Quackery Abounds

I'm getting fed up with all the quackery I'm running into online.

Everyone seems to gulp it down without giving things any thought whatsoever...like the anti-soy madness.

If you trace this garbage back to a source, it all seems to be coming from the Weston A. Price Foundation.  They claim that they get no funding from for-profit companies.  That's true, but they do get funding from INDIVIDUALS who are part of the dairy and meat industries.  So it's just a word game, really.

And of course it's just a coincidence that this anti-soy campaign began just as soy products were starting to make a significant dent in the dairy and meat-producing industries.

Let's just take their principle claim about soy...that it has compounds that mimic estrogen.  This is simply not true.  Soy is rich in isoflavones which have regulatory functions in plants.  Humans are not plants, we're animals.  So compounds which biochemists have called plant estrogens do not affect us like human estrogen.

The anti-soy propagandists always use words like "could" or "may" when talking about the dangers of soy.  They have no proof whatsoever for their claims, and I'm fed up with all you gullible people who believe this stuff without looking into things further.

Stop being such suckers.

A Word About Christmas

Please don't make a fuss over the way the holiday season seems to be more about partying than Christian devotion.  Spare us all that.

Let's lay out the facts first...the original festival with the tree, the holly, the mistletoe, the wreath...that was part of the Old Religion in northern Europe.  It's called Yule, not Christmas. The Church did what they always do in these situations...they despaired of getting people to abandon their solstice festival in favor of churchgoing and giving money to the priests.  So they sanctioned the pagan festivities by saying they were all part of the holiday of Christmas.

Christmas itself had been moved to December 25 by the Roman emperor Constantine when he created modern Christianity by merging Mithraism, Zoroastrianism, and Christianity into one religion...and then making it the official faith of the Empire.  If you've never heard of Mithraism...think of a holy Savior who is the son of a sky god, comes to earth to save humanity from its sins, has a last supper with 12 disciples, gets buried in a stone tomb, rises from the dead, and ascends to heaven on a cloud to be with his Father.

A copy of Christianity you say?...guess again.  Mithraism originated in the Fifth Century BCE.  They celebrated rituals called "masses" on Sunday, and were organized by diocese.  The supreme leaders were descendants of Mithras and were called by the name Peter, which means rock, since Mithras was born from a rock.  This birth took place on December 25th.

Mithraism was favored by the Romans as the religion of the military men.  It held women to be inferior and justified rape during war. Roman soldiers had little contact with family life as we know it, they were married to their jobs, so to speak.

Zoroastrianism introduced the concept of an eternal struggle between good and evil, another concept that fit well with the power of the "benevolent" rule of the emperor.  Zoroastrians escaped persecution in ancient Iran by hiding in catacombs where they shared their sacraments of bread and wine.

So please don't tell me that Christmas is being stolen by secular doings.  Even if it were, it would be a case of "what goes around comes around", since Christians stole Yule from pagans.  Personally, I'd like to have it back.

And while you're at it, give us back Samhain too.  It's not Halloween, that's a name the Church made up too.  Easter is pagan too, it's the spring festival where Scandinavians celebrate the fertility of the earth and the fecundity of animal life with bunnies and eggs. Oestre is the Norse Goddess of the Dawn....may she continue to bless us all each and every day.

Strange Events in Ferguson

For those who are ignorant of how legal proceedings are normally conducted, the grand jury failure to indict Officer Darren Wilson can almost sound reasonable.

But in truth, failure of a grand jury to indict is extremely rare.  And presenting the grand jury with ALL the available evidence, including all the possibly exculpatory evidence, is beyond rare.  It doesn't happen.

Grand jury proceedings are NOT a trial.  There are no battling lawyers, no judge, no formal rules.  It's just a relatively informal proceeding that is supposed to help a prosecutor decide whether to bring a case to trial.  Normally, no exculpatory evidence is presented, the TRIAL is the place for that.  It's a proceeding that is supposed to evaluate the evidence against a possible defendant(s) after a possibly criminal incident has occurred, to investigate whether the incident(s) that took place could result in a conviction at a subsequent trial.

This is not what took place in Ferguson.  The prosecutor did not guide the grand jury as he would normally do, he just dumped all the available evidence on them and left them to fend for themselves. With the mountain of conflicting stories available to consider, they had little choice except to give up and say there is no clear case.

But the reality of criminal law is that witnesses almost ALWAYS differ in the details.  The prosecutor would normally point this out, and in any case would never normally present the grand jury with exculpatory or confusing accounts as the prosecutor did in this proceeding.

The process was rigged, it was a crooked proceeding dressed up to look like something fair and impartial.  Most importantly, it was very far removed from anything that would have happened if the shooter had been anyone other than a white police officer in a racist community.  There was enough solid evidence in this case to indict Officer Wilson 20 times over.  If he is innocent of a crime, a TRIAL would have been the place to prove that, not a grand jury proceeding where a prosecutor played the role of Wilson's defense attorney and abdicated his role as a representative of THE PEOPLE.

Mr. Tambourine Man

I've been waiting for a long time for someone to figure out the lyrics to Bob Dylan's Tambourine Man.  I knew what the song meant, but it seemed like nobody else did.  I've heard music professors proclaim pompously that it's about drugs.  Well no, dummy, it's not.

Finally, I found it online...some people had figured it out, and it was verified by someone who knew a musician who was present at a late-night session where Bob actually explained how he came to write such a strange song.

It's really a simple song, if you happen to know who the Tambourine Man really is.  I won't help you there, go find out for yourself.  He symbolizes something and you can find depictions of him in art that goes back centuries.  Bob is a strange musician in a way, he doesn't seem to care that people are too ignorant to understand his references to mythology and human culture.  He never did like the obtuse and ignorant people who demanded to know what his songs meant.  I'm with him on that, actually.  As he once said to a reporter who asked him about the meaning of his songs..."I wouldn't know, I'm just the guitar player."

People who get angry at poets because they can't figure out the meaning are fools.  Poetry isn't for the wife-beaters and dog-kickers of this world.

Racist Nation??

It's so annoying when people whine about the US being racist. Nothing could be farther from the truth.  Look at the comparison of assets...Median assets of white families - $97,000...Median assets of black families - $4900...Median assets of Hispanic families - $1300.

Wait, that doesn't sound right...well, maybe people of color are lazy and don't work hard.  That's what my father always said.

OK, forget the numbers.  Just listen to what the politicians tell us and you'll see that this country has equal opportunities for all. Maybe there's a mistake and some zeros got dropped off the numbers for the "colored".

Liberal Bias

I've just heard the news that reality has a liberal bias.

Now we all know that liberalism is synonymous with evil and ungodliness.  So the solution to this problem is clear...

We must pass laws banning any mention of reality...also any blogs based on the real world or publications that mention it.  Reality is no longer acceptable in America.  It's our patriotic duty to separate ourselves completely from reality.

Just doing my part to clean up this country...I hope you're all with me on this. I know the Congress is already on board...they want nothing to do with reality.

Islamic State

We are dealing with the threat from the Islamic State aka ISIS aka ISIL in the wrong way in the media. The group is falling into the category of a political/religious/insurgent group in discussions and news articles.  Islamic State, as they currently call themselves, is not any of these things.

It's an enormous, highly dangerous criminal conspiracy.  They are not political, they're organized crime on a vast scale.  The recent UN report on the group details their activities...child abuse, mass murder, ethnic cleansing, sex slavery, abuse of the elderly and infirm, systematic use of armed robbery...on and on it goes.  They seem to have no ethics or morality whatsoever.

Ordinarily I take a relatively pacifist approach to politics.  But this has nothing to do with politics. These people are simply criminals, and this is a law enforcement problem on a vast scale.  The UN report shows that they're guilty of many crimes against humanity.

If the world doesn't stand up to them, they'll just keep on growing like a cancer.