Luke Judge

The Biblical Tower of Babel.  The Roman Empire.

I’ve always compared the impending collapse of our way of life in the Western world to the fall of the Roman Empire.  really, I think the better solution would look more like the story of Babel:  God sends man’s folly crashing to the ground and scatters the people to their own corners of the earth.

The Union makes a great story for the history books.  these English rebels with their middle fingers stuck in the air decide to start their own government, dammit, and they have all these awesome ideals (these days it’s the i-Deal that’s running things…a far cry from the good ol’ days, but that’s the story book version I guess).  So they drop the F bomb on England in the form of the Declaration of Independence and a war.  Some people die.  Some decisions are made.  A new government is formed.  Freedom!  A Bill of Rights and a new Constitution, a free market, a bright, bright future.  Several individual states allow a federal government to provide protection and some basic laws of the land, while making sure everyone plays nice . . . most of the time.

Over the past several years, between suspicious military campaigns that seem pulled directly out of 1984 and our constant economic troubles, it has become obvious that maybe the Union has outstayed its welcome.  We were never meant to be ONE nation but a group of individual states working together with a federal government to moderate over our protection and relations.  yet, everything in our history has given us more and more of a false sense of that kind of unity.

Besides that, our collective lifestyle — bigger is better — has gotten out of control.  We all want more, more, more.  bigger, bigger, bigger.  and the feds can’t handle our demands.  We look to them to help us support our lifestyles.  it ain’t gonna happen.

I’m of the opinion that we should dissolve the Union and allow the individual states to fully govern and protect themselves.  This would foster a more local sense of community, responsibility, and unity.

It would also keep us from crumbling like the Romans and becoming another good story for school children to read.

But this is just me thinking out loud.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 7th, 2011 at 2:26 PM and is filed under Uncategorized. you can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. you can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

ancient History Books babel, decisions, earth, i deal, middle fingers

Published: Thursday, November 04, 2010, 7:00 AM     Updated: Thursday, November 04, 2010, 8:55 AM Fourteen years after Ken Buckles first brought war veterans to speak in front of Milwaukie High School classes for the first Living History Day, the annual event has been placed on hiatus largely because of fundraising troubles.

Buckles, a former physical education teacher and coach at Milwaukie, began the Veterans Day tribute to honor his father, who had been tortured by memories of the Korean War throughout his life.

Buckles now works on similar events full time as the executive director of the Remembering America’s Heroes nonprofit organization.

Instead of bringing hundreds of veterans to Milwaukie this year, Buckles has arranged for two veterans to speak at the school during its 53rd annual Gold Star Assembly, which honors Milwaukie High alumni who lost their lives in service. This year’s assembly on Tuesday will feature former Tuskegee Airman Lt. Col. Alex Jefferson and former U.S. Marine Cpl. Leo Champagne, a veteran who participated in the Battle of Iwo Jima.

At Milwaukie High, the Living History event had long been a source of pride for the 1,200-student school, which frequently contributed hundreds of student volunteers. Principal Mark Pinder said students understand the economy’s impact on the event, but that many are still disappointed.

“I’ve had students come up to me and express sadness about it,” he said.

Buckles’ efforts for Living History Day seemed to grow each year since its inception. But in recent years, Buckles and the nonprofit struggled as the economy soured and a major revenue source, a bingo game, was evicted from its original venue in 2009.

The nonprofit attempted to raise funds for Living History Day this year, but the sponsors declined sharply. Buckles estimates that about $10,000 is needed each year for the event.

“I got turned down by so many people that I was shocked,” he said.

When he had to let go of his only employee, an office manager, the prospects of keeping Living History Day alive seemed even slimmer. By September, Buckles said, it seemed clear he couldn’t scrounge up enough money.

Still, Buckles will be able to put on another event: He was recruited to put on a USO-style musical called “A Tribute to Veterans,” which is sponsored in part by the Portland Trail Blazers, at Portland’s Memorial Coliseum. The free event will begin at 3 p.m. Sunday.

Though Buckles has his hands full with the Rose Quarter event, he said he is still struggling with the reality of Living History Day’s current status. He still hopes the event can be revived.

“I just have a lot of shock and disappointment,” he said. “I hope people realize this is important and we don’t want this to go away.”

ancient History Books 53rd, buckles, fourteen years, korean war, marine cpl, veterans day

One of Anniston’s oldest residents has kept her secrets hidden behind carefully wrapped linen bandages for more than 2,000 years.

But after a visit to Regional Medical Center, those ancient secrets finally will be revealed.

Anniston Museum of Natural History officials plan to transport Tasherytpamenekh (pronounced Ta-SHER-eet-pa-MEN-eck), one of their two Ptolemaic-era Egyptian mummies, to the Tyler Center at RMC Aug. 18 for a state-of-the-art, 64-slice computerized tomography, or CT, scan.

The information from the scan will then be sent to the Ohio-based Phillips Corporation, where the data will be used to render a three-dimensional forensic image of the mummified woman, something never before possible.

“We are all very eager to see the images resulting from this scan and also from the subsequent forensic reconstruction,” Anniston Museum Director Cheryl Bragg said in a press release. “It’s a great honor for us to be a part of this, and we look forward to being able to share a lot of new information with the public as well as other scientific institu-tions.”

The CT scanner, which RMC acquired about a year ago, is typically used by the hospital to diagnose ailments in pa-tients’ chests, abdomens and pelvic areas. The device combines a series of X-ray views from many different angles to create cross-sectional images of tissue and bone inside a person’s body.

“It’s the most sophisticated piece of diagnostic equipment in the area,” said RMC CEO David McCormack. “This will expose our technology to the community.”

RMC CT and PET supervisor Vincent Glanze, who will perform the scan of the mummy, said the device makes sliced images the way a person might slice bread.

“We do slices all the way down to .4 millimeters, so you can imagine the details we could get off that,” he said.

Glanze said the scan, which should not take more than five minutes, will produce similar, three-dimensional details of the mummy as it would a live patient, even though the mummy is wrapped and 2,000 years old.

“We should be able to get very nice detail on that,” he said. “We will be able to almost construct a face from that.”

Glanze noted that the Phillips Corporation, which sold RMC the CT scanner, would use software to construct a much more detailed 3D image of the mummy’s face.

But museum officials will receive more information than just what the mummy looks like underneath her wrappings.

“We’ll see skin, flesh, teeth … we’ll be able to see where incisions were made,” said Margie Conner, the Anniston Museum’s marketing manager. “We can see this person underneath the bandages without the removal of them.”

Conner said examiners would have to destroy the bandages and likely much of the mummy itself if they wanted to see details like those the CT scan will provide.

“Obviously, that’s not something we’re willing to do,” she said.

This is not the first time technology has been used to examine the mummy.

Tasherytpamenekh and the museum’s other mummy, whose name is unknown, were x-rayed in 1978 in the radiology department of Stringfellow Memorial Hospital.

Both mummies have been part of the Anniston Museum’s permanent collection for 80 years.

Tasherytpamenekh was chosen for the far more advanced CT scan because her skeleton is the most intact, thereby offering the maximum amount of information possible for the x-ray.

Though the CT scan will take just a few minutes, the process of moving the mummy will be long and labor-intensive.

“It will be a very involved process from our point of view,” Conner said. “We’ll have to remove the display case, which is very heavy … then she’ll be taken carefully to the place where we’ll load her, then we’ll shore up her sides and feet so she won’t move.”

Conner said the museum’s exhibit department has special materials to keep the mummy as stable as possible.

To prepare for the move, the museum will close at 4 p.m., which is an hour early for the facility. Once the mummy is ready, it will be placed in a hearse provided by K.L. Brown Funeral Home.

“The mummy is very fragile, very old and incalculably valuable,” Bragg said. “A hearse is immediately recognizable on the road and people expect it to move slowly, so we felt it would allow us the ability to travel safely under the speed limit.”

The Anniston Police Department will provide an escort for the mummy to and from the Tyler Center.

“It’s incredible … the staff is very excited,” Glanze said of the event. “It’s a good opportunity that is great for the community.”

Contact staff writer Patrick McCreless at 256-235-3561.

ancient History Books ancient secrets, computerized tomography, forensic reconstruction, institu

                                                         By Zeki Ergas

 Israel is the world’s sixth nuclear power. It has a formidable army. Its air force is one of the best in the world. All the talk therefore about there being an external threat to its existence because it is surrounded by implacable enemies is unconvincing.   No conceivable coalition of forces in the region could beat Israel in a conventional war, and that would include Iran, even if it succeeded in a few years time in becoming a nuclear power.   On the contrary, the real danger of apocalypse in the region is rather that Israel may launch a summer attack on Iran to destroy its nuclear-enrichment facilities. It has the implicit support of Sunni Saudi Arabia which has reportedly accorded over-flight permission, and a covert green light from the United States which, for internal political reasons, would not punish Israel if it attacked without US permission.  An attack of that sort could have dramatic consequences because Iran has multiple possibilities of forceful retaliation including: the blocking of the straits of Hormuz at its narrowest passage, which would interrupt the flow of oil that the Western world needs and cause oil prices to skyrocket; reactivating its clients in the region, Hezbollah, Hamas and the Shia groups in Iraq; and even targeting missiles on Israeli population centres that could cause massive casualties.   In my view, Israels paranoia about Iran has two causes: firstly the memory of the Holocaust, and secondly that fear of an external threat serves the political interests of the present extreme-right-wing Israeli government. A nuclear attack on Israel by a future nuclear Iran is a quasi-impossibility simply because United States reprisals would result in that country, a very ancient civilisation, being sent back to the stone age. Irans theocratic and civilian political leadership may be implacable enemies of Israel, but they are not foolish.   I therefore maintain that, in the long run, the primary threat to Israels existence is not external, but internal. Israel is not faced with the risk of destruction by a major conventional war, but rather by the risk of an implosion due to the incapacity of its political leadership to stem the rising tide of fanatical, fascistic and divisive forces within the country.   The recent clash between the Ashkenazi Haredim (ultra-orthodox Jews) and Israels highest court may appear risible to outside observers, especially in the West, but it is symptomatic of a serious malaise that it would be a serious error to underestimate.   The disturbing aspect of the event was not that a small number of Ashkenazi Haredi parents in a West Bank settlement called Emmanuel broke the law by refusing to send their daughters to school. (They had refused to do so because they did not want them to be in the same class as the daughters of their Sephardi counterparts, believing that they would thereby be contaminated or suffer a loss of purity, because the Sephardi girls were considered to be inferior in terms of adherence to Torah requirements.)  What rather gives cause for concern is that, when the parents of the girls were sentenced to two weeks imprisonment by Israels highest court, a massive crowd of between 100,000 and 120,000 Haredim accompanied the condemned parents to prison, thus demonstrating not only an extraordinary level of solidarity, but that the Haredim would probably violently resist evacuation of the Territories in any move to end the occupation.   The size of the crowd (mostly men – the women and children stayed at home), was enormous, particularly when one considers that a demonstration in support of the exchange of Sergeant Gilad Shalit for a thousand Palestinian prisoners attracted merely 20,000 people. Yet Israelis care a great deal about the liberation of Shalit, to the extent that the issue has become a national obsession.   On the other hand, demonstrations protesting the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem (Sheik Jarrah) and against the hardships caused by the Wall (of Shame, according to many) in the Occupied Territories (Bilin, etc.) mobilize no more than a few hundred.   The statistics concerning the anti-democratic and anti-peace forces in Israel have become extremely worrisome. The religious extremists and nationalists (Haredim and Dati-im Leumi) in Israel are estimated to constitute about 15 per cent of the Jewish population. To these may be added another 15 per cent of secular ultra-nationalists – those who vote for Israel Beiteinu (Israel Is Our Home) of Avigdor Lieberman, and other similar but smaller political parties. So it is reasonable to affirm that around 30 per cent of Israels Jewish population (about 5.8 million) are in the political danger zone – and their numbers are growing by leaps and bounds. Moreover, in the last year or two, as is well known, opinion among the Israeli population as a whole has shifted to the right.   As a result, the majority of Jewish Israeli citizens now support the current extreme-right-wing government that, in its present form, simply will not, cannot, engage in serious negotiations for peace, because that would imply consideration of territorial and other concessions that important members of the coalition are not prepared to make. So for meaningful negotiations to take place the present government must fall and be replaced by a national unity government including Tzipi Livnis Kadima. Not that that in itself would be enough. It would not. It would still be necessary for such a government to act in the right direction.    Israel however lacks the prophetic voice and forceful leadership that would convince its Jewish citizens to move openly and resolutely towards a two-state solution, even one requiring painful concessions, before it is too late. But, failing such leadership, Israel may become a pariah state without a future.  Deep down, the vast majority of Israelis know that, given the international situation and the direction that the country is taking, making peace with the Palestinians is the only solution. That means the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank: the Palestinian National Authority PNO) led by Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad. And not the Hamas leadership of Ismail Haniye and Khaled Meshal. While it is true that Hamas won the elections because of incompetence and corruption problems within the PNO, and that it has done some a lot of good in the form of providing social services and building clinics, the major  good social work, the major problem remains its extremist and fundamentalist ideology which stops it from explicitly recognizing Israels existence. It still hopes to liberate the whole of Palestine.  

That ideology is neither realistic nor achievable. And it is in utter  contradiction with the feelings of the majority of the Palestinian people who are sick and tired of the occupation and want peace, and overwhelmingly support a two-state solution. The latest polls indicate that a free election would result in a massive Fatah victory. 

   But there remains little time.  

The Haredim and Dati-im Leumi have a much higher birth rate than other Jews. They are fanatically committed to their cause and will never relent. If they are not stopped soon, they will turn Israel into what will be, for all intents and purposes, a theocratic state. Already, the majority of pupils in Israeli primary schools are religious, as are a rapidly increasing proportion of soldiers and officers in the army, in both combat and elite units. A majority of the latter have declared that they would refuse to use force if ordered to remove settlers from the occupied territories.   In addition, civil liberties are under attack by fascistic radicals. Recently, Im Tirtzu, a right-wing student organisation viciously attacked the New Israel Fund (NIF) and its president, Naomi Chazan. (Im Tirtzu means, “If you wish”, it is the first half of a celebrated phrase by Theodore Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism, the second half being, ein zo Agada