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.

Modern Mythology

I'm interested in Comparative Mythology.  Usually scholars focus on the historical and on a comparison of belief systems around the world.  But there don't seem to be many who have the starch in them to study their own culture in modern times.

Pop culture has an extensive, shifting mythology associated with it; as do all cultures.   In the US it's all taken for granted and unspoken for the most part.  And in the media it seems to be shifting backward in time, to a past age when monogamy and religion ruled almost all of American life.  It's like there's a movement to undo the liberation of the sixties.

So let's list some currently touted beliefs...

First there's the belief that a monogamous, heterosexual relationship is the only path to true happiness and personal fulfillment.  That's an idea from the Nineteenth Century that's being resurrected lately in the media.

I don't think we need to comment on the flaws in that idea.  Even without considering the needs of LGBT people, you should be able to see that this kind of concept leaves a lot of people doomed to a life of misery.  Yet they keep trying to realize this false ideal of human happiness.

My belief is that the concept of a soul mate is total garbage. People seem to find these soul mates most often among those they see on a regular basis in their everday lives...destiny or just the reality of the way humans "fall in love" with people they see often?  I go with the latter.

There are animals who mate for life as a characteristic of their species...mostly birds.  But I don't think humans normally do this. Partners tire of each other, they part, they find new partners.  Face it, that's our nature to do that.  It's far healthier than monogamy, because it spreads genes around...making our species stronger and less prone to genetic flaws.

Some people seem to be happy in a longlasting monogamous relationship.  I don't dispute that.  But teaching young people that this is the only path to true happiness is simply misleading them. It's wrong to lie to young people.  They usually figure it out and become disillusioned, or they try to realize false ideals and lead miserable lives.  Either way, it's just wrong.  We should teach them truth, not lies.

OK, next time I'll attack some other beliefs that nobody dares question.  Stay tuned, even if you aren't ready to believe me. Who knows, maybe some of you will learn something.

Bad Grammar Among the Educated

OK, let's talk grammar...bad grammar.  There's just way too much of it, especially among the educated.  I blame the school system and the boobs who made occupations like lawyer and doctor pay at least ten times as much as being a schoolteacher.

We're all to blame.  When we get an outlandishly padded bill in a doctor's office, do we raise a stink over it?...No.  Well why not? Wimps, all of us...we should be ashamed.

Doctors resisted "socialized medicine" in the US and lobbied for "anything goes" aka the "free market".  Does anyone really believe that doctor's fees are controlled by free-market forces in the economy?  They wanted to be "free", so they should be prepared to dicker over prices and give estimates.  That's what free markets are, not fixed prices set by doctors and hospitals in secret meetings.

Back to grammar...

The word I is nominative, me is objective case.  So when soldiers risk their lives to protect our sorry butts, we should say they did it for you and me, not "you and I".  The word and is a conjunction, it has no effect whatsoever on case of personal pronouns.

So when a pop star sings "Between you and I", she's being stupid. It's "Between you and me", not "you and I".  Would you say "Between I and you"?...I hope not.

Next lesson...the word than is either a conjunction or a preposition.  People who insist that it can only be a conjunction are arrogant fools....who don't look things up in dictionaries because they think they're "educated" enough that they don't have to do things like that.

Two examples...."She's a better singer than I could ever hope to be."...."She's a better singer than me."  Both are CORRECT!

"She's a better singer than I" is clearly wrong.  In this sentence, a corruption of the second example, the word than is a preposition, so it should be followed by the objective case of the personal pronoun.  I wish educated people would buy dictionaries and use them before they spout their absurdities.  In the first example I gave, than is a conjunction.  In the second, it's a preposition.  The personal pronoun in the first example is "I" because it's the subject of a phrase containing a pronoun and a verb.

Trouble is, the widespread use of "taller than I", "to you and I" and other corrupt usage of English will continue...because they sound "educated".  It's like the snobbish phrases "It is I" and "aren't I"...they sound "upper class".  The correct things to say are "It's me" or "am I not" or even "ain't I".  "Aren't I" is dead wrong, "It is I" is just bad use of language.  The word is does not take an object, but the common usage is "It's me"...which is not wrong at all.  In French it's "C'est moi."  "It is I" is just plain snobbery, and it's been recognized as such by language scholars since the Eighteenth Century.  Don't be a snob, they're disgusting.

I once had an editor red-pencil the phrase "none were found" in something I wrote.  I demanded an explanation and he said none is singular....complete garbage.  None has no number, so it can't be singular or plural by any rule.  Zero is not a measurable quantity. In truth it doesn't exist.

The proper usage is to see the word none in context.  If you looked for survivors (notice...plural) after a disaster and "none were found", that's good usage, sad as it may be.  You were looking for as many as you could find, not just one and forget the rest.  But it's not a rule, it's just common sense...a foreign concept to that editor.

Seemed like everyone in academia and government agreed with that editor's confusion at the time..."none was" became the rule in all publications for a while.  I have visions of someone FINALLY referring to a freshman textbook of English grammar where the use of the word none is discussed.  "None were" has made a comeback since those dark days of foggy brains.

Anyway I refused to allow my work to be published with stupid "corrections" to my good use of English.  They went along reluctantly, shaking their heads.  I learned that the worst kind of fool is an educated one who's really only partly educated.  They can be appallingly certain when they make mistakes.