All Together Now

A deftly choreographed carol caroled by the most-gifted musicians in the known universe — a gift from the most aetherial sentient cloud ever to have dwelled ‘tother side of the troposphere (400 years in the aging, as it were). Fancy in Nubibus:
https://standrewsrarebooks.wordpress.com/2018/08/22/samuel-taylor-coleridge-fancy-in-nubibus-1817/

Esme upon the Cloud's avatarEsmeralda and The Cloud

It’s his wee knee tremble that gets me. Worth staying with for solo.

Felicitations folks from Esme and the Cloud! ❤

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Wypipo: Standing on the Shoulders of Slaves

Whites, more specifically “wypipo,” are the beneficiaries of the settler-colonialist system that created the American Empire — the exceptionalist wing of the “special relationship” that a kinship with British imperialism taught to their former colonies in North America. The colonized learn how to become colonizers. Wypipo permeate every cell of that imperial body politi

Old empires never die, they just pass their skills on to their progenitors. Today, the sun never sets on the American Empire. Are they blessed by a god who just seems to like them better than peoples of another color?

“Reverse racism” is con artistry, a notion that whites are being victimized by non-white populations, a conceit held by many whites — wherever they place their boots on the ground.

Western Civilization is a story of how European empires ruthlessly plundered darker-skinned “savages” who had been living for countless centuries in a give-and-take balance with neighboring tribes — a fine tapestry of diverse cultures. Colonialism is thievery, those who benefit from its system are receivers of stolen goods. Slavers are thieves whose crimes are cast as virtues. They provided their logistics expertise and the venture capital to seed the dreams of ambitious white power brokers — those from the right (white) families, and the right (white) schools, and the right (white) European ancestry.

Technologically more advanced imperial forces use an imbalance of might to waste at will for advantage, to subdue and conquer, to claim every available plot of land in the name of various European states, to load ships with plunder, to drop off the wealth back home, then to proceed clockwise along favorable ocean currents to the coast of Africa, where they could take on valuable human resources for the advancement of white destiny. Complete the circular trade route and repeat, ad nauseam.

Who are the ADOS?

American Descendants of Slavery are uniquely branded peoples. They did not immigrate to the Americas, they were absconded by the usual thievish characters who knew how to get a return on investment. Free hard labor does wonders for a bottom line if you can live with Faustian bargains. What matters is what you can get away with, not whether you redress injustice as deep as centuries of slavery. How much of an ROI did that accrue to ADOS? A trick question, because injustice continues unabated at all levels of society. From neighborhood to nation.

Justification for the white-supremacist system — the deathblood of our body politic — were set into law by the framers of the Constitution. a legal instrument written by wypipo for the preservation of proper cultural traditions and values. It defines blacks as fractional citizens — sworn upon a Bible that justified the corporations favored by the framers. SCOTUS contains its share of self-proclaimed “Originalists” — those who decide legal precedents based upon what the all-white framers of the Constitution had in mind when their “justice” system was created. Originalists such as Antonin Scalia and his replacement justice Neil Gorsuch lock their focus on the days and ways of the 18th Century. Not surprisingly, those decisions have always kept ADOS subservient citizens who are always thwarted if they are not willing to part with their soul. Each Constitutional Amendment that ostensibly purports to redress injustice contains language that offers a recourse clause for hegemonists of one color.

Thanks for reading.

Climbing Language Trees

Prefacing Remarks مرحبا

Hello

Using AI to learn Arabic

Learning language is a gentle art that opens entire universes in return for mere study; it is a means for breaking barriers that lead to separation, misunderstanding, and the brutality of endless war. Mistranslation is inevitable because translations are always approximations; however, deliberate contortion for the sake of a hidden (or open) agenda befouls all sides. Propaganda deliberately twists words to serve political purposes, it engenders mistrust in exchange for self-serving advantage.

Any religious institution that seeks to subdue others by force serves a dark hegemony loosely cloaked in words of false love. Ascribing innate evil to the very existence of a faith’s traditions and customs is false witness of a most devious kind. But uniting that evil with political motivations to sanctify wanton bloodletting of innocents has become the tone of our times. Islamophobia is one such creation, white supremacism is another. Both are forces of systemic hate.

Climbing Language Walls

Complex sets of cases and genders convey the presence of various parts of speech — a tool set not available in uninflected languages such as English. The Saxons who conquered the British Isles brought complex grammar paradigms with them. Then the Vikings arrived. The tool set got tossed in short order — they selected the Gordian solution, cutting that knot asunder and degendering each thing, place, and person while they were at it, thus reducing and replacing each nuance with something we now know as “the.” The resulting language revision led to an enforcement of meaning through word order.

The German language is a major tree branch derived from Proto-Indo-European (PIE). Learning of it’s very existence required reverse engineering, a backward-looking process. The commonalities of scripting systems point to a common geography near present-day Ukraine.

There remain a few isolated non PIE languages in Europe, such as Basque, Hungarian, and Finish; but they are few — influence outside their circle of speakers is tiny.

I had not realized it at the time, but the inflections I memorized in high school Latin classes offered me some insight into the nature of inflected grammar. They are a tool that works to eliminate ambiguity. Prepositions of relative position do just such a thing, as the case may be. Accusative, ablative, dative…

Of course, language trees can range in character, as much as a boab differs from an oak. Farsi does resemble Arabic but is actually a fellow piece of PIE — the Persians adopted Arabic script, but without the root system that is a characteristic of Arabic language. Farsi may look like Arabic, but it is really quite different — a false friend for language learners. For example, “das Gift” is German for “poison”. It appears as an apple in Snow White (Schneewittchen), one offered as a “gift” perhaps.

Arabic is the largest language in Afro-Asiatic, a disparate set of languages that extends from the northwest coast of Africa through Palestine and covering much of southwest Asia. Climbing a different tree as you look at your home tree is what I call a lot of fun.

I liken this experience to extending a tin can from one tree to the other and conversing with a fellow traveler who is climbing onto a branch of PIE. YouTube offers many opportunities for the language learner. For example, you can find someone who also learned German as their second language. The ability to communicate across two very different frames of reference, without the crutch of English. Large fun.

I have found that most Arabic-language learners study it for military and/or fossil-fuel purposes. In both of these cases the object is geopolitical hegemony that continues to shorten the time available to address the catastrophe that is climate nakba (the Arabic word for catastrophe).

Thanks for reading.