Pregnancy Pact Myth Refuses to Die

Miskatonic Student To Exhibit Rare Artifacts at Local Fair!

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Including Rare Statues, Books, and Misc Papers Relevant to Pieces! Exhibit expected to be met with extreme trepidation by skittish locals.

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Vila Wolf, a 24 year old Anthropology student currently studying under Professor Harrington at Miskatonic University had this to say:

“These are important pieces of history and need to be available to the general public. Especially now that the Exhibit Hall of Miskatonic University in closed for important security upgrades and general renovation.”

When asked about the closure of the Hall and her Professors recent commitment to Arkham Asylum for observation she had this to say:

“ No, the hall was not closed because Prof. Harrington suffered a mental break and attempted to burn the entire building.’ she said with a look of extreme annoyance ‘Seriously now, whoever started that rumor was probably the one who stole the Cephalopods Mascot Costume and danced on the roof of the biology building after last months spectacular loss. 120 to 2 Wow.

Look, Prof. Harrington’s work habits have been long and stressful for years, if not decades. I wont deny that he’s been acting odd lately but I can assure you that it’s a simple case of over work.”

Pieces included in the exhibit include The Cthulhu Idol, The Necronomicon, 4 sigils, a collection of rare volumes, recently uncovered paperwork.

If anyone has any thing they would like to contribute to this exhibit please send them in digital form to Vilawolf@gmail.com deadline of September 10th 2008.

The exhibit will be held from September 17th through the 28th at the Kern County Fair, Hobby Pavilion, 1142 South P Street Bakersfield Ca, 93307 Open Daily from 8.30 am to 5.00 pm. Admission Prices to be Determined.

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This is what I get for sleeping through my Journalism class. *sigh*

Current Location: The Den
Current Mood: creative
Current Music: Tiny Tim

Everyone's heard the line from Henry VI, Part 2: The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.

Some lawyers would like you to believe that this praising with faint damns, but be not fooled, gentle reader. The Bard really had it in for the legal profession.

H/t Wendy McElroy.

Tags: law, lawyer, mcelroy, shakespeare

This is more of a personal musing than anything else, but I promise, it does relate to dominionism and the combat thereof. If it is inappropriate, I apologize in advance, but I'm curious to hear what people in this comm think.

( Family win and family fail )

Texas now requires that computer repair technicians have a private investigator license!?

(Editorial note: Happy American Independence Day, or Fourth of July. In honor of the holiday, I wanted to interrupt this two-part series and insert a traditional, even for me, bit of patriotic glurge, because I really am like that. Fortunately, I came to my senses. There is nothing more patriotic, during a Presidential election year, than actually discussing with my fellow Americans what principles we want to be governed under for the next four years. So screw glurge; politics is my patriotism.)

This is another journal entry, like yesterday's, where in order to verify that I understood the facts of the matter, I had to wade through a ton of absolutely garbage journalism. Yesterday, I wrote about Democratic presidential nominee-presumptive Senator Barack Obama's announcement that he intends to vote for the current version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act renewal, the one that gives the telecom companies that spied on American's phone calls (whether or not anybody actually listened to the calls so tapped, it's technically still spying, technically) without the niceties of even the shallow fig-leaf of a FISA warrant application. Journalists all over the world have "knowingly" (cynically) assured people that Barack Obama doesn't "really" mean it, that he can't "really" mean to eliminate the penalties whenever the NSA taps Americans' phone calls without a warrant, that he's just pandering to the crowd who are afraid the Democrats will be "soft on terrorism." I spent yesterday's journal entry documenting the reasons why that theory is almost certainly false; it is much more likely that Senator Obama really does intend for America's spies to keep violating the law, and even the Constitution, and relying in in-agency and telco whistle-blowers to protect us from actual harm, just like every US President since Lincoln.

The case against the supposed political motivation of Obama's "tack to the right" in his speech outlining his plan to expand government funding to faith-based charities (PDF) is an even easier slam dunk. It annoys me what it says about how little the almost entirely white journalism establishment understands about black Americans that they think that the first credible black Presidential candidate would only shovel money to churches for political reasons. This is one area where black history and white history are diametrically opposed. First, the relevant white history: even the most religious white colonists who first came to America, the Puritans who made up over 80% of all the non-natives in America by 1640, came here fleeing from a church. From two of them, actually: the Catholic Church, and the Church of England. They had fought a war in England against the imposition of state-sponsored Catholicism. They took one look at what state-sponsorship was doing to their own Protestant faith and its ministers, and came here opposed, at least initially, to that, too. Stamped in the DNA of white America is a deep and abiding suspicion of organized religion. Even the most pious fundamentalist assures himself (delusionally, in many cases) that he, not some clergyman, let alone some government-supported clergyman, is his own highest moral authority after God and the Bible. For crying out loud, white American Catholics believe that, and that's 100% opposed to stated Catholic doctrine.

And in fact, even the limited extent to which the Southern Baptists have gone along with the current administration's Office of Faith-Based Initiatives has startled me. When I was being trained in Christian theology and Republican politics by Independent Baptist and Southern Baptist teachers back in the 1970s, they were entirely opposed to this kind of thing, for two solid practical reasons. First of all, they explained to me as a kid, just because your church is on the approved list for government funding this year, doesn't mean that it will be next year, not if the voters get any say in it, and we do elect a new administration every 4 to 8 years. And secondly, their own limited experience with accepting even the most indirect of government funding, through grants to private schools, left them with a sour taste in their mouths. They told me that every time, the politicians and government bureaucrats had waited until the churches' organizations were dependent on that money coming in, and then made intolerable demands in order to keep it. After one particularly horrific experience nearly bankrupted St. Louis's second-largest Protestant school back in the 1970s, the Missouri Union of Christian Schools passed a resolution forbidding any of their member schools from taking any government money. The state legislature had allocated funds "to promote physical education" by making grant money available to any school that wanted to build a gym, public or private. But then didn't allocate enough money to pay for one in one year. St. Louis Christian Academy had 2/3rds of the money they needed, paid the architect, got the permits, dug the foundation for their new gym. Then their legislator came in and said, in so many words, that the legislature was thinking of cutting off the funding to any school that didn't use the state-approved textbooks, including pro-evolution science textbooks. So SLCA said, fine, and tried to drop out of the program. The next day, a building inspector came by, asked them how they were going to finish that gym, and when he found out that no construction was ongoing, he condemned the building. It took fund-raising all across the state to raise the money in time and to pay the legal bills to fight that condemnation. So tell me why, with stories like that in circulation, churches want to let legislators and bureaucrats in Washington get their hooks into the churches' budgets? Can their greed have so thoroughly overruled their own knowledge and common sense?

What's more, at least two Christian legal organizations have already spotted one potential trap-door in Barack Obama's proposal, too, that's making them nervous. Obama gives what seems to him to be the reasonable requirement that if the taxpayers are funding someone's salary, then hiring for that job can't discriminate against applicants on religious grounds, or any other protected status like race, ethnicity, or Vietnam veteran status. He's on solid constitutional ground, there, in theory; I recall working indirectly on the case of a Wiccan clerical worker for the Salvation Army who won her case on the grounds that her duties were not in any way religious, so Sally's couldn't claim that sharing their Christian faith was a bona fide occupational qualification, a BFOQ. But as both the Center for Law and Religious Freedom and the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations have pointed out, this gets problematic fast given Obama's commitment to roll these grants out to smaller and smaller churches, because those churches have hardly any paid employees, maybe even only one. Commingling of funds becomes automatic, impossible to avoid. And a commenter at the Center for Religious Freedom's blog pointed out an even bigger trojan horse in this proposal: the same law that Obama refers to covering discrimination in hiring, Title VII, is one that he's already promised gay and lesbian groups that he intends to amend to protect sexual orientation. So under Obama's proposal, any church that takes dollar one of federal funding and allows one thin dime of that money to commingle with church general revenue can no longer fire the pastor, or any other employee, if they find out he or she is gay.

But Senator Obama's proposal is neither proof that he's a right-wing Democrat in disguise, nor a dishonest attempt to portray himself as more moderate than he is, nor a liberal plot to advance the homosexual agenda. How do I know this? Occam's Razor. It is far, far simpler to believe that he is just that much of a believer in the black church, like nearly every educated black man in America. Remember that different black-versus-white historical experience I mentioned earlier? Let me finish that thought. Because, you see, black Americans' ancestors didn't come here fleeing any kind of church; they were captured by enemy tribes back in Africa and sold to white plantation owners as slaves. Those plantation owners lived in constant fear of organized revolt by their slaves; the term "monomania" was originally coined by southern plantation owners, for whom this "obsession" that black slaves had with getting free, their unwillingness to accept their fate, was seen as a mental sickness. But the one organization that black slaves were allowed, the one time they were allowed to gather under their own authority without white overseers, was in church on Sunday morning. At the time of emancipation, all black leaders in America were ministers, except for a tiny handful up north. And under the Jim Crow laws that were enacted to keep "freed" slaves enslaved in practice, and in the face of substantial barriers of institutionalized racism in education and hiring, it stayed true for another hundred years. Virtually the only black college graduates were seminary graduates in the American Methodist Episcopal and American Baptist churches; until the 1964 Civil Rights Act, practically the only good-paying job for black Americans was pastor of an AME or a Baptist church. As a result, up through 1964, the pastorate was a highly coveted job, one that without almost any exceptions attracted the best of the best, the brightest of the brightest. There have even been some black intellectuals who've complained about one of the unwanted side effects of the 1964 Civil Rights Act being that the black church lost its monopoly on intellectual and moral authority, and a few of them blame that at least as much as they blame racist economics for the high rates of single parenthood in black America.

So given that difference in how white Americans and black Americans feel about their churches, if you thought that America's first black President wasn't going to funnel money any which way he can to the African Methodist Episcopal church, and probably the American Baptist Church, and conceivably even smaller black denominations like the Nation of Islam, by any means possible, whether you or I or any white person likes it or not? If you think you have to make up some implausible conspiracy theory to explain why he'd suggest he wants to do so? If you think that your conspiracy theory is more likely than that he just plain likes and respects the black churches that much and wants them to be richer whatever it takes? Then I think you just plain don't know what you're talking about.

Tags: election 2008, history, politics, religion
Current Mood: good
Current Music: Arthur Lyman - Beyond The Reef

_The Tri-Cult "Interfaith" Devival_
from noon until 2am on this Sunday, July 6th, 2008
located @ VICE aka Fascination St. (304 6th, just East of San Jacinto), Austin, TX 78701

featuring Live Music, Ranting, Transmedia Infotainment, Midnight Marriages, and more...

For advance tickets, go to:
http://www.Devival.com

Yes, this event is 14 hours long, it's inside, and AIR-CONDITIONED!
Breakfast & Dinner Catering by Ararat Mid-East Fusion
Massive Sound provided by Big Medicine
Merchandise tables from Thunder Puppet, Pop Noir, & Gomi

Live Music by:
Hipnautica
John Gomi
Infidelic
Exstus
Space Bunnies Must Die!
Destroyed for Comfort
Two Saturdays
Furby Youth Choir
Swarm of White Kids
Saint OZ CDXXIII
aethyrflux
We will have multiple DJs of extreme variety all throughout the day!
And surprise guests...

So, what the Hell is the devival, you ask?
Well, you might as well ask what is fnord...
But, since you enquired:

( The Devival is almost but not entirely unlike: )


For further inspiration, here's some background info for The Tri-Cult "Interfaith" Devival:

( A few Discordian resources: )

( Some )

( Various Cthulhoid resources: )

Roegher was dying, which he did not think a tragedy. Everyone was dying one way or another. He was just dying a bit faster and, as he was The Last True Man, his impending death was 'special'.

He had actually been 'dying' for nearly a century and a half, starting right after The Prohibition when the augmentations that gave him longevity were turned off or dialed back. There had been much beating of breasts and rending of garments over that, but Roegher had not been a part of that nonsense.

He knew that The Time of True Men was over. The Rebellion of The Sons of Hercules had proved that to all but the most die hard Masculinists. He himself had lost a daughter and two grand daughters in that nightmare.

There had been seven centuries of peace before that. Yes, there were violent feuds between Cult Clans, but those were resolved with personal duels or, if need be, by Cavalry Wars; hundreds, sometimes thousands, of Sisters on horseback with sabers and lances upon an open plain.

Once the fighting was done – usually with few killed – both sides held a festival for the dead, sang, danced, got drunk, and had sex together...and the matter was settled.

But the Supermen of Ashkelon, engineered to be Perfect Men by one Cult of well meaning but misguided Sisters, proved to be too Perfect and founded a Masculinist Republic. After a century of conflict, a dozen worlds had been ravaged, Ashkelon was reduced to a slagheap, and the Sons were all dead, along with over twenty million others.

The Grand Council and Assembly of The Sisterhood declared The End of Men, a Prohibition, and no more True Men were to be born. Males in the womb would be allowed come to term, but most were aborted anyway. What was the point?

Some True Men protested or bemoaned their fate. Many simply committed suicide or downloaded into Mandroids.

Not that it mattered all that much. Even before The Prohibition, three quarters of all Full Humans - Mandroids were not counted - were Sisters, a steady trend for centuries. Why bring male children into a Matriarchy?

While all that raged around him, Roegher tended to his garden. The Soil was Mother no matter what sun shown in the sky.

Roegher had laughed at all the Masculine/Feminine 'balance of energy' debates. There were thousands of Mandroids for every Sister, all cyborgs based on Y-Chromosome DNA. “That balances out nicely,” he thought.

For a while he had been an advisor on Mandroid psychology and trained many Sisters in that field. He got along well with the simple minded Workers and the idiot savant Harlequins. The Sliders, the Sisterhood's living starships, unnerved him, their brilliant minds like sharp cold steel. But he lived most his life dirtside, so no matter.

He had however visited Gaea one last time before it was encased in a Temporal Variance Sphere to be healed. That was a cherished event.

Now, as his life wound down to its end, he was content. His four life mates had borne two dozen daughters by him and there were many, many more grand, and great grand, daughters. They came to visit him, some out of love, some out of curiosity. But they were all kind and gentle with him and many would be there when he passed.

Plus The Priestesses of Eriskigal had assured him that his next Reincarnation was as a Sister. All things considered, Roegher knew he had nothing to complain about and planed to go out smiling....as befitted The Last True Man.

Okay. I just did a massive purge of my flist. If you have been removed and would like to be re-added please let me know. Let's re-acquaint and really get to know each other. I simply want to have closer relationships with people on LJ.

It has come to my attention that I rarely comment on people's journals anymore. This has lead to a decrease of feelings of intimacy amongst you all.

Livejournal isn't about a popularity contest, its about fostering fraternity and community..and I think I've fallen down on that a bit as the last six months I've been primarily posting (writing is very therapeutic for me) and though I read every day, my commenting has been atrocious.

I would like to say that I had some sort of clear method for why I removed who I did but I did not. I went through my list and I removed everyone on there that had never commented on my journal and whose journal I never commented on. Then, I removed some people who have abandoned their journals a long time ago (or at least are not posting) and who it would not be heartbreaking if I lost touch with. Some people who appear to have abandoned their journals, i kept on my list because I want to know where they are should they ever surface again. Then I went through the list a third time, and I randomly removed people who I felt I didn't have a sense of commonality, had never met, or a had not shared any intimacy with.

What remains is a hodge podge of personal friends, occult colleagues (whose occult work i want to keep track of), various philosophy/transhumanist/science geeks (whose geek work i want to keep track of), old time LJ and IRC friends who i have shared something with at one time even if we've grown apart, people that I know are local and look interesting and neat and i think maybe if i met them we could be meatspace friends, and an odd collection of folks who for some reason I feel like I have a connection with and want to keep in my life in some way but with whom I don't frequently interact and will likely never meet but wish I had more time to get to know. (this fits with my local connections mix)

It's my purpose to spend more time on less people on LJ and have richer relationships. When I first joined LJ, I had a lot of rich relationships on it, this has appeared to wan for me..though there are amazing people like takarosa who though I never talk with anymore..are near and dear to my heart still.

Funny, there are some people I kept even though I am not on their friends list due to the fact that a. their occult work is interesting or b. i've taken an odd liking to them and just want to keep track of them for some unknown reason.

Tags: friends
Current Mood: thoughtful

Spooky Men's Chorale

===The Sig Other of one of the band just joined the Top Bar Beekeepers Forum I am on.

===I absolutely adore this band...the first song got me completely hooked. (grins)

In the fridge, I have a quart of salted caramel ice cream base cooling. Oh, my godz- this is one of the yummiest ice creams I've made yet. And I haven't even churned it. That'll happen in the morning, so I can get it into the freezer to set properly. Since I can't have y'all over for an Ice Cream Sociable, I'll do the next best thing and share the recipe:

Salted Caramel Ice Cream

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups heavy cream

1 1/2 cups milk

6 egg yolks

3/4 cup sugar

1 tsp. vanilla extract

1/2 cup dark caramel sauce

1 1/4 tsp. fleur de sel or other high-quality sea salt

Directions:

In a saucepan over medium heat, warm the cream and milk, stirring occasionally, until steam rises from the surface. Remove from the heat.

In a heatproof bowl, whisk together the egg yolks and sugar until blended. Slowly add the hot cream mixture, whisking constantly. Pour the mixture into the saucepan or into a double boiler and set over medium-low heat. Cook, stirring slowly and continuously with a wooden spatula or spoon, until the custard thickens and a finger drawn across the back of the spatula leaves a path, about 6 minutes; do not allow the custard to boil.

Pour the custard through a fine-mesh sieve set over a clean bowl and stir in the vanilla, caramel sauce and salt. Nestle the bowl in a larger one filled halfway with ice and water and cool the custard to room temperature, stirring occasionally. Refrigerate until chilled, at least 1 hour.

Transfer the custard to an ice cream maker and freeze according to the manufacturer's instructions. Transfer the ice cream to a chilled container, cover and freeze until firm, at least 3 hours or up to 3 days before serving. Makes about 1 quart.

from Williams Sonoma

The trick to making this is the proper tempering of the warm milk