The Last of the Prophets

I never liked boxing; hated it in fact. I thought it was a throwback to Rome, to pure Barbarism, and didn’t care much for the pseudo-gladiator “blood-and-guts” show it purveyed. Moreover, I found the people (not the boxers themselves) who made money from “professional” fighting to be something too repugnant to stand for long. Was always repelled by people who made money from any blood borne business. But all my “scruples” never kept me away from a Muhammad Ali bout for a single minute. Of course, that was a long, long time ago, when TV was free and you could actually see boxing on “the Box.” 

Now that Mohammad Ali has gone on to fight in a greater ring… I’m wont to remember how Ali made every bout seem like it really mattered, as if life and death hung on the balance (which it always did in such a dangerous activity). But it was more than that, when Ali fought, it was as if he were fighting for every person of color and every poor man, woman, and child in America (and perhaps in the world!). In the ring, he was an artist. His technique was poetry in motion to an exquisite degree. When he upset Liston in 1964 it was breath-taking…

Folks may not remember those times, but the ‘60s of the 20^th Century in America was the height of Apartheid, and Mohammad Ali, while he was still Cassius Clay, and in the ring, he scared white people half to death. Then, when he opened his mouth, and spoke the Truth – they couldn’t take it. They had to shut him up… Here was a strong, smart, cocky Black man with moral principles – their worst nightmare! They say that Ali was outlandish and provocative (they said worse, of course), at a time when stating the obvious, for speaking truth to power, would either get you killed or land you in prison forever.

I can praise Ali for his fighting prowess all day, for his many great victories in the ring, but none of them compared to what he accomplished outside the ring. Who has a thousandth of his guts today? Certainly no boxer does, but neither does any other professional athlete or performer – they’re all bought and their souls have been sold to the lowest bidder… Craven doesn’t even come close to the midgets who crawl all over themselves for a buck in the ring, in the football pitch, in the baseball diamond, in the basketball courts, or any other “performing animal” in any circus arena in the world. And, you know what? These exemplars that are half the athlete he was, are all multi-millionaires thanks to Mohammad Ali.

But I’m not going to add anything new about Ali’s career as “The Greatest” boxer who ever lived – he had innumerable fights that were each more memorable than the one that went before. His fights versus Frazier and the “Rumble in the Jungle” against Foreman will never be surpassed. Man… no one who saw these things could be immune to them – and there was something beyond a bet and a payoff riding on the outcome. There was Mohammad Ali – human being – a heart on fire. That’s what was riding on every fight in the ring! With every court appearance even! As if Christ himself had stepped into the ring… (and I mean that literally!).

Pure, raw valor. I never saw it except in him (and I was nowhere near the guy, thousands of miles away at the end of an electronic transmission!). I know that millions of people every day have to climb that steep hill, face the odds, take the lumps. But somehow, Ali epitomized that in a sublime way. I can’t explain it. The Lion of Zion is the only thing that comes to mind... the courage of the sacred heart.

The Thrill Is Gone

Thrilling is a word I seldom use… and never in the context of Sports. But when Ali stepped on the mat, when he ducked under the ropes, when he bobbed into the ring, your heart started pounding – in your temples!! It was exhilarating and terrifying at the same time. I consider myself lucky to have been a television witness to these marvels! 

Who today would ever believe that a world heavyweight title bout could be fought in Africa? When will that ever happen again? Impossible. Simply not enough money to be made there… Might as well try and send a man to the moon! And it’s not only because boxing is simply finished as a “sport,” it’s also finished as a spectacle – just like bullfighting (even in its heyday, boxing was never an art form like bullfighting was, but you get the idea). There’s not enough blood there to hold interest, if you see what I mean.

Why is this the case? Nothing in the world of sports is “thrilling” anymore – not even the crash and burn of 20 Formula 1 or NASCAR racers when they go spinning off into the grandstands killing people in the audience. Not the crunching of bones when one of these young knuckleheads crave their 15 minutes of fame, flying off the rails and off the cliff on their bikes or their skateboards. All of these Corporate concocted “X-sport” TV events, with their phony copycat “lethal” activities, they breed like reality TV programs, but have nothing whatsoever at stake.

To me, and to anyone who loves sports, they’re as thrilling as canned beans! What’s pushed as “thrilling” on the Internet or TV couldn’t give a jolt to a lab rat wired to a car battery. Sports has no meaning beyond the millions that pass hands behind the scenes. Titles, championships, they’re nothing, and they’re forgotten before the year is out. Does anyone remember today who won the 60^th Champion’s League? Does anyone care who the 49^th Super Bowl champion was? Or who the 110^th World Series champion was? (I remember, because it was recently, and it was won by my hometown team…). But seriously, these are all ephemeral “victories” that are of no account or consequence in the bigger scheme of life. It’s the “Hunger Games” without the “hunger” I guess… the poor stay poor, the hungry stay hungry… nothing changes.

Not so with Mohammad Ali… When Ali was champion everyone knew THEY were champions right along with him – somehow Truth had won, Light shone a little brighter, the bad guys were not going to win forever... Who needed phony superheroes when the Butterfly floated – the Bee stung?

“He Who Is Not Courageous...”

In this Islamophobic age, when demagogues get selected to the position of “chief executive officer” of the most powerful military machine on the planet by virtue of their hate for Islam, it’s something to ponder… You can’t have any clue as to how revolutionary Ali’s conversion to Islam was back in the ‘60s. And when he was sent to jail as a conscientious objector for not going to Vietnam “to shoot brown people,” everyone saw it as the crucifixion that it was… 

The Pharisees were going to get their pound of flesh from the insubordinate slave who refused to cow down to the murderers and war criminals… Ali may be dead, but the evil ones are still out there... the fight has only just begun…

When he converted to Islam it set off a firestorm (at least, in the hermetic bubble of racism and xenophobia that was the U.S. in the 1960s). No one who lived through it can deny it. Literally, it was a public crucifixion… I can’t imagine what Ali went through, it must have been horrendous. And, it’s that “passage through the fire,” that “baptism” that makes Mohammad Ali the last of our prophets, for there are no more coming…

We can’t depend on the prophets to save our asses every time. From now on we’re on our own… We’re in the depths of the Dark Ages and if we don’t carry the light ourselves, it’s going to be exceedingly dark from here on in. Ali was the last of the giants (there’s still one more with us, but no new prophets are due). I know that people today are jaded (but in the wrong way), and that they saw Ali’s words as posturing, as “showmanship.” But that would be simply dismissing what was really going on. Ali was the last of those luminous beings who could speak into a microphone and change the world – literally! His charisma was such that when he spoke, he took you, like a real prophet preaching, into his heart and you were the heart of the world right along with him…

If we think about it, History in nothing but a record of the killing or incarceration of our prophets... We’ve had prophets in abundance in the 20^th Century, from Gandhi to Lennon, from Che to Marley, from Mandela to MLK, from Malcom X to Ali, and the many Bikos and Rosa Parks whose names we’ll never know. Thousands of them! Those who spoke truth to power, who gave their lives for real Freedom, who will remain anonymous and unknown because the assassins, and the cowards who hire them, have dealt with them in the dark, and in the back, when no one was looking… All of the victims prophets. All of them showed the rest of us the Way… like Buddha and Jesus Christ incarnates. They didn’t preach – they led by their example.

Wasted lives? Perhaps… But in the great economy of the universe, nothing ever really goes to waste. One word of truth, one deed, one action, goes a long way, perduring long after it has been done. Any number of bullets may be fired to kill the prophets, any number of bombs set off to silence the Truth, but all the destruction will be for naught because it can’t accomplish anything that lasts. In our slow climb back out of the morass and to the Light, on our eternal journey to Paradise, we’ll find Ali’s soul resides there right now.

I can only say, although I never met Ali personally, that a real human being died today… a great loss to all us human beings. His courage (his heart of the Lion) in the face of real life – the worst the devil could dish out – will always be a beacon to me. Ali was great; God bless him, but, Allahu Akbar… 

The Timeless and The Ageless – Part I

The persistence of the idea that ancient peoples – humans who lived before the Classical Age – were just like we are today, in every respect, boggles the mind. The belief that people who lived thousands of years ago were exactly like we are today, that they had the same way of thinking, the same motivations, the same values (and the same lack of them), as well as a similar fashion sense, I find both absurd and degrading. How this singular, idiotic idea has grown in recent times to become the underpinning of all historical research – its fundamental dogma – is uncanny.

We Moderns and the Ancients are exactly alike, but of course, we’re better than they were in every respect too. Or so we keep telling ourselves... The idea is not only illogical, but unscientific. Is it our inferiority complex showing? Or, are we just too big-headed? Yet, there it is, that ugly assertion of superiority, always creeping into everything; into the very marrow of our consciousness, where it serves to keep churning out theories and hypothesis about our past that are as inane as they are worthless.

Apply the Same Ruler To Measure Weight!

The most evident misuse of this idea, the greatest disservice it renders is when this “everything is just like it is today” is applied to a unique civilization such as that of the Ancient Egyptians (well, all civilizations are unique, so the disservice is of the equal opportunity kind). Under the circumstances, it makes it difficult to talk about the subtler things that shine through so clearly from ancient civilizations. Consciousness makes all the difference. Yet, to modern “specialists,” whether they are Egyptologists or archeologists, consciousness doesn’t enter into it, they move only within that narrow rectangular box of pure abstractions and never stray from that tight enclosure. Ancient people have exactly the same consciousness we have, they tell us, only they were “dumber” – not just “primitive” or “ignorant” – the implication is that they’re somehow less human than we are today.

It’s funny how orthodoxy in anthropology and archeology is predisposed to assert this underlying assumption in everything they publish (this hold true for any branch of modern science). Does anyone study these sciences today? These days, does anyone take a vow of perpetual poverty for the sake of science? For two hundred years, maybe more, we’ve been accumulating “facts” and “details” to enshrine yet another dogma about what human beings were like, using our present selves as the model. The alleged failings of our Ancestors – their stupidity and inadequacy in comparison to our enviable superiority – are “popularized” so that every man, woman, and child, is infected with this banal conception.

From this misconception all kinds of value judgments are derived – usually of a Racist nature – to the detriment of veracity. It begs a commingling of modern social “values” with those of ancient people, who harbored no such values as we claim to have. Despite the common negation of their humanity, ancient people had values of a much higher degree, of a nobler order than we do today... I don’t mean the trite “noble savage” idea, so prevalent in the 19^th Century’s Romantic school of thought. Although, to their credit, they clearly intuited that the “Ancients” were not as inferior as the “Moderns” concluded (harking back to that great intellectual debate of the Enlightenment). I guess the “Moderns” won... there goes all that sweetness and light...

The Many Lives of Ancient Mummies...

From this well-rooted prejudice all kinds of misinterpretations branch out and grow. To that dynamic we have to add another modern trend, namely, that thinking is not what most scientists engage in while they practice their specialty. And, asking questions seems to be “verboten” as well these days... We simply have to accept that skepticism is not the scientists’ strong suit... Reading about the less invasive procedures being applied to mummies in the last 20 or 30 years, got me thinking, however, a decidedly dangerous occupation, I know...

Let me give you an example, because it’s closely related to an area of great interest to me – pre-history, and Ancient Egypt in particular. I was reading recently one of those sober, dried-up, calcified works delving into the various methods used to “study” ancient mummies. As it turns out, after 268 pages, ancient mummies are studied exactly as people living today are “studied” – after all, they’re no different than we are. In the past few decades, ancient mummies have been probed, dissected (when convenient), invaded, and otherwise abused just like patients in any modern hospital are... Anyone who’s had the pleasure of a colonoscopy can attest to this kind of “handling” of the victim, I mean the specimen, as being ubiquitous.

What we lack is humility and a sense of awe of anything. We feel ourselves entitled to this kind of “investigation,” this attempt to bring all that is high low, turning everything that pulses and oscillates with life into a flat line... Not even mummies are sacred (they certainly were sacred once, otherwise they wouldn’t have been turned into mummies!).

Yet, we don’t give a flying banana about that, or anything else for that matter! We think as badly of the ancients as we do of whatever we may encounter in “outer space” in future. To us, they’re just in the way. Think about our immense ability to “transpose” our self-image (Freud would say “transference”), and our desiccated “values” into the far past as well as into the distant future... A great majority of people actually believe that extraterrestrials (supposedly from a higher, more advanced civilization) have kidnapped human beings in order to poke, probe, dissect, and fornicate with them aboard various types of spaceships... (I hope the fornication took place on the upper decks of the “penthouse suite” of the mothership, with a little “sparkly” on ice...). In other words, we can’t seem to help ourselves and even relate to those as yet unknown and unseen aliens as if they were ancient savages... God help those poor suckers if they ever do show up here!

Knowing how unpleasant and rather useless a colonoscopy is these days, mummies both royal and not have been getting this very “royal” treatment of late. In a way, both copying and mocking the art of embalming in the first place (after they stick the probe up your ass they tell us how bestial the practice is!). Fortunately, the Black People only put a probe up your nose (a bronze wire or bone hook) and pulled your rather useless brain matter out... but that was after you were dead! Can’t wait until they try that at the hospital next, while under local anesthesia!

Where No Probe Has Gone Before...

What exactly are they looking for up the anal duct? That’s the first question that pops into my mind. What does this tell us about where our scientific thinking is leading us today? Don’t want to get into “potty humor,” but it’s really at that level, isn’t it? The anal-retentive level. If we can’t learn a single thing about a living human being by doing a colonoscopy (with the rare exception of finding a carcinogenic growth), what are we going to learn about the mummified skin and bones we’re intruding into so familiarly?

For starters, the mummy itself is in a state of “uncurableness” – deader than a parrot nailed to its perch. What drives this need to “investigate”? Is it voyeurism or scientific curiosity? Without awe and devotion to truth, aren’t they about the same thing? And, all this “getting at the truth” nonsense comes after knowing that the embalmers have already been at work. Knowing, no less, that the temple embalmers have done altered every molecule of the deceased... Long after that came the profaners, and then the robbers got their hands on the mummy, if not the temple priests themselves, whose duty it was to “save” them from worse sacrileges... Talk about a contaminated “crime scene” – there’s one for you.

I ask myself, when performing these “operations” why do the specialists put on the latex gloves in the first place? Is it because that’s what the actors on “CSI” do on the Tele? I got news for them... the one who murdered the mummy is long since dead, and far out of reach of the arm of the law. Or is it in order not to catch something the mummy might have? Like an ancient strain of HIV? Or Ebola? Or maybe mummy snot! It certainly couldn’t be in order not to “contaminate” the specimen, since the mummy’s about as contaminated as it’s ever going to get – it’s been dead for 6,000 years, for crissake! In the end, I have to scratch my head and wonder, who let these bozos off the bus and anywhere near the MRI or CAT-scan equipment?

They’re Just Shooting Another Documentary For The History Channel

Can a dead thing shed any light on life? Hardly, but if the “thing” was a former human being, the corpse could tell you how it might have died... that is, if it weren’t a mummy.

Mummies went through some serious transformations at the hands of the “sem priests,” a cadre of high initiates and powerful magicians, notable for being able to change every single molecule of the cadaver before them. On the Tube, whenever you watch a police drama, there’s always a small army of forensic experts, top-notch surgeons from the best medical schools on the planet performing long and expensive autopsies with state-of-the-art equipment, on some homeless John Doe. But that’s Hollywood for you... Unlike a recently deceased individual, like those murder victims on the Tele, ancient mummies were also “treated” by experts.

Treated to what? To a whole bunch of procedures, most of which were of a secret and magical nature, with the very intention of changing every molecule of the deceased’s former body (otherwise, how were you going to get into the Dwat as a pure khat?). And any forensic expert worth their salt would quickly tell you that the older the corpse, the more difficult it is to make a determination as to the exact “cause” of death.

Not to get sidetracked into a discussion of what forensic science can and can’t accomplish, but to point out the obvious. Even today, to determine the age of a recent corpse (a John Doe) is no as open and shut as it may appear. And when modern forensic methods are applied to ancient mummies in order to determine not only their alleged “state of health,” what they died of, but also to tell us their age at death, it’s more than problematic.

Material science (the unsacred, modern kind) looks on death as just the “cessation” of life, an identical phenomenon whether it takes place in plants, animals, or humans. Scientists fail to realize that something that may seem the same in all cases may actually have a variety of underlying causes...

Likewise, something today looks externally like a polyp, a cancerous “growth” in a mummy, even if a biopsy were performed on the sample, that doesn’t necessarily mean the “cause of death” for that individual was cancer. This type of misdiagnosis occurs more frequently with tuberculosis (MTB) and other “common” diseases that are, of course, rarely found in the mummy itself. When they do occur, they’re discovered through some microscopic, tomographic, or invasive procedures are performed. It’s the inevitable case – material science always finds what it’s looking for – like in every self-fulfilling prophecy.

A celebrated case from 2009 claimed that a DNA sample proved that the mummy in question died of TB. Maybe it did or maybe it didn’t. But the fact that the mummy is from around the 6th Century B.C. and not 1,500 B.C. has some bearing on the matter. This is not even discussed in the literature! Ignorance about mummification and its processes? Probably. Laziness and lack of thoroughness in the scientific method? Absolutely!

Then there’s our scant knowledge about TB itself both as an organism and as a disease causing organism... (the bacterium (MTB) is not the “cause” of the disease, any more than the gasoline in the car that ran over the pedestrian is the cause of the hit and run!). Tuberculosis is a disease that began its life-cycle during the epoch in which the mummy was found – but of course, no one who studied Medicine in the last 100 years could possibly know that! But they also never even bother to find out. Facts only get in the way. So we want nothing to do with them! In fact, TB grew to truly global proportions only in the early 20^th Century. This has to do with Karma and not bacteria (as a result of WW I – no one gets off without Karma having to be paid!). But we’d rather blame the gasoline in the tank for the hit and run, instead of the drunk driver... (Duh! Without the gasoline in the tank the driver could have never run over the pedestrian – why didn’t I think of that!)

Yet, it’s equally likely that while that human being was alive – the mummy in which they found a trace of TB – the bacterium was dormant and actually inert, and did not manifest or cause the person to experience symptoms of the illness during the person’s lifetime. The problem with trying to prove something with an example that’s an exception is typical of today’s bad science. This kind of bad science is further spread by conflating one age with another (i.e., the embalming of a mummy in 500 B.C., was not mummification as it was performed in Ancient Egypt, since by 500 B.C., Egypt was a Persian colony).

Unfortunately, to perpetrate bad science, facts are not only irrelevant, they’re a nuisance. In this particular mummy, the internal organs were left within it (which explains why it’s not the traditional method), and these likely kept rotting and contaminating the mummy. But do these tin pot scientist care? Apparently not, all they want to prove is that TB was a deadly killer in the past, and by implication, we don’t have to worry about TB anymore. Hey, I got news for these knuckleheads – TB is a killer today!

Can’t Fool Mother Nature

Scientific curiosity has always had more than a tinge of malice to it. Always ready to apply the scalpel before any thinking on the question is applied. The dissection and the “rape of Isis,” as Goethe called it, when he compared the animal vivisectionists, and other charlatans, to what a real scientist ought to be striving for. But alas, in the name of “bad science,” the rapists and dissectors have won. They’re more than happy to tear everything apart, cut everything up and down, and sideways, and therefore destroy the very thing they supposedly claim to want to learn about – usually some minute, irrelevant detail is garnered from all this ill-advised activity (something that can be used to fabricate another lie – usually for commercial gain or propaganda benefits). By destroying the “thing in itself,” namely life, these misguided souls hope to tear out some “secret” from Mother Nature... As if she’s going to give up her secrets to the first miscreant that comes along!

Luckily, it is thus that the secrets of life are still being withheld from the unwise... Well, it’s not news to any of us that we are still at that primitive, savage level ourselves – the one we “transfer” to the ancient people of the past – and, it should therefore not surprise us that from this kind of slipshod approach, through such counterproductive activity, we reap the wrong answer every time. It’s not as if 300 years of dissecting animals for fun and profit has gotten us one iota of “truth” or even the slightest medical knowledge... To Big Pharma and the rest of the cretins, they perform vivisections only to cover their butts legally, that’s how they justify submitting rats and other animals to their torture (this they call “drug testing” and in the same breath tell us how many hypothetical people they’ve saved). But, that’s what you get when herd-animals prevail – when they’re the ones selling you the drugs you don’t need, yet crave...

The quality of medical science and “scientific research” has deteriorated drastically in the last 40 years or so. They can stick whatever they want up the mummy’s exhaust pipe, but they’ll never learn anything from it.

After each “investigation” of this kind, the “scientists” still tell us the same old B.S. (I wonder who funds this stuff and for what gainful purpose? What are they selling?) From all this “research” we still hear the same old dogma, namely, people in Ancient Egypt died when they were extremely young – around 30, or maximum 40 years old. This was “known” (or postulated) back in the 19^th Century. I ask myself, after more than a century why are they still wasting good money after bad to come to the same conclusion? I suspect that it has to do with perpetuating the Lie. This is a peculiar madness that’s prevalent today, that little hobgoblin of “foolish consistency” – the hallmark of a gormless mind.

Where malice is not involved, one must conclude that most modern scientists fail to think things through. This is their Achilles’ heel. The weakness stems from the way they’re taught or trained, and that all too dominant aberration called specialization. Because scientists are forced to be “specialists” in their very narrow field of expertise (the narrower and more esoteric the better), that way there’ll be less competition for the funding dollar! The result is invariably limited, because nothing ascertained is connected in any way with reality, except at some irrelevant, microscopic, or sub-atomic level.

Additionally, to survive in today’s sclerotic, academic environment (one funded by Corporations), the distinct trend of the herd is toward orthodoxy and dogma, or they won’t survive long. The tendency to survive requires disregarding pertinent, yet inconvenient facts, or facts that don’t fit into preconceived, accepted premises. New, imaginative interpretations of old facts are not solicited or desired – the whole academic environment reeks of death and dead thinking. Don’t make waves and your boat won’t tip, is the enforced rule of Academia. Since most facts don’t fit, and the “peripheral” vision is an acute angle to begin with, they invariably come up with the wrong conclusions. It’s boringly predictable... Well, if one were of the right mind, one would have to consider it madness (that’s after all the clinical definition of it).

The Real Fountain of Youth

It should not surprise us then that people in ancient times actually lived a lot longer than is generally assumed, especially by modern anthropologists and historical researchers, not to mention those in the medical sciences. There’s a whole litany of cultural and racial prejudices that need to be swept aside when studying History, but of course, that’s not going to happen...

Whenever doctors or biologists are invited into the archeological field in Egypt, let’s say to determine the age of mummies found in a cache there (i.e., mummies that have been desecrated, robbed, removed, or otherwise molested). In order to maintain the myth of low life expectancy in the past, these specialists perform what is called a BMD (Bone Mineral Density) test or MRI, 3D-CT, or similar computer tomography, especially when they can’t get at any exposed bone. Sometimes, the specialist is good enough to do this without the fancy-schmancy equipment (a good forensic doctor, for example), since modern growth rates for bone are well known, requiring only external measurement.

But herein lies the problem. Once the measurement of the BMD is done for the mummy, it is invariably given the age of development of a modern human being... Why this is so speaks volumes of the sheer lack of real scientific method currently operative. Why does no one question the underlying assumption? Bone does not grow at the same rate throughout time (evolution). The bone of a human being 6,000 years ago did not grow at the rate that a human bone grows today. Why is this simple fact not taken into account? Why is the considerably older bone specimen given the same age than a bone aging today?

Long ago, the mummy was once a living organism, and it underwent a considerably different physical development than a person does nowadays. But it was not only the physical circumstances under which that ancient individual grew up, conditions completely different from that of humans in the last 200 years, but the environment in which the individual grew into adulthood was radically different than it is today (even the geography was).

Today bone density develops at different rates in different socio-economic classes within the same country – and that’s a superficial matter. Imagine how much more effect thousands of years and the entire planetary force of Evolution can muster to create a variation in the rate of growth of bone or any other tissue. The passing of time alone changes everything (and don’t let any coneheads tell you different, since it’s an obvious law of physics that things change constantly!). Thousands of years ago, bone mass accrued at a different rate than it does today, a considerably slower rate at that. People in general aged much, much slower. In effect, they lived longer!

It’s Not The Years, It’s The Mileage...

So how does one “tiny” error, such as the one on gathering the age of a mummy from its bone density affect everything else they say about Ancient Egypt, and life in antiquity in general? Well, how about life-expectancy? The experts come up with 34 years old as the average life expectancy for adults in Ancient Egypt – without mentioning any dates, of course, or where the samples were taken – seriously folks, it’s like kindergartners running the show. All of this based on the fallacious age they attribute to mummies they’ve done BMD testing on, when they’ve actually done the work, since most of the time, there’s no funding to do the expensive analysis.

Conceivably, taking into account the variableness of the forces acting on organic matter through time, it could be possible to say that by Roman times (30 A.D.), when Egypt became a Roman province, that life expectancy was sharply lower than it had been traditionally (over against the Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom, and New Kingdom, and through long periods of time past). But again, the same error made with the Ancient Egyptians is also carried over into calculating the average Roman’s lifespan, which was surely longer than the life expectancy they are currently being attributed (i.e., 30 years old, if you survived infancy, with a child mortality rate of 50% – no wonder the Romans were always screwing around! They had to start young and never, ever stop!).

Even in the 15 Century B.C., way before Rome was the glint on some Etruscan wolf mother’s eyes, and when Ancient Egypt was already in full-tilt decline, the average lifespan was more likely to be closer to 90 years old. Almost three times longer than what “researchers” attribute with their 30-35 years as an average lifespan. Kiddo, if you’re propagating an error that is exponentially off by three, you’re in the wrong line of work!

It only stands to reason that life was not as “disposable” as it is in our modern times. Life was not “smaller” then than it is now (the opposite is probably true). For one thing, there were fewer people (again, population density and numbers of inhabitants for ancient civilizations are non-existent, when estimates are proffered, they’re most likely as not to be “fantasy” rather than fact). But from what the Ancients left us, in their art and in their prose, it’s clear that the body of an Ancient Egyptian was suppler, more flexible even than our present body. Even if you’ve learned to “walk like an Egyptian,” which is quite an achievement in balance and form, try next to sit in the pose to which they applied their daylong work. See how that “crouch” feels after 10 minutes! Unless you’re a contortionist, you might not be able to get to your feet without help.

But that’s just plain facts and common sense... what reality offers up without distortion or interpretation. From the more abstract and nebulous we can turn to Evolutionary Theory to support our case. We can deduce that things have become “harder” over time, less elastic, permeated less and less with nature’s vital life force. Suppleness was a natural gift bestowed upon us by the gods. But since then the gods have withdrawn from us, as we ourselves have withdrawn from nature and the gods, and secluded in our modern, artificial existence, we’re like the ostrich with its head in the ground, as far away from the gods as possible.

Even Metaphysically (or philosophically, if you prefer), the whole evolution of Matter on Earth is clearly a stream toward “materialization” – and then entropy! From the watery element of earlier eons (from which all life sprung) to the more “solid” forms we see today, it’s all part of an ongoing process. Everything material, including our physical bodies have “hardened” and “shrunk” over time. Physically, we live in the temporal-spatial dimension and are subject to what forces there are inherent in it. There are even spiritual forces active in this process, and these penetrate beyond the obvious, superficial differences in human biology and physical environments from that time to the present. The Hindu Vedas also tell us of the gods and their weaving of Light and Life... from airy to fluid, from fluid to solid, from gigantism to our current stature (i.e., puny).

Likewise, with bone tissue! So once our researchers come up with the age of the mummy at death to be 30 or 35 years old – what they’re really looking at is a human being that was nearly thrice that age before they were eviscerated, embalmed, and mummified... Thirty-four, thirty-five, is also what the Egyptologists believe the “life-expectancy” of the average Ancient Egyptian was. Not how many years people actually lived in antiquity!

Look at it this way, if the BMD measurement for Tutankhamen's mummy was 18 years old – as I’ve heard bunted about in the popular media – you can bet your last buck he was most likely 56 years old. By any stretch, the “teen” pharaoh would have been, at the very least, 36 years old, if not 56! The Ancient Egyptians didn’t begin to age until they were nearly 56 years old (8 cycles of 7 years each). Women didn’t sport their first wrinkles until that age, and most likely even those of the “lower castes” didn’t before their 49^th birthday – put that in your cosmetic kit with your mascara brush!

So it goes... Any person living 3,500 years ago, which we have determined to be “18” (as far a bone density is concerned), was in fact, three times older! And, I would guess not just the Ancient Egyptians lived longer through a natural kind of “extended youth” (the gift of the neteru), but other peoples elsewhere, during and before the Iron Age, lived considerably longer than we do today. Which only goes to show that there’s a huge difference between external appearance and reality my friends...

In other words, when you and I were Ancient Egyptians, all those centuries ago, our physical bodies looked “18” between our 49^th and 56^th birthdays. When we turned 56, we might look “21.” Depending on your Karma, and your mileage, once you surpassed the mid-fifties, you started to physically age... yet again, this phenomenon occurred very, very slowly. Thus, when you were a septuagenarian drinking the waters of the Nile, you looked like someone today looks when they’re in their 30s. At 82, a venerable age, according to the Ancient Egyptians themselves, you possessed the physical body of a 50-year-old today. Of course, you would have been a 50-year-old, who physically was twice as strong and flexible as a 50-year old professional athlete (still training) would be today.

Again, the bone mass measurements are the key. The older you got, the stronger you got, and the slower the bone would accrue in its mineral density. This is one of the reasons why in Ancient Egypt you seldom see “old” people in statues or paintings (which the knuckleheads use as evidence for the argument that everyone died before they reached 35! See! No old people!). When you do see a representation of “old age” in tombs, a sage with a cane, well that individual was probably as old as Moses! (Which also explains why Moses lived to be over 140 years, and perhaps much, much older. More often than not the Bible has it dead nuts. Especially when you can think in pictures, like the ancient ones did!).

Naturally, today’s non-thinking herd-animal will immediately cry foul at any and all of the above assertions. They’ll claim some cultural prejudice, religious dogma, or historical fable they heard about the Ancient Egyptians. Or, if they’re of a more “refined” bent, they throw out the “artistic” argument (i.e., all art is unreal) and therefore these tomb paintings are mere “paintings,” and they’re “not real” representations of actual things, they’re not meant to represent “reality.”

Blather of that sort, however, is cheap, and more of the same – the Ancient Egypt are just like we are today, no more than primitive, fanciful liars... Every bleating sheep out to pasture is an art critic these days (not to mention a book critic and film critic too!). As if the Ancient Egyptians were fakes, just like we are, just another bunch of groveling suckers and expedient liars!

How wrong can you get? For the purveyors of our “bad science,” the sky’s the limit!

The Thousand-Year News Cycle

Who today can possibly imagine events, from catastrophes to weather phenomena (what’s the difference), to worldwide, historical happenings unfolding in a predictable, almost orderly manner? No one can, of course, because we believe all events, including cosmic ones, are random and are therefore unexpected (not to mention, unpredictable). But is that really so? Or is that another of the modern delusions we superstitious humans harbor with such care and delight?

To people in Antiquity (from 500 B.C. on back to the dawn of time), the future was NOT dark – it was full of light – and fairly straightforward to discern. It was full of light (and maybe even sweetness) because they themselves shone that light on into the future. By simple acts of piousness – by making offerings to the gods – by making sacrifices, the people themselves shone their love from the past into the future. As we all know, although we may often forget the fact, light is a purified form of love... so there’s significance to the sacred imperative: “Shine your love into the future!”

Now, there’s a sacred duty to consider next time... Today, we’re tackling other conundrums. And, what can be more fun than deciphering another riddle from the past? After all, it’s just more light into the gloom of the present.

We all know that if you go deep enough into the past, the farther you go, the scantier the “record” gets. Not too far back into the past there comes a time, rather very late in human existence, when there are no records at all. Roughly speaking, it’s tough to find any records (esp. written ones) that predate the Late Bronze Age. By the way, modern primates don’t use the tripartite division for Early, Middle, and Late Bronze Age anymore – now it’s all just one color – the Bronze Age.

You leave the room for ten minutes and these knuckleheads rearrange all the furniture without telling anyone. It was probably too much to have to think about! Things ought to be “simple” for consumption by the modern herd-animal... And, more historical detail certainly wasn’t going to help promote the political nonsense of the day, that is, to prove the argument that human beings are violent savages and that war is a natural human activity that’s been going on since time immemorial. So... they’ve discarded whole tracts of History!

Let’s not let scholars and academicians bore us with their “expertise,” or lack thereof... For ancient people there really was no such thing as History, at least, as we understand it today. History only begins to exist when “individuals” come to the fore... when someone named “King X” claims something or other to himself (in its earliest manifestation, this claim was usually a divine one... “King X is the son of god X, etc.”). But this conspicuous individuality is relatively late in the course of our development and evolution as human beings on this planet – very, very late, indeed. In fact, it just happened a couple of centuries ago...

Moreover, why does it seem as if through vast stretches of time nothing much took place? Was it because things were more static in the past? Outside of Ancient Egypt, there are no major empires attested to before the end of the Bronze Age – the last thousand years before the Iron Age. Likewise, before then, there were no wars to speak of either. Practically no wars are attested to until the end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Iron Age. Now, they call that critical transition period, the Bronze Age “collapse” (how apropos). What’s the deal?

The past must have been dull without wars and famines... But if there were no wars, there must have been something going on... Why didn’t folks in our ancient past record the “news of the day”? Was it because there was no need to, since their news-cycle was a thousand years long...?

History Is The Record Of Our Egoism

In Antiquity, and more so before the Classical Period, from which we get most of our “history,” there was no news – not in the sense we understand the word “news” today, as “a report or information of a recent event.” Not even reports of events past, in other regions, kingdoms, or cities were reported. The reason is mainly because such events were not of an unexpected nature. The death of a beloved or hated monarch was not a newsworthy event. The ancients knew people died and it was simply a matter of time that such-and-such a king would kick the bucket, and invariably, they eventually did! When or how it actually took place was totally irrelevant to the ongoing course of life, and even to “matters of state” between kingdoms, such as they were in olden times (diplomacy is an ancient art, and while it is not practiced today, since it requires brains to do that, in the past, diplomacy had nothing of the unforeseen in it).

Let me give you a concrete example: Herodotus, who lived in the early 5^th Century B.C., went out (like journalists of the past century used to do) and actually talked to people and tried to “see” things for himself before writing things down. But he was the exception, the oddball... Events, like the death of the monarch, the start of the last war, all these things were written down after the fact, and usually way after the fact (it was by then old news, and very cold news!). Then again, by the 5^th Century B.C. it was way late in the course of things anyway, and the danger at that time was that by then memory flagged. People’s memories weren’t as robust as their ancestors’, they couldn’t remember what took place a thousand years ago anymore because their memory stretched back only a century and not much more. Things had to be written down, or they’d surely be forgotten.

As hard as it may be to believe today, when events seem so sudden and haphazard, not to mention frightening and revolting at the same time, there used to be a one thousand-year news cycle. That’s how long events of any import were actually remembered by large numbers of people around, let’s say, 5,000 B.C. (and earlier in time, of course). You can say that “oral tradition” had something to do with the retention of great events in the collective memory of a people, tribe, or clan, etc., and you wouldn’t be wrong, but there was more to it than that. Individual people actually remembered stuff – they had memory (something we lack today).

The clarity and concreteness of the memory enjoyed by our ancestors back then is something we have no inkling about today when we use the word “memory” as a function of remembering some past event. If you have a clear picture of even a single event that you alone witnessed before you were four or five-years-old, you have the quality of memory reserved to less than 1% of the human population. If you can remember anything before you were seven-years old, with the clarity of today’s experience, you have a great memory, perhaps as good as 5% to 10% of the human population. The rest of us can’t actually remember what we had yesterday for lunch...

I Don’t Remember, I Don’t Recall...

I’m talking here about a genuine, independent memory, not the “false memory” so prevalent today, which is not a memory at all, but a logical connection made of and buttressed by testimony from other witnesses present, or material evidence, including photographic images, which are contemporaneous with the “event” remembered. Such evidence may be used in court, but alas, reality is never present in a court of law – that’s just institutionalized theater. Here we’re dealing with the real deal, and a genuine memory is something precious – something held within the living soul (i.e., it’s not something you lie about, claiming it as a memory, in order not to pay for damages).

And speaking of courtrooms... here’s another factor for which memory was a substantial contributor – Justice. Memory was the glue bringing people, the tribe, or clan together by being the arbiter of fairness in dealings between individuals of the community – both in the sharing of material resources and in imparting punishment. 

The old Biblical condemnation: “The sins of the father shall be visited upon his children and the children's children, to the third and the fourth generation...” is telling us something real. It was possible to condemn someone’s family or clan (and at that time, “blood ties” were stronger than they are today) over many generations because people remembered back across the generations to what each individual did (or how they behaved with respect to their obligations to Jehovah). This kind of “justice” was indeed possible only thanks to the thousand-year, or by that time, the hundred-year “news-cycle.”

Memory of injustices, blood feuds, poor dealings, etc. were kept alive by each member of a community across generations, so it was very hard to get away with petite or even grand larceny (much less something more unsettling, like murder). People having the ability to remember everything about “you,” your family, your ancestors, and also the life of the community itself, pretty much kept everyone in line. Tough to finagle your way out of a bind, when everyone knows what you and your ancestors have done! (Kind of like our current Police State, in America and Europe, wherein cameras and false testimony play the part collective memory once did, in order to condemn everyone for jaywalking, or worse, littering).

Although “tradition” and “history” was handed down from ancestors to descendants in a long, unbroken chain, through chants, music, folklore, legends, and especially myths, giving ancient people a leg up on us modern, mindless sheep, nevertheless, in the past, people had already an intuitive knowledge of events to begin with.

By “events” I don’t just mean human events, those actions by people either individually or in concert, which affected the community. Such actions were rare, since people then were guided by a more or less intuitive consciousness – they were guided by leaders. And, even without these leaders, people knew how to act and did so, generally, in a beneficent manner.

You could say their lives were ruled by the gods (the neteru) in the sense that the great cycles of nature were repeated over and over again, with very slight variations, and these disparities were not considered significant. Which explains why Ancient Egyptians didn’t even record the appearance of supernovas in the night time skies, since to their way of thinking, it was not an “accident” which brought the phenomenon about, and as a result, it was not newsworthy!

Memory As Identity

Memory was, in more ways than one, the great common pillar of identity for ancient people (external features of race and ethnicity had nothing to do with it!). In other words, people didn’t flock together because they had the same colored feathers, so to speak. Not at all, folks got together because they shared a common memory, which was attached to the geography of the region in which they lived (the rocks and stones also helped them remember). They congregated and were united in their lives by shared feelings brought on by those events which they experienced together (both good and bad, although I have my doubts such a judgement was ever made in light of most events).

There were several reasons why this lengthy “news cycle,” this prodigious memory, was a gift enjoyed by the populace at large. They had help, naturally... and I don’t mean simply the help of the gods (although that was always a factor). One of these factors was that, as a matter of course, nothing much unexpected ever took place – that’s why ancient people didn’t have History, or any need for such an artificiality to explain what had gone before.

Naturally, nothing unexpected or unpredictable occurs today either, it just seems that way to us because we live enmeshed in superstition and fear and we’re constantly surrounded by a bubble of distraction that insulates us from the real world. Further, we shy away from “connecting-the-dots,” especially the more obvious ones, because we fear reality with every fiber of our being. Despite the fact that the vast majority of people today are convinced that things “just happen,” nothing could be further from the truth.

To the modern way of reckoning, almost everything that takes place around us is an accident, or some kind of a “coincidence.” This pseudo-fact keeps us in the dark and relieves us of all responsibility (and what is superstition, if not the dire flight from responsibility?). The modern idea of a coincidence would not only be a totally alien concept to someone living in 5,000 B.C., but a factual impossibility. And nothing to them was “foreign” when it came to nature, her eternal cycles, and the fabric of her Reality. Therefore, that “consistency” in reality still remains in place today. We simply choose not to look at reality in any of its manifestations... perhaps it’s the repetition that bores us (we’d rather digress into the repetition of the 24-hour news-cycle and get distracted from having to pay attention to her Reality).

Living under the illusion that “shit happens,” separates us from reality, and it gives us leave to not pay attention to what’s going on. People in ancient times didn’t have that luxury – knowing what’s going on was likely the razor thin difference between life and death. But we no longer live under “Damocles’ sword” hanging by a horse’s hair over our heads, or so we tell ourselves. You can believe whatever you want, but that usually doesn’t change the facts on the ground... (of course we live under worse delusions than Damocles’ sword, we just don’t want to own up to it!).

I’d Be Lazy If I Weren’t So Tired...

And so it goes... It’s a kind of laziness that’s endemic to our time, a stupor, a sleeping through things which gives us a false sense of security (why else would we be so cock-ready to give up our political freedoms and our human rights to be protected from “others” who are allegedly after our ill-gotten “wealth” and privilege). We simply don’t want to be bothered... and since most of us don’t wish any ill to anyone, when something bad happens, and we hear about it on the radio, the tube, or on the Internet, then it seems to us like something “out of the blue.” Or we chalk it up to “divine intervention.”

But seriously folks, we’re just living in denial. Is war and famine something that happens out of the blue? Another accident? Like global warming...? As if the weather were not a reflection, and true echo, of what we’re doing: “This last super-storm, I had nothing to do with it! I just consume gasoline and plastic like it’s going out of style, and run the electricity and water all day long... What’s wrong with that??”

Yeah, heard that, done that...  Our long-gone ancestors didn’t live in our superstitious times, of course. Such mumbo-jumbo would have probably driven them mad. In our phony reality, wherein everything that happens has a “hidden cause,” which is magically out of our control, we can continue to be oblivious to the consequences (since we’re ultimately responsible for what we do, if we were to fess up, we’d have to discard this “magical” cause for our troubles, and own up to what our actions are really doing – not a ticket for political success!).

The ancients didn’t live under the illusion that things “just happen” without “rhyme or reason,” as we claim to ourselves today. Human beings at that time were not easily surprised or overwhelmed by events because they were not detached from their natural environment the way we are today. To us, it’s our neighbors fault, our government’s fault, or God’s fault, and if he weren’t dead, we’d be vociferously claiming we have no control over what God does... Can a weasel be more specious than that? (I apologize for the insult to weasels...)

Were ancient peoples to be surprised that a storm came in? That an earthquake struck? Hardly. Nothing nature could throw at them, including the rare famine or drought, was ever going to catch them unawares (especially since they knew they had created the earthquakes and famines themselves!). This was simply not possible since they were in constant union with the external world, not only through their gods, but also the lesser natural and elemental spirits which inhabit the ground, the rocks, the trees, the streams, and the wind.

Not to mention, they had a memory that went back centuries, and they knew that when their ancestors did such-and-such, then something “bad” happened. And, since they weren’t knuckleheads like we are today, they didn’t repeat stupid behavior ad nausea merely to “make money,” or cheat someone (which is really the same thing).

Memory Is Our Conscience

Even without consulting their oracles or their gods, our ancestors would know days or weeks in advance when a storm was brewing (and more accurately than our Met Service does), and likewise would know months in advance, if not actually years in advance, when a drought was inevitable. Most of the time, humans were successful in avoiding these pitfalls, at least, until more recent times, let’s say, around the Middle Ages, and then into the Renaissance, when people, especially in Europe, no longer had anything but a tenuous link to their natural surroundings.

Well, by the Middle Ages the gods were gone... we simply abandoned them! Yet, people were still in touch with nature. For a time, even onto the 14^th Century A.D., they had traditional folklore, folk wisdom and apotropaic magic to rely on. But this knowledge was being permanently lost thanks to the witch hunts, book burnings, and the lies and superstitions introduced by the Roman Church (not to mention the internecine wars and crusades they fanned over the continent with glee and abandon for centuries).

If it rained a thousand years ago, it’s going to rain again! Where’s the surprise in that? If you’re going to burn down your surrounding forest, no birds will be around (and other animals) to fend off bad weather and colder winters (life maintains the temperature of the planet constant – death both rises and lowers the temperature). Likewise, if you burn the forests of the entire planet, then the weather is going to change... and it won’t be for the “better.” What’s “news” about that?

There’s nothing complicated or magical about it. We just think it’s “magical” because we have succumbed to the Big Lie we tell ourselves (i.e., we’re not responsible for anything we do, and collectively, for anything that takes place). As I said, we can make the lie a plausible one as long as we sever our connections to the real world... to our “little voice” inside. To our memory! Memory, as I’ve explained, is a kind of “conscience” and if you can shut that off, you can do any gruesome thing without sensing its immediate consequences.

Losing our Memory is what our “modern,” materialistic life-style brings with it. We’re dependent entirely on an artificial environment generated by electricity, we have nary a conscious connection to the natural world as it is... Of course, despite our denial, we have a connection to the natural world, and a deep one at that, so deep in fact that we can’t escape its consequences. We simply prefer to ignore the consequences, hoping someone “downwind” or “downstream” will bear the brunt of it.

In the meantime, we’d rather remain blissfully asleep and unbothered.

An Idiot By Any Other Name...

Getting on near April again, and fools and appearances are, as they say, against us! They don’t whisper, nor do they murmur, they yell! We gnash our teeth at the “hardness of our fate,” yet fools and appearances speak against us. In this world in which we have to fear and love, they’re always getting in the way (at least, in the way of a free lunch). 

In our “modern age,” in our present evolutionary state, fools and appearances can’t be helped. Although we may defend against clumsy spectators and familiar curiosity, we’re always exposed! As Freddie always said: “We have been woven into a strict yarn and shirt of duties and cannot get out of it...”

Well, we may have rent and torn at that yarn since his day... to the extent that the fabric of society is more than frazzled (if one is to be mistaken for a naïve fool, as one more of the bleating who actually believe what the media reports). 

In the tumult and uproar, it may have gone unnoticed, but it’s through duty that idiots are woven into our lives, right into the very stitch of our social fabric, into the yarns of clumsy spectators and nasty observers. What is this “duty” which no longer hounds us as in Freddie’s day, nor tugs at our collars, nor yanks at our conscience? Where have our moral obligations to our brethren, our community, our living environment, to the noble gods, gone?

Nevermore! They’re no more. No one owes anyone anything (except the banks, of course!). It used to be that everyone was looking for someone (that must have been during the Summer of Love), today, it’s everyone looking at themselves! The youthful narcissists and their “selfies” (as in: “Here I am with that unloved, dour hijacker! Hey, we didn’t get blown up?”). We are no longer duty-bound, bereft of self-less love, and all we have left are the bitter dregs of fear... the great masses of spectators, those not-so-meek herd-animals have nothing to live for; nothing to die for either.

And so it was, that before the word “idiot” took on its more vulgar meaning of “stupid,” “lacking intelligence,” and worse (in the States, until the ‘50s, idiot was used as a technical-legal term for “mental retardation”), it had a more poignant meaning (not that “idiot” isn’t poignant when it’s use properly and to identify and describe the proper individual or collective). The word comes to us from the Greek. You can always leave it to them to endow everything with a clear and salient meaning. The Greeks knew a thing or two about idiots in general, and “idiot” had a very special meaning, which has since been lost in the transit of time.

 “From these things therefore it is clear that the Polis (city-state) is a natural growth, and that man is by nature a political animal, and a man that is by nature and not merely by fortune citiless is either low in the scale of humanity or above it (like the “clanless, lawless, hearthless,” man reviled by Homer, for one by nature unsocial is also ‘a lover of war’).” -Aristotle- Politics, ca. 350 B.C.

We want to recall Aristotle’s axiom about human beings being political animals, especially today, when we reference idiots... (idiots such as: The Donald or Hillary, who are not “above it” but rather they are below the evolutionary stage of mere animals, for they are “war lovers,” and therefore, not worthy of being called “political” in any real sense of the word. Idiots is by far more accurate and should be the term used henceforth.).

You’ve got to hand it to Homer too! He was no slouch... Blind as a bat he may have been, but he listened! He could sense the throbbing of the blood, the pulsing of the ka-double, the vibrations in the wind, and in the air itself he sensed the gods singing and dancing. Undisturbed by sight or the brightness of day, his ears touched at the same time as they heard, and that’s how Homer got the rhythm for the hexameter!

Citizens and Idiots Lend Me Your Ears

Back to our friend Aristotle... He said that we were political animals for a reason – to be a “political animal” was something vaunted and desired in the “citizen” of the Polis. An idiot, therefore, was someone who cared nothing for, was totally disinterested in, or did not partake in the affairs of the Polis. In other words, someone alien to the affection of their fellow brothers and sisters – someone whom the ancient Greeks despised since they felt such an individual was “too individual” and not a part of their community, and was as if living apart from humanity. After all, such an idiot, as Aristotle observed, was either on a higher evolutionary path then the rest of humanity, or relegated to be lower than an animal... more than likely the latter.

“For it is the special property of man in distinction from the other animals that he alone has perception of good and bad and right and wrong and the other moral qualities, and it is partnership in these things that makes a household and a city-state.” -Aristotle- Politics

Hmm... “the good and bad and other moral qualities,” those very values which have disappeared from the modern state and even the household of the modern herd-animal. It’s as if selfishness and egotism have silenced the individual’s conscience, removed the word “morality” from the vernacular, and from everyday social behavior as well... To act “morally” was the duty of the citizen of the Polis. This is why Freddie was right when he said we’re “bound by duty” to the fabric of our communities. But alas, we’re certainly not in Athens anymore... and we’re not in Kansas either!

We’re in a state – a stasis – which the Greeks would consider to be utter chaos. Going even further back in time, I doubt the Ancient Egyptians would have had much stomach for it either. They didn’t even have the word idiot – since there wasn’t anyone remotely resembling an idiot among the Black People. Their “Polis” was like the energized buzzing of a harmonious beehive (something as diametrically opposed to our current state and how it conducts its affairs would be unimaginable!).

It’s not simply the fact that the “modern state” (what used to be the Polis) is ungovernable... Aristotle’s insight that the natural growth of the “city-state” is ultimately human, seems to indicate that it’s not the institution per se, but the individuals, its so-called leaders and those making up its membership that are lacking; in other words, they also happen to be idiots.

Let us take a moment to consider what made the Polis governable in antiquity. Not to intimate that in ancient Greece, or even in Athens, there was any semblance of “democracy” as modern idiots understand the term (in Athens there were many women and slaves, which amounts to the same thing – non-citizens). No, it had nothing to do with power. It had to do with duty (to the Ancient Greeks it was a sacred duty – an expression of philo – or self-less love). The only essential thing that made an ancient Polis governable, therefore, was the small number of idiots around – the rest were either slaves or citizens.

It’s not that complicated... it’s almost mathematical. Today, things are mathematically “unbalanced,” you may say, to the detriment of the State and of Politics in general – the “political animal” has degenerated considerably. There’s no art or power, and certainly not any “art of governing” or “political science,” required to figure it out. Whether a nation or a people can be governed depends on Number – the ratio of idiots to citizens the nation or territory possesses. How can anyone govern today when selfish idiots outnumber dutiful citizens a million to one? (Make that a billion to one).

Governing is a duty, and that naturally, doesn’t enter into the modern political calculus. All that matters is the attainment of selfish, personal power. Governing, dealing with the proper management of the “household” (a.k.a. Economics), which explains why women were the only ones to manage such, was the highest duty. When it comes to the “common good,” that is the “household” of the many, that’s something first-rate idiots like Trump or Hillary cannot fathom. They fail to take the “human household” into account... and once in power, they’ll never take account of anything, and much less responsibility for anything! Like most first-rate idiots they haven’t paused yet to think things through (thinking things through is simply not within the skill set of the normal, run-of-the-mill, first-rate idiot!).

Is it any wonder then that we are surrounded by idiots? We’re not only surrounded by them, but being led down the slippery slope to Armageddon by them! It’s exasperating, but true. It’s a demeaning and unsavory task to have to deal in or with Politics, so I won’t belabor the point, and I won’t be going down that rat hole any time soon. To speak of or about first-rate idiots and politicians (well, they amount to the same thing), is beneath a mere slave anyway. Nevertheless, the state of affairs in our decadent age (and not just in Politics and Economics!) is such that fools and appearances are always against us... 

                                                    Happy April Fool’s Day!