TUNE INTO Matriarchy Conference!

The live webcast of the 2nd World Congress on Matriarchal Studies is going on now, live, here! (Actually, it's 10:08 am, and I've tuned in to a lot of chatter and two guys close up to some mikes they're adjusting, and now they're starting! A woman has just introduced a man from AFrica, who will do the opening ritual, and they're adjusting the mike on him.... Gotta go and listen!)

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CONFERENCE SCHEDULE: (Central Standard Time!! or whatever is the time zone that's one to the west of Maine; it's 10:30 here, but 11:30 there....)

Friday 30th September Texas State University, San Marcos

11:30 a. m. - 2 p. m. Panel 5: West and South Africa

Wilhelmina J. Donkoh, Akan, Ghana, West Africa
Female Leadership among the Ashante

Gad A. Osafo, healer, Akan, Ghana, West Africa
Akan Healing Heritage – an Overview

Cécile Keller, woman doctor/healer, Switzerland
Matriarchal Medicine

Dr. Yvette Abrahams, Khoekhoe, Namibia, South Africa
Living in Our Natural World:
Indigenous Women, Power and Knowledge

Bernedette Muthien, Khoisan, South Africa
Beyond Patriarchy: The Khoisan and Partnership

2 - 2:30 p. m. Discussion with the audience
2:30 - 4 p. m. Lunch Break

Part IV. Present Matriarchal Societies - Asia

4 - 6 p. m. Panel 6: India, Sumatra, China

Patricia Mukhim, Khasi, Northeast India
Matriliny among the Khasi and Garos of Meghalaya:
Challenges and Opportunities

Savithri de Tourreil, Nayar, Kerala, Southwest India/Canada
Nayars: matrilineal or matriarchal or a bit of both?
How do they fit into a South Indian Matrix

Peggy Reeves Sanday, USA
Divine Queenship: Considerations from the Minangkabau of West Sumatra
of West Sumatra

Ibu Ita Malik, Minangkabau, Sumatra, Indonesia
The Role of Minangkabau Women

6 - 6:30 p. m. Break

6:30 - 7:30 p. m. Lamu Gatusa, Mosuo, China
A Sacred Place of Matriarchy: Lugu Lake – Harmonious Past and Challenging Present

Danshilacuo, Mosuo, China
Mosuo Woman – Environment, Pullulation, and Views on Own Culture

7:30 - 8 p. m. Discussion with the audience


Saturday 1st October Texas State University, San Marcos


Opening ritual

Part V. Past - Historical Matriarchal Societies

9 - 11:30 p.m. Panel 7: Research in the USA

Joan Marler, USA
Old Europe through a Matriarchal Lens

Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, Italy/USA
Black Madonnas, Cathars, and Witches – Peaceful Societies and Violence

Vicki Noble, USA
Those Without Husbands: How the Amazons Got Their Name

Marguerite Rigoglioso, USA
In Search of the Libyan Amazons: Preliminary Research in Tunisia

Susan Gail Carter, USA
The Matristic Roots of Japan
and the Emergence of the Japanese Sun Goddess, Amaterasu-o-mi-kami

11:30 - 12 P. m. Discussion with the audience
12 - 2 p. m. Lunch Break

2 - 4 p. m. Panel 8: Research in Europe

Annette Kuhn, Germany
Transitions of Matriarchal Power in the Symbolic and Social Sphere in History

Kurt Derungs, Switzerland
Landscape of the Ancestress. Principles of the Matriarchal
Philosophy of Nature and the Mythology of Landscape

Kaarina Kailo, Finland
The "Helka Fest" - Traces of a Finno-Ugric Matriarchy and Worldview?

Christa Mulack, Germany
Matriarchal Structures in the Hebrew Bible

4 - 4:30 p. m. Discussion with the audience
4:30 - 5 p. m. Break

5 - 5:40 p. m. Origin of Patriarchy

Heide Goettner-Abendroth, Germany
Origin of Patriarchy -
Criticism of Theories and a Suggestion for the Solution

5:40 - 6 p. m. Discussion with the audience


8 - 9 p. m. Evening program
Max Dashu, USA
Slides Show: Mother-Right and Gender Justice

Lydia Ruyle, USA
Icons: Sacred Images of the Divine Feminine Around the Globe


Sunday 2nd October San Marcos, Texas

At the Parks and Recreation Dept. Activities Center
501 East Hopkins
San Marcos TX 78766

Opening ritual

Part VI. Matriarchal Politics

9 - 11 a. m. Big Panel: All of the lecturers are invited who would like to make
a short statement on this topic.
Discussion with the audience

11 - 11:30 a. m. Break

11:30 - 12:30 p.m. Developing a DECLARATION


San Marcos River

3 - 6 p. m.
Public matriarchal ritual of

"The Circle of a Peaceful World"

Women~Men SEPARATING~CONVENING

If we wanna boot the GodFather, and give our hearts back to the GodMother, we need to find a way to bring men into our world. But since women have been wounded by men, perhaps for a while we need to wallow in the wonder of being together without them! But come on -- let's not be overly selfish. Men need God the Mother as much as women do (many say more).

Here's a thought:

“I don’t quite know how men fit in, and that’s a problem…. I know there are spirituality groups that have both men and women, but I don’t feel really good about them. I like the private groups for women. There’s something wonderful about women being with women, and not having men present. I wouldn’t want to give that up, not yet; we have such a long way to go…. I’d rather see men going off and being spiritual together, and women going off elsewhere and being spiritual together. Most worship could be separate, with joint events occasionally….” From an interview in Barbara Walker’s Restoring the Goddess, p. 375.

What d'ya think?

TOM DELAY Indicted

NEWS FLASH!

ARLINGTON, VA (IWR News Parody) - House Majority Leader Tom Delay was arrested today at Kenmore Middle School for allegedly extorting lunch money from students.

The Arlington bunko squad, at first thought "The Hammer" was just some pervert peddling pornography to the kids, but were surprised to discover that the suspect was actually extorting money from the students in return for not cutting funding to their band, cheerleading and football programs.

Mr. Delay protested his arrest claiming that extorting money from citizens, regardless of age, was his God-given right.

"Look. This is no different than what I do all day long in Congress for Christ sakes. You want a bill passed or defeated? It's going cost you something like making a significant contribution to my little Texans for a Republican Majority PAC (TRMPAC) for example. The kids want their Cougar's football, and I need some money to pay for my golf fees when I play President Bush on Sunday. It's quid pro quo I tell you," yelled Delay as he was lead away in a paddy wagon.

Thnx to Echidne of the Snakes for the early heads-up on the DeLay indictment (Echidne, by the way, will give you real leads to the real story). I had vowed to avoid political "reporting" from now on, but couldn't resist this one!

RESEARCH ON god

Today I sent the following to Cousin Doris the Fundamentalist. Sending it almost made me sad. It signals the death knell of god -- and of Doris. And I kinda had fun crossing swords with Doris for a while.

Doris, I almost don't want to send you this, but I think you need to see it. It's what I've been trying to say all along. It was published today in the London Times, the leading and most respected newspaper in England:

"Societies worse off 'when they have God on their side'
By Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent

"RELIGIOUS belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today...."

If you want to read the rest of the article, go here: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1798944,00.html

We need to turn to a deity of love, a female deity. History shows that when we worshipped the Goddess, we lived in utopia.

Thanks to Echidne for the link and to EXIF for the foto.

RESTORING THE Goddess

This nuts-and-bolts review of Walker’s wonderful Restoring the Goddess might make a short but valuable introduction for your friends new to Goddess or feminist studies. The author seems new to both areas. A few snippets:

Walker states that Goddess images have produced more tolerant, peaceful, kind and caring societies than the God image. How many wars have been fought in "God's name?"

I recall as a young girl, I was forced to attend church. I never understood WHY I had to bow down to a god that held nothing for me. He wouldn't even let me attend to him; I couldn't approach the altar. I had to wear a hat to show respect, while the men did not. Why was I so much inferior to men? I could give life; men can only take it violently away.

Walker writes that if Goddess beliefs were to become more widely held, a link with Mother Nature would bring us all closer to the Earth itself, closer to environmental causes, preservation of our Mother Earth.

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nickwinch, thnx for the foto

The Slimy Slide

This is Barbara Walker’s theory of how the gods annihilated the Goddess -- what I call the "slimy slide," through history, from Goddess-only societies, to mixed pantheons, and then (for many of us, at least), god-only societies.

“Few societies of the Stone Age envisioned male gods. Their artifacts [seem to] show us only Goddesses and animal spirits…. Many centuries passed before men understood the real nature of paternity. During that time they invented a number of male gods who were supposed to have created either life on earth, or eternal life for humans by giving their blood and dying in the process….

“For thousands of years, various manifestations of the Mother Goddess lived on and were assimilated into the pantheons of patriarchal gods…. Gradually, however, the god became more and more ‘jealous .. until we find the evolution of something like the violent, warlike biblical Yahweh preaching complete destruction of all the pagan Mother-worshipping peoples….

”The same kind of conversion by warfare took place in Europe after the Roman Empire turned Christian…. [T]he last shreds of Paganism were destroyed in a five-century bloodbath now known as the reign of the [Christian] Inquisition.”

Walker, 2000, pp 79-81, Restoring the Goddess.

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thnx to glanzrr for the foto

Jurgen Habermas Swinging to Religion?

In the current issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, is a worrisome article. It suggests that a leading secular philosopher -- Jürgen Habermas* -- is shocking his liberal friends by turning to god. Worse, he’s calling for religion to scoot into world politics (and somehow I doubt he’s left any room under that umbrella-word “religion” for the Goddess).

“It would be unrealistic and prejudicial to expect that religiously oriented citizens wholly abandon their most deeply held convictions upon entering the public sphere where, as a rule and justifiably, secular reasoning has become our default discursive mode.”

I do, however, like one thing Habermas says: in a religion, it’s right-on to argue!

“… [T]he give and take of argumentation, as a learning process, is indispensable. Through communicative reason we strive for mutual understanding and learn to assume the standpoint of the other. Thereby we also come to appreciate the narrowness of our own individual perspective. Discourse ethics proposes that those actions are moral that could be justified in an open-ended and genuine public dialogue.”

Especially at this point in the rebuilding of Goddess spirituality, I think this “give and take of argumentation” (with, of course, respect maintained for others) is a Goddess-send.

Then Habermas throws out a thorny issue: the (very popular) idea that everyone must “respect” everyone else’s religion:

“Only those religions that retain the capacity to bracket or suspend the temptations of theological narcissism -- the conviction that my religion alone provides the path to salvation -- are suitable players in our rapidly changing, post-secular moral and political universe.”

Here’s the problem: Some religions are dangerous to both their followers and to the rest of us. As a world community, how should we respond to entities that threaten to destroy us? What should our response be to religions that subjugate and maltreat certain classes of people? To religions that invite worldwide environmental destruction?

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*”Following Jacques Derrida's death last October, it would seem that Habermas has justly inherited the title of the world's leading philosopher. Last year he won the prestigious Kyoto Prize for Arts and Philosophy.”

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thnx to jonathanma for the foto

MEN LOVING THE Goddess

Here’s a recent article from the New Age Journal about Men and the Goddess. I’ve lifted a few interesting snippets from it:

“Men are Starved…”
“‘Because we've been born into a culture where the Goddess has been demonized and kidnapped, men are starved for contact with divinity that has the feel of the Feminine--or even simply for nurturance and unconditional love. Men therefore turn to the women in their lives to fill that void, and that puts everyone in an impossible position.’" [statement of a male Goddess worshipper]

“I Don’t Need You, Mom”
“But despite the rewards of the Sacred Feminine, men have been slow to embrace the Goddess. And some are steeled in opposition. That troubles Mark Roblee. ‘I don't like the backlash against feminism I've seen in some quarters of the men's movement, for example,’ he says. ‘I think men need to stop saying “I don't need you, Mom.” That's a necessary adolescent individuation process, but it shouldn't become a spiritual practice.’"

“Orestes Killing His Mother…”
“Campbell [a male Goddess worshipper] sees the re-emergence of Goddess spirituality as the answer to the social and environmental problems that haunt Western culture. ‘In a sense, we've acted out the myth of Orestes, where the son has to kill the mother,’ he says. ‘As a result, we've become a crazed society. You can see it in the emptiness of the faces all around you in any American city.’"

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thnx to stock.xchng and to emielcia for the foto of the chalice, and to sjtodey for the blade.

a Pagan RESPONSE TO KATRINA

Message from Olivia Robertson
Co-Founder, FELLOWSHIP OF ISIS
Clonegal Castle, Ireland
August 30, 2005

"We in the Fellowship in Ireland, offer our love and support to the members of our centres all along the Gulf of Mexico who may have suffered hurricane damage, and we would value news of their safety on the web. It is with the deepest sorrow that we in Clonegal see on television the desolation that has overwhelmed the noble city of New Orleans.

We who believe in Deity can truly help with the survivors who have lost people they love. We can give comfort to those hundreds who have lost their earthly bodies and are confused in the Astral sphere.

Our thoughts go especially to Cathryn Anne Rogers, ArchPriestess, who acts as a focal point for counselling and healing through her Gulf Network on the Web.

May Isis Star of the Sea, Yemaya, African Goddess of the Oceans, and Brigid of Springs and Rivers, Bless all those who suffer. New Orleans will surely rise again through the brilliance, imagination and courage of her people."

Olivia Robertson
Foundation Centre
Fellowship of Isis
Clonegal Castle

gods of PEACE?

Mother perverted into War Goddess 

Can you see the magnificent mothering in this ancient statue of Athena and the warrior? This is the formerly-healthy-Mother Goddess perverted into a war Goddess by the Indo-Europeans who smashed Greece circa 3000-1000 BC. And even though this is the perverted Athena, the artist still conveys Her as a woman who loves not only her child, but also herself -- as a woman -- in ways I doubt we could ever truly understand.

Google “Goddess” + “peace” and you get all kinds of sites. About Tara the Goddess of Peace; Pax the Roman Goddess of Peace; Brylana the Goddess of Peace, Prosperity and Plenty; Eirene, the Greek Goddess of Peace and Wealth ; a site about a book called Buy A Goddess in My Shoes: Seven Steps to Peace . A site about the ancient Greek play “Peace,”in which Peace is a Goddess; Kuan Yin, Goddess of Peace clean across the globe in China ; and on and on.

Although I didn’t find any because I didn’t look hard enough, Grainne points out that Googling “god” and “peace” also produces multiple results (see Grainne’s comment below).
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Thnx to hylzscq for the foto of Athena

THOTS ON THE Equinox

Fall Equinox: 100% balance between light and dark. A major spoke in the Great Goddess's always-turning wheel of the year.

In Maine, days are still balmy, but mornings are now raw reminders of the coming of ice, snow galoshes, extra money for snow removal; move the cars before snow-remover guys get here so they don’t bury them (the cars); no more green anything until May (or sometimes June). But – I can see the hill in back, because it’s not hidden by tree leaves anymore! That's nice.

LIVE WEBCAST of Conference!

Sit down RIGHT NOW all you matriarchy fans and hang on to your sombreros! Are you ready for this? Remember the Matriarchy Conference starting September 29th down in Texas? (See Athana’s post on August 3.) The one you’ve been dying to go to and can’t? It’s being webcast live!!! That’s right, folks. We can all lean back in our slippers and listen to it from wherever, without lifting a leg to journey down into Texas.

The Conference runs Sept. 29 - Oct. 2 and features everyone you’ve always wanted to meet, including Max Dashu, Heide Göttner-Abendroth, Joan Marler, Peggy Reeves Sanday, and many, many others!

Thanks to Sage at Goddessing for this fabuloso news! As Sage points out, matriarchies aren’t just patriarchies in skirts.... (MORE>>>)

ANYHOO, On Sept. 29, here’s whatcha gotta do: go to the FIRE webpage (Feminist International Radio Endeavour) and, just tune in to the “Societies of Peace: Past, Present & Future (2nd World Congress on Matriarchal Studies)" Conference.

The gods Take Over, Part II

Yesterday, dear readers, I treated you to the first part of a review of Riane Eisler's The Chalice and the Blade, the riveting story of the way in which the West was devastated by dropping its worldview of human equality and picking up a dominator model to replace it. Today we’re still struggling under that dominator model. Like a giant wedding cake, we live squashed in layers, with people in each layer “superior” to those in the layer below.

Part II of the review:

Changing Norms
• New male-dominated, violent, and hierarchical societies gradually began to be seen as not only normal but also as RIGHT.
• Norms were changed by constant fashioning and refashioning of oral and written literature

Chalice Replaced by Blade "It had to be established that the old powers that ruled the universe--as symbolized by the life-giving Chalice--had been replaced by newer and more powerful deities in whose hands the Blade was now supreme”

Goddess Pulled Down “And to this end one thing above all had to be accomplished: not only her earthly representative--woman--but the Goddess herself had to be pulled down from her exalted place.”

Justifications of Male Dominance
• “In some Middle Eastern myths this is accomplished by a story of how the Goddess is slain.
• In others she is subdued and humiliated by being raped...
• Such tales served a very important social purpose.
• They both symbolized and justified the imposition of male dominance.”

Goddess became consort or warrior “Another common device was to reduce the Goddess to the subordinate status of consort (wife) of a more powerful male god. Still another was to transform her into a martial deity."

Goddess Absent in Hebrew Bible In Cannan: "...the invasions of the thirteen Hebrew tribes not only accelerated, but also radicalized, this process of social and ideological transformation. For only in the Bible is the Goddess as a divine power entirely absent…”

New Male Social Order
• “If we read the Bible as normative social literature, the absence of the Goddess is the single most important statement about the kind of social order that the men who over many centuries wrote and rewrote this religious document strove to establish….

We are still Imprisoned in a Dominator System
"Millions of people still today seem incapable of perceiving what our sacred literature really says, and how it functions to maintain the boundaries that keep us imprisoned in a dominator system".

One important point highlighted here is what I call "The Slimy Slide." The Slimy Side is an historical set of events in which humans drop, through time, from Goddess, to mixed Goddess/god pantheons, and finally to gods alone. We begin with societies in which the Goddess is worshipped alongside few if any male deities. Next, a few meek gods pop up and serve along with her. In the next stage these meek gods are whining for a little more power. Next, the gods are equal with the Goddess -- and marrying Her. Then Zeus is pushing Her around, around and raping other women to boot. Finally, the Hebrews pitch the Goddess out altogether. Of course The Slimy Slide didn't occur everywhere in a straight-line progression. However, Eisler (and others) see ample evidence to support it as a general trend in Western history.

HOW the gods TOOK OVER

Below are excerpts from an excellent review of a world-shaking book, Riane Eisler's The Chalice and the Blade (I'll present the second half the review tomorrow). The "Chalice" symbolizes the ancient pre-god Goddess, and the "Blade" the war-peoples that conquered Her. The review is in outline form. I'm giving you snippets from it, which I hope will entice you into reading the entire outline, if not the actual book:

The Feminine Chalice
• The feminine Chalice symbolized the source of life
• The highest values were for the generative, nurturing, and creative powers of nature, not the powers to destroy
• The function of priestesses and priests was to benefit all the people in the community
o NOT to serve and give religious sanction to a brutal male elite

The Great Change
"But then came the great change--a change so great, indeed that nothing else in all we know of human cultural evolution is comparable in magnitude (the arrival of the Kurgans,Indo-Europeans).”

Old Europeans
• "The Old European (Goddess peoples) and Kurgan cultures were the antithesis of one another. …

Contrasting Ideologies
• One economy based on farming, the other on stock breeding and grazing, produced two contrasting ideologies....
• Peace and morality are now associated [in the 21st century] with both Judaism and Christianity
• But it is historical fact that these early Semites were a warring people ruled by a caste of warrior-priests --the Levite tribe of Moses, Aaron, and Joshua.

Jehovah was a war God
• Like the Indo-Europeans, [the Hebrews] too brought with them a fierce and angry god of war and mountains (Jehovah or Yahweh)....

Social system: Domination Indo-Europeans and Hebrews imposed a social system in which male dominance, male violence, and a generally hierarchic and authoritarian social structure was the norm....

The Masculine Blade
• "At the core of the invaders' system was the placing of higher value on the power that takes, rather than gives, life.
• This was the power symbolized by the "masculine" Blade, which early Kurgan cave engravings show these Indo-European invaders literally worshiped.

Women Reduced to Concubines • The Goddess and women were reduced to male consorts or concubines

The New Norm: Male dominance
“Gradually male dominance, warfare, and the enslavement of women and of gentler, more "effeminate" men became the norm"

MORE TOMORROW

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Thnx for the fotos to Neadeau (chalice) and
Naraosqa (blade)

Religion is PANHUMAN

Anthropologist Dan Sperber on religion:

The idea of God isn't a supernatural idea. If the idea of God were supernatural, then religion would be true. The idea of God, the idea, the representation of something supernatural is not itself supernatural. If it were, then we would be out of business. Precisely what we're trying to explain is, to quote the title of a book by Pascal Boyer, the “naturalness of religious ideas,” explain, in other terms, how these ideas of the supernatural can occur in the natural beings we are, in human brains and minds and culture, and have the kind of success that they have, in spite of the fact that you can't explain them in the way that you explain so many human ideas, such as ideas that are acquired through experience of the things they are about.

We humans have ideas about plants and animals because we experience plants and animals in a special way with the brain we have. We don't experience God, or goblins or witches, because there are no such things. Nevertheless, we have rich complex ideas about them, a richness in many ways comparable to the ideas we have about plants, animals and the natural things around them.

How is that possible? The issue is what makes these kind of ideas psychologically, cognitively attractive — "catching", such that they stay with you in your head and you may want to communicate them and to guide your behavior on their basis. And also: which of them, among all the unrealistic unsupported ideas that are possible in infinite variety, are going to be so "catching" as to achieve cultural success, in the manner of the many religious ideas that has been around for centuries?

It's not like any blatantly false idea will somehow make it to a cultural success — far from it. Most of them don't stand a chance. What's special about ideas of the supernatural? I argued long ago that it had to do with the fact that they are rooted in our cognitive dispositions, in the way we approach the natural world. Instead of departing from our commonsense ideas so to speak at random, they're like direct provocation — they have always an aspect of going directly against what should be the most intuitively obvious.

So for instance it's part of our common sense knowledge of living forms, that an animal can’t be both a dog and a cat, but the supernatural is full of creatures like dragons that typically belong to several species simultaneously. It's part of our common sense knowledge of the physical world that an entity cannot be in two places simultaneously, but ubiquity is a distinctive trait of supernatural beings. It's kind of again commonsense, in our commonsense psychology which we deploy in everyday interaction with one another, that one's visual perceptions are limited to what's present in front of one's eyes. Supernatural beings typically can see the past, the future, and things on the other side of earth. So supernatural beings are kind of provocations to commonsense. They are really deeply counterintuitive. That's an idea I suggested a long time ago and that Pascal Boyer has developed and enriched in a remarkable fashion, and which I think is one of the cognitive ingredients that helps explain the success of religious ideas. Of course, it's only one little fragment of a kind of complex picture.

Like most anthropologists, Sperber does not "believe in" religion. What he knows, though, is that religion is found in all cultures, at all times. It's panhuman.

What this suggests is, we need religion as much as we need food, water, love and sex. It suggests we all "have" religion. Even ardent atheists. Even serial killers. Even mass murderers. We might not recognize their deities, but they're there, nevertheless.

Bush Slash-&-Burn

There's a scorching article attacking Bush in the current New Yorker Magazine:

"...[T]o a frightening degree, Bush's faults of leadership and character were brought into high relief by the [Katrina] crisis. Suntanned and relaxed after a vacation so long that it would have shamed a French playboy, Bush reacted with fogged delinquency, as if he had been so lulled by his summer sojourn that he was not quite ready to acknowledge reality, let alone attempt to master it."

Alright! Let's have a little more where this came from
!!

Snookered Again?

Raddy Rightie 

Well, looks like we were snookered again by the Raddy Righties. From what Brad over at Brad's Blog is discovering, Bushy probably didn't win either the 2000 OR the 2004 election:

In exclusive stunning admissions to The BRAD BLOG some 11 months after the 2004 Presidential Election, a "Diebold Insider" is now finally speaking out for the first time about the alarming security flaws within Diebold, Inc's electronic voting systems, software and machinery. The source is acknowledging that the company's "upper management" -- as well as "top government officials" -- were keenly aware of the "undocumented backdoor" in Diebold's main "GEM Central Tabulator" software well prior to the 2004 election. A branch of the Federal Government even posted a security warning on the Internet.

MORE >>>

Just heard Brad interviewed on Air America.

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thnx to zulu for the foto of the rat

Awful Offal

In a September 13 comment, Lisa said,

“The thing about the Bible for Christians is that the story of Jesus is the NEW Testament, Jesus said he was bringing in a NEW covenant. ‘This is a NEW Jack City, baby!’"

To which I say:

FIRST, I agree -- Jesus is a rung up from his daddy. But Jesus gets dragged down by that crazy old man Jehovah. I’ve never met a Christian yet willing to give up that ugly, ratty old boy. The one who wants them to burn their children to a crisp (just to see if they’ll do it). The one dedicated to whipping them into war with the guys down the street who won’t “obey.” The one who says disabled folks give him the willies ("The LORD said to Moses, 17 '… none of your descendants who has a defect may come near to offer the food of his God. 18 No man who has any defect may come near: no man who is blind or lame, disfigured or deformed; 19 no man with a crippled foot or hand, 20 or who is hunchbacked or dwarfed, or who has any eye defect, or who has festering or running sores or damaged testicles….'” Leviticus 21:16-20 [New International Version])(Thnx to The Raving Atheist for this last). I could go on and on. If Jehovah tried to walk the streets today, he’d be pitched into solitary overnight, and/or committed to a mental institution the next morning.

SECOND, Even Jesus, as improved as he is over his daddy, is still deadly. Check out the New Testament. How often do you get details about a big basic of being human – our bodies? Our sexuality? Our five senses? Our sense of humor? Why is Jesus humorless? Take any verse in the New Testament and I’ll show you an arid desert lacking smells, tastes, most sounds, most sights and ALL humor. Anything human is stripped away like so much awful offal.

We never question this because we’ve never known anything different. But don't you have to wonder what it does to us to have gods who see our basic humanity as so much trash?

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Thnx to Jell96 and Stock.xchng for the foto

Goddess = SAVING the PLANET

Okay, another Hot Book, about the Pure-Goddess Era* in Western history:

"Ancient humans were peaceful -- modern violence is avoidable." That's the basic message contained in Saharasia, a controversial "marriage of heresies" over 10 years in the making. It will change forever your way of looking at the world, your home culture, and current events. Saharasia constitutes a revolutionary new discovery on a geographic pattern to global human behavior. The first cross-cultural, anthropological, archaeological and historical survey of human family and social institutions, tracing human violence back in time to specific times and places of first-origin.

The full title of this 1998 winner is SAHARASIA: The 4000 BCE Origins of Child Abuse, Sex-Repression, Warfare and Social Violence, In the Deserts of the Old World.

I hafta get this one. No, don't tell me I can go to the library and get it -- it's obviously one I'll need to underline and scribble notes all over! Here are excerpts from other reviews:

"One of the most profound works I've ever come across...."

"A copy should be lodged in every public and school library ...."

"Even leading military experts cannot find much evidence for organized warfare prior to 3500 BCE...."

MORE >>>

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*"Pure-Goddess era" refers to times in the past in which people worshipped primarily Goddesses and few, if any, gods. The best evidence for such societies come from time periods roughly before 3000 - 4000 BC.

Goddess Wisdom from Paul McCartney

~*Let it Be*~
"When the broken hearted people
Living in the world agree,
There will be an answer,
Let it be, let it be."

“Let it Be” …begins with Paul [McCartney] saying [that] when he finds himself in times of trouble, "Mother Mary" comes to him. I had always thought that Mary meant the virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus. But Paul's mother was also named Mary, and she died when he was a young boy.

In the song Mary comes like an angel whispering to him these wise words-- let it be. "Let it be" means let go, relax, don't worry about your troubles…. [don’t] think about sad things too much, … accept … bad things … that [you] cannot change.

But this is not the only message in Paul's song… MORE>>>

NEEDED: Food and Meds

Michael Moore is down in Louisiana helping with the relief effort, which he says is not being carried out adequately by FEMA even at this late date. Morgaine at The-Goddess brings this plea from Michael:

If you want to help, here's what we need in Covington right now:

Cleaning Supplies (glass cleaner, bleach, disinfectant, etc.)
Aspirin and other basic over the counter drugs.
Bottled Water
Canned Goods
Hygiene Supplies
Baby Supplies - Baby Food Formula, diapers #4, #5, Wipes, Pedialyte
Sterile Gloves
Batteries - All kinds, from AA to watch and hearing aid batteries.
Volunteers with trucks and cars
Self contained kitchens with generators, utensils, workers

Consider sending supplies in reusable containers. List the contents on the outside of the package so the folks in the warehouse can easily sort the items.

Clothes are not needed.

Send supplies via UPS to:
Veterans for Peace
Omni Storage
74145 Hwy. 25
Covington LA

MORE >>>

In Times of Trouble

Goddess Solace

I don’t know about you, but I need a wee pick-me-up after Katrina etc. So I’m bringing you this message from the Star Goddess:

“Hear the words of the Star Goddess, the dust of whose feet are the hosts of heaven, whose body encircles the universe:

“’I who am the beauty of the green earth and the white moon among the stars and the mysteries of the waters, I call upon your soul to arise and come unto me.

“For I am the soul of nature that gives life to the universe.

“From Me all things proceed and unto Me they must return.

“Let My worship be in the heart that rejoices, for behold – all acts of love and pleasure are My rituals.

“Let there be beauty and strength, power and compassion, honor and humility, mirth and reverence within you.

“And you who seek to know Me, know that your seeking and yearning will avail you not, unless you know the Mystery: for if that which you seek, you find not within yourself, you will never find it without.

“For behold, I have been with you from the beginning, and I am that which is attained at the end of desire.’” [from The Spiral Dance, Starhawk, 76-77]

One of my favorite lines is “Let there be beauty and strength, power and compassion, honor and humility, mirth and reverence within you.”

Like god the father, God the Mother treasures strength, compassion, honor, humility and reverence. What’s "new" with Her are beauty, power and mirth. Especially the “mirth” part is foreign to most of us. You won't find much laughter in the god-the-father holy books.

I think the humans who manufactured the god religions knew that ripping the humor out of deity would weaken people and make them more controllable (which was, in my opinion, the reason the god religions were invented in the first place – not for the people, but for the people who controlled the people).

So I even in times like these -- perhaps especially in times like these -- the Goddess reminds us to keep humor close by, ready to work its magic whenever the time is ripe.

______________________
niksan -- thnx for the foto

Goddess is Empathy; god is Discipline

My brother sent this today, by George Lakoff:

“The moral of Katrina is mostly being missed. It is not just a failure of execution (William Kristol), or that bad things just happen (Laura Bush). …

“The cause was political through and through -- a matter of values and principles. The progressive-liberal values are America's values, and we need to go back to them. The heart of progressive-liberal values is simple: empathy (caring about and for people) and responsibility (acting responsibly on that empathy). These values translate into a simple principle: Use the common wealth for the common good to better all our lives. …

“The right-wing conservatives now in power have the opposite values and principles. Their main value is Rely on individual discipline and initiative. The central principle: Government has no useful role. … It's the difference between We're all in this together and You're on your own, buddy. It's the difference between Every citizen is entitled to protection and You're only entitled to what you can afford. …”

MORE>>>

Sounds like the difference between God the Mother, and God the Father, to me. To the Mother Goddess we’re all Her children, and therefore all equally valuable. Furthermore, She demands that we love, cherish, respect and support one another as She does us. The love of a (healthy) mother for her children is not based on whether they meet pre-set conditions: Her love is unconditional, without condition, no strings attached.

On the other hand, it’s no accident that so many religious fundamentalists are right-wing conservatives. They are loved only by a father god, whose love is much less unconditional than The Mother’s. This makes fundamentalists deeply insecure and profoundly frightened at a deep level. Their deity loves them not for who they are, but for their ability to meet certain specific conditions, including outperforming others. If one fails to meet these conditions, the Sacred Parent punishes and/or withholds love. And since right-wingers are drenched in this damaging half-love, it’s the only kind they're able to give others -- or even themselves.

What Starhawk Says About It All

Starhawk on recent national events:

"But reality has a way of being, well, real, and catching up with you. Real loss, real grief are the real results of the Bush administration's policies. His neocon friends maintain their power by manufacturing fear, exploiting the dead. But now the real dead are coming back to haunt them. And so I imagine Cindy and the mother from New Orleans joined by a legion of mothers from Iraq. I envision the roads of Crawford lined with the corpses of Baghdad and Fallujah, with the one-eyed monstrous stillbirths, the children blown to pieces, caked with flesh, soaked with blood. I hear a chorus of voices asking, "Why? What noble cause? What great gift are you bringing us? What is this democracy that abandons the poor to drown?" I see them laying the bodies at the gates of power. I see us joining them, turn the stormwind to a wind of justice, a wind of change. Hurricane season has just begun."

thnx to Jason at Wildhunt for this.

CALLING FOR Impeachment

Letter from Athana to Maine Great Goddess & Senator, Olympia Snowe:

Dear Senator Snowe:

Thank you for your courageous efforts in halting Congress's attempts to cut $10 billion from Medicaid and pursue $70 billion in tax cuts.

Senator, I am deeply concerned not only about the health and safety of Americans, but also about the health and safety of our democracy. As Professor Andrew J. Bacevich points out in his book The New American Militarism,

“War abroad and its ‘blowback’ -- in the modern age, terrorism -- erode the founders' ingenious system of checks and balances by allowing the chief executive to usurp power from Congress.…”

He goes on to quote James Madison:

“Of all the enemies of public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies. From these proceed debts and taxes. And armies, debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. ... No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

Because of this and numerous other excellent reasons (of which I’m certain you are aware), I am asking you to support Boston attorney and constitutional scholar John Bonifaz's Resolution of Inquiry into the reasons America invaded Iraq:

"Whereas considerable evidence has emerged that George W. Bush, President of the United States, has engaged in a conspiracy to deceive and mislead the United States Congress and the American people as to the basis for taking the nation into war against Iraq, that George W. Bush, President of the United States, has manipulated intelligence so as to allege falsely a national security threat posed to the United States by Iraq, and that George W. Bush, President of the United States, has committed a felony by submitting a false report to the United States Congress on the reasons for launching a first-strike invasion of Iraq:

"Now, therefore, be it Resolved, That the Committee on the Judiciary is directed to investigate and report to the House of Representatives whether sufficient grounds exist to impeach George W. Bush, President of the United States. Upon completion of such investigation, that Committee shall report thereto, including, if the Committee so determines, articles of impeachment."

Thank you,

Sincerely,
Athana

Flash: Mo. Goose Rises from Grave

Mother Goose is so impressed with Georgie Bushlet that she rose from her grave today and wrote a new nursery rhyme – her first in over twenty decades, titled "Georgie Porgie #2." She’s expecting it to become as popular in nurseries as Georgie Porgie #1. She hopes it will, because when the world collapses from Georgie’s kiss of death, she says we’ll need an oral tradition to remind us why we’re swimming in a cesspool.

Anyhoo, Mother ran the rhyme over to me today, and I told her I’d post it. Here it is:

GEORGIE PORGIE 2

Georgie Porgie
Puddin’ and pie,
Kissed the States and
Made them cry.

Georgie Porgie
Crumpets and tea,
Spread our waste o’er
Land and sea.

Georgie Porgie
Leaked a lie,
Attacked Iraq and
Made it cry.

Georgie Porgie
Puddin’ ‘n pie,
Kissed Iraquis,
Made ‘em die.

Cindy Sheehan
Called his name.
Georgie Porgie
Felt no shame

When the finger
Pointed his way,
Georgie Porgie
Ran away.

Georgie Porgie
Puddin’ ‘n pie
Left New Orleans
High and dry.

Michael Brown
Got outa town,
Watched New Orleans
Sink and drown.

Now my country’s
Shrouded in shame,
Georgie Porgie’s
Wrecked its name.

Come you children
Fan the flame,
Time for the game of
Blaming the lame.

Georgie Porgie,
Go away,
‘N don’t come back on
Any dang day.

Georgie Porgie
Puddin’ and pie,
Kissed the States and
Made them cry.

The BLAME GAME

Here's my gift of the day to you: a Jon Stewart video clip called Meet the F**ckers. It's priceless.

Here's a tiny teaser: Jon: “When people don’t want to play the blame game - [pregnant pause] - they’re ... to ... blame!”

HOW not TO BE THE GODDESS

Yesterday, in one of her few public remarks since her husband raped three-fourths of black New Orleans, America's First Lady opined: "I think all of those remarks are disgusting!”

This directed at rapper Kanye West, who on live TV last Friday declared quietly: "George Bush doesn't care about black people."

Mrs. Bushy, we know being Shrublet’s mommy is a full-time job, but couldn’t you just throw the rest of us (say, like, New Orleanites) a scrap of unconditional love?.... Conditional love, then?.... A mini-morsel of concern?....

Whining in New Orleans

Since Anne Johnson over at "The Gods Are Bored" is so mad at the god boys she can't type, she asked the Goddess Chaos to sit in for her:

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" My name is Chaos, goddess of ... ummm ... chaos. I'll be your host today.

Anne is so furious she can't type. And my attention span is short, so here's her problem in a nutshell:

One of her "Christian" friends complained that the hurricane survivors in New Orleans were whiners "looking for the government to take care of them." The "Christian" friend added: "I guess every society has people looking for handouts."

Anne channeled me, and the bail hearing is set for two weeks from today.

The Shrub & Herr Hitler

Morgaine at The-Goddess offers a chilling picture of the degree to which The Shrub resembles Herr Hitler. Here's a snippet:

Without provocation, Germany America then invaded Poland Iraq, a sovereign country that could not defend itself and was no threat whatsoever to German American national security, overrunning it just a few weeks. Thousands upon thousands of Polish soldiers Iraqi Soldiers were killed in the defense of their homeland. Millions of Over 100,000 Polish Iraqi civilians also met their deaths as a result of the German American invasion.

"It also gives us a very special, secret pleasure to see how unaware the people around us are of what is really happening to them."

-- Adolf Hitler

Another Goddess Woman

Another Goddess woman: Oprah Winfrey, who, in contrast to our national leaders, dared journey through the horror that was the Katrina aftermath:

Winfrey wore a gas mask as she toured New Orleans' now-empty Superdome, which housed thousands of people in disgusting conditions for several days.

She says, "Nothing I saw on television prepared me for what I experienced on the ground."

The Rape of New Orleans

Email to MSNBC this morning:

If I hear the cutsie little phrase "blame game" one more time on your news network, I'm going to scream. The Bush administration raped New Orleans. If a school teacher rapes a student, do we react by calling it a BLAME GAME when people try to remove the teacher from the school?!? Is it impossible for this nation to do two things at once: help the Gulf States and at the same time remove the monstor that raped them?

Would You Hire This?

Would you hire this man to run your company?

Katrina Goddess Women

Some women have it, and some – well, some never will.

OUR MOTHER GODDESSES….

Senator Hillary Clinton: "They [the Bush Administration] do believe that people should rely on state and local response and private charities," she said. "I think that is a recipe for disaster. There was nobody in charge in the federal government, and there was nobody willing to take responsibility to work with state and local officials to make sure they were prepared."

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi: “Pelosi yesterday described Bush as ‘oblivious, in denial, dangerous’ to problems in and around New Orleans.”


… AND WOMEN WHO AREN’T

Condoleeza “Sleazy” Rice: Sept. 1: “Just moments ago at the Ferragamo on 5th Avenue, Condoleeza Rice was seen spending several thousands of dollars on some nice, new shoes …. A fellow shopper, unable to fathom the absurdity of Rice’s timing, went up to the Secretary and reportedly shouted, “How dare you shop for shoes while thousands are dying and homeless!” Never one to have her fashion choices questioned, Rice had security PHYSICALLY REMOVE the woman. MORE >>>

Mommy of Bushlet, Barbie Bush: “And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this, this is working very well for them," Mrs. Bush told American Public Media's "Marketplace" program, before returning to her multi-million dollar Houston home. MORE >>>

First Lady Shrublet: “ “. (I could find nothing F.L. Shrublet said, except for a chance remark she made a few days ago beseeching volunteers to flood into the Gulf States to help. This was days before the government let in the Red Cross or the National Guard. Shrublet and the FL must not be sleeping together these days.

ATHANA INTERVIEWS Scotty McClellan

I had a rare chance today to interview Scotty McClellan, the White House Press Secretary:

Athana: Scott, Bushy the camp counselor raped 6 boys, drowned a 7th, and 10 boys are missing. Are you going to fire the counselor, or are you going to let him search for the ten boys missing?

Scott: Athana, look, what should be done immediately is that we get help to the boys who need it, and we are continuing to do that. The Counselor Bushy has been doing that; he’ll continue to do that. I know some just want to engage in the blame game. There will be a time to talk about all these issues. We've got problems to solve, Athana –

Athana: But Scotty, the camp counselor may not be the right person to help those boys –

Scott: Athana, we've got to continue to do everything we can in support of the counselor Bushy, who is involved in the operational aspects of this response effort. And that's what we're going to do. There will be plenty of time –

Athana: Scott, Scott, listen to me! When he finds those ten boys, the counselor will probably rape or drown them! Or both! Like he did the others!

Scott: The Counselor's most important responsibility is the safety and security of the boys. He talks about that often. That is his most important responsibility. Again, there's going to be plenty of time to look at the facts and determine what went wrong and what went right and how the coordination was between Bushy and the other counselors. Right now we've got to continue doing everything we can in support of the ongoing operational activities on the ground in the region to help those ten boys.

etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

Seriously, go to EditorandPublisher.com to read a real interview in which the press finally takes Scotty to the laundromat.

IMPEACHMENT Petition to Sign

Go to ImpeachCentral.com to sign a petition to impeach Bush and Cheney.

I decided to sign because, first, I don't want to give RoveHead-BushBody a chance to distract us from Katrina. Each one of the crises they've used to distract us from the previous crisis, is a little worse than the last. What's next? A small nuclear device exploded over Hawaii and passed off as the work of Korea? I'll believe anything of them, now.

Second, if we moblize to impeach now, we have a group sharp and ready to put Hillary in office in '08 (and, just as important, to take back Congress in '06!).

Third, impeachment will smear and tarnish these Radical Righties, dampening Americans' desire to vote for them in future.

Lon as Prez?

Lon Cheney 


What's the solution here? If we impeach Bushy, we inherit Richard Lon Cheney. If we impeach Cheney, we get who? The Speaker of the House, right? The current Speaker seems to be one Dennis Hastert. Dennis WHO? Who's ever heard of Dennis Hastert?!? Boy, are we sitting in pickle juice up to our armpits.

Invocation

O Great Mother, send us the power and insight to do what needs to be done in our small sphere of the whole, in this time of great human need. As always, our aim is to love each other as you love us, your children, and to love You in the Earth as we love ourselves.

THE WRATH OF god

Another observation from Jesus General, this time from a reader commenting on jehovah's punishment of the Gulf Coast:

... We all know that God likes to throw water around when he's pissed, but why did he have to hit the southern coast of the U.S. if he's ticked off at Israel and Washington state? Seems like he could have sent a plague of locusts into the Gaza and the mother of all fogs into Washington state. As for the gay thing, earthquake, San Francisco, 'nough said.

The thing that southern Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama are really known for are corrupt crackers. But if he was pissed about that, why did he torture the brown-skinned folks?

He truly works in mysterious ways.
The Venerable Ed

Katrina’s LESSON

The Goddess Says:

My lesson unto you re: Katrina is not the perfidy of George Bush. It is this: Why in hell have you let 100,000 of your bros and sisters get so poor they don’t have gas money out of New Orleans?!?

Ouch!

THIS SAYS IT ALL: A letter from Switzerland on Katrina
by Hudson
Sun Sep 4th, 2005 at 20:33:36 PDT
NOTE: A close friend passed along this searing letter which he received via email from a friend in Switzerland. With Swiss precision, it summarizes just how America looks, in the wake of Katrina, to the rest of the world.

- - - -

Chez-les-Reuse
Saturday morning, 3 September 2005

Dear S---,

Watching the events in New Orleans unfold from here in Europe, mostly via BBC World, we have the impression that the storm blew up a corner of the carpet beneath which America had long been sweeping some of its fundamental problems.

Among the fundamental problems revealed are:

(1) the enormous divide between rich and poor (which has expanded rapidly in the past two or three decades);

(2) the racial divide leaving blacks in the poorest class (nearly all the stranded, angry, unassisted poor we see on the TV screen are black),

(3) the failure to invest in infrastructure (not only the failure to protect the dikes and levies, but the failure to storm-proof the electric and telephone systems by burying cables, etc.);

And, perhaps most striking of all,

(4) the bizarre law-and-order mentality which orders the National Guard to shoot-to-kill looters (that is, to give priority to protecting property more than human lives).

Perhaps it is going too far to state that we are watching a collapse similar to the collapse of the Soviet Union fifteen years ago. Much as the total-collectivization and total-centralization of society in the USSR collapsed, eventually, of its own internal contradictions, we wonder whether or not America, too, with its ultra-individualistic, ultra-material ideology and its absence of much concern about the collective needs of society (health care, education, infrastructure, etc.) will collapse of its own internal contradictions.

One thing is for sure: America, whose reputation in Europe was already tarnished by its go-it-alone pre-emptive invasion of Iraq, has lost even more respect here thanks to Hurricane Katrina. This is only partly due to the slow and stumbling response of the federal government to the tragedy. It is due more to the revelation of some of America's carefully hidden social problems.

All the best,

J---

From Daily Kos

Ouch! I thought the rest of the world knew how ugly our social problems are.

About ANGER: The Goddess Says:

When my children are hurt or threatened, anger is a consequence. Anger is the fuel that gives you power, in times of trouble, to aid my children – your earthly sisters and brothers. But refine your anger. Don’t let it overpower you. Learn to feel it, but also to stoke and control it as you would a cooking fire: keep it large enough for heat, but not so large as to consume and destroy both you and your aims.

Shopping for Shoes

From today’s London Times, the major and most respected paper in Great Britain:

" ... The vice-president was nowhere to be seen. The secretary of state was observed shopping for shoes in New York City. The president had barely returned to Washington; and had already opined that nobody had foreseen the breaching of New Orleans’ levees.

Earth to Bush: the breaching of the levees had been foreseen for decades. If anyone wanted evidence that this president was completely divorced from reality, that statement was Exhibit A. It didn’t help coming after a five-week vacation, when most Americans are lucky to get two."

Pulling herself up by her bootstraps

Thnx to Jesus General for this highly instructive insight into what might possibly prompt our plucky national leader to bestow upon us that coveted personal pat on the back:

"Along with the water and garbage bag, I shall strap to my back my 82 year old wheelchair bound mother. She can put the water on her lap. I shall then put my 2 children in one arm, (my husband is in Iraq) wrap my dog in rope and put that rope between my teeth. I shall leave my other arm free so that I can push aside the debris and the dead bodies floating by me as I resolutely walk through calf, thigh and chest high water that is filled with known and unknown items. (that I am pushing away with my free limb) for X miles to get to X. I do all this with 4 herniated discs that I received as a result of my carelessness at work. I was standing on a platform doing my job (S&R) and the platform collapsed I guess I should have telecomunicated. My car by the way was at the mechanics for yearly inspection. I went to get it out on Saturday but the mechanic had fled. Yep, in my car.

"I called my uncle (he has a private corporate jet) but he could not come and get us, no permission to land.

"Tried to rent a car, none left. I did see a big SUV leaving and when I asked for a ride to where ever, the driver said no, the back seat was filled with his clothes and knickknacks from his house. I offered him the 300.00 I had He grabbed it from my hand (the one the free limb is attached to)and he shut the door and took off. Now, when I reached the French Quarter I went to the Hilton. No rooms. I did have a credit card left but the manager was busy getting the guests out. I then made my way to the convention center.

"There was a criminal element there (just like anywhere). They had privatized all the water and food supply. Some were running around with guns and raping woman and children and stealing from people just seeking shelter. Others, were shooting at anything, moving or still. I believe they were the addicts coming down from a high and no where to get a fix. I am at my wits end. It has begun to rain. I admit it is all my fault. I am an utter failure. I deserve what I get.

"My great-great- great- great parents should never have settled here. Although I do know we had working levees in 1729."

Invoking the Great Mother

It’s time for all of us to invoke our Great Mother. We all need help knowing what to do for our suffering earth sisters and brothers.

Below is an invocation you can use. Or if you want, create your own. And by all means, if you have an invocation you'd like to share, it would be most welcome.

Although it's not necessary, you may want to gather representations of earth, air, fire and water for use in your ritual. I use, for example, a set of small white stones for earth, a lit candle, a bowl of water, and a bird feather. These remind us we’re not just heads and brains, but also bodies -- embodied in a living, breathing earth, and connected, one with it, one with one another, and one with all life. I set the stones, candle, water and feather in front of a mirror, which reflects the Goddess, Who is manifest in me always, as She is in all women.

INVOCATION:
I call upon you, O Great Mother,
And I call upon the powers of the quarters. [Face each direction as you invoke it]
In the name of the great stag and element fire, I call upon the powers of the South.
In the name of the salmon of wisdom and the element water, I call upon the powers of the West.
In the name of the great bear of the starry heavens and the element earth, I call upon the powers of the North.
In the name of the hawk of dawn and the element air, I call upon the powers of the East.
May there be peace throughout the whole world.

Grant, O Goddess, Thy protection
And in protection, strength
And in strength, understanding
And in understanding, knowledge
And in knowledge, the knowledge of justice
And in the knowledge of justice, the love of it
And in the love of it, the love of all existences
And in the love of all existences, the love of Goddess
And all goodness.

O, Great Mother, open our hearts to what we must do
To connect in love with
Our living, breathing and bleeding brothers and sisters
Around this globe.
We are in great need, Great Goddess
And we ask your blessings now.
Fill us with holy power.
Illuminate us from within
That we may radiate light upon the world around us,
And so that the harmony of our world may be complete.

So be it.

_______
Thnx to Polar Bears International for the picture

"Troops threatened to BEAT REPORTERS"

Yeah, it's exactly as I suspected. Our "democratic" government is gagging the Press, covering up who knows how much about what's really going on down south. This is from a 14-minute-old Reuters article about the New Orleans Convention Center:

People here said there were now 22 bodies of adults and children stored inside the building, but troops guarding the building refused to confirm that and threatened to beat reporters seeking access to the makeshift morgue.

-- snip --

One National Guard soldier who asked not to be named for fear of punishment from his commanding officer said of the lack of medical attention at the center, "They (the Bush administration) care more about Iraq and Afghanistan than here."

The Louisiana National Guard soldier said, "We are doing the best we can with the resources we have, but almost all of our guys are in Iraq."

-- snip --

One police officer told Reuters there were 100 people in a makeshift morgue at the Superdome, mostly people who died of heat exhaustion....

At the arena, too, there was much talk of bedlam after dark.

"We found a young girl raped and killed in the bathroom," one National Guard soldier told Reuters. "Then the crowd got the man and they beat him to death."

MORE >>>

HITTING Spit ON THE FLY

Just watched Baby Huey Bushlet on CNN spin to the nation about Katrina. At the end of the spin, a lone voice carried up to him from the crowd below:

"Mr. President, why did you take so long -- ..."

That lone voice got chopped faster than you can hit spit on the fly. Prez turned his back on that Voice and kept right on walking away from the cameras. Before the spit hit the floor, CNN had switched scenes back to a commentator -- who was coyly mum and mute about that Voice.

This, my fellow Americans, is our great fourth estate in action.

_____________
Thnx to brokenarts & stock.xchng for the fly foto

Who IS Karl Rove?

“The short story is that Karl Rove is the political director of the Bush Administration…. You know the ... type. KR is the archetype of the kid with pit stains who sits in the corner of your political science/history/social studies/geography class and waxes philosophical about how black mothers are the cause of all of America’s social ills. The guy who you feel personally embarrassed for whenever he speaks….

MORE >>>

I smell Rove poo

– I’m smelling Rove poo in New Orleans. After all, the man’s political career is at stake. What are a few black lives in N’Awlins compared to Mr. Rat’s – er, Rove’s -- career? I keep forgetting who the real President is. I really don’t think it’s Baby Huey Bushlet. I saw Baby yesterday hugging a black teenage girl, and he looked like he’d just lost his feeding bottle, his blanky, and his momma all at once.

We have to remember constantly who’s the Body and who’s the Brain. I know it’s shocking to anyone’s who’s not read Bush’s Brain (which is all about Karl Rat – uh, Rove), but I wouldn’t put it past The Rat to carefully plan and engineer the entire New Orleans debacle, from carefully neglecting to set up pre-Katrina disaster gear, to herding hundreds of thousands of poor blacks into one giant arena, and cooking them to death in the heat. And those fat rats lunging at people in the pitch dark of the Convention Center night, their fangs dripping the blood of the dead? Those rats are Rove. Rove the disease-ridden, who spends his night feasting on the dead, slinking, at first light, into a hole in the wall of the Oval Office.

This is prime Rat-Rove strategy: diverting attention from one corner of his rat hole to another. He’s done it with every new horror he’s visited upon this country. Every time we have a crisis, another crisis mysteriously appears to pull us away from the previous one. First there was the war in Iraq. Then the Social Security crisis was engineered to drag our attention away from the War. Then we moved to the Downing Street Memos and talk of impeachment of Rat Rove. So the Valerie Plame thing was hyped to drag our attention away from impeachment. But Americans began calling for the firing of Rat Rove. And then Camp Casey was set up in Crawford, and Rat Rove’s popularity began to plummet.

Whoa! We need a Gigundo Distraction to pull attention away from all this Rove-Rat bashing! How about herding hundreds of thousands of Americans into a mammoth building and cooking them to death? Yeah, that oughta do it. And let the corpses lie so we rats can feed on them, sharpen our fangs on them, spread the plague we carry in our matted, feces-laden Rat-Rove fur.

Yeah. I like that.

Bright Spot: ANDERSON COOPER

Well, here's a bright spot: This morning on CNN I heard Anderson Cooper take on Trent Lot like a bulldog with a bone. Trentso just kept spinning and spinning about how nobody's done anything wrong handling Katrina, it's just that Katrina was so BAAAAAD. Way more bad than all those other, nicer hurricanes.

Well, Anderson refused to cut him a break. Kept badgering him with repeated questions about why it took five days for aid to arrive. About why, when we all knew ahead of time that Katrina was on her way, no one had emergency paraphernalia in place before she hit. Etc.

At one point Spinster Trentso got hot and said something like, "It's only you news media who are pointing fingers!" And Anderson -- staying way cool -- said something like, "No sir, it's not. Mr. ____ from New Orleans asked me to ask you these questions."

wHINE, wHINE, wHINE

A lotta Big People fucked up Big Time re: Katrina. (Or, as some have suggested, are intentionally allowing genocide so that developers can slurp up the potentially lucrative coastline of New Orleans.) So prep yourself for whining and spin. It’ll be coming soon. It’s gonna be whine, whine, whine about why this wasn’t their fault. Sean Hannity of Fox News has begun already -- surprise surprise. He’s spinning about how this is all the fault of the (Democratic) governor of Louisiana, and/or the (Democratic) mayor of New Orleans. Baby Bush Huey, FEMA, and Baby’s federal government are all blameless. Whine, spin, whine. As a woman of the Goddess, I am full of WRATH & FURY. My children are being fried alive in that New Orleans Convention Center AND IT MAKES ME LIVID.

Living in GA-GA LAND

You won't believe this one. Got it from Echidne of the Snakes, who got it from Eschaton:

"We heard this on CNN (on satellite radio) last night while we were driving home and almost ran off the road. It was an exchange between anchor Aaron Brown and Jamie McIntyre, CNN's senior Pentagon correspondent, about the military seeking to explain it's slow response to Katrina:

MCINTYRE: And as to your question about political, I talked to a lot of people at the Pentagon today who were very frustrated about the fact that the perception was being created that the military didn't move fast enough. And they did it somewhat as political. They thought that part of the motivation was the critics of the administration to make the president look bad.

And they seemed to question the motives of some of our reporters who were out there and hearing these stories from the victims about why they had so much sympathy for the victims, and not as much sympathy for the challenges that the government met in meeting this challenge.

And I have to say thinking about that, it doesn't really seem all that unusual that you would tend to understand the plight of the victims a little more than the bureaucrats in Washington.

Go see Echidne for more.

______
Thnx for the pic ("I am not crazy 2," by naraosga)

Baby Bush Huey to the Rescue

Terrorists? Who needs terrorists when we have Baby Huey in the White House? Of course now that the terrorists see how skillful our Homeland Security Department is, they're sure to want to rush in and give it another test. Aren't we lucky?

Just heard today that Bill Clinton turned FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) into a top-notch federal program, but that Bush boy stripped it and threw it into the Homeland Security Department. And the razor-sharp HSD has had five days to drop food and water into the New Orleans Convention Center (where people are literally dying from lack thereof), and it took them four days to figure out how to do that. Am I just smart? I knew how to drop things the day I was born.

Boy, are we screwed.

I still can't figure it out. Is Baby Huey really this dumb, or is this the work of a mad genius anti-Christ?

god-boy BUSH

Well, I’ll give you the god-boy’s talent for stealing the White House. After all, he did manage that twice. But theft seems to be both the beginning and end of god-boy’s talents. Don’t expect much from him if you don’t need something stolen, because it wouldn’t be fair to ask the man for much of anything else.

When Clinton was in office, he began strengthening the New Orleans levees; when god-boy got in, he slashed the levee budget and threw all the money into prostitution and drugs. Smart! Now all the New Orleans prostitutes, dope dealers and drug addicts are dying in the New Orleans convention center along with the elderly (lying dead in their wheel chairs), and other miscellaneous peoples (lying dead on the ground under white sheets). You can see them if you step around the piles of feces everywhere.

It’s just not fair to expect more than one talent from a guy who failed every civilian job he ever had, barely squeaked through college, has probably never gazed upon the inside of a book (I wonder: did he, in college? Or did Daddy buy him a personal reader?), can’t speak his own language, and sat huddled in a ball of fear in a kiddie classroom after hearing terrorists were bombing his country’s largest city.

god-boy also sent the Louisiana National Guard -- who could be helping right now with the Convention Center feces -- to Iraq.

And what was god-boy doing AFTER the hurricane began? Well, from what I heard, he was just hanging. Around his ranch. Like he hung after 9-11. With the little tykes. Where he was safe.

I wonder too -- does Bush know what the word “p-l-a-n” means? He had none in Iraq, now none in Louisiana. But you know. New Orleans is where the Pagans have that Mardi Gras thing. Is it really fair to ask a born-again to leave his ranch to save a city of Pagans?

BREAKING NEWS: Corpses IN THE STREETS

While New Orleans falls apart, Bush the god-boy is no where to be found:

TOP NEWS ARTICLE AT 3:44 PM ET, 9-1-05
New Orleans Mayor Issues 'Desperate SOS'
NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- Fights and fires broke out, corpses lay out in the open, and rescue helicopters and law enforcement officers were shot at as flooded-out New Orleans descended into anarchy Thursday. ''This is a desperate SOS,'' the mayor said.
MORE >>>

Unbelievably, the Mayor has given up trying to find Bush, and has sent his SOS plea to the Associated Press. Meanwhile, Air America reports that Bush failed not only forward, but backwards as well:

Money To Repair Breached Levees Was Diverted to Iraq War

"It appears that the money has been moved in the president’s budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that’s the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can’t be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us." -- Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; New Orleans Times-Picayune, June 8, 2004.

In early 2004, as the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush proposed spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed for levees around Lake Pontchartrain. Those levees are now breached, and the city of New Orleans is inundated."

WHERE HAVE ALL THE Flowers GONE

We can plaster billions of bandaids on the war problem, but until we dry up the spring that’s feeding It, War will never fade away.

_________________
Thnx to wseahorse and stock.xchng for the flower foto

I Challenge You

A few days ago, Lisa left this comment:

“Lol, do you guys realize that you sound exactly like fundie fascist Christians with all this God the Father is Evil and should be obliterated …?”

Here’s the difference, Lisa:

Fundies wanna squash all other deities because their god Jehovah says to.

I wanna squash male deities because of RATIONAL evidence that male gods squash the world.

See the difference?

Jehovah says, “Pitch all other gods, because I am a jealous god.”

Science and history say, “Pitch male gods, because they’ve done a number on humankind.”

I’m calling for peaceful separation of my people from male gods in the same way Ghandi called for peaceful separation of his people from the British. The British were hurting Indians; male gods are hurting humans (see my May 14 post).

Lisa, I challenge you: Are you gonna let male gods threaten life on earth, or will you be Ghandi and stand in their way?

Now, you might think Morgaine and I are just two lonely souls wandering in the wilderness, here, and if that’s the case, go to my April 20 post and read Women’s Studies professor Ellie Amico on the relationship between female divinity, peace, prosperity, equality and non-violence. Or go to April 10 and read Lynn Keller, Director of the Women's Spirituality Ph.D. programs at the California Institute of Integral Studies on the same topic. Or June 9, author Riane Eisler, also on the same topic. Or May 4, anthropologist Marvin Harris on how the highest war casualties come from Christian countries. Or June 20, psychologist James Hillman, author of A Terrible Love of War, and his argument that male gods are the source of war. Or June 29, world-famous archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, who makes the case for the “Goddess is to peace as god is to war” equation. There are even more good posts back there somewhere; these are just a few I’ve pulled out for you.