May 30 2009
“Out of Egypt I will call my son,” says the prophet, so Mary and Joseph, in Matthew, make a detour to Egypt.
“Born of a virgin,” Matthew reads in the Greek translation of the scripture, so he invents virgin birth. If he had been able to read the original Hebrew, he would have realize the word was not virgin. Whoops!
Christianity doesn’t make any sense. Now, onto the evidence recently recovered from the sands of Egypt which definitively prove the innocence of Judas Iscariot…
May 30 2009
The Sotomayor nomination. Conservative radio host asks, “what happened to the TRUTH?” General Petreaus says, “We violated the Geneva Conventions.” A black off-duty NYPD officer is killed by another NYPD officer.
May 30 2009
As usual, on Fridays, I post a series of, sometimes related shots, & sometimes random ones.
I`d call this set random, though I often do have a common thread in the set.
If you find such a thing tonight please advise me.
The only common theme in tonight`s shots is that they should distract you from conformity.
To set the mood, I`ll put this shot up to pique your curiosity.
YUCCA MOON
May 30 2009
On the way to Baghdad in 2003, in the aftermath of “prolonged, ferocious combat” in the Euphrates Valley around Najaf, General David Petraeus talked about the invasion with journalist and historian Rick Atkinson. When the interview was over, Petraeus hooked his thumbs into his flak vest and adjusted the weight on his shoulders. “Tell me how this ends,” he said.
The English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley could have told him how it ends. It ends in death and desolation, it ends in ruin. No ruler, no matter how powerful, no matter how arrogant, can escape the judgment of history. It does not redeem tyrants, it exposes them as posturing frauds . . .
I met a traveler from an antique land,
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone,
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read.And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay,
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Round the decay of that colossal wreck Dick Cheney, the boundless crimes of his torturers are being exposed and laid bare. But with a sneer of cold command . . .
he has told America to look upon his mighty works, and despair that Obama will not keep America “safe” like Dick Cheney did, with rape and sodomy and torture.
May 30 2009
Sometimes while prowling back alleys you find things that don’t bear the light of day, brass ritual cymbal turns out to be a trashcan cover, exotic seafood dinner is really rotten fish guts.
Yet perhaps there’s some truth to these lies.
Here in NYC the sun has gone down. That’s the time to prowl.
You’re in kindergarten and some strange large being is telling you about reading and showing you something called an alphabet. And you go with the flow and recite all the letters and hear how they’re put together and daydream and look out the window and listen some more and sneak candy from out of your desk and make faces at the other children when the teacher’s not looking and take naps on mats.
And then one day you can read. You look at a page with black squiggles on it and all of a sudden they’re not squiggles any more, they’re words and you can read them. You’ve taken the leap.
May 30 2009
You. Yeah, you. You pontificating white males (so unrepresentative of the vast majority of your fellows in race and gender) that think that one bloody word in one speech years ago, a membership to an organization with a Spanish name and a decision upholding a city’s move to limit its liability and scrap a bad test because its results uniformly favored one racial group over another one…
…get real.
You think that Judge Sotomayor is worse for the country than the Confederacy winning the Civil War? You seriously believe that Victoria Woodhull, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony would have locked arms with you in protesting her nomination to the Supreme Court?
You believe that if Martin Luther King, Jr. were alive today he would be on the Sunday talk show circuit talking about how she’s a “reverse racist”?
May 30 2009
I can’t say it has been a top of the line week. Given that last week included the death of the faculty colleague I work most closely with, one might have expected this week to have little direction to go but up. But one apparently would would have been wrong about that.
Of course leading off with Memorial Day weekend was a giant indication the week wasn’t going to be a whole lot of fun. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell ramps up for veterans, whether the public is supposedly honoring the live ones or the dead ones. As a former draft dodger who was arrested by the FBI and forced to serve as an alternative to spending five years in the Oklahoma State Pen, I’m not terribly proud of my service…but I did the best I could while I was there.
Irony is one of the things the military does best. What better MOS for a draft dodger than military police. There was method in the madness, however, since at the time, Nixon had told the public that draftees would not be made into combat troops and combat troops would be brought home from Nam. What he failed to mention was that MPs were not combat troops, that the combat troops would be replaced by MPs and the draftees would be trained as, you guessed it, MPs.
