Category: education

I Would Prefer Not To

linuxanarchy

I am just another person who has not yet read Moby Dick, but it’s still on my list.

Watching reality TV resembles a Philip K. Dick dystopia, it keeps getting closer to its total eclipse of reality.

Name a television show broadcast in the timeframe 1969 to the present. I probably have not seen it. I did not watch the white Bronco, nor the endlessly falling towers. Wait a generation, then tune in to the Simpson impact and the meaning behind those Twins.

So here is my advice for any unsuspecting reader: ignore top news stories. Innumerable conjectures extrapolate scant evidence into innumerable dead-ends. Wild-ass propaganda flourishes as every opportunity for a story blossoms, petals drop and the wind takes them all.

Study themes completely unrelated to the:

…major news story we are now following. We will continue to track this story as information becomes available. Stay tuned to WWTF for complete coverage of (FILL IN THE BLANK), our top news story.” 

Thus creating an urge or crave to keep listening, keep watching, keep supporting our sponsors. The band drones on.

I would prefer not to

One afternoon in 1971 I was discussing George Orwell with Dr. William R. Siddall, then head of the Geography Dept. at Kansas State. He had not read Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” but I piqued his interest with my personal gleaning. It became required reading for the entire staff.

politics-and-the-english

Reread the good stuff with an open, but not gaping, mind.

When I graduated Bill Siddall suggested that I read widely. So I did. A solid memory.

Goethe suggested that Western Civilization might have taken its direction upon a Homeric turn rather than a Christian model.  Daniel Mendelsohn wrote “Englishing the Iliad” for the New Yorker. I took a plunge.

“The decline of the West” by Hans Günther:

Goethe had a premonition of this decline of the West: even in October 1801 he remarked in conversation with the Countess von Egloffstein, that spiritual emptiness and lack of character were spreading — as if he had foreseen what today characterises the most celebrated literature of the Free West. It may be that Goethe had even foreseen, in the distant future, the coming of an age in which writers would make great profits by the portrayal of sex and crime for the masses.”

from Goethe and the Indo-European religiosity

bible-mass-murder

Alternate history, geography, language, sentients…

I now return you to your normally scheduled program, in progress.

Thanks for reading.

 

 

 

Zoocide, Genocide & Passenger Pigeon Martha

This morning I tried to find the right word for the large-scale destruction of animals by humans and for humans. Universal rights ignores the innocent elephant in the room: animal rights.

whaaat

A couple centuries ago there were more passenger pigeons than there are chickens in the slaughter-house chain today. The last passenger pigeon (Martha by name) is preserved and on display at the Cincinnati Zoo, the final victim of zoocide. They were edible, guns were available. So were bison. Hey, mistakes are made. No, specious arguments are made.

100.years.ago.the.last.passenger.pigeon

When multi-trillion dollar production is at stake you direct attention to a splendid table (I cite the website because of its rather more conventional approach toward food). Comfortable and cozy, but too complicit for me as a vegan. Marginal movements like veganism irritate meat eaters. Just saying.

I haven’t heard about pink slime lately, the stuff that nano technology makes available. Let us capture each molecule and direct it to a consumer. Hey, don’t mention pink slime in polite company. We are nice people.

The enormity of sentient suffering is as great as the consumer demand for the ultimate insatiable decadence. There are no articles on animal trafficking via slaughter house in the NYT Magazine this week.

animal.trafficking

Climate change may just be the only thing that jolts homo sapiens to attention. We are a species intelligent enough to discover the existence of six extermination events in the history of the planet, but arrogant enough to shrug at the prospect of another.

How comparable are extinction events? Even the possibility of an errant asteroid does not direct attention to preventive measures. We’re too busy feeding military, prison and industrial-slaughter=complex obsessions.

By the way, vegan diets are healthy, inexpensive and planet-friendly. But as trolls are ever ready to counter: they are cruel to plants. Specious arguments never end.

Recommended website: Crows Head Soup

Thanks for reading.

Crows Head Soup & Vegan Anarchist

I recently discovered Crows Head Soup, a site for the perplexed among us who do not view fellow sentients as simply human resources. What happens when every molecule of flesh and bone is exploited at a mega scale? Does it even rate a half-hearted shrug?

crows-head-soup-original-recipe

Poetry strums and strikes here, it’s what poetry does.

Crows Head is a site gracious enough to allow rants that dare question the horror of the status quo. The Vegan Anarchist is a related site that is quite new, it appears on FB: a shorter vegan venue.

vegan.anarchist

This evening I read one of many pieces here that pierces the heart. It encapsulates the reality of daily existence in the confines of Butchertown, an historic town near Louisville. Some thoughts:

Visiting any supermarket in the country suggests the enormity of this flesh industry and the banality of its volume. How many tons today? How rapidly are the store shelves emptied? How many shelved products contain factory extermination camp content?
Twice as many chickens on earth as people. I won’t do the math here, but more than one in every pot by rough estimate.
Yes, man’s inhumanity to man sadly exceeds the ability to imagine, but fatalities among homo sapiens does not run into the multiple tens of billions per year of fellow sentients today.

bison.skulls.1870s
Bison skulls on the fruited plain

 

 

 

Remain humane, and thanks for reading.

Speak Arabic Openly and Joyfully!

Arabic is a tapestry

Modern Standard Arabic is a construct used to help Arabic speakers living over a wide expanse to understand each other. To speak the language, and yet be understood, you have to choose among Arabic dialects specific to particular geographical areas, as suggested by the map below:

Arabic_Dialects.svg

Modern Standard Arabic is akin to Esperanto among its many speakers: about 400 million Arab speakers on this planet of ours!

Lines on a map I’ve viewed 10,000 times mask the neighborhood scenes, but empires find borders (preferably using a straight edge) an expedient means for control.  Africa before Europeans. Is there a downside?  Empires rape as much as they can as fast as they can, but what’s wrong with that?  Endless decadence for one.

My safari (سفر, from Swahili) into Arabic started some years ago when teaching a German class: sample, sample. One student was born in Jerusalem. Palestinians live under constant occupation. Occupied by Ottomans until 1923, British Empire until May 1948, then another legal entity to 2016 and counting (down). But Palestine is a forever place.

I made a good deal “if you can learn some German I can learn some Arabic.” It was a means for transcending culture and stereotypes, the kind explained in the documentary Reel Bad Arabs.

It’s fun tackling curiosities in Indo-European roots. Only recently did I discover that Persian shares Indo-European roots along with most European countries. Their alphabet looks like Arabic, but there isn’t much overlap in vocabulary.

Farsi doesn’t use the root system – a fundamental building-block system for assigning meaning. Arabic dictionaries are arranged by consonant groupings

SFR = SaFaRi, a journey

indo-european-word-history-of-plek

Arabic script is brilliantly beautiful. The Roman alphabet has a tiny toolbox, as useful as thimbles for trumping fingers and thumb IMO.

Latin doesn’t even have lowercase letters and it does not often include curved letters like U when a V will do. But they are easier to chisel into stone.

alan-dunn-does-ex-take-the-ablative-or-the-dative-new-yorker-cartoon

Nothing beats a zero when speaking the language of science. The Romans didn’t get there. To paraphrase the John Cleese (Why does British food suck? “they had an empire to run.” It’s not easy to derive square roots using Roman numerals.

Let me say something about resources: not all Arabic alphabet aids are good. This one helped me the most: Sugar comes from Arabic.

Many Spanish words derive from Arabic. They stayed on after Arabic culture was forceably ejected from Spain in 1492. So at least two all-time epic fails happened in 1492.

The Crusades and the Inquisition (The Church Militant) were not good ideas. Spreading lies like Joseph Goebbels lends not a single grain of truth. Truth went into exile from 1933 to 1945. No literature or art of any value springs forth under Fascism. Nothing good comes of Fascism. “When I hear the word ‘culture’…”

Islamophobia (from the xeno family of racism) will not lead to a better gentler world.

An earlier post on this theme: Thinking about language

 #RumiWasntWhite.