Jesus V. Horus

*Both born to a virgin, as announced to the expectant mother by an angle.

*Both births announced by angles to three monarchs who were led to the birth place by a bright star in the east.

*Both were under threat of murder by a king (Herut & Herod respectively)

*Both were said to be both god and man.

*Both were called “The anointed one” (Krist and Christ respectively)

*Both were referred to at various times as:

                The Lamb of God

                The Good Sheppard

                The Son of Man

                The Word

                The Fisher

                The Winnower

*Both have no biographical information between ages 12 through 30 when:

*Both were baptized in a river by a holy man who was subsequently beheaded.

*Both were taken from the desert to a high mountain top and tempted by an evil force (Set & Satan)

*Both had 12 disciples.

*Both raised a dead man named Lazarus from the grave.

*Both gave a key address called: “The sermon on the mount.”

*Both were crucified along with two thieves and buried in a tomb from which:

* Both were raised from the dead 3 days later and appeared first to a woman in their inner circle.

*Both will allegedly “Reign for 1,000 years in the Millennium.”

The ONE difference between the pair:  Horus was worshiped four centuries before Jesus’ birth.  Get over yourselves, crossers–your religon is a remake…

The Simon Wiesenthal Center has been circulating a petition in hopes of getting the United Nations to declare suicide bombings a war crime. I object strongly…

First things are first, the text of the petition is as follows:

—————————————————————————————————————-

To: UN and World Government Leaders We, the undersigned, petition the United Nations, its Security Council and World Government Leaders to join Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to declare that homicide/suicide bombings and acts of terror against civilians are “war crimes against humanity.”

Furthermore, we insist that the United Nations, its Security Council and World Government Leaders declare that raising infants and children to become suicidal/homicidal bombers is a violation of fundamental human rights, a breach of the Geneva Convention and a war crime.

We ask that those political, governmental, military and religious organizations and their leaders and supporters be prosecuted by the International War Crimes Tribunal to the fullest extent of International Law. It is our firm belief that when these genocidal war crimes cease, populations will not have to conduct defensive actions against terrorism. When that happens, there stands to be improved chances of peace in the world through negotiation and civilized conflict resolution. The petitioners firmly believe that conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere can and must be resolved by diplomatic, political and negotiated means, but that when civilians are attacked by terrorists, there is no recourse but for defensive measures.

We have signed this position and sent it to people of all faiths, ethnic backgrounds and political beliefs with the hopes that the UN and World Leaders will not only vote to divest countries of their weapons of mass destruction, but upon the immorality and criminality of raising of innocents to kill other innocents.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

—————————————————————————————————————-

My problem with this?  Why “Suicide” bombings and not, say, aerial bombings, or shelling the shit out of people with artillery for that matter? I will tell you: Because rich countries can afford planes and howitzers and poor ones cannot. In effect, what this petition is saying is that since Israel is wealthy it is right and proper for them to kill Palestinians. That’s what governments do and it is accepted practice. The dirty Palestinians, on the other hand, have no right to retaliate because they are poor and CAN’T afford these things.

All their feckless arguments about the “immorality and criminality of raising of innocents to kill other innocents” can be equally applied to the state of Israel sending uniformed goons to butcher people and take their land by force. In the end the only significant difference between a soldier and a terrorist is matching outfits.

This is what the rich always do. When they murder nations in the name of profit they glibly brush aside the carnage of their greed as the unfortunate cost of progress. If a man steels a loaf of bread to feed his starving family he’s a degenerate criminal sack of shit. Hypocrisy is not morality, and this petition represents hypocrisy in its most naked form.

I have a plan to end all suicide bombings in Israel tomorrow: Sell the Palestinians Stinger Missiles. They aren’t crazy; they’re just making do with what they have: pissed-off teenagers. Who doesn’t have those?

1)      Ban all forms of public advertising.

2)      Limit free speech rights to individual citizens.

3)      Make it a criminal offense to file a frivolous lawsuit.

4)      Make it unlawful for non-individual citizens to own stock and then only in a company they are directly employed by.

5)      Make corporate officers criminally libel for any illegal acts committed by their companies.

6)      Make it unlawful for a news organization to disseminate information that is factually inaccurate or irrelevant to the public welfare.

7)      Make it unlawful to own more than a single residential property.

8)      Make it unlawful to file a patent on techniques of any sort, methods of communication, or anything that occurs independent of human intervention.

9)      Require professional jurists trained in the law, the effective critiquing scientific evidence, and to ignore emotional arguments.

10)  100% socialized medical industry where all treatment and access is fully communal and not for profit.

11)  100% socialized legal/penal system where all representation and incarsaration is fully communal and not for profit.

12)   100% socialized educational system where expenditures are based purely on number of students and advancement is strictly limited by individual achievement and not for profit.

“It’s not sniping, it’s Extreme Voting”

–Dave Henking.

Here is an experiment that you can perform at home which proves there is no god. Pick up a pen or other small object. Hold it out at arm’s length and release. If it falls, assuming you are on earth at the time, there is no god.

If there is a god who created everything then he MUST be perfect and all powerful. So then why do the laws of physics exist? If the universe was created by such a creature everything would happen in a magical and arbitrary fashion, with no way to explain anything. Natural laws would be utterly pointless, everything doing what it does because: “HE WILLS IT TO BE SO!”

If such laws are required, then god is not perfect. If he isn’t perfect, he isn’t god. Is he?  Get over yourselves, dipshits.  The universe isn’t about you.  Believing in god is just a pittiful way of trying to convince yourself that it is.

“Anything worth fighting for is worth fighting dirty for.”
–Unknown

“Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.”

–Oscar Wilde

We are all born of the far-flung debris

Of ancient lights that have gone from the night.

We and the trees, the rocks and the soil:

All brothers brewed in a cosmic cauldron.

We race our way along the expanse in

A seething tempest, too huge to be seen;

Strewn wide like seeds through the boundless reaches

And reunited by gravity’s hand.

There is no free will, only gravity.

Boundless, soulless, relentless gravity.

The cold-hard compulsion of chemistry.

All things are foregone; pointless, closed and fixed.

All will end lightless, scattered through the void

Or in the bellies of the great dragons

Upon which all of the galaxies wheel.

All was planned in the musings of atoms,

All of us doomed before time’s inception;

All questions are answered simply:  Because…

Sightless we scramble about in the dark,

Inertia’s shadow ever gaining ground.

Blotting the sun out, then the stars in turn,

And bleeding the heat from our sweat-soaked skins

Which shiver and quake for want of a flame.

How easy it is, insulated by

A few feet of earth once entropy comes,

Hunting like a shark through the depths of time.

Hear them bay, the dogs of the Wild Hunt,

Rabid with pleasure we may never know.

You can contact me here.

Please direct all death threats here.

“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”

–George Orwell

When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle.
Then I realised God doesn’t work that way, so I stole
one and prayed for forgiveness.

–Emo Phillips

Ephesians 6:5-9

“Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ. Obey them not only to win their favor when their eye is on you, but like slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from your heart. Serve wholeheartedly, as if you were serving the Lord, not men, because you know that the Lord will reward everyone for whatever good he does, whether he is slave or free.”

Judges 21:10-24 NLT

“So they sent twelve thousand warriors to Jabesh-gilead with orders to kill everyone there, including women and children.  “This is what you are to do,” they said. “Completely destroy all the males and every woman who is not a virgin.”  Among the residents of Jabesh-gilead they found four hundred young virgins who had never slept with a man, and they brought them to the camp at Shiloh in the land of Canaan.

 The Israelite assembly sent a peace delegation to the little remnant of Benjamin who were living at the rock of Rimmon. Then the men of Benjamin returned to their homes, and the four hundred women of Jabesh-gilead who were spared were given to them as wives.  But there were not enough women for all of them.  The people felt sorry for Benjamin because the LORD had left this gap in the tribes of Israel.  So the Israelite leaders asked, “How can we find wives for the few who remain, since all the women of the tribe of Benjamin are dead?  There must be heirs for the survivors so that an entire tribe of Israel will not be lost forever.  But we cannot give them our own daughters in marriage because we have sworn with a solemn oath that anyone who does this will fall under God’s curse.”

  Then they thought of the annual festival of the LORD held in Shiloh, between Lebonah and Bethel, along the east side of the road that goes from Bethel to Shechem.  They told the men of Benjamin who still needed wives, “Go and hide in the vineyards.  When the women of Shiloh come out for their dances, rush out from the vineyards, and each of you can take one of them home to be your wife!  And when their fathers and brothers come to us in protest, we will tell them, ‘Please be understanding.  Let them have your daughters, for we didn’t find enough wives for them when we destroyed Jabesh-gilead. And you are not guilty of breaking the vow since you did not give your daughters in marriage to them.’”  So the men of Benjamin did as they were told.  They kidnapped the women who took part in the celebration and carried them off to the land of their own inheritance.  Then they rebuilt their towns and lived in them.  So the assembly of Israel departed by tribes and families, and they returned to their own homes.”

Deuteronomy 20:10-14

 ”As you approach a town to attack it, first offer its people terms for peace.  If they accept your terms and open the gates to you, then all the people inside will serve you in forced labor.  But if they refuse to make peace and prepare to fight, you must attack the town.  When the LORD your God hands it over to you, kill every man in the town.  But you may keep for yourselves all the women, children, livestock, and other plunder.  You may enjoy the spoils of your enemies that the LORD your God has given you.”

Exodus 21:20-21 NAB

“When a man strikes his male or female slave with a rod so hard that the slave dies under his hand, he shall be punished.  If, however, the slave survives for a day or two, he is not to be punished, since the slave is his own property.”

Nahum 1:2-8 NLT

“The LORD is a jealous God, filled with vengeance and wrath.  He takes revenge on all who oppose him and furiously destroys his enemies!  The LORD is slow to get angry, but his power is great, and he never lets the guilty go unpunished.  He displays his power in the whirlwind and the storm.  The billowing clouds are the dust beneath his feet.  At his command the oceans and rivers dry up, the lush pastures of Bashan and Carmel fade, and the green forests of Lebanon wilt.  In his presence the mountains quake, and the hills melt away; the earth trembles, and its people are destroyed.  Who can stand before his fierce anger?  Who can survive his burning fury?  His rage blazes forth like fire, and the mountains crumble to dust in his presence.  The LORD is good.  When trouble comes, he is a strong refuge.  And he knows everyone who trusts in him.  But he sweeps away his enemies in an overwhelming flood.  He pursues his foes into the darkness of night.”

The gunfighters raised their own pantheon
Of martyrs and saints up to the heavens,
It was the grave alone that could place them
Firmly beyond the reach of challengers
And all their blood-thirsty aspirations.

Their tortured headstones riddled with vein
Pot-marks of bitter grapes from later comers.
Living practitioners were but touchstones,
Their cold professional blood a prized ink
For others to scribe their eager names in.

Those heady days, buried with Marshal Erp;
No more would big hats and righteous anger
Excuse the exchange of lead in the street.
People seem to find it less cute these days,
Now only the cops get away with it.

                          * * *

I destroy you over and over,
Unmake you with every thread I tug;
I see you unravel before me.

Should I fear your dismantlement?
Or shrug, as I do, indifferently;
Unconcerned as a mayfly with time.

I create you again and again,
Re-thread you like an eager needle
That knows no industry but mending.

                      * * *

Ghastly, horrid, in tattered shrouds;
Their features ravaged by decay.
Though their faces haunt you at night,
They are only the dead, my love.

Lifeless they lay, fettered to doom.
Unable to taste of our world.
Though their eyes seem ever to stair,
They are only the dead, my love.

Wretched husks, devoid of all sense,
They taunt us with our mortal fear.
Though they encroach upon your dreams,
They are only the dead, my love.

Gone to dust, banished from time,
They howl in silence from the grave.
Though their spirits have found no peace,
They are only the dead, my love.

Shadow things, cast into the void
Where we can not hope to reach them.
Though even now they walk and breath,
They are only the dead, my love.

                             * * *

A life’s work rendered in coarse white chalk;
A monumental undertaking
Of intricate construction, wrought on

A wide plane of slate hung from a wall.
Endless labyrinths navigated–
Thought surging through the darkened future

For the surface and promised daylight.
The numbers boggle me, leave me dry;
My math-happy friend swims their ocean

                           * * *

In the interest of fairness and amity, here are ten things I like about christians:

1 ) They don’t get reincarnated.

2 ) They’re biodegradable.

3 ) I never have to wait behind them in line at the book store.

4 ) They often kill each other.

5 ) They are flammable.

6 ) They always know where to score the best drugs and cheapest hookers.

7 ) They congregate at health clinic for easy target practice.

8 ) You can punch one in the face at random, secure in the knowledge they likely deserved it.

9 ) They come to your house so you don’t need to waste time hunting them.

10 ) They hate dirty hippies like Jesus.

First off, in the interest of full disclosure, let me start off by saying:  My math skills are limited.  I can add, subtract, multiply, and divide; the latter of which causes me to cry tears of blood.  I took and passed all the math classes in HS and let the information die a quick and dignified death upon graduation.  So, when Neil Tyson comes on my TV and says light moves at 12 million miles a minute, I’m prepared to take that on faith. I haven’t a decade and billion dollars to check for myself and I’m confidant that scientists cross-check one another savagely, hoping to advance themselves through the misfortune and humiliation of their peers–like everyone else on this wretched little dustball we call home.

That said, I know bullshit when I hear it.

I can’t help but feel like “Dark Matter” is basically a huge “fudge” to get gravity to behave the way we think it should but apparently doesn’t.  If M-theory (as superstrings are apparently called by the hipster kids these days) has any merrit, might this just be a case of:  “There’s a lot more to gravity then we see going on in our 4 observable dimensions and we’re just not going to have a valid answer for a while.”?

Scientists are certainly capable of all the same self-delusion the rest of us are.  Hoyle insisted upon his “Steady State” model until his dying day, in angry defiance of all the facts.  Even Einstein, whose work in relativity essentially gave birth to the “Big Bang” theory, adamantly denied its implications simply because he simply didn’t like the idea on philosophical grounds.

Newton laid down the law when it came to gravity, questioning him was tantamount to heresy in scientific circles until Albert came along and showed that there were simply things going on with gravity that old man Isaac  couldn’t  have known or even guessed at given the scientific infrastructure available to him.  Doesn’t it seem most likely that the same is true of Al himself today?

“There’s this magic stuff that you can’t see or detect in any way but happens to make all our otherwise clearly flawed ideas about the structure of the universe work perfectly.  Really, it’s there.  Honest.”  Just doesn’t cut it for me…

1) If there is dark matter, why am I not being bombarded with advertisements asking if I’m tired of messy dark matter build-up on my counter tops?

2) Okay, let’s assume it naturally separates from ordinary matter like oil and water. If it still interacts gravitationally, why doesn’t it form huge clumps and seal our galaxy in an opaque shell?

“Being scourge of the galaxy involved more work than he counted on as a young lad; still, he did get to kill the customers and was his own boss.”

A complete novel

 “Iceni Queen: A Pirate Yarn” ©2009 Jason Maffettone

An avid reader in general, of science fiction in particular, It has always struck me how medicine and law are impeccably researched in fiction while space “SciFi” gets away with the most insipid technobabble and pseudoscientific tripe. On the other extreme, much “Hard Science Fiction” seems to be dull, populated by stick figures, dated by the time it goes to print, and written by anal-retentive physics Nazis, bitter over time lost stuffed inside of lockers.

I have written privately my entire life and, in the mid 90’s, published a handful of poems in short-lived lit rags like Infinity Ltd, Wicked Mystic and others so impressive I can’t even recall their names. I do have a piece in the second issue of the online poetry journal “Innisfree.com” but otherwise have no credentials to speak of.

Despite my lack of formal experience however, I know what makes for a great story: Murder, rape, incest, theft, vandalism, arson, impalement, immolation, mutilation, decapitation, rioting, genocide, mass extinction, dehumanization, degradation, decadence, duplicity, betrayal, revenge, exile, loss, ignorance, intolerance, sectarian violence, savage human indifference, all seven deadly sins, blasphemy (lots of that) singing, dancing, gratuitous foul language, lesbian fighter pilots and genetically engineered ninja assassins.

The SETI program, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, started back in 1960 with astronomer Frank Drake from Cornell University, who used a 26-meter radio-telescope to examine the Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani systems.  No luck.  Today, SETI projects survey the sky for transmissions from distant civilizations.  The soviets took an early interest in the 1960’s and the U.S. contributed money early on, but now it is funded privately.

My question is this:  Is SETI wasting its time and resources in this endeavor.  I am NOT suggesting they be stopped from perusing their goals however they wish.  It is a privately funded program that can and should do what it honestly feels is best to accomplish its mission.  But is it truly realistic to think this has any meaningful chance of success?

100,000 light years side to side; 200,000,000,000+ stars.

From what I have read on the subject, our TV and radio transmissions, which travel out in an expanding shell away from our planet, will be so defuse within two lightyears that they will completely disappear into the cosmic background radiation and be utterly invisible to anyone they might encounter.  That’s not even half-way to our nearest solar neighbor, the triple Alpha Centauri system.

A radio transmission, to reach between star systems, would have to be of incredible power and restricted to an very narrow beam to have any hope of detection.  Even if thousands of other civilizations have attempted aiming such a transmission directly at us, the chances of our being in the right place at the right time to catch it seem astronomically small; quite literally so in fact.

Radio simply isn’t a viable technology for communicating across these kinds of distances.  You might as well roll up a piece of parchment and tie it to a balloon.  Remember the old story about the ancient Chinese astronomer who tied rockets to a sedan chair to go to the moon?  He had a general concept of what to do, but no real appreciation of the technical problems involved in achieving it.  Any advanced, spacefaring civilization has either found a radically different technology for disseminating information across the void, or else that information travels only as fast as the ships that carry it.

Also, though life may well be as common as liquid water, I suspect that a biosphere as complex as the Earth’s is likely to be incredibly rare.  Think about it, any number of fantastically unlikely things had to happen for our homeworld to become the hothouse of life that it is.

The Earth was unspeakably lucky.  It grows-up in a stable planisphere, survives massive bombardment and the collisions of the early solar system.  One glancing blow knocks off a nice piece to create a stabilizing moon.  It has lots of big jovians in the outer orbits to gobble the comets up.

I would wager that most worlds where life develops it I bet it never makes it far on.  Of those where it does, few will produce higher animals.  Of those which manage that, how many will produce biosystems as extravagant as our own?  Or an animal that will build tools and eventually leave its nest to spread life elsewhere.  Think about the number of both sperm and eggs that never get to join and create a new animal.  How many offspring most animals have because most won’t survive” Reverse attrition seems to the universe’s M.O; fewer and fewer each step; a tiny drop from one ocean, divided again and again.

Going by this, admittedly assumed trend, it also seems likely that few sentient creatures develop, fewer still will survive long once they do.  Doubtless many will kill themselves off with technology, as we may well do, or because they never leave their homes before some comet shows up and wastes their sorry asses.  Or whatever they’ve got.

SETI Institute: http://www.seti.org/

"Hypatia" by Charles William Mitchell, 1885

In 415 CE, the Great Library of Alexandria was burned to the ground by a mob of christians led by the future saint Cyril, after they mutilated and killed its last curator, Hypatia, in broad daylight on a public street.  She was flayed alive with abalone shells.  Their reasons:  The library contained information contrary to the word of their “god” and its keeper was a literate woman.

 Most estimates place the library’s collection at 500,000 to 1 million scrolls, by far the largest collection of knowledge in the ancient world.  The complete works of many of the ancient world’s greatest scientist, philosophers, and artists lost forever.  Others decimated, leaving a bare handful of scraps to survive for future generations.  

Imagine if you will, there was a guy named Shakespeare back in the day who wrote these two plays:  “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “As You like it.”  Apparently there were others with names like “Hamlet” and “King Lear” as well as some historical dramas but we know nothing else about him.  And there were some scientists with names like Newton and Einstein but nothing they wrote survives so we have only their names.  Multiply this by a thousand and you can begin to estimate the damage done to our species that day.

This act of utter barbarity was the christian faith’s greatest accomplishment for the vast majority of their history.  Something they took unabashed pride in, at least until recently.  There is now a massive effort on their part to lay the blame for this act at the feet of others:  The Romans, even though they OWNED the library at the time and simply would have torn it down if they chose, even the muslims who didn’t exist yet.

How little these “people” have changed.

They tortured and killed Mathew Sheppard then claimed it was a robbery even though his killers admitted in open court they killed him because he was gay and that’s what god wanted.  They bomb health clinics, assassinate doctors, then “denounce” the killers from one side of their mouths , straight faced, while claiming the real crime is that the victims died before they could be saved.  They said the same about young Mr. Sheppard.

 When Timothy McVey bombed the Oklahoma City Federal Building in service of Jesus, the entire Christian community began a massive disinformation campaign to claim he had been seen with an “Arab” on several occasions to make people think it was a muslim plot.  Interesting behavior for a self-proclaimed christian fundamentalist and white supremacist; so much for not bearing false witness against thy neighbor, eh?

 The latest item in the news, the killing of Dr. Tiller is just the most recent example of a wave of christian violence that even includes fellow christians.  Dr. Tiller was himself one, and let us not forget the recent gun-rampage in a church that the wider christian community deemed “Too liberal.”  That’s right, the black shirts are now going after the brown shirts.

 The self-proclaimed christians I have met in my life have been, almost without exception, the ones most likely to lie, cheat, steel, and commit acts of unprovoked violence.  They believe the world is about to end (they have ALWAYS thought that) and that it is their duty to their god to ensure this takes place as quickly as possible:  To include encouraging nuclear war to help bring it about.  Some kill, some praise the killing, and some just keep their mouth shut but you know what, I have NEVER heard a christian meaningfully denounce another’s murderous bullshit.  When they do it’s always to say:  “Too bad the guy we just killed hadn’t been saved yet.”

And yet, dispite this abysmal track record, christans feel they have a right to force others to live by THEIR rules.  Especially obnoxious since hardly any of them do.  They feel they have the right to ban movies, books, etc.  They want their religious laws to be the laws of the land, affecting people who do not belong to their religion. 

 Why do I hate christians?  In short, they are savages and hypocrites.

Addition:  Okay, I will confess that last line was harsh.  I do know people who call themselves christians who are decent individuals.  Trouble is, so very few are individuals at all.  Taken as a group however, my comments stand.

I actually took this down for a while last night after a particularly weird exchange but you know what, Fuck these worthless, sniveling, dumb animals.  This is how they operate, they threaten and attack people because they can’t reason and that’s what they have to offer.