Abraham’s Family Values

The three Abrahamic monotheistic faiths — the ones who celebrate the same deity — form something of an isosceles triangle. Two of them feel themselves fated to a certain god-directed purpose, what they share are tales that comprise an Old Testament to Christians and a Torah to the Judaic adherents. The Christians and Judaic adherents are called “People of the Book” by Muslims.

PEOPLE OF THE LIE

Islam is typically viewed with much disdain by the other two groups. Islam places faith derived from an angel jealously guarded by the Christians: Gabriel. He visited a short while with Mary and was patient enough to give Islam their entire Qur’an, a text that has more shared virtues than differences, but that gets lost when marketing faith to new adherents. Marketers play a large role in selling one faith over others. Commonality doesn’t lead to sales pitch success. A good salesperson emphasizes the parts of the product that are desirable; “more of the same” does not make a sales pitch convincing. You do not want to point to the equipment not “new-and-improved”, preferred by your deity of tradition. Perhaps they are selling the way of the better god, perhaps a better way to spend eternity with friends and relatives who are spending eternity in the bad place. I have found that eternity is a slippery concept — three nanoseconds spent in the afterlife is the same length of time spent in the good place as the bad place, I guess it seems like a longer eternity if you have “chosen” the bad place. Catholic tradition does not assign any responsibility to their God in finding yourself doomed. The faith marketers insist that their God plays no part in the decision process. You get to end up there because you didn’t spend enough of your life praising the three personalities of a God who just can’t get praised too much. He (never ‘she’ by the way) never gets enough love from the folks who created him — they could have enjoyed all the fruits of “no knowledge” forever in Eden, but they kept finding themselves longing for the tree labelled KNOWLEDGE. Obedience is not exactly a choice, but following directions is everything, and that is what obedience is all about.

Tree of Life/Knowledge/Ygdrassil

Tree of Knowledge

Islam did not stop worshiping the same God as the other two sects that flowed from Abraham. Sunni and Shia grew into those sects when the Archangel Gabriel came down to convey the nature of Allah’s love for his faithful. (Jesus) and Mariam (Mary) are deeply adored in the Islamic faith. Gabriel related Allah’s intent to the chosen Mohamed, the occasion is described unambiguously in the Holy Qur’an. It represents a love letter delivered by the Archangel Gabriel to the progeny of Ishmael. The monotheistic God also reveals his love for Mariam and for her son. Far more is written about Mariam in the Holy Qur’an than the two books esteemed by the People of the Book, it all comes down to good salesmanship.

Feuds among human families often become as bitter as vitriol, the line of the triangle between the Jewish and Christians is short and is well travelled. In that triangle, the line between the Jewish adherents and the Islamic adherents is very long, the line between the Christian adherents and the Islamic adherents is similarly long. Misunderstanding and blind hate along those very long lines have only become more bitter and more filled with hate over the millennia. Slavery is accepted as the natural course in the first testament and this continues into the second (new) testament.

Jerusalem is the third-most important site for adoration to Islam and it has been that way for millennia. I have written quite a bit about events that reached a catastrophic level by 1948. I have also written about how the empires that developed in Europe have grown considerably after the “discovery” of the “New World.” This imperial ambition exploded into a messy set of “settlements” that were also connected to Forts from the Atlantic to the Pacific Coasts. Look at how many cities have the word “Fort” emblazoned upon their city “limit” signs. I happen to live in one of the “Fort” towns. These were developed to provide safety and comfort for the colonists that end up taking as much milk and honey as possible and to starve the indigenous peoples at the same time. Everywhere that the White-Supremacist ethnic cleansers appear, a fort is constructed. Zionism is another “patriotic” system that learned lessons of history. It developed in Europe and continues to occupy the settlements in Palestine.

Ethnic Cleansing

The European imperial state had already been arming itself and was terrorizing the British Empire. So the Zionist terrorists spoke the same language as the British Empire, this made gradual control of the imperial “forted” areas quite easy. By 1947 they were already ethnically cleansing unarmed Palestinians by the thousands. Their weapons became world class (including at least 100 nuclear weapons), as did the security operations that led to the creation of a nascent Mossad. They now ruthlessly control the entirety of what was named A Mandate for Palestine. Absolute control of every square inch and every Arab Palestinian refugee has already been effected. They are now at a mopping up stage. None of these operations are well understood within the American Empire because each major media source within the American Empire defends the mopping up operations as inevitable if not completely unjust, only the actual date is of question. Media has become a tool at the NY Times, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, and all the right-wing-hegemonic sort that keep the propaganda strong and deadly.

Thanks for reading.

Donald is my pet hamster

A very useful pet

I piddle around (some would suggest I piddle on) several languages. These languages differ considerably from one another, they go about the business of Clarifying their thoughts and intentions. They use widely different ways to explain the very object ot their communication.

English went through a massive shift to make the spoken word more clearly resemble the written word, curiously this took place at precisely the time that Gutenberg’s invention was increasing the volume of texts available to the readers of the day. The change to written vs. spoken English is something called the great vowel shift. You may have seen a T-shirt that proclaimed the event:

I survived the great vowel shift!

Arranging the letters on a printing press set contemporary spelling into concrete. The timing of this event could not have been more ill timed. The printed word had to be taught using a misfitting reckoning system. Of course, English went on to become the international language despite all this. Although it did receive some help from the absence of accurate weather forecasts, that event led to the sinking of nearly every ship on its way to defeating the British Empire. The geopolitical significance was enormous.

The great digital information shift occurred during my lifetime, around the 1960s. Learning my second language of German relied on intense time spent in a language-instruction classroom, and reinforced in a language lab — all based on an instructor-led distribution of sounds saved on magnetic tape. Vocabulary building required using an English-German dictionary unti nearly all the leaves fell out. Now I have free access to the findings of Google and can access new languages at a significantly more comfortable state. The change is unfathomable to generations that grew up with these tools widely available and frequently updated.

I also survived the shift from slide rule to pocket calculator

Thanks for reading.

Russian: what gives?

In 1975, when foreign language lessons appeared in textbooks and on vinyl, I decided to learn Russian as a complement to the German that I had just learned with some fluency. The Cyrillic alphabet provided interesting and confusing sets of letters — enough to keep a learner engaged in sounds and texts that looked familiar to the under-aided eye. It appeared to resemble Gellarese in many ways, cobbled together in a manner that seemed intuitive to the 1970s Cold War setting, an interesting series of words that deliberately resembled a code and a language history that included the drama of Tolstoy and a presence that made it seem like background music in a Soviet department store.

Intrigue comes across between German and Russian as it is cast against a background that the geography of post-war Europe provided. However, German and Slavic speakers would not yield to translation with any degree of ease. Russian uses neither the definite nor the indefinite article, whereas German conveys the meaning and usage of every noun and pronoun. The German language spoken by a five-year-old in Berlin provide all the parts of speech, every inflection, and every nuance of meaning. Stack Russian next to German and you arrive at that enigma wrapped within a mystery that Russia represented to Churchill. The Slavic and German ways seem to play out like a spy thriller, where the similarities may lie somewhere between the butler and the wrestler. God help the translator maintain any measure of surety and sanity in such a world.

A Passionate Love Story

My German and Russian proceeded along these avenues of restriction. Of course, the tools available on the internet were yet decades away. It is difficult to imagine how any new language can be approached without Google and YouTube: an assuring set of mouse clicks away. Hence the heightened curiosity that is aroused upon employing YouTube and Google to assist the learner who arrives to answer the question posed for this post — what gives?

Somehow, languages once learned to any extent seem to stick onto various brain cells and cortexes. I still remember much of the Russian that I heard on those 1975 records, language segments that blended together like a fermenting beverage. Somewhere between beer and vodka, I believe.

Thanks for reading.

Freedom and Liberty

For me, but not for ye.

Jim Jordan Trips Over His Own Asshole Trying to Debate Anthony Fauci

Yesterday, Representative Jim Jordan and progressive epidemiologist Dr. Anthony Fauci met to meet on the absence of civics in the marketplace. Jordan represented the wealthy sectors who depend upon the Republican Party to keep the markets pumping gilded wealth to the capitalists who count on cheap labor and fossil fuels to remind their purchased politicians in D.C. that the chains must continue to keep the marginalized on the margins and to keep libertine liberty to pass the laws that keep the 99% to the whims of the marketplace. Jordan called on Fauci to give a date for opening the economy to full-throttle openness. Unlock the American economy that he had unfairly held hostage for so long. Just give us a date Dr. Fauci, just name the date. That was all he required of a country that had simply had too many chains imposed upon economic miracles, in the view of Mr. Jordan. Need I mention that Jim Jordan was standing for his Ohio constituents, that among those participants were those who called on the execution of Anthony at the earliest possible moment.

Dr. Fauci, don’t tread on me!

Freedom and Liberty, as understood by the comfortably wealthy beneficiaries of unfettered capitalism, keep cash flowing from the most productive participants of our economy to the least productive members of that economy. Jim Jordan wants to know when the most decimated groups would be permitted to simply return to the mills, when the most protected can see the invisible finger pry the economy fully open. These are the billionaires who multiplied their gains the most at the expense of individual working for a minimum wage that has not increased since the 1970s.

There appears to be no shame at wearing the tiniest fig leaves — call it a fig-leaved futures market. Freedom and Liberty are always fobbed off in this way. The Evangelical Right feel themselves the victims of a new brand of persecution. Churches seem the last bastion in their mode of thought, the progressive elements of our society are battering at the door. Mind you, it is a metaphoric door, not the kind of door bludgeoned open at the Capitol Building on January 6th. The legions who followed every word of their Emperor God flew in on private jets, in muscled pick up trucks with all the flags of MAGA “free” to flap in the breeze, to fuel their need to vandalize and to plunder. The leader was on his way up Pennsylvania Avenue, wasn’t he. No, he was bunkering in a room reserved for friends and family, the kind of nice people you could find on the town square, the kind who were debating the form of execution. A predilection for the mighty noose, a more “scary” beheading of a guillotine. Any form of execution that would provide the most theatrical moment, guillotines and noosing devices started to appear. The would be a reign of terror not seen on any scene, but long longed for. A gentle return to the lynchings that so very well conveyed the spirit of law and order that called for the bloodiest of theatrics, a return to the perfectly proper white-supremacist call to revenge by the most highly armed. Strange fruit would once again be found dangling from the branches of trees to affirm a new spirit of magical madness that would mean a return to the great white way by those who had been denied the true meaning of the Second Amendment and who wanted the removal of the Fourteenth.

A massive mob to redress the wrongs inflicted by the Marxists upon the spirit of American manliness, a return to family values, an America First point of view solidly anchored to the Holy Bible of the founding fathers and based on freedom and liberty.

Thanks for reading.