God, Isis, Politics, Goodbye

THE ABSURD TIMES

Above: this is what we have declined to.

            Zarathustra stood amongst his animals, his eagle on one wrist and the falcon on the other.  He leaned forward on his walking stick, glanced at the sun, and then to his animals.

            "Ye all are with me as I glanced at the sun, and what would the sun be without those form whom it shines?  Yet I am weary of man and how he has gone under and kept sinking.

            "Yea verilly, I thinketh that man has sunk to his greatest depth and shall never rise up."

            With that, Zarathustra grew melancholy.  He gazed about and saw his friend and said "Thou shalt go down to man and tell him how deep he has sunk.  Let him know I am no longer with him, but thou, thou shalt return after this last trek and tell me what transpired.  Let not man depress thee, but have fun in telling him the most recent of the truths.  The tell him that Zarathustra seeks a new breed and future and bid him farewell."

            His friend replied "I've quit these morons, you know that."

            And Zarathustra replied with a heavy heart "Yea, I knowest that, but thou owest me this one last favor.  After that, we shall stay on this mountain and roam as we wish"

            And his friend replied, "Ok, ok, but I'll be damned if I'm going to use that Renaissance English you use."

            And Zarathustra replied "It be a common error, verily Common, but speakest thou as thou wilt"

           

Also Sprach Zarathustra

           

________________________

            So, here I am to clue you in.  I wanted to take a break from all this nonsense, but once more around the rosie.

            Let's start out with an old simple issue, marriage.  An English poet once wrote the only two lines of his worth remembering.  It consists of a preface of a prospective wife named Margaret who said "I will not marry you unless you stop smoking your cigars."  At that point, Kipling wrote:

"A million Maggies are willing to bear the yoke,

And a woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke."

_____________________________

Ok, that's not what I'm talking about here either.  First, let's get it clear that God is dead and Zarathustra said "Where you can not help, there you must walk by."  So I don't expect to do either until I'm finished with this. 

We can start with ISIS which is only the latest example of what a belief in a God can do if carried on to its logical conclusion.  Religion is used as a cover for the lust for power and money.  The last example, before ISIS was the Spanish Inquisition.  Salem wasn't a thrill either.

ISIS, to give Islam its due, is not even a corruption of Islam.  Indeed, instead of calling it Deash, which is a step in the right direction, the term "Hawarji" best applies to them, something that approximates what Christians think of as "Apostates".  If Islam had a Pope, he would excommunicate them all, but there is no centralized authority like that in Islam, only those who claim it.

Cockburn, of the Independent  points out that every time ISIS suffers a setback, it comes up with a new atrocity.  So, beheading doesn't seem to have the effect that burning people alive does.  Thus, the Guillotine is replaced by knives and people are burned alive in caged rather than on posts as in the cases of Joan of Arc and Savronolla. 

People wonder why, if ISIS is do committed to eliminate "Zionism," it doesn't attack Israel rather than "other" Moslems.  Well, Netanyahu of Israel claims that it is only his presence that prevents them from coming.  If he looses the election, ISIS will come.  Actually, Daesh is too busy purifying Islam.  Furthermore, is there any doubt that ISIS would have been stopped had Saddam Hussein remained leader of Iraq?  Would Iran be the only force capable of stopping them, and willing to?  Is there any doubt that the US created it in order to cause problems for Assad in Syria?  That things would be far better in Libya had Gaddafi remained in power?  Bush, Bush, Obama, Clinton, the axis of medieval (with apologists to those who actually know the middle-ages).

This is what Republicans are trying to do with a recent letter to Iran, saying the treaty will not last.  Exactly what the more ISIS-like Shia clerics in Iran are saying.  The two groups are well-suited for one another. 

The latest series of atrocities has to do with destroying ancient ruins of 3,000 year old cities and remnants of their civilization, again in the name of Islam.  Daesh overlooks the fact that we did the same in Iraq with Bush I and people here were unfazed.  See, for Americans, nothing is more sacred than a 1959 Edsel, real history, not some old statue. 

When the Taliban destroyed a statue of an ancient Buddha, despite the outcry here, the Dali Lama said, while giggling, "They will loose some tourist trade," or something like that. 

Anyway, must of the above is documented in the interviews below.  There is so much material there that I don't expect anyone to get through it all, but it should be in one place, I thought.

I will be sending them all together in the next issue, just to keep things is some sort of order.

Anyway, I'm outta here.  I've told you all of this crap before and it hasn't made one bit of a difference.  I don't expect it to now, so farewell! 

-->