power. The general immorality, the general weakening of older values, and the organization of irresponsibility have not involved public crisis; they result from creeping indifference and a silent hollowing out.

The images of the powerful that prevail are of the elite as celebrities. They share it with the frivolous or sultry creatures of the world of celebrity, which is a dazzling blind of their true power.

Two things are needed in a democracy: articulate and knowledgeable publics, and political leaders who, if not men of reason, are at least reasonably responsible to such knowledgeable publics as exist. Such a public and such leaders – either of power or of knowledge – do not now prevail, and knowledge does not now have democratic relevance in America.

The lack of knowledge as an experience among the elite ties in with the malign tendency of the expert, not only as fact but also as legitimization. Our national debate has become timid. The tyranny of experts disguises our true best interest. The trend has been abdication of debate and the collapse of opposition under the easy slogan of bipartisanship. Public relations displace reasoned argument; manipulation and undebated decisions of power replace democratic authority.

Status, no longer rooted in local communities, follows the big hierarchies. Status follows big money, even if it has a touch of the gangster. Status follows power, even if it be without background. Below, in the mass society, old moral and traditional barriers to status break down and Americans look to standards of excellence above them, to model themselves and judge self-esteem.

Those in the higher circles are not truly representative; their high position is not a result of moral virtue. They sit in the seats of the high and the mighty selected and formed by the means of power, the sources of wealth, and the mechanics of celebrity. They are not shaped by nationally responsible parties that debate openly and clearly the issues this nation now so unintelligently confronts. They are not held in check by a plurality of voluntary associations, which connect debating publics with the pinnacles of decision. Commanders of power unequalled in history, they have succeeded within the American system of organized irresponsibility.

PEASANTS and MASTERS

 University of Wisconsin law professor Joel Rogers says, “Public opinion in the United States is conventionally mapped on a liberal-conservative axis understood to run from government do-gooders without values on one end to free marketeering rich people without hearts at the other end. Most people in America place themselves in the middle. They don’t find either end particularly attractive. Today, the fight isn’t really between liberals and conservatives but between the workers/consumers/citizens who actually want the economy to reflect our values and those who want to keep things the way they are with a few irresponsible corporations running the country for their own benefit. In that fight we can win. It’s our country. Let’s run it for the people.”

We cannot make minor process changes, but must deal with the value system, which powers our economic engine to the divorce of all other concerns. Social Darwinism supposedly died after striking U.S. Steel workers were murdered by union-busting toughs while Andrew Carnegie played golf in Scotland. Carnegie turned a blind eye to what his managers were doing at the Homestead Mines. It seemed good business to lower labor costs. It got out of hand. Carnegie learned that individual action, even when the most rational and best for the individual or stockholders, may be a terrible disaster for other individuals.

The only way to resolve the problem is to:

GO STRAIGHT AT THEM

I reluctantly support the President.  If we want positive change in America, he’s the man we should back.  He comes nearest to my own philosophy and that of people I respect and care about most.  However, I feel he is being “reasonable” with his opposition to the point of timidity, if not self-deception.  What should he do?

• Go straight at them.
• Eschew any advice from Wall Street chameleon Robert Rubin and his clones who brought us NAFTA, GATT and WTO, and mentored Clinton, Bush, and now Obama with the same advice that created the present fiscal disaster.  Prosecute Goldman Sachs for their very real thefts and confidence rackets.
• Speak Keynesian economics again. Emphasize we the people, public issues, community, human rights, common sense, and the common good; not the bottomline for a gaggle of avaricious stockholders.  Practice economics as if PEOPLE mattered.
• Seek new, innovative solutions – not stock reprises of old routines; that’s the pattern of alcoholics and addicts.
• Make Corporations pay their fair share to support the system that enabled their success; stop treating them as “individuals” in the legal system; hold executives and stock holders personally accountable for their corporate actions.
• Protect the planet.  JOB ONE.  Everything else is subordinate in priority. 
• Educate the children – dump top-heavy, discriminatory Trojan Horse Standards obstacles; eliminate public subsidies (vouchers) for boondoggle separatist, religionist, preferential, and elitist “home” schooling; insist upon a democratic public education, scholarship, and scientific rationalism.
• Call the generation to service: “Let’s get our hands on these problems and solve them.  We can do it, if we stop procrastinating and move on.”
• Tell Republicans they can worry about haircuts, dirty words, and hurting people by making money from wage slavery, exploitation, lies and violence.  The rest of us will go to work to end two disastrous wars and fix the nation’s now critical issues: environment, health care, and the economy (thanks to years of flagrant and cynical Republican corporatist neoconservative neglect, abuse, misuse, cynicism, and outright unabashed destruction).

We can’t let the Republican monarchists kill the real American dream: freedom and a better life for all our people, children, posterity, and not just ourselves.

We’re not in this life for the next quarterly report, we’re here to build a lasting rule of law that we can be proud of again; and that means saving it from the Republican cabal that brought us this fiasco, before it collapses us in an economy of chaos and death, as they smugly profit off our bones.

How’d that be?  I’d like it fine.  And, we need to dump the Bluedog Democrats and give President Barak Obama an overwhelming progressive majority in both houses of congress, too, or we will spend generations suffering from the harm of the Bushies and their corporate neocon masters.

If it will be done, it must be done soon, or I fear it will not be done at all (although the planet will outlive us, barren as the moon, perhaps). 

PRESIDENT PHARAOH

G.W. Bush’s recent efforts to rewrite his history remind me of Ramses the Great (pharaoh of the biblical exodus, if you believe). He is called “great” because he managed to live longer than any other pharaoh and used the time to build more monuments to himself than all his predecessors and successors combined. He had a factory that just turned out busts of his head so that he could knock the heads off other pharaohs’ statues and put his in their place; thus, half the monuments in the Nile Valley are his. He advertised himself shamelessly: painting and carving the story of the Battle of Kadesh on every wall and pillar in sight. Kadesh was not even a draw and Rameses quickly signed a peace treaty with the victorious Hittite King, and went back to Egypt. He nearly got himself killed and almost lost his army due to egotistical rash actions as an inexperienced military leader, but he declared victory from near defeat, and covered up the fact that he came precious close to losing the farm – not just for himself, but for the whole kingdom of Egypt. And that’s why G.W. Bush’s recent rewrite of his history reminds me of Ramses the Great, pharaoh of the biblical exodus, if you believe. G.W. became president of the United States by the skin of his teeth and the lies on his lips: the same way Ramses II became “Great.”

 

Site of the First Chrysler Factory

 

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GOING REALLY ROGUE

MY STORY BEGINS

MY STORY BEGINS

My story begins where the Old Testament ends.  It does not pick up with the New Testament – that painful detour for so many who entered its twisting maze to become helplessly lost. We tend to forget that the reader, not the character in the story, is the one being educated about the nature of the divine.  The best that can be said of the rest of the Old Testament is that it kept god god, and did not try to make a man out of him; however, all men became gods when Job did his ju-jitsu. Practically, the Story of Job is liberating revolutionary dynamite.

God shows growth and development throughout the compendium called the Holy Bible.  He starts off as an insane and dysfunctional parent, up to and including infanticide en mass, but “mellows” by the time of Jesus (“You bleed for them, kid, and we’ll call it good this time”). However, in the Story of Job – essentially the end of the original First Five books – God lets the Devil torment Job, mainly for reasons of vanity, and exposes His own “feet of clay.”

“I bet ya ten bucks I can shake this guy,” Satan says.

“You’re on!” God replies.

Job, however, refuses to forsake his faith in the face of overwhelming personal bodily and mental torture, including the loss of his entire family.

Since God created man in his own image, allowing Satan to do violence to Job, without giving Job relief or reason, makes God complicit in evil.

Job has shown God his true self (which is man’s function): man is in God’s image and God is both good and evil. As man sees himself in God, God sees himself in man.

God finally feels guilty enough to declare Job right and almost admits Himself wrong (Big Guy has real responsibility issues). He admits and fixes His mischief (close enough). This is the end of God’s growth into a mature deity.

It is the end of Man’s growth into maturity too; from here on out, for good or evil, he is able to be a free self-directing agent.

Worried learned men wanted to leave Job out of the Bible; their “Jobs” were on the line.
“Down with equality!” They cried. “The Invisible Cloud Being (ICB) rules; we’ll tell you what he wants you to do! You can’t be fully responsible for yourselves!”

Viewed in Job, God and man cancel each other out and merge as one. One can see why the learned men wanted Job out of town as fast as humanly possible. It was a real career-ender for them. But the story got in anyway. Probably because Job “took a licking and kept on ticking,” like a good old American-built Timex watch.

Ever since then, this whole business has been called a “Mystery of the Bible.” And, small wonder.

BUTTERFLY BUD

A Bit More About Adult Responsibility:

When Buddhists recognize the human being, or other in one another, they similarly acknowledge that everyone is under the authority of their own individual adult responsibility for their own thoughts and actions.

Christians, however, seem content as perpetual children, forever dutiful to a paternal authority, oddly manifested in an Invisible Cloud Being (ICB) – as fantastic as Santa Claus, or any other unproven fantasy figure – who, in this mythology, had adulterous sexual relations with an earthly teenaged virgin.  Christian desire for god is not nonsense, but their invention is a surrogate, crutch and dangerous doppelganger for the real deal.  It is the cop-out of every irresponsible dependent Christian soul.  It is also a handy tool that makes it easier for the unscrupulous to take advantage of the gullible and foolish, and even move them to fiendish deeds in the name of the deity.

The world will not improve while great numbers believe in an Invisible Cloud Being; it’s too easy to pass the buck, alibi, excuse, or harm others in the Big Poobah’s name.  Yet, if the act is one’s own, by will or grace, who is finally to fully praise or blame?  Does this argue that man is divine and divorced from the rest of creation?  Such a disconnect is a purely self-destructive insanity.  Like it or not, we are biologically nailed to this earth. Christians, and other religionists, seeking to escape life for imagined perfection in an impossible airborne Disneyland are a survival liability for the rest of us.

“Let us cross ovah the rivah and rest undah the shade of the great oak tree.”

One must be specific and particular, scientific and rational when addressing this volatile subject, because all religions are fundamentally intolerant and flawed.  My own prejudice is obvious in the few paragraphs above. However, Buddhism (for those who do not know) is not a religion, but a methodology for successful living; Buddha recommended shopping around if his tools didn’t fit the job, and asked his followers not to make him a god, which many of them obviously ignored.  Yet, somehow Buddhism admits the mystery without trying to explain it, remains open to new information and the next scientific revelation, and answers questions with more questions.  Other religious systems seem primarily fixed and inflexible, imposing absurd limits on the infinite, and providing definite answers to inherently ambiguous questions about inherently unknowable things.

It is, therefore, advisable IMO to be knowledgeable about all religions, and to select tools from each as they may best fulfill a specific need.  Critics say that this relativistic approach to philosophy and religion defies their true wisdom, which is intrinsic and whole, to be specifically and fully obeyed. One has to spend a lifetime proving only one point, which eliminates making a discovery that may be better, or being able to avoid a false conclusion before having wasted one’s entire life upon it.

Perfectly good lives are wasted with trivia, nonsense, and utterly worthless self-hobbling concepts, such as, sin, guilt, heaven, and hell.

• The ancient Sumerians had no concept of guilt or sin, yet managed to build the world’s first true high civilization.
• Ancient Greeks: To sin = “to miss the mark” – can be high or low.  Sin is not living up to, or being who you are.

People allow themselves to be kept in check with threats of eternal fire and damnation after death!  As soon believe on Santa’s list of good and bad boys and girls, and lumps of coal in your Christmas stocking; or rabbits hiding eggs at Easter time – he is risen, have an egg.  What kind of garbled mash is that?

Those sure of eternal life, are usually obsessed with and afraid of death.  One had better have a pretty good alternative at hand to mollify the despairing crowd, bemoaning their fallen faith, if they ever decide their emperor has no clothes, and god vanishes in a single weak puff of doubt.  Without faith, they might invent something truly harmful and ridiculous as a substitute.

Self-deception is apparently a core human behavior – I would now say gene; its use permits all sorts of mindless or mad adventures.  Self-deception enables otherwise perfectly decent people to burn disbelievers at the stake, or to bring guns to a town hall meeting; or to sit on the end of a big bullet and get fired at the Moon!  Self-deception allows us to feel perfectly safe when we are in fact balanced on a knife’s edge above a raging inferno – and no, not hell, something real, like Mona Loa.

Did you know, Amen, Amun, or Amon was the chief god of Egypt in the New Kingdom?  The Hebrews (Habiru) took his name into the desert with them in the Exodus.  They literally call on the Great God of the Pharaohs at the end of all their prayers when they intone “Amen.”  And so do Christians and Moslems.  The three great religions unwittingly – for the most part – believe in the same god and pronounce His name every day: Yahweh-Jehovah, Jesus and Allah are tribal manifestations of the one great god: AMUN.

Pharaoh and the Lion Goddess

ALL OF A KEY

Alice said:

“There was a lad in there with a great polished shield of tin or brass, reflecting the yellow-white Egyptian sun back into the tomb recesses so that the paintings were clearly visible in all their profound beauty.  There’s a sadness about it, for their discovery and exhibition are destroying them.  They were intended as funerary decoration to be shut from sun and air and water for the rest of eternity, not to be displayed like some Messrs. Barnum & Bailey amusement.  The academics from all over the world are exposing their fragility to the rough outside world and the great legacy of ancient Egypt is crumbling to sand.  I think that those academics are searching as much for themselves as for the remnants of an ancient past.  Who and how and what and why mean nothing really except for context.  These modern grave robbers are trying to discover how they – the searchers – are somehow more profound, more intelligent, more advanced than the ancient people they are studying.  How arrogant it sounds when some fifty-year-old archaeologist marvels over the similarities of modern and ancient man!  It is a burlesque of the young judging the old – the foolish criticizing the wise.  In the end, it isn’t our technology, which defines our humanity; it is our relation to life and death.  In that, the ancient Egyptians were far ahead of the majority of we modern fools.”

ANCIENT WISDOM

Later, the Renaissance considered a life unencumbered by revealed religion.

I MET JESUS

I met Jesus walking down the road with Buddha the other day.  They were discussing the oddity that, by eschewing things of the world, and accepting and giving unto Caesar that which is his, one re-arrives at a destination that is also a point of departure called acceptance or rejection.  It’s an endless loop, coming from nowhere and going nowhere; and, the leader is the guy who can be seen going by on the merry-go-round at any particular moment.  Nothing is fixed, and nothing ever changes; or, to put it another way, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

   Philosophy will do that to one, and that’s why I was so delighted, because any argument that begins and ends in chaos, with a lot of confusion, bafflement, and befuddlement in between is bound to be as fraught with opportunity as with risk, and holds as much potential good, as it does evil.  Having said so, they looked at me and said loudly and in unison,

“Go away!”

AGE OF REASON

“That which is now called natural philosophy, embracing the whole circle of science, of which astronomy occupies the chief place, is the study of the works of God, and of the power and wisdom of God in his works, and is the true theology.

“As to the theology that is now studied in its place, it is the study of human opinions and of human fancies concerning God.  It is not the study of God himself in the works that he has made, but in the writings that man has made; and it is not among the least of the mischiefs that man has made; and it is not among the least of mischiefs that the Christian system has done to the world, that it has abandoned the original and beautiful system of theology, like a beautiful innocent, to distress and reproach, to make room for the hag of superstition.”  – Tom Paine, Age of Reason, p. 37

Stephen Hawkings

AMERICAN DUMMIES

 RECENT NEWS FROM THE FRONT:

Published on Thursday, September 3, 2009 by the Associated Press ‘We Are Heading Towards an Abyss’ U.N. chief tells 150 governments that time running out on climate change.  GENEVA – U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon told a meeting of some 150 governments on Thursday that time is running out for a new climate deal to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/09/03

Published on Friday, September 4, 2009 by The Guardian/UK Global Warming Has Made Arctic Summers Hottest for 2,000 Years. The Arctic has warmed as a result of climate change, despite the Earth being farther from the sun during summer months by Ian Sample.  Warming as a result of increased levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has overwhelmed a millennia-long cycle of natural cooling in the Arctic, raising temperatures in the region to their highest for at least 2,000 years, according to a report.

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/09/04-3

Published on Friday, September 4, 2009 by The Guardian/UK Current Economic Growth Model Is ‘Immoral’, Says Prescott. With the world’s population growing to nine million by 2050, Britain’s former deputy PM predicts far more crucial and complex talks in Copenhagen than in Kyoto by Jonathan Watts.  John Prescott, the former UK climate negotiator, called on developed nations today to accept a new model of economic growth that would create a more equitable spread of carbon emissions in the world. Speaking to the Guardian in Beijing, Prescott said talks at Copenhagen would probably not be decided until an 11th-hour crisis, but that no global consensus could be reached without a fairer spread of emissions.

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/09/04-8

Verizon Wireless Faces Ire Over Mountaintop Removal Rally

Currently, Verizon Wireless is cosponsoring a pro-mountaintop-removal, anti-climate, anti-union Labor Day rally — and the Center for Biological Diversity is leading a pressure campaign to compel a quick about-face. Massey Energy’s “Friends of America” rally, to be held atop a former surface mine in West Virginia next Monday, will cheer for the devastating practice of mountaintop-removal coal mining, which blows up mountains and chokes waterways with debris in Appalachian habitat. The rally, organized by coal giant Massey Energy, will guest-star global warming denier Lord Christopher Monckton, and boasts an on-site anti-climate legislation petition to sign. Further, the rally’s Web site homepage shockingly features the company’s CEO on video accusing “environmental extremists” of destroying jobs by opposing mountaintop removal. (Meanwhile, the rally is competing with the nearby 71st annual United Coal Workers of America Labor Day celebration for attendees.)

But thanks to the Center’s immediate leap into action and bold national grassroots campaign, Verizon Wireless may be losing more than a few of its 87 million customers: Thousands of them are asking, Can you hear us now? and pledging to spend their money with their conscience. On August 30, the Center notified Verizon Wireless’ CEO in no uncertain terms that Verizon must withdraw support for the rally and mountaintop removal or we’d have to tell our 225,000 supporters why we left their pro-coal, anti-environmentalist, anti-union company. Now we’ve joined forces with CREDO Action, and in just three days our concerned citizens submitted 69,000 letters and made hundreds of phone calls to Verizon telling it to drop the rally.

Join us in commanding Verizon Wireless to withdraw its sponsorship and read more about our opposition in Advertizing Age. Help submit more than 100,000 letters by Labor Day — join the cause on Facebook, tweet about Verizon, and learn why Grist magazine calls Massey’s CEO “the scariest polluter in America” in this New York Times piece.

CENTER FOR BIOLOGICAL DIVERSITY.

http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/

Tip o' the hat to ALL HAT NO CATTLE: Watching the Cons in Conservatism.

ALICE and YUYA

Excerpt: ALL OF A KEY, an unpublished novel:  (Scene: Seniors Alice  and Lou and Twenty-something Charlie tour Cairo Museum)

The ground floor of Cairo Museum was dominated by a statue of Queen Tiye seated beside her husband, Amenhotep III, in a huge composition seven meters high and five meters wide.

“For the first time in Egyptian history,” Alice said, “the queen is shown the same size as the king.  She was a commoner.  Her father, Yuya, was her husband’s chief vizier, as he had been for his father, Tuthmosis IV.  We’re going to see him today.”

“He would be important, why?” Lou asked, fumbling with his folding map guide to the exhibit halls.

“The Exodus may have occurred at several different times and places, and a great deal of money and faith has been expended to ‘prove’ each of them.  Each has its merits and advocates, each its flaws and detractors.  What is incontrovertible is that a Semitic tribe co-mingled with the Egyptian pharaonic family, fell afoul of orthodox Egyptian authorities, left or fled Egypt, looting as much of the place as possible as they went, setting up a religious opposition and a separate organization that not only challenged Egyptian traditions, but declared a ‘special,’ ‘separate,’ and ‘supreme,’ relationship and claim to the only true god.”

“God,” Lou agreed.

“Inventing different versions of the same truth, denying common roots, and claiming sovereignty over the myth has been criminally disruptive.  Akhenaten and his Habiru-Shasu shepherd henchmen were power-obsessed manipulators, breaking the peace and harmony of the world for personal gain.”

“Selfish bastards,” Lou agreed.  “Let me get this straight, you’re talkin’ about Joseph and Moses and those guys, right?”

“I’m talking about a particularly garbled tract of proto-history, beginning with the Story of Joseph in what is referred to as the first book of the Old Testament in the compendium called collectively the Holy Bible.”

“Oh,” Lou said.

“Scholars agree,” Alice continued, “that the Joseph Story was an original narration put down in writing in the 9^th Century B.C. and is thought to be the Judah-Israel version.  A second story came a century later, the Reuben-Jacob version.  The story in Genesis is mainly from the two sources, however, priests returning from the Babylonian exile arranged the sources, and added details: Joseph’s age (30) at time of Pharaoh’s elevation, the number of the tribe of Israel that went down into Egypt (70), the length of the sojourn (430 years), and Joseph’s request to be buried in Canaan.  Then, an editor, sometime before the second century B.C. took on the task of making one story from the three sources, and added the section on Joseph’s death and his request to be reburied in Canaan on his own initiative, or orders.”

Lou looked at her blankly.

“People believe a cobbled, fiddled myth,” she said.  “We must go to its roots to see the truth, which should prevail.  However, our self-deception and self-aggrandizement overpower facts with inventions suiting our basest desires for certainty and dominance.”

“Yeah, but so what?” Lou disagreed.  “Guy got lucky, huh?”

Charlie laughed.

“Okay, Alice,” Lou said, “men wrote the Talmud and the Bible…”

“…and the Koran,” she said.

“…and the Koran, but refute this: they also made the mistakes – not God.  God had to use several men until we correctly reconstructed what happened.”

“With another man to pronounce the trail ended.  Neatly bent,” she complimented.  “First rate religious counterpoint to reason.  That’s just the trouble, isn’t it?  Religious people see what they’ve taught themselves to believe and deny any exception on the grounds of deviltry and perdition.

“Muhammad is the descendent of another of Abraham’s sons,” Alice continued.  “Ishmael out of Hagar, Sarah (Sarai’s) Egyptian maid.  Muhammad was born in Mecca in A.D. 570, eighteen centuries after Exodus.  He started his mission at age 40 or so, preaching to Arab idolaters the ‘true faith’: Islam, the monotheistic Hanif religion of his remote ancestor Abraham.  Hanif is the Islamic word for someone who believes in one God, but is not a Jew, a Christian, or a worshipper of idols.

“Significantly,” Alice said, “the Koran agrees with the Judah-Israel and Reuben-Jacob versions of the story, but ends there, making no connection to the later priestly and editor’s additions.  This reinforces the conviction that the original story is in the first two sources, before it was given shape, or included Joseph’s reburial in Canaan.  It helps convince me that he never left Egypt.”

“So, where’d he go?” Lou scoffed.

“He’s in Room Number 12 according to the floor map,” she replied.  “I like what I understand of the ancient Egyptian concept of our relation to god.  God created all out of thought and word.  Everything is part of god.  The million gods are one; all creation, everything, is part of the whole.  Hence, the world went out of balance when the Akhenaten-Moses megalomaniac took his god out of Egypt and set him up separate above everything else in the world.  It would be good for all of us, if we recognized and nourished the roots instead of losing ourselves in the branches.  Of course, anything is possible, Lou, but let’s have a look at this particular mummy.  I really believe it’s  your Joseph.”

Yuya had a long thin dignified face, almost alive, wearing a calm confident expression.  The position of his hands was striking.  They were normally placed over the chest in the Osirian position, but here, in the only example Alice had ever seen, the palms were down just under the chin, as if giving reverence, not to the gods, but to himself.

Unusually, his ears were unpierced.  His strong, aquiline features and hooked nose immediately suggested foreign, possibly Semitic origin.  His white hair and aged appearance indicated that he was at least sixty years old when he died.

“Commanding figure,” Lou admitted.  “Lot of character in that face: full, strong lips, prominent determined jaw.  He could wake right up.  Wow!  What an embalming job.”

“He’s the originator of the great religious movement that his daughter and grandson carried into execution.”

“Come on, he could be Syrian, or anything.  You don’t know he’s Moses.”

“He is Yuya, father of Tiye, whom Amenhotep III made his Great Royal Wife. Their son, Amenhotep IV (Akhenaten) married his cousin, Nefertiti, Yuya’s grand daughter by his son Aye.  Akhenaten closed the temples, banned the ancient gods of Egypt, and established a monotheistic God, like the God of Israel, with himself as high priest.  I believe he can be linked to Moses, or rather to the mythological stereotype we know as ‘Moses.’”

Looking at the well-preserved features, Lou thought that Yuya did have the face of an ecclesiastic; there was something around the mouth.

“I have in my files at home,” Alice said, “a photocopy of Yuya’s titles, taken from the book written in 1907 by Theodore M. Davis.  One of them was it ntr n nb tawi, “the holy father of the Lord of the Two Lands”, and not just the common semi-priestly it ntr, “the father of the god”.  That certainly sounds like a blood relation, doesn’t it?  If we’re ever to get the truth, this is a good reason for re-examination.”

“To what end, Alice?” Charlie asked.

“All three religions revere Joseph,” she replied.  “If this is he…”

“They’ll kill each other to get him,” Charlie said.  “Best to let the poor beggar lie.  If that’s your Joseph, or anyone else’s, he didn’t get to Canaan, but he looks content.  Let’s not trouble his rest.”

Lou laughed and nodded.  Alice took a few notes and made a sketch from which she would later do an ink painting.  Yuya’s profile was particularly interesting, she thought.  He’s not Syrian.

Yuya, "Holy Father of the Lord of the Two Lands"

PARTIAL SOURCES:

Moses the Egyptian, Jan Assman, the memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism.  Harvard University Press. The author is Professor of Egyptology at the University of Heidelberg.

Hebrew Pharaohs of Egypt, Ahmed Osman, the secret lineage of the Patriarch Joseph.  Bear & Company.  Cairo-born author presents results of twenty-two years writing and research.