Fear, The Root Of Evil

Here's a question for you: Why do "refugees" spend so much time trying to change other countries and cultures into something they are trying to leave?

Here's the deal: if you truly want to emigrate to another country because you think the life there is, for some reason, better or different or offers more opportunities than the one you are leaving, then why would you refuse to integrate and rather bring all the worst aspects of the culture you are leaving?  Doesn't that seem to defeat the purpose?

I do not, nor have I ever agreed with mass immigration.  This is not true immigration, it is an invasion.  Invasions are forceful take-over of other countries and cultures, replacing them with something foreign.  In my humble opinion, when this happens it is an act of war and the existing population is fully within their rights to fight back violently.  They have the right to round up and forcefully expel the invaders and to do everything possible to eradicate the invaders, and to prosecute to the fullest extent of the law any of their own who aid and abet the invaders.

It astounds me to no end that the EU and US populations have reacted with such passivity to the forced invasions of millions of foreigners with incompatible legal and social mores.  To my mind, this demonstrates the profound extent to which Western civilization has declined, in that there is no longer enough people with moral and physical fortitude to stand up to this literal take-over that supplanting millennia-old cultures practically overnight.

Some readers might argue that Brexit and Trump and upcoming "leaders" like Marine Le Pen and Janos Ader are the reaction, but I say this may be too little too late.  First, what can one say about the mentality of the masses who rolled over and accepted the invasion in the first place, or allowed "leaders" to fling open the doors years ago?  Second, there are sufficient numbers of apathetic or mind-controlled idiots who still fight to destroy their own cultures and still have a significant voice.

In a matter such as this, there should be no polite tolerance.  There should be no compassion or passivity.  When one witnesses the wholesale destruction of one's nation and culture.  It is one thing to accept incoming individuals who want to contribute to the general well-being and merge into extant society, but when waves of faceless masses swarm into a nation, absorb irrational amounts of the economy as a "right" and immediately demand that thousands of years of development be thrown out in favor of a wholly incompatible system, that is an invasion and should be repelled with all available force.

It is perhaps instructive to note that this exact situation, though far slower, was the primary cause of the fall of Rome.  By the time Alaric I and the Visigoths sacked Rome in AD410, the social and cultural core had eroded to such a degree that what was once the greatest force on Earth could not repel, nor really gave much effort to it, the invading hordes.

These invaders do not deserve tolerance because they are not tolerant.  They do not deserve compassion because they are not compassionate.  They have as their primary motivation to destroy the existing order and supplant it with their own.  They don't seek to contribute to the general welfare, but to loot it and like locusts leave nothing but barren earth behind them.  The hordes are not educated, thinking people, they are blank slates upon which ideologues can write any program they choose.

If these hordes were truly motivated to change things for the better, they would stay home and reform their own countries.  That is not their goal.  They are exporting their error in a way that is destructive to the invaded lands.

At this point, many readers will take issue with me, having not made it this far and thinking that somehow I am singling out certain peoples over another.  However, I castigate ANY invading culture, whether it be my own or any other.

I have watched closely as the American Way has infiltrated by stealth or force into dozens of other cultures.  I have walked through the wastes of many unique and fascinating cultures now supplanted with McDonald's, KFC and Starbucks.  I have seen what passes for American entertainment muscle out homegrown forms.  I have witnessed American greed literally rape other nations for profit.

To a certain extent, I see the poetic justice embedded in the waves of humanity pouring over US and EU borders.  I have experienced first-hand the effects of British, French, Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese colonialism.  I have seen the same effects of Arabic and Chinese domination of unsuspecting lands.

I do not care what color or background the invaders have.  To me it is sufficient to revile the invaders who seek to destroy, plunder and replace any other culture.  I don't care what ISIS believes, and they are free to attempt to convert others, but when they blowup and bulldoze ancient monuments because the culture that created them is not their own, then they deserve to be eradicated with prejudice.

In history, we have seen great art and wisdom wiped out by invaders.  The European powers that colonized Asia and the Americas should be sufficient warning to the world that this type of behavior is not acceptable, and it doesn't matter who is invading whom.  We cannot change the past, but we can certainly change the future, and the the extent possible, we can seek to preserve as much of the cultures that were destroyed, if for no other reason than to serve as a lesson for the future of humanity.

Trump will not fix the problem.  Brexit, Le Pen and Ader will not fix the problem.  The problem in buried in the core of the individual and no amount of "leaders" can change it.  It is a flaw in human nature that we accept leaders in the first place.  Humans are programmed to roll over and beg whenever confronted with power of any kind.  It is our lack of faith in our own characters and abilities to control our lives that is at fault.  That humans can be herded so easily is our fundamental weakness.

By the same token, when an invader is successful, it is the individual's personal responsibility for that success.  It is our lack of conviction and strength to resist that is to blame, not "leaders."

In short, it is our fear that is our defeat.

Paul vs. The Powers That Be

Languages are slippery things.  Especially when you are translating one to another, and even more so when you are being paid to do it by someone with an agenda.

Language is never limited to simple 'word = word' kinds of formulas.  There are layers of connotations and subtexts, cultural contexts, and individual experience that flavor every part of a language.  Some examples?

In German, there is the word gemuetlichheit (the ue can also be written with an umlaut).  If you look the word up in most dictionaries, it will tell you that the English equivalent is 'cozy'.  This is such a pale translation.  Gemuetlichheit is an emotion for which there is no English word.  It is a feeling of well-being that one has when the environment includes good food, drink, friends, music, and a warmth and camaraderie that is only found in such a setting.  In English, it would take a whole group of words to convey the same content as that single word in German.

How about another?  In Indonesian, there is the word selamat.  Most dictionaries will tell you it means 'good', as in "good morning".  However, the word means much more than that.  Selamat can mean good, happy, fortunate, well, congratulations, and about a half-dozen other English words.  There is no direct, word-for-word translation for selamat.

This is true of every one of the 15 languages that I am proficient in.  Each of them have concepts expressed with single words that do not have equivalents in other languages.  Furthermore, every word you can think of has a vast context that includes every encounter you have had with the word, all your experiences that you self-describe with the word, the etymological origin and cultural baggage of the word.  On top of all that, words evolve over time, growing slang usages and additional cultural baggage.  After all, how would an American English native translate the slang meanings of 'hip' or 'cool'?  What Russian or Mandarin word would your choose to separate 'joint' and 'low temperature' from 'cutting edge' and 'very nice'?

With that said, what about texts written in other languages that are translated into yours?  Add to that a span of hundreds and even thousands of years.  How much is lost when a Babylonian clay tablet is translated into modern Spanish or Turkish?  Worse yet, how much is lost if the original text is ancient Greek, which was then translated into Latin, and from there into English?  Worse yet, suppose the Latin were first translated into older forms of English, and then updated several times over the centuries.

To this already big pile of confusion the fact that punctuation is a relatively modern convention.  Ancient Greek and Latin did not use punctuation.  Instead, they had a complex body of affixes, which combined with syntax and context, told the reader when one thought ended and another began, or indicated a direct quote, or talk the reader that this word was the subject and this other word was the object or a thought.

You have to imagine that huge piles of meaning have been lost, right?  And to complicate matters, we can assume that the translators, or the people paying them, had agendas that 'flavored' the translations, skewing the results in one way or another.  It doesn't take long before the compounding effect takes us far afield from the original intent and meaning of the primary text.

With all of this in mind, I come (at long last) to my point.  I want to examine a brief passage of ancient text that is often mistranslated, often on purpose, and has profound implications for contemporary thinkers.

The passage comes from something called 'Paul's Letter to the Romans'.  We'll bypass the whole 'was Paul a real person' argument and stipulate for the sake of moving along.  The text can be found in any copy, any version of the New Testament, which is a highly controlled and misused set of documents that have profoundly influenced the modern world.

How profoundly?  Well, I'm willing to bet most folks use the term 'powers that be', but few take the time to investigate the origin of the term.  In fact, it comes from the King James translation of the New Testament.  Specifically, it comes from the aforementioned Letter to the Romans, with the common delineation of Chapter 13.

Credible scholarship tells us that Paul's letters were written in ancient Greek (the Gospels probably in Aramaic).  That means we can search the internet for the original text in the original language.  So we click over to Dogpile, type in "original greek text of romans 13", and select what looks to be a fairly authoritative source that even gives tenses, voices, moods, and cases to help us understand what we are seeing.

Searching Romans 13:1, we get:

Πᾶσα ψυχὴ ἐξουσίαις ὑπερεχούσαις ὑποτασσέσθω. οὐ γὰρ ἔστιν ἐξουσία εἰ μὴ ὑπὸ θεοῦ, αἱ δὲ οὖσαι ὑπὸ θεοῦ τεταγμέναι εἰσίν:

Now I know what you are thinking: Hey!  This is all Greek to me!  I know, but I want to make sure that you can't come back and say I cheated.  I'm putting all the info right here.

Now, before we go on, let's take a look at how this passage has been translated.  For this, we click over to biblegateway.com (can you say gateway drugs?) and look up Romans 13:1 in the NIV translation:

Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.

Keep in mind that the 'authorities that exist' is the part we all know as 'the powers that be.'  The word ἐξουσία actually means 'to be at liberty' or 'free', as in what you might tell a house guest when you want them to relax and feel at home.  Already, we've completely shot the standard translation out of the water.


In the 4th century, Jerome was commissioned by Constantine to translate the Greek text into the Latin Vulgate.  In every other instance that I've aware of, Jerome properly translates ἐξουσία as liber, or free.  Yet, in this one instance, he changes it to 'authorities', or the more familiar 'powers that be'.  Why?


Because the line actually reads: let everyone be at liberty and only follow those who are of God and righteous.


In other words, we are told NOT to follow blindly, but that only those who rule in righteousness and godliness are worthy of leadership.  The text goes on to tell us that revolt against evil rulers is a virtue.


Obviously, not something kings and emperors want people thinking.


If it is true that this one little line in the Bible has been maliciously manipulated to conform to the agenda of the PTB, then what other lies fester at the core of our culture and society?  What other 'little' changes have been made, not just to this book, but to all others?  How many other falsehoods have been foisted upon us to make us docile slaves, rather than empowered unique creations with moral duties and obligations to fight evil in all its forms?


We human beings have been played for fools for millennia.  It is morally incumbent on us to take back our power and to clean up our mess.  We owe that to our future, both as individuals and as a species.  It's time to flog the money changers in the temple.


The way to begin is to remove the blinders that were installed on our eyes from earliest childhood.  It is time for us to become adults and take responsibility for our lack of understanding, and our lack of action because of it.  Ignorance can be cured, idiocy can not.  We are left with two clear choices: cure our ignorance, or admit we are idiots.  Frankly, I choose the former.


There is a fictional character that has provided inspiration to me since those long-ago days in high school:  Chief Broom in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."  The first step is to see the fog that clouds our minds, the second step is to clear it away and take back our true power.


It is our birthright.

Just A Little Bit Closer

Reader Note: Our usual column on acupuncture for treating blindness in MS will return next Saturday due to a heavy work and travel schedule in the past two weeks.  Thanks for reading and for the information folks have been sending in.  Sampai jumpa!
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Close.

Interesting word.  Depending on how you pronounce it, you can be zeroing in on your target, or missing it altogether.

Denmark closed its borders.  Minnesota closed its doors.  Stauss-Kahn is closer to freedom.  And the Greatest Depression is getting closer every day.

You can be a closer and get brownie points at work.  Or you can be a closer and be the last man out when the factory shuts down.  Kind of the opposite of a Wally Mart greeter.

Close only counts in horseshoes and hand-grenades, but we all love to get close to our significant squeezes.

A lot depends on what preposition you put with it, too.  Close up, close down, close in, close out, close to, close with.  Close the door, close to the door.

Back to Strauss-Khan for a minute.  Looks like the New York prosecutors read this column, since they have decided, as we did some time ago, that the whole 'raping chamber maids' story didn't smell right.  Last we saw, he had slipped his house arrest, and the maid was headed for deeper water.  What's interesting to note is that as soon as a new head of the IMF was beknighted and ensconsed, Strauss-Khan found himself quite a bit freer.  We're smelling a different rat now.  This story got more exposure than Lady Gaga's not-so-interesting breasts, and now they're all standing at the boarding gate waving him good-bye?  C'mon.  Do you really think we're that stup...don't answer that.

Speaking of reading this here column, looks like Wisconsin schools are suddenly flush with money after they put the reins on unions.  Did we call it, or didn't we?  We have nothing against unions, per se.  At the time they were in vogue, they served a vital purpose.  However, they have become nothing more than fronts for mafia and gangsters, fat and bloated from their own success.

On top of that, the public service is no place for unions.  If you want better pay and bennies, get a real job in the productive sector, so your servants to rob you too.  Sorry, bub, but when you are living off of my dime, you should be grateful to have food on your plate in the first place.

We here at LFS are all for screwing the corporate giants.  Lord knows they've bent us over for far too long.  But government employees work for us and take our money (at gun point) to do it.  Collective bargaining on their part should be limited to begging to keep their jobs every fiscal year.

In other news, Texas closes the legislative special session by allowing TSA to get too close to your goodies.  That the Perry/Dewhurst team are a traitorous bunch of NeoCon scum is obvious, but what do they have on the rest of the servants in Austin that makes them lapdogs?

How anyone could submit to TSA's illegal and immoral groping is beyond us, much less willingly allow their wives and daughters to be personally violated in such a gross and public manner is indicative of mass psychosis.

Obviously, the American male has closed down his higher reasoning and is close to being extinct.

Washington state has closed its tourist bureau and is close to a Minnesota Mambo itself.  Florida has enclosed pink slips with many of its public servants' payslips.  Many states are closing schools and libraries, and California is close to splitting in two.  At the same time, the US is no closer to a solution to its fiscal stupidity.

Many countries are closing parts of the internet to their citizens because it represents a direct threat to the hegemonic sovereignty of government over every aspect of people's lives.  They are using the threat of cyberwar as justification, yet those same governments are the perpetrators of the cyberwar.  Makes close to no sense, or does it?  Perhaps they need more bandwidth to launch their idiocy into cyberspace?  Gives a whole new meaning to the term, "Grow a backbone."

Every day we move closer and closer to the inexorable demise of the prevailing paradigm.  We are in a bus careening down a perilous mountain road, completely out of control, and we are wringing our hands over whether the engine oil was recently changed.  This is very close to being textbook insanity.

It is akin to organizing a shuffle-board game as the Titanic goes down by the bow.  We are hoisting sails in the hopes of gaining speed while the ship's pumps are overwhelmed by the onslaught of water in the ballast.  We are tossing out the baby while fretting over the safety of the bathwater.

We love a good metaphor around here.

It's the closing days of Western Empire.  Our sun has set and our flag is lowered.  We have squandered our moment in history out of sheer greed and avarice.  Many say, "The elite would not endanger themselves, so we must stay close to them!"  Au contraire.  As personal witness, we have seen first-hand the ability of someone who has lost all contact with reality destroy themselves and everyone around them, by being trapped in a model of reality that is flawed at its very core.  Closeness to the perpetrators will only hasten the inevitable demise, not protect against it.

Megalomania causes one to envision a personal cloak of invincibility, so that one is blind to the many holes in the armor.  Throughout history, we see repeated examples of people drunk with their own success and imagining themselves incapable of error.  Just because the ladder of domination has withstood so far, does not mean that the next rung will sustain the weight, or that there is even a next rung at all.

The PIIGS are close to complete implosion.  Denmark is withdrawing into its peninsular nest.  Gross Britain is anxiously watching the subjects get restless.  The US is on the verge of a collapse that will be the grist of history texts for hundreds of years to come.

Even if we stop dead in our tracks, the precipice will continue to move ever closer.  Nothing can stop the Laws of Economic Gravity.

As a civilization, we have built a mountain by digging the dirt out from under our feet.  No matter how careful we are, we must inevitably fall into the pit, while admiring the product of our cleverness.

When we attend the funeral of a friend, whose profligate lifestyle led to their untimely death, we don't marvel at the tragedy of their passing, we nod our heads in knowing that their choices made the current situation unavoidable.  Perhaps we admire their achievements, possibly envy some of their experiences, but we still feel justified that our own reserve leaves us living while they are dead.

The weakness of any paradigm are the assumptions on which it is founded.  We have assumed that debt was properity, while closing our eyes to the repeated examples, both personal and historic, that this is not true.  Every mouthful of food we take is a mouthful denied to someone else.  Every dollar of debt we use is a piece of future properity that we will not have.

Remember the Canadian guy who started the jogging craze?  His name was Jim Fixx.  He died of a heart attack at 55 while jogging.  Brings you close to tears, doesn't it?

As we close this chapter in human history, there will be many who will bemoan its passing, yet the aware person will see that we have carved our own headstone.  It is difficult for the individual to conceive of things so much larger than the Self.  The scale of our hubris has outstripped our ability to deal with it, even on a conceptual basis.

The hardest thing for humans is to come to grips with their own failure, but if our progeny is to survive, we must do so and quickly.  Look at the way the Army Corps of Engineers has fought the flooding Mississippi.  Accepting the inevitable flood, they have calculated when and where to release the onslaught.

In dealing with our creation, we must take the biblical advice and pluck out the offending part, in order to save the rest.  When a physician is dealing with a gangrenous extremity, his choice is to amputate or risk losing the patient entirely.  The climber whose arm was pinned beneath a boulder had only one choice, cut off the arm himself or die.

We are closing in quickly on this singular choice.  Will we sacrifice everything to keep the paradigm whole?  Or will we chose to amputate the offending parts to spare the more vital systems?

Close.  Closer, Closing.  Closest.