It’s just a ride

Lest the post below be taken as a slam against mythological belief systems, I wish to recount a conversation with my late brother. As part of this studies for the priesthood, he was required to read the gospels in their original form, Greek, and claimed they had therein far more than the English text offered.

He was defensive at that time, and for a reason. Like all intelligent people, he knew that the simple myths of virgin birth and a corpse rising from the dead were not true. But he wanted to take me one level above that. He said that mythology, like science, was a vehicle for passing information from one generation to the next. He found myth to be a much better vehicle, and that the truths thereby transmitted to be of far more value than those given us by science.

For me, mythology is a matter of curiosity and not much more. I look at life’s passing in the same way that Bill Hicks did in the video above – it’s a ride. We get on, we get off. What happens while we are here is horrible, wonderful, fascinating, intriguing, and we are powerless to change it. Evil people seem to have control of this place. Good people, like Hicks himself, make early exit. But what the hell – 30, 40, 90 years … what does it matter?

If it is some kind of test, most of us are doomed to repeat second grade. We leave this place knowing not much more than upon entrance. Yes, the myths carry within them important truths. Just as importantly, one must strip the wrappers off the mythology for current use before repackaging it and handing it on. It’s not the wrapper, but the content that matters.

The truths are simple: love, comfort and care for one another, take care of our home and leave it in good shape, remember that you leave your stuff behind when you go. It’s not complicated.

I do not understand why it needs to be packaged as it is. All that does, as I see it, is to empower shamans as intercessors when we can engage our own minds without such help. I see TV preachers taking undue pride in their expertise in memorization of passages of the Bible, pretending that they thereby have superior wisdom … and are therefore worthy of cash contributions from helpless followers.

As George Carlin said, this God we worship who made everything and knows all past, present and future … is always short of cash.

I don’t mind the mythology. Metaphor and storytelling enrich our existence. The recent movie Gravity was a metaphor about a woman who lost a child, and her suffering and survival. That final scene where she gets up, recovers her balance and starts to walk again is so very moving. How wonderful it is to tell the story that way rather than just act it out in real time.

But please remember when you leave the movie theater that it was just a story. That’s really all that bugs me – that serious grown ups believe in angels and demons, and think that movie was about astronauts in space rather than people on earth.

Merry solstice!

Gods of all cultures around the world were displayed with wild hair, much as rays emanate from the sun.
Gods of all cultures around the world were displayed with wild hair, much as rays emanate from the sun.
Every year in the northern hemisphere the sun appears to move south on the horizon. The last day of this apparent movement is the one we call December 21st, or Winter Solstice. It appears to rest in place for three days, and then begins its journey back. That is, on the third day it rises again.

While all of this is going on, the constellation Virgo (virgin) is apparent in the night sky. So it might be said that the sun is born of a virgin, since Virgo is the constellation symbolizing of fertility.

Later in the year the sun will nurture the growth of plants that sustain life, including grapes with which we make libations. Indeed, the sun turns water into wine.

There are twelve months, twelve apostles, twelve tribes of Israel, and twelve signs of the zodiac.

Of course, most of the ancient myths that we still celebrate today happened during the Age of Pisces, symbolized by the fish. I still see some of those on the back of automobiles.

And most amazing to me, the ancient Sun God, even with the multiple languages on earth and thousands of years having transpired, is still referred to us in english-speaking culture as “The Son.”

Merry Christmas, everyone. Myths are important. I do not denigrate them. We even have people in government who supervise our popular myths, among them Oswald, 19 Arabs, cherry trees and rail splitting, and virgin birth. As far as I know, the only virgin ever to give birth to a child was Doris Day.

Forecast for tomorrow: Much like yesterday

MachiavelliI would like to add some order to the matter of conspiracies, a topic for which an ordinary person can be ridiculed and led to confounding arguments far from the matters of importance. To wit:

  • The term “conspiracy theorist” is a CIA invention, and a bit of a PSYOP even of itself. It is meant to separate those who do not believe official truth from those who do, and cast them in a negative light.

It’s clever. Before we ever get to evidence or perps or motives, we have to overcome the presumption that our thought processes are corrupted. In fact, once at that point, most people never bother to look at evidence due to fear of ridicule. Orwell called it Crimestop.
Continue reading “Forecast for tomorrow: Much like yesterday” →

Was OWS another turkey shoot?

I mentioned over at Intelligent Discontent that the level of corruption we now face in this country can only be overcome by massive and peaceful resistance, and that a dumbed-down (spell-check wants me to use “numbed-down” there, perhaps more descriptive) public isn’t ready for that. I also mentioned Occupy Wall Street, and how efficiently it was crushed by the Obama Administration.

This brought to mind an incident in American military aggression in the Mideast known as the “Highway of Death,” or more accurately, the “Turkey Shoot.” The “war,” such as it was (a barbaric onslaught on the Iraqi civilian infrastructure) was pretty much over in February of 1991 when the Americans gave the Iraqis permission to return to their home country on Highway 80, which runs from Basra to Kuwait City.

The Turkey Shoot
The Turkey Shoot
Once exposed, the Americans blew up the vehicles on either end of the convoy, blocking escape, and then systematically destroyed every vehicle and human in between. It was called a “turkey shoot” because there was no opportunity for resistance, so that brave American pilots could dump their loads without any fear of being taken down by missiles or gunfire. Pilots returning to aircraft carriers were reported to be orgasmic swelling with patriotism.

The reason this came to mind is that it is an long-practiced military strategy to get the enemy to expose himself in order to destroy him. This was the effect, if not intent of Occupy. Internal resistance in the US exposed itself, and was crushed and demoralized. (The state also took names, which combined with dictatorial TSA authority effectively makes it possible to prevent future travel by any participant.) We know that the movement was infiltrated. The question is, was it instigated by the same forces that did so? If not, it would have been a good idea anyway.

Teacher, my brain is full. May I be excused?

This is not The Onion - it is a cover from a catalog of courses for accountants put out by a firm in Bozeman.
This is not The Onion – it is a cover from a catalog of courses for accountants put out by a firm in Bozeman.
Phew! What a relief now to have my continuing education credits in place, and a grueling 16-hour tax conference behind me. My daughter, a non-accountant who works for a CPA firm in Montana, tells me that the people in that office all behave as if they are the exception to the rule that accountants are rigid and dull and humorless. They are not exceptions, she says.

She also says that I used to be like that when she was young. My daughter, you see, is very smart in human relations, knowing how to play her dad.

My most lasting reflection on the conference is how it focused almost entirely on the problems of the rich, and at the opportunities we have to save them a buck here or there, keeping a slice for ourselves of course. The tax law has yielded many new opportunities in that regard. There was also quite a bit on the health care law, nothing earth-shattering. As it is a room full of starched-shirt right-wing accountants, few are aware that the lower classes are now a conduit for a huge subsidy to the important classes: the corporations, their well-paid managers and employees. (I mean only the upper-tier employees.) No one in the room questions the need for health insurance companies, as worthless a societal segment as those who used to make their living bringing slaves to the new world. Some institutions we can do without.

The trade magazine for the profession is called the “Journal of Accountancy,” and not the “Progressive Magazine.”

Ah, but I am light of foot today, full of new energy, ready to clear my desk and get on with life. It’s over! My license is in place for two more years. My brain is hereby clicked to its “off” position.

A rare opportunity

Tax conferring today … Not fun but necessary. This paragraph that follows needs emphasis, as if affects everyone:

You will receive a notice from the IRS stating that you owe the penalty (for failure to have health insurance). The IRS can collect the money by reducing the amount of any tax refund that you are owed in the future. But the law says that you will not be subject to criminal prosecution and the government cannot file a notice of lien or file a levy on your property.

Got that? They went off the rails. The health insurance industry wrote and passed ACA, mandating that we purchase products from private companies. They must have assumed that a penalty on a private mandate would be unconstitutional, if not the mandate itself. But AHIP was insistent. So they wrote a penalty and made it unenforceable.

I expect this to change, as the mullahs in black robes ruled that the mandate is a tax. But for the time being, if you are penalized for failure to have insurance and are not owed a refund, tell IRS to f*** off. It’s rare we can do that.

Deadland

deadwood_wideweb__430x303_2I just walked around our house opening blinds – it is 6:40 AM and it is pitch black outside. This time of year we normally subscribe to television, but mainstream fare is too laden with advertising to be palatable, no matter the quality of the programming inserted between the commercials. I do from time-to-time hop around those channels, often hitting five or six channels before finding one not in ad mode. What I see is pretty silly, even stupid.

Sitcoms are so poorly written and acted that they merely highlight the sham of laugh tracks. Unless openly perverse and mocking and having no intent of offering a serious message (Seinfeld in the 90’s, Two and One-Half Men more recently), they are either cheesy soap operas or lurid tales of hyper-sexual twenty-somethings. I haven’t sat through serious drama – I refuse to believe that beautiful men and women become brilliant doctors, police and lawyers, and at young age to boot. Have you been to a hospital? People of physical beauty do not have to work or study hard to succeed.
Continue reading “Deadland” →

“And we won.”

If is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. (Upton Sinclair)

If the strategy of the Pew Charitable Trusts is divide and conquer, it has succeeded. Pew has systematically over the past few decades become one of the most active funding sources for mainstream environmental groups. As a legacy of the Sinclair oil fortune, its activities might represent a guilty collective conscious. More likely, it’s an ongoing effort to neutralize opponents.

This article, by John S. Adams in the Great Falls Tribune, demonstrates divide and conquer success. There are deep divides now among environmentalists in Montana.

The divide is not philosophical, at least on the surface. All parties involved claim to have conservation as their primary goal. However, since the late 1980’s there’s been a split, and this coincides with the dominance of Pew as a primary funding source. The split is best described as “activists” and “collaborators.”
Continue reading ““And we won.”” →

Syrian butchers: Views differ

I can tell you from my viewpoint that spinning Montana’s newspapers was as easy as spinning a top. There’s precious little congressional news that is actually broken by a Montana newspaper. That works to the advantage of the politician. Absolutely. When you are free from a burrowing press, you pretty much have clear sailing. (Pat Williams, on leaving office in 1997)

Speaking of managed news, what I’ve seen today reminds me of an event involving former Montana Senator Conrad Burns back in the election campaign of 2000. One of his campaign staffers called a newspaper reporter and went on a rant about his opponent that year – Bryan Schweitzer. The words and accusations were so hard and furious as to cause the reporter to go directly to press with it, and the story caught wind.

I later interviewed Schweitzer for my little public access show at that time, oddly enough called “Piece of Mind.” I mentioned that event to him, and he gave me a bit of inside baseball. Burns had gone off leash, gotten drunk and went into a racist anti-Indian tirade with enough people witnessing to cause problems. The campaign was in damage control mode, and used the telephone call to the reporter as a deflection device. It worked. The phone call became the story, and the rant never made the news. Our news media is ever so pliable!

This came to mind this morning as I read the following two stories. Judge for yourself what the underlying reality might be.

From RT.com: ‘Whole families murdered’: Syrian rebels execute over 80 civilians outside Damascus

From Huffington Post: The Butcher kills another 76

One might be tempted to assume that the truth lies somewhere between the extremes. That’s a logical fallacy, in my opinion. The truth can lie anywhere, on the edges, in the middle, or not even apparent. From my frame of reference, I am inclined to think that HuffPo is lying or exaggerating or dissembling, as it has been my experience that the US news media is corrupt at the top and clueless at the bottom.

But I am open to suggestion.

Chinese exceptionalism

Jiang Zemin, former Chinese president, in unflattering photo used to advance narrative here
Jiang Zemin, former Chinese president, in unflattering photo used to advance narrative here
Travel is a good thing. It allows us to experience foreign cultures first-hand. If done without stereotypes interfering with impressions, it can be a rich experience.

On the other hand, being in a country for a short time, experiencing mostly the tourist interface, tempts us to form far-reaching conclusions based on scant evidence.

That in mind, I wanted to share a couple of experiences, not direct interactions, with Chinese people on our Asia trip.
Continue reading “Chinese exceptionalism” →