The Cow in the Room

from The Vegan Society: 3 May 2019

The cow is on the table, she takes on roles to disguise her guise, she must assume names that soothe the savage sapiens who seek satiety. A “meat” cookbook is a collection of vignettes for social occasions and celebration. Let’s look at just one: veal medallions — carefully crated cow-boys separated from their mothers at birth and slaughtered at youth, at the exact moment when their flesh is optimally tender to the tongue and teeth. The name ‘medallions’ evokes an honor bestowed upon the diner, esteeming the favor of their palate. Vegan diets are healthy for children and other living things.

The Jungle opened a section of curtain to reveal where the cow body parts on your plate originated. The best minds of inhumane capitalism hire the most devious among us to serve man. Capitalism wretches souls that way. It’s for dinner.

Sinclair Lewis had already predicted the vicious horror that a body politic driven by greed and wanton power could unleash. He did a damned good take on a fictitious character who possessed certain skills and ambitions, including a despotic trumpish draw.

The Jungle’s heart-wrenching critique of industrial capitalism was lost on readers more worried about the rat faeces that, according to Sinclair, contaminated their sausage. Sinclair later observed: “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.

Sinclair Lewis THE JUNGLE 1906

Mr. T took on fifteen fellow Republiconnivers and finished them off with considerable ease in 2016. Lewis wrote It Can’t Happen Here, revealing that every brick of its heavy foundation had already been kilned.

Artificial intelligence is approaching the capability of moving its not-so-invisible finger, in a curiously recursive way, to write robust robotic code to compile algorithms of cruel but profitable intention. A perfection of agency commanded by global geopolitical intention without the slightest sliver of morality. Let there be slaughterhouses, and there were slaughterhouses.

The turkey is also in the room

Thanks for reading.

cibarA Arabic

I think of Proto-Indo-European as a linguistic continent comprised of many languages — geographies mapped by language. Though PIE has left nothing in writing for her descendants to examine, a process of reverse engineering points to a hub at the greater Ukraine vicinity.

All homo sapiens came from East Africa, the shortest and most easily traversed paths have gone through what is now Palestine. Those who took up residence in the fertile bread-basket of Western Asia stopped to create PIE before proceeding to various points of the compass.

My first steps taken outside the world of English were in German, where I wrestled her complex set of inflections — function signals developed over the millennia on the Northern European Plain — an easily traversed topography as well. The shortest distance between two points takes longer if you must scale mountains along the way.

Arabic doesn’t look three-quarters of a smidgeon like PIE.

Saxons brought German across the channel, The English. Along that path, the “b” became a “v”, the “t” became a “d” and a few other things I shall leave unexamined right now. Vikings made short work of inflections when they occupied Isles, The British. The “t” latched onto the “h” to do something not done in proper German society — sticking the tongue out. A native German-speaking friend once told me that her mother would scold her at any spoken breach, such as allowing your tongue to extend beyond the teeth.
“It’s what the Englanders do. Tut tut. The very idea…”

One of my German students, a Palestinian, introduced me to the Arabic alphabet. I accepted his interest in German as a challenge to learn Arabic, at the time I hadn’t known that Arabic was not one of the PIE tongues. The excerpt of the Qu’ran included below might alert you that Arabic doesn’t look three-quarters of a smidgeon like PIE. Peruse this image for a long take at nine English words. It’s a color-coded snapshot of those nine that elucidate many aspects of Arabic grammar. The Quranic Arabic Corpus provides detail from the hair strands to the toenails.


Quranic Arabic Corpus (67:1)

Search any translation, interpretation, analysis, mistranslation, misinterpretation, or spurious analysis in any Qu’ran 67:1. Take it where you will or where you won’t. Languages should always offer a means for removing barriers, not exacerbating them. Weaponizing translations for propaganda value is a kind of false witness that literally obfuscates communication for a hidden or unstated agenda.

A few closing thoughts:

Arabic language has

  • a script that makes many alphabets (alpha, beta…) based on Latin look hammered and chiseled by comparison.
  • a root system that works as precise architecture — form follows function. It combines beauty with linguistic precision.
  • some amazing flexibility. German, my second language, can concatenate nouns, can use entire prepositional and adverbial phrases to function as adjectives. However, Arabic can incorporate entire sentences into a single word.
  • a different look and feel that distinguishes it from Proto-Indo-European language. Farsi is a PIE language, it’s not based on a root system — even though its words look like Arabic.
  • something for the left-handed student. Arabic allows me to see what I am writing as I write, to sweep a pen across a piece of paper. To pull along a sheet of paper rather than to plow into it.

All my posts on a theme of Arabic Language

All my posts on a theme of German Language

Thanks for reading.

Fascists v. Francis

You may think you already know too much about geopolitical regime-change architect Steve Bannon, perhaps you were hoping that the creep had already crept back under a rock — not at all, Bannon fans. Be of good cheer, Altrighteers! Taste fist, AntiFas!

Fulsome News and U.S. Empire Report:

Good news for the Fas: SB has crept under a different kind of rock, the Petrine.

Steve Bannon is working to make friends and influence Fascists in a Europe that has shown entirely too much unity since post-war Fascist losses in 1945. The great man is setting up shop in Italy, just one easy commute away from Vatican City, a world capital where he can simultaneously keep his friends and his enemies close. It’s at a medieval monastery built in 1204 CE (only eleven years before the Magna Carta, for the sake of Christ!), a facility quite large enough to simultaneously accommodate dozens of über-conservative deal brokers. The monastery’s building complex was built in an era when Cannon Law was supreme and unfettered, when separation of church and state was capital heresy.

Dignitatis Humanae Institute

Bannon is a reliable information (propaganda) source for the rightwing political players in the Roman Catholic Church. A base that has become most rigidly rigid in its resurgent Church Militant: a call to reinvigorate The Crusades — a mission, in their words, that has never ended, that needs recruits to defend The West from Moslems (the word Muslim is insufficiently orientalist for their purposes) that have always sought to conquer European Civilization: The Judeo-Christian West threatened by Mohamedism (orientalist for Islam) and the dreaded boogymen in the “Koran” — perhaps best pronounced perhaps as the “Ko-ran”, those fiery fiends that threaten Israel — perhaps also best pronounced as “Is-real”.

Imagine a placard on the base statue of Mr. Steve in the square of St. Peter.

Steven Kevin Bannon

Founder of Bannon Law, an informed interpretation of Cannon Law

stalwart champion of White Rights, Bannonavellianism , the guy who knows how to get the job done and is ready to drop shells on all the egg shells it takes to make a proper Stalinist Omelet.

Rough-beast incarnate: not the kind of slouch who would limit his reach to Bethlehem.

After leaving the White House, Bannon declared his intention to become “the infrastructure, globally, for the global populist movement.

Steve Bannon Is Done Wrecking the American Establishment. Now He Wants to Destroy Europe’s.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/09/world/europe/horowitz-europe-populism.html

Thanks for reading.

Vegetarianism and veganism. What gives?

A vegetarian ingests an animal’s personal effects by consuming merely eggs, milk and/or cheese — highly addictive substances that keep addicts coming back for more. It takes commitment and some patience while your body excretes toxins, but it’s also enormously rewarding. Immeasurably if you have genuine compassion for animals and remember that we ain’t nothing but mammals.

Learning to Think in the Anthropocene

Calfs get separated from their mothers at birth. Her breast milk is diverted to a marketplace. Oddly enough, a cow’s milk is designed for her offspring. Imagine if you can. There is no weaning process, just immediate separation of mother and calf.

Sir, would you please direct me to the supermarket’s breast-milk cooler?

Unfortunately, a vegetarian ends up causing more cruelty than a “meat” eater who eats only meat. When chickens and cows can no longer produce the goods for the dairy industry they are shipped to a slaughter houses for marginal return on investment.

As a veganist, I advocate formal legal recognition of the inalienable rights of all sentient animals to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Animals are not a necessary “resource” for a becoming life. We become inured our entire lives to the unspeakable violence that attends denial of these rights — multiple times per day for most non-vegan humans.

Look at a chart of “cuts” in a butcher shop. Connect the dots to Grey’s Anatomy. We share virtually the same vital organs, virtually the same body systems: from head to toe and wrapped in the largest organ of all, the skin. Skin keeps the organs protected from the elements. You are what you eat.

A rodent living a matter of inches below scorched Earth was the mother of all mammals.

Humans once lived in harmony with this planet — some time after the fifth extinction event ended reptilian species that evolved over 200,000,000 years. By comparison, human have evolved for only 200,000 years. That should humble us, but I don’t think we are terribly modest in our self-estimation. Having an extinction event named after ourselves — The Anthropocene — is not a cause for celebration.

A rodent living a matter of inches below scorched Earth was the mother of all mammals. Who knows what might follow an Anthropocene?

Thanks for reading.