Depraved penguins

[Apech]

Sexual depravity in penguins

 

Worse was to come, however. Levick spent the Antarctic summer of 1911-12 observing the colony of Adelies at Cape Adare, making him the only scientist to this day to have studied an entire breeding cycle there. During that time, he witnessed males having sex with other males and also with dead females, including several that had died the previous year. He also saw them sexually coerce females and chicks and occasionally kill them.

 

They need to remake that march of the penguins film. Sex with an ex is one thing ... but sex with an ex-ex!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[zerostao]

[三江源]

~ three penguins on a quiet night out ~

 

 

http://www.youtube.c...feature=related

[Taomeow]

Apart from the word "depravity" which is not a term a scientist should be using, nothing in this behavior is unusual except for necrophilia which a scientist should have explained by the combination of the majority of penguins' monogamous fidelity and permafrost that preserves the deceased spouse's body indefinitely. Which is why species living where a corpse disintegrates from the elements rather than is preserved by same, like ours, had to invent embalming to copulate with their deceased loved ones and leaders spiritually, but occasionally physically too -- Alexander of Macedonia, e.g., upon killing the queen of the Amazons repeatedly made love to her dead body. And he's supposed to be one of our historic heroes.

 

Occasional violence latching onto sex (sex is not sex in this scenario but rather a weapon of violence) and occasional use of sex for pain processing rather than procreation is common, but our scientists choose to ignore multifunctional purpose of the sexual release and ascribe only procreational goals to it on the grounds of sheer superficiality of analysis. Our species is engaged in non-procreational sex that has other goals (chiefly a pain-processing mechanism, confirmed by the fact that the most disturbed, abused, suffering individuals are also the ones seeking maximal amounts of sexual encounters and/or solo release) by far more than any other.

 

Oh, and a percentage of all sexually reproducing species engage in same-sex encounters on occasion, so the connotations of "depravity" are religious- rather than scientific-based. Most primates have around 10% same-sex encounters (with some preferring them exclusively while others will engage in them only occasionally, and still others, never), the numbers are perhaps much lower in felines (who also don't hump furniture unlike canines), but none of it is "depravity," scientifically speaking, only behavioral variations around the norm. Depravity begins when the norm is pushed out of existence by those variations though, as is happening today with penguins, polar bears, and all other arctic animals suffering major reproductive problems and exhibiting uncharacteristic sexual behaviors en masse due to DDT poisoning (as one factor ascertained, but perhaps not the only one.)

[konchog uma]

quite so taomeow, thank you for the sanity

[Apech]

quite so taomeow, thank you for the sanity

 

Er did you guys read the article it was about a scientist from 1911 who wrote this stuff up in Greek so the hoi poloi could not read it. That was the funny part ... i.e. the reflection on humans.

[konchog uma]

Er did you guys read the article it was about a scientist from 1911 who wrote this stuff up in Greek so the hoi poloi could not read it. That was the funny part ... i.e. the reflection on humans.

 

lol missed that part

 

thanks for the clarification

[Taomeow]

Er did you guys read the article it was about a scientist from 1911 who wrote this stuff up in Greek so the hoi poloi could not read it. That was the funny part ... i.e. the reflection on humans.

 

Yes, I've read parts of it.

 

So, Apech, WHEN does our "real" "modern" "science" BEGIN? What's the zero hour? When did we start doing it exactly? What have we been doing before that date? How did we manage to get so scientific so recently without getting a clue in the prior one million years or so?

 

I submit the zero hour is "never." We don't have life sciences. We have manipulations, prejudice, meddling, playing god with zero qualifications, and making final-truth judgment calls based on prior brainwashing. It was so in 1911 and in 1611 and in 2011.

 

That's why I don't care WHEN they said what they said. They always say the same thing: "I am in the position of power to say what's natural and what's not." They write it on milk cartons -- "I say RBGH is perfectly fine and natural, so suck it up." They said it best in The Simpsons:

"Abortions for all! No abortions for anyone! Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others!"

[Apech]

Yes, I've read parts of it.

 

So, Apech, WHEN does our "real" "modern" "science" BEGIN? What's the zero hour? When did we start doing it exactly? What have we been doing before that date? How did we manage to get so scientific so recently without getting a clue in the prior one million years or so?

 

I submit the zero hour is "never." We don't have life sciences. We have manipulations, prejudice, meddling, playing god with zero qualifications, and making final-truth judgment calls based on prior brainwashing. It was so in 1911 and in 1611 and in 2011.

 

That's why I don't care WHEN they said what they said. They always say the same thing: "I am in the position of power to say what's natural and what's not." They write it on milk cartons -- "I say RBGH is perfectly fine and natural, so suck it up." They said it best in The Simpsons:

"Abortions for all! No abortions for anyone! Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others!"

 

Well since you ask I would say that the modern scientific paradigm emerged in the mid 17 century to the beginning of the 18th. This is when for instance Alchemy and Chemistry first became separate disciplines. I think your assessment is a little harsh. I think there are scientist who are genuinely interested in the natural world and try to understand it (within the limits of the paradigm).

 

I think the funny thing about the article is that the scientist in 1911 projected his values onto the penguins. But he did observe and record presumably accurately and those bits of information can be used to increase understanding despite the fact that he did not himself understand. I think it was Marx who said society and the zeitgeist project the philosophy for the time ... so the prevalent ideas which gain general acceptance at different periods reflect the way in which people were living. So for instance a feudal society would propagate very different philosophies to democratic one and so on.

 

The scientist wrote about the activities of the penguins in Greek so that only educated people - which presumably means people sufficiently ok with ideas - could understand ... it was his judgement that others (i.e. the proles) would react strangely to the discoveries he had made. If it was discovered today I think this would not apply which is why it appeared in a mainstream newspaper. So the commentary or subtext of the article was that today we would not necessarily jump to the conclusion that the penguin activity was depraved and so on.

 

I do not share your view of science which seems entirely negative. Although I would naturally gravitate to Blake rather than Newton ... I still think that the insight of the application of mathematics to things such as the laws of motion and gravity is a significant and helpful breakthrough for mankind.

 

I don't understand the Simpson quote at all ... I have no idea what you are saying there.

 

 

[Protector]

[Taomeow]

Thanks for your take, Apech.

 

I do not share your view of science which seems entirely negative. Although I would naturally gravitate to Blake rather than Newton ... I still think that the insight of the application of mathematics to things such as the laws of motion and gravity is a significant and helpful breakthrough for mankind.

 

Oh, my view of science is far from negative -- I specified I was talking about life sciences. My "harsh" view in this regard is shared by Linus Pauling of the two Nobel prizes who proved with infallible logic and reason that we have no medical science.

 

Besides what Linus Pauling was talking about (perhaps for some later discussion unrelated to penguins), it's just that I see several problems with science as we know it... um, as we are told it is and isn't. Here's just one, out of quite a few I could point out:

 

Our life sciences are dead. They learn them by opening up corpses, studying under the microscope tissues preserved in formaldehyde, and killing hundreds of millions of helpless "lab" animals (what makes an animal a "lab" animal? -- surely not tao). To base LIFE sciences on DEAD people, animals and tissues is beyond ironic. Beyond insane. Beyond inefficient and beyond conductive to erroneous philosophies of life. It is evil.

 

And writing in Greek (that's not live modern Greek, incidentally, it's Ancient Greek they used for scientific writings, a dead language) so the proles don't understand what the demigods are talking about hasn't gone away at all, only they use "medical Latin" instead (used to be both, but our demigods are getting hard to educate in two dead languages -- but then, they have new dead languages to study instead, have you ever read the PDR? All the words that are made up to name made-up conglomerates of molecules used to "treat" us, as we are told -- and as I believe they are really used, no one is talking about using anything to "heal" us, we are "treated" all right, but to what? -- none of these words have a live counterpart anywhere in the world, unlike, e.g., when you read the Materia Medica of TCM. The latter talks about live things -- roots, flowers, seeds, bugs, animals, all of them real entities encountered in nature. Try finding something like that in the huge tome of thousands of items a med student has to commit to memory -- none of these were born of a mother and a father or hatched out of an egg or burst out of a seed. Dead. Dead shit. And we call it progress? But toward what?.. ??? And please don't tell me they learned to prolong our lives and conquered our once-deadly diseases, that's propaganda and has nothing to do with reality. It's lies. I don't like to be told lies. And truth is nowhere near to be found in our life sciences.)

[Apech]

@TM

 

Well thanks in return for your view.

 

I think that this idea of treating reality (in the life sciences) as dead comes from the same scientific paradigm which emerged in the late 17 Century. That is reality is an object which can be dissected, broken down into parts and therefore understood. Hence the tendency to kill things to understand them. What they are looking at of course is the gross precipitation of higher and more subtle life functions which they cannot detect.

 

The use of ancient ... what you call dead languages is not necessarily such a bad thing. For large periods of history Latin was the lingua franca of the intelligentia and a such allowed people from different countries to converse ... and thus promoted learning. Ancient Greek was interestingly enough the lingua franca of the Roman Empire and also the language through which the philosophy and science of the ancient world has come down to us (in the West). No bad thing in my view.

 

In the truly ancient world of course learning was the province of the priesthoods. Mathematics, geometry, architecture, medecine and so on were linked to a spiritual view. This view was preserved in subjects like alchemy (which even the likes Newton studied) and did not separate the spiritual from the empirical.

 

Empiricism does have a virtue though in that it has to try to explain facts. As much a scientific dogma may think it has the 'answer' always in every discipline, sooner or later, actual detectable physical effects undermine the standard model. By recording actual observable facts the scientist is actually able to move forward. For instance the penguin man saw homosexual behaviour at a time when such things were both illegal and socially unacceptable in human society ... despite being widely practiced. Sooner or later this forces a reassessment of homosexuality as un-natural or whatever. So I think there is something to be said for pragmatic empiricism as distinct to received and untested ideas.

[Taomeow]

@TM

 

The use of ancient ... what you call dead languages is not necessarily such a bad thing.

 

Particularly in the context of necrophilia we've been discussing.

 

However, it's not what "I" call the languages that no longer have a function of the first natural live native tongue in a live population anywhere. It's the proprietary term of another science, linguistics, in reference to such languages. See http://en.wikipedia..../Language_death and also http://en.wikipedia....tinct_language. (Not the greatest articles on the subject, from the POV of someone educated in comparative linguistics, but I'm too lazy to hunt for better, and too rusty to remember what it was they gave me an M.S. for so many moons ago. )

 

Latin and Ancient Greek are both "dead" but not "extinct." A language that is dead but still used as a "sacred" one is still dead though. Christian religious studies from which all our modern life sciences were derived in a smooth unbroken transition, inheriting their sacred language, their central image of an entity in the state of death, their casual disdain for "mortal flesh," etc., were indeed conducted in languages the uninitiated weren't supposed to understand. But the purposes of such use of a language are intimidation, exclusivity, elitism, and discrimination, not the spread of knowledge. If the purpose was to spread knowledge, why not spread it in the language the population you're spreading it to comprehends?

 

Walk into a doctor's office today and see what I mean. He talks to you as though you're retarded, in the simplest terms reserved for the simple-minded -- but if you probe for real knowledge behind the pitch, he throws a Latin term at you, end of conversation. Well, I know Latin, and I make a point of using it the second a doctor uses it on me, invariably outplaying him at his own game (for mine is not limited to medical Latin ), but everybody else is duly intimidated when they hear a spellbinding invocation of a sacred language. (It's either Latin or a made-up word -- the ones targeting the largest population groups insert a cross in them, have you noticed? -- FosamaX, PaXil, CelebreX, EffeXor -- as well as, of course, in the RX insignia of every prescription.)

[Apech]

 

 

Latin and Ancient Greek are both "dead" but not "extinct." A language that is dead but still used as a "sacred" one is still dead though. Christian religious studies from which all our modern life sciences were derived in a smooth unbroken transition, inheriting their sacred language, their central image of an entity in the state of death, their casual disdain for "mortal flesh," etc., were indeed conducted in languages the uninitiated weren't supposed to understand. But the purposes of such use of a language are intimidation, exclusivity, elitism, and discrimination, not the spread of knowledge. If the purpose was to spread knowledge, why not spread it in the language the population you're spreading it to comprehends?

 

...

 

Because Latin and to a certain extent Greek was the lingua franca in Europe where science was emerging. And actually English has the capacity to absorb words from different language bases particularly Latin and Germanic roots. As in moon and lunar. We don't talk about moon eclipses but we do talk about lunar eclipses. In medical science we talk about larynx and pharynx and not throat and voice box. Ok this might exclude some people who do not understand how these terms are applied but it allows people who need to be to be more precise.

 

The fact is that knowledge did spread through the use of Latin and in a way which eliminated the need to translate continuously from French to German to English to Spanish and so on. Also remember there were many regional languages which are now truly dead. For a long time a minority of people living in France actually spoke what we would now recognise as French.

 

The idea that someone using precise and yet not necessarily commonly understood terms is doing so to intimidate and exclude people is to attribute a motivation held only by a few on the many.

[Taomeow]

Because Latin and to a certain extent Greek was the lingua franca in Europe where science was emerging. And actually English has the capacity to absorb words from different language bases particularly Latin and Germanic roots. As in moon and lunar. We don't talk about moon eclipses but we do talk about lunar eclipses. In medical science we talk about larynx and pharynx and not throat and voice box. Ok this might exclude some people who do not understand how these terms are applied but it allows people who need to be to be more precise.

 

The fact is that knowledge did spread through the use of Latin and in a way which eliminated the need to translate continuously from French to German to English to Spanish and so on. Also remember there were many regional languages which are now truly dead. For a long time a minority of people living in France actually spoke what we would now recognise as French.

 

The idea that someone using precise and yet not necessarily commonly understood terms is doing so to intimidate and exclude people is to attribute a motivation held only by a few on the many.

 

A code is a code. The motivation for using a code is to hide, not to reveal, information encoded.

 

A lingua franca is a common phenomenon that has always existed among peoples who communicated and traded extensively while speaking many different languages. Most of these many different languages, however, were meticulously destroyed. E.g., Native Americans before the intervention spoke more languages than all of the Old World combined... extinct today courtesy of premeditated linguicide. Now English is their lingua franca... no wait, now it's also their "mother tongue." Not Latin though, because no code language ever coincides with any mother tongue -- or with any currently alive lingua franca. This would defeat its purpose.

 

Swahili is the lingua franca of Africa today, but it is not a code language. If Latin didn't become dead, it wouldn't have become a code language for hiding knowledge. A lingua franca is never hidden by default. Latin basically went through stages (overlapping for a while) -- mother tongue to lingua franca to dead to sacred/code language. When it was alive, other languages were used as code languages. Same deal with Aramaic (the language Jesus spoke), lingua franca for 1200 years. Once it was quite dead, it became the language of scientific discourse (used by European alchemists, among others, for writings absolutely secret of course, along with Hebrew in which, e.g., Nicolas Flamel wrote his alchemical works. Latin was still not unavailable enough and too widely known for purposes of encoding at the time. Dead but still warm, so to speak. )

[Apech]

A code is a code. The motivation for using a code is to hide, not to reveal, information encoded.

 

Not completely true. Some codified information is necessarily so because of the kinds of ideas which are expressed. for instance the bagua could be said to be a certain kind of code ... but not one that is intended to hide knowledge but to present in a way which has to be earned by working on the concepts involved, realisation and application through which real understanding can arise. This as distinct from say the enigma code in WWII or the encryption of files on computers which is as you say deliberately intended to conceal information.

 

A lingua franca is a common phenomenon that has always existed among peoples who communicated and traded extensively while speaking many different languages. Most of these many different languages, however, were meticulously destroyed. E.g., Native Americans before the intervention spoke more languages than all of the Old World combined... extinct today courtesy of premeditated linguicide. Now English is their lingua franca... no wait, now it's also their "mother tongue." Not Latin though, because no code language ever coincides with any mother tongue -- or with any currently alive lingua franca. This would defeat its purpose.

 

There is a strong theory that English evolved in Britain through trade between Celtic Latin speakers, Saxons and other Germanic tribes and the viking/norsemen ... as a lingua franca specifically for trade ... this in someways shows why it is so strong internationally now ... because it has a very adaptive lexis and non-prescriptive syntax and grammar. Compare for instance with French where they regularly control imported words and try to protect its purity ... this makes French more closed off than English and less easy to speak in a street style ... which is what you need for a lot of trade/business.

 

Swahili is the lingua franca of Africa today, but it is not a code language. If Latin didn't become dead, it wouldn't have become a code language for hiding knowledge. A lingua franca is never hidden by default. Latin basically went through stages (overlapping for a while) -- mother tongue to lingua franca to dead to sacred/code language. When it was alive, other languages were used as code languages. Same deal with Aramaic (the language Jesus spoke), lingua franca for 1200 years. Once it was quite dead, it became the language of scientific discourse (used by European alchemists, among others, for writings absolutely secret of course, along with Hebrew in which, e.g., Nicolas Flamel wrote his alchemical works. Latin was still not unavailable enough and too widely known for purposes of encoding at the time. Dead but still warm, so to speak. )

 

Latin of course is no longer a lingua franca ... this was only the case because of the Catholic Church and its hold on education and hearts and minds.

 

The Hermetic tradition has always used Latin, Greek and Hebrew ... the older and perhaps source language Ancient Egyptian being completely dead at the fall of the Roman Empire. Christianity, god bless it, wiped out most of our heritage ...

 

But even by the time this gentleman was writing about penguins (1911) it was still the case that the educated classes would have been fluent in Latin and Greek and these would have been the academic lingua franca. He was still of the opinion, presumably, that knowledge was for the elite because other people, not properly trained could not be trusted with it. I don't think this kind of thinking died out until after two world wars, especially the first which wiped out a generation of these kinds of people and exposed the aristocracy as being fallible.

[Taomeow]

There is a strong theory that English evolved in Britain through trade between Celtic Latin speakers, Saxons and other Germanic tribes and the viking/norsemen ... as a lingua franca specifically for trade ... this in someways shows why it is so strong internationally now ... because it has a very adaptive lexis and non-prescriptive syntax and grammar. Compare for instance with French where they regularly control imported words and try to protect its purity ... this makes French more closed off than English and less easy to speak in a street style ... which is what you need for a lot of trade/business.

 

You mean English is internationally strong today because of its grammatical adaptability to borrowings? I'm pretty sure it is strong for geopolitical rather than linguistic reasons. Slavic languages are infinitely more flexible in lexis and grammar (there's no English, French, Chinese, Swahili word that can't be turned into a Russian word and subject itself to all the rules of Russian grammar as fluently as any native one... so "president" becomes six cases -- president presidenta presidentom o presidente etc, the adjective presidentskiy, the feminine adjective presidentskaya, plus all the six case changes of the masculine and all six of the feminine adjective, the designation of the president's wife as presidentsha sometimes also used as a common low-flown style word for female president, the collective of president's advisors as presidium but also the premises where they might congregate, the verb presidentstvovat', with its very long paradigm of conjugation capabilities -- presidentstvoval in the past and presidentstvuju in the present etc. but then presidentstvujet for what he or she does now and presidentstvovala for what she did, and then the tongue-in-cheek naprezidentstvoval when the president screwed up, and poprezidentstvoval if he did it and then stopped, and on and on, dozens of ways to use this one borrowed word as dozens of Russian words that offer no resistance to being adopted and adapted. This is the case with any foreign word, with a rather short list of traditional exceptions, one of the curious ones being the word coffee.)

 

Chinese (which has to make every borrowed word immediately inherently meaningful to a native speaker, instead of just adapting an alphabet soup like what an English speaker gets when dealing with "borscht" or "weltschmerz" or "taijiquan") has no built-in limits on the extent of borrowings it can absorb either. French is resistant for reasons of national politics rather than linguistic peculiarities. Things are controlled in this world, and become this or that because of this control far more often than they naturally would.

 

Latin of course is no longer a lingua franca ... this was only the case because of the Catholic Church and its hold on education and hearts and minds.

 

Bingo. Not its hold on hearts and minds though -- its hold on politics and economies and finances and, yes, science, contemporary "modern" science. Except it's not just the Catholic Church. It's the Roman empire. We are it, still.

 

Look where the penguins have taken us.

[Protector]

 

Fun fact:

Penguins are made of teeth

[Apech]

You mean English is internationally strong today because of its grammatical adaptability to borrowings? I'm pretty sure it is strong for geopolitical rather than linguistic reasons. Slavic languages are infinitely more flexible in lexis and grammar (there's no English, French, Chinese, Swahili word that can't be turned into a Russian word and subject itself to all the rules of Russian grammar as fluently as any native one... so "president" becomes six cases -- president presidenta presidentom o presidente etc, the adjective presidentskiy, the feminine adjective presidentskaya, plus all the six case changes of the masculine and all six of the feminine adjective, the designation of the president's wife as presidentsha sometimes also used as a common low-flown style word for female president, the collective of president's advisors as presidium but also the premises where they might congregate, the verb presidentstvovat', with its very long paradigm of conjugation capabilities -- presidentstvoval in the past and presidentstvuju in the present etc. but then presidentstvujet for what he or she does now and presidentstvovala for what she did, and then the tongue-in-cheek naprezidentstvoval when the president screwed up, and poprezidentstvoval if he did it and then stopped, and on and on, dozens of ways to use this one borrowed word as dozens of Russian words that offer no resistance to being adopted and adapted. This is the case with any foreign word, with a rather short list of traditional exceptions, one of the curious ones being the word coffee.)

 

I think you proved my point. English is much to lazy to make such a meal of one word.

 

 

 

 

Bingo. Not its hold on hearts and minds though -- its hold on politics and economies and finances and, yes, science, contemporary "modern" science. Except it's not just the Catholic Church. It's the Roman empire. We are it, still.

 

Look where the penguins have taken us.

 

Yes I think I agree. The history of Europe is the history of attempts to rebuild the Roman empire ... including the dreaded European Union ... see the price we (and the Greeks) are paying for that conceit? Interestingly all the stuff that the Romans are famous for, technology and wotnot they stole from the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Phoenicians and so on. In fact lets have a Phoenician empire recreated ... that would be something to behold. Carthage rebuilt.

[Taomeow]

I think you proved my point. English is much to lazy to make such a meal of one word.

 

I don't think I did. Russian successfully functioned as the lingua franca of the Russian and then Soviet empire, and the fact that hundreds of millions of people used is this way has little to do with its grammatical expansiveness but much to do with the expansiveness of the empire's drive for domination and with the battles these peoples' ancestors (and themselves) had lost to the imperial troops, then cops, then hangmen. Exactly the way it happened with Latin and English, incidentally, though at a laughably modest (by comparison) scale of 1/6 of earth's dry land, in the case of Russian.

 

Yes I think I agree. The history of Europe is the history of attempts to rebuild the Roman empire ... including the dreaded European Union ... see the price we (and the Greeks) are paying for that conceit? Interestingly all the stuff that the Romans are famous for, technology and wotnot they stole from the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Phoenicians and so on. In fact lets have a Phoenician empire recreated ... that would be something to behold. Carthage rebuilt.

 

Carthago Delenda Est!!!

 

!!!!!

I think I want this on my every T-shirt.

[Birch]

"our scientists choose to ignore multifunctional purpose of the sexual release and ascribe only procreational goals to it on the grounds of sheer superficiality of analysis. "

 

THIS!

 

and

 

http://www.amazon.com/Unconscious-Civilization-John-Ralston-Saul/dp/0684871084

 

on the language/information thingy

[Apech]

I don't think I did. Russian successfully functioned as the lingua franca of the Russian and then Soviet empire, and the fact that hundreds of millions of people used is this way has little to do with its grammatical expansiveness but much to do with the expansiveness of the empire's drive for domination and with the battles these peoples' ancestors (and themselves) had lost to the imperial troops, then cops, then hangmen. Exactly the way it happened with Latin and English, incidentally, though at a laughably modest (by comparison) scale of 1/6 of earth's dry land, in the case of Russian.

 

The sun never set.

 

 

Carthago Delenda Est!!!

 

!!!!!

I think I want this on my every T-shirt.

 

The Phoenician Alphabet.

 

THE OLDEST CITY IN THE WORLD Archaeologists have uncovered

homes of farmers and fishermen in Gebeil dating back to 7000 B.C. They found

one-room huts with crushed limestone floors and stone idol of god El. Because

of these discoveries, it is thought that Gebeil (later known as Byblos) may

actually be the oldest city in the world.

 

 

TIES WITH EGYPT As far as back as 3200 B.C., the people of Gebeil

(Byblos) were cutting down cedar trees in the mountains of Lebanon, to be

shipped to Egypt and Mesopotamia for use in building ships and making

columns for houses. In return, the Phoenicians brought back gold, copper, and

turquoise from the Nile Valley and Sinai. Canaanite ceramic pieces have been

found in Egyptian tombs dating back to 2999 B.C. In 1954, archaeologists

found Cheops (khufu) at Giza. Cheops lived around 2550 B.C. The barge was

made of Lebanese cedar wood and faint scent of the cedar was still in the grain

at the time of its discovery.

 

THE ALPHABET Sumerian cuneiforms (wedge shaped symbols in clay

tablets) and Egyptian hieroglyphics (pictographs) were the only known forms of

writing before the alphabet as we know it was developed. Both scripts, though

separately created, used picture writing. Eventually, pictures or signs

represented sounds. Finally, the pictures became so simplified that a whole

word was written as a single sign. By about 1200 B.C., the Phoenicians had

developed symbols which in time became a real alphabet. The Phoenician

alphabet consisted of twenty-two symbols, all consonants. Each one

represented its own sound. The Egyptian symbol for the ox head was given the

Semitic name aleph and was sounded as "a." The symbol for house became

Beth and was sounded as "b." It is easily see how the Phoenician alphabet was

used to form the other alphabets which followed it. Aleph became the Greek

alpha, Beth became beta. In time, these letters became the Roman letters A and

B and eventually the English A and B, and so on for the entire alphabet. Once a

written language was established, it was inscribed on Egyptian papyrus, a type

of paper made of reeds. So, closely linked with papyrus with the city of Byblos

(which traded cedar for the paper) that when the writing of the Hebrew

prophets were translated into Greek the city's name was given to the great book

- the Bible. Because the papyrus rotted away in the damp sea air and soil, there

are practically no Phoenician writings left. Thus, the literature of the people

who influenced the western world in her writing has largely vanished. Still,

because Egyptian scribes copied the Phoenician letters after hieroglyphics were

no longer used, and because artists in Ninevah inscribed them in stone, the

alphabet remains with us. Alphabet

 

THE CITY-STATES For the next three centuries, independent Phoenicia

reached its height as a nation whose prime interests were trade, the arts, and

religion. Organized into individual city-states, each Phoenician city was under

its own form of government. Each had its own god and its own ruler, whose

usually remained in power for life. Gebeil (Byblos) was a strong religious

city-state. Sidon and tyre were cities of Business, industry, and navigation.

 

 

 

 

[Owledge]

Haven't read the whole thread, but in a German zoo penguins were observed to turn to homosexuality and through that they realized they had only males in the compound.

 

Also, I remember a documentary talking about flocks of male dolphins hunting a female to coerce her into sex.

 

Humans are animals. Fewer differences than people think.

[Vanir Thunder Dojo Tan]

 

 

 

 

 

mmh penguins into beastiality?

 

 

 

Tiajuana penguins?

[Stosh]

Apart from the word "depravity" which is not a term a scientist should be using, nothing in this behavior is unusual except for necrophilia which a scientist should have explained by the combination of the majority of penguins' monogamous fidelity and permafrost that preserves the deceased spouse's body indefinitely. Which is why species living where a corpse disintegrates from the elements rather than is preserved by same, like ours, had to invent embalming to copulate with their deceased loved ones and leaders spiritually, but occasionally physically too -- Alexander of Macedonia, e.g., upon killing the queen of the Amazons repeatedly made love to her dead body. And he's supposed to be one of our historic heroes.

 

Occasional violence latching onto sex (sex is not sex in this scenario but rather a weapon of violence) and occasional use of sex for pain processing rather than procreation is common, but our scientists choose to ignore multifunctional purpose of the sexual release and ascribe only procreational goals to it on the grounds of sheer superficiality of analysis. Our species is engaged in non-procreational sex that has other goals (chiefly a pain-processing mechanism, confirmed by the fact that the most disturbed, abused, suffering individuals are also the ones seeking maximal amounts of sexual encounters and/or solo release) by far more than any other.

 

Oh, and a percentage of all sexually reproducing species engage in same-sex encounters on occasion, so the connotations of "depravity" are religious- rather than scientific-based. Most primates have around 10% same-sex encounters (with some preferring them exclusively while others will engage in them only occasionally, and still others, never), the numbers are perhaps much lower in felines (who also don't hump furniture unlike canines), but none of it is "depravity," scientifically speaking, only behavioral variations around the norm. Depravity begins when the norm is pushed out of existence by those variations though, as is happening today with penguins, polar bears, and all other arctic animals suffering major reproductive problems and exhibiting uncharacteristic sexual behaviors en masse due to DDT poisoning (as one factor ascertained, but perhaps not the only one.)

 

I dont really know why you are contesting Apech on the 'depravity' angle.

Yes animals are animals but, applied to humans, the behavior lends itself to

that descriptive very easily.

 

Unless you are just fine with murder+rape , sex with the young or dead etc

and would choose to include all of that in a childrens flick about penguins,,,

You essentially agree.

 

It would be refreshing to find someone here who felt that morality ,

right and wrongness were subjective illusions,

(and so the pursuit of 'virtue' is on shakey ground)

but I dont think that is the case. Is it?

 

Stosh

 

PS: as far as the language thing goes I figure that the huge size of English

points to ready acceptance to new ideas

( an attitude of acceptance and adaptation rather than a linguistic flexibility per se' )

I dont know which of yalls argument I am in support of regarding that.