Relax. It's Not the End of the World

Evangelical Christians, who I have a lot of fun with only they don't know it, believe that Donald Trump's election is one of the heralds of something they like to call "The End Times."  Based on a totally sideways reading of the Book of Revelations,  it's a time when the world will be divided up into warring nations all following false prophets, the environment gets wrecked, some kind of beast shows up (Roseann Barr?) as does Jesus, everybody living and dead will be judged, and 1,000 years of peace and prosperity will follow -no word of what happens January 1 of year 1,001.  To answer this claim, I quote the late 20th century philosophers Frankie Goes to Hollywood and say, "Relax."  Sure, things aren't too spiffy now, but we -as in humanity -have been here before.  And we've pulled through.

It's me, Akhenaten, and really not an alien

Take the New Kingdom period in Egyptian history.  Things were finally looking up for the Two Lands: foreign invaders had been repulsed, monumental building projects resumed, the weather cooperated, and all looked peachy keen.  Until the reign of Amenhotep IV.  Five years into his rule, the Big A got this crazy idea that Egypt's polytheistic religion was a bunch of water buffalo poop and decided to do something about it.  He closed all the temples except the sun god Aten's,  moved the capital from Thebes to a city he was in the process of building, changed his name to Akhenaten (Everything's Great with Aten), and spent all his time bonking his wife, the fabulously beautiful Nefertiti.  Well, you can imagine what happened next! All the out of work priests were pissed, the people were terrified of offending the traditional gods, the new capital at Samarna royally sucked, and Nefertiti got bored with the Big A and took up papyrus origami.  If it wasn't the end of the world, it was pretty darn close.

Luckily, Akhenaten died and after a fumble or two the throne wound up in the hands of an eight year old boy called Tutankhamun -King Tut to you and me.  Now the Egyptians were really screwed, right?  It turns out no, because Tut's vizier was a capable career civil servant named Ay who really had a knack for ruling.  Under Tut/Ay, the capital was moved back to Thebes and the temples reopened, which earned the priestly class' undying gratitude.  And so things went on swimmingly on the banks of the Nile, right up until the 1180's BC, the next time the world turned into a festering pool of excrement.

For many reasons way too obscure to go into here, the entire greater Mediterranean world fell completely apart in the late Bronze Age.  How bad was it?  The Egyptians were totally whupped by a bunch of nasties collectively called the Sea Peoples, but that's not all.  Troy fell -for the fourth or fifth time, I lose track -Mycenaean Greece entered the Dark Ages, the Hittite Empire vanished, Assyria and Babylon were trashed, and even the mighty Phoenicians left town for Carthage, safely far away in present-day Tunisia.  Not one, but several end-of-the-world scenarios were being played out during this time.

Hey, we're the Sea Peoples.  So, Egypt... wassup?

However, eventually the Greeks got it together and invented philosophy, drama, democracy and baklava.  In Mesopotamia, the Persians put together the largest empire humans had managed to create up until that time.  It turned out that the move to Carthage was just what the Phoenicians needed, because they got staggeringly rich pedaling dye, grain, wine, olive oil and adult marital aids all over the known world.  And although Egypt wasn't the world-striding colossus it was during Ramses the Great's time, at least it turned into a peaceful backwater.

Let us next consider Rome, though let's skip the Grandeur part and go right into the Decline and Fall.  After Emperor Marcus Aurelius went on to join his family ghosts on the Elysian Fields, the Roman Empire lurched from one crisis to the next until the whole shebang wrenched apart and the Western half folded like a chump holding only a pair of sevens in a Texas hold 'em game.  Sure, the Eastern half would keep the lights on until the 1453, but for everybody in Spain, Italy, France, England and other smaller bits of Europe, life was shit that just kept on getting shittier.  Barbarians?  You bet: Huns, Vandals, Goths and Picts.  Disease? Yup.  Starvation and hopelessness? Ditto.  End of the world?  Not quite.

Know why it was called the Dark Ages? Because of all the KNIGHTS!!  Bwa-Ha-Ha!

For all the headaches of Western Europe's so-called Dark Ages, a vibrant culture emerged commonly called the Medieval world.  Knights, ladies, monasteries, great cathedrals and tales of chivalry were all hallmarks of this period.  Granted, life was difficult, but it went on all the same.  During this time, the seeds of all the wonderful qualities of Western Civilization were sewn: scientific inquiry, commercial capitalism, nation-states, engineering and exploration.  Democratic liberalism and rational medical treatment still had a long way to go, but at least they were on the right track.  The society produced was even strong enough to survive a series of events that, to their contemporaries in the 1300's, really did look like the end of the world.

In 1347, a merchant ship pulled into Genoa harbor from a trading post on the Black Sea.  The boat had left under fire from the Tatars who were besieging the port.  Among its cargo was the deadly virus Yersinia Pestis, a disease carried by the fleas that infest rodents like rats, mice, gerbils and hamsters, but can also attack humans.  The disease hit Southern Europe with the force of a bomb blast.  After several years of increasingly deadly outbreaks, 30-60% of Europe's population died.  For those that survived, their world view was warped by so much death, starvation, war and sickness that one wonders today how they found the strength to go on.  End of the world yet?  Close, but not yet.

Renaissance Man: six-pack abs and stone junk

Europe shook off the death shroud and donned a cloak of real radiance during the Renaissance
period.  Painters sculptors, poets, playwrights, businessmen, kings, princes, Popes, adventurers and even some ordinary people burst forth in an explosion of creativity whose echoes are still being felt today.  That's really what I admire the most about humanity: push us to the limit and we often show you human spirit at its best.  Granted, the Renaissance was mostly a cultural movement of Europe's political and social elites, but in cities like Florence, Italy, individual citizens were becoming important and valued for their contributions to society.  The years that followed were crowned by scientific achievements in industry and medicine, increasingly participatory governments and even greater artistic creativity, until it all almost destroyed itself in the 20th Century.


Starting with the Great War in 1914 and pausing at the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the blood-soaked 20th Century  actually had the ability to bring about the end of the world as we know it.  World Wars I and II brought industrial efficiency to the practice of killing soldiers and non-combatants alike, with  such crackerjack tech as the machine gun, attack aircraft, poison gas and submarines, finishing up with ballistic missiles and atomic bombs.  The ensuing so-called Cold War brought about a horrifying build-up and proliferation of ever more powerful atomic weapons and rocket delivery devices.  For the first time, humans had the ability to kill off entire populations within hours and to poison the whole planet with radioactive fallout.  Scientists even postulated a "nuclear winter" scenario affecting the climate, leading to mass species extinctions not seen since the KT-Boundary extinction event that wiped out the large land dinosaurs.  End of the world?  Believe it or not, no.

As of this writing, the world and humanity are open for business.  Since 1945, not one nuclear bomb has been used in war, although the USSR and USA came close during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  I am also pleased to report that we have passed the dates for the end of the world set by the Jehovah Witnesses, the Mayans and the Heaven's Gate cult.  That said, there are some ominous signs: drug resistant diseases, climate change, the proliferation of radical politics, and the growth of intolerant hate groups.  But there are some hopeful signs as well: recognition of the human role in climate change and the first attempts to slow down and mitigate the damage; the growth of multi-racial, multi-ethnic nations and families; advances in communications technology that literally puts in your pocket the ability to talk to the whole world, at least one person at a time. 

Sorry my evangelical friends. Donald Trump, although he has a highly inflated opinion of himself, isn't the end of the world.  When or if it ever comes, the real end of the world will be way more bigly, really yuge, believe me!

Now?  Is it the End yet?  Ready for me?  Sigh...

It's Just Like Money in the Bank

the View from the Podium

It's Just Like Money in the Bank

Have you heard the most disgusting news yet from the already disgusting, on-going story of fiscal and financial mismanagement?  The country of Cypress (Motto: Cypress- we can't decide if we're Greek or Turkish.  Or maybe Albanian) is reeling under the news that banks will be taking money from the savings accounts of its depositors in order to bail themselves (the banks) out for making bad loans to that shady, flash-in-the-pan, broke-on-its-ass country of Greece (Motto: Greece- we're not as slippery as we sound).  That's right, banks are stealing from their depositors to cover their financially over-extended asses.
 Puh-leeeeze!

Where's my free calendar?

All of these bankers-behaving-badly have prompted Adjunct Proff to peer into the mists of history to reveal the slightly sleazy origins of what suckers around the world still call banks (instead of, I don't know, casinos with ATM's instead of slots?) so that you, my loyal, constant, got-way-too-much-free-time-on-your-hands reader, can steer clear of their shenanigans and keep your hard won coin safe.

Way back before there were CD's paying a paltry 1.3% interest for a 10-year term, there was the town of Jericho (the one with Joshua and the walls that came a-tumblin' down, not the fake Ohio town on that SyFy Channel post-apocalyptic series).  The people there were perfectly happy --or as happy as people just 5 hours removed from a hunter-gathering economy could be --because they had no money.  At all.  And no banks.  Anywhere.  If a Jerichoan (Jerichoite?) wanted to store a little of his excess grain in town, he just brought it to the granary and trusted that the fearsome cats of Jericho would do their job in eating any and all mice that tried to steal it.  Oh, and in case the next harvest was crap, our thrifty Jerichoian (???) could schlep to the granary and withdraw enough grain to keep him in pita-bread for the duration.

Mouse: I kan haz teeney nom of wheeete?
Cat: No; I kan haz moussie, nom-nom-nom!

The Sumerians altered the above transaction slightly by inventing a religion of gods and goddesses who had wings, bird-like feet, and owned all of the extra food in the whole town because they had, and this is where it gets really funny, allowed the poor farmer to sow and reap in peace.  This in no way took into account that the rest of our Sumerian farmer's time was taken up digging irrigation ditches to bring the water to his thirsty crops because the great-and-birdy Sumerian deities couldn't be bothered to make it rain.  Pleeeeeze, every decent civilization had at least one god in charge of rain!  So, the Sumerian farmers were the first to be robbed of their excess labor, although to be fair, it was the priests and not the bankers who were doing the dirty work.

Rain would ruin my pretty feathers

However, the Sumerians do have some blame in this whole scandalous history of banking because they came up with the first ever medium of exchange, the token (a fake coin that drivers used to throw in toll-collection bins before there were electric transponders that tracked their every move for the fascist imperialist usurper governments of the Running Dogs of Capitalism)

*** Adjunct Proff has just regained control of his blog from the Chinese Army's Cyber-Attack unit.  Disregard any weird stuff that you may have just read***

These tokens were little animal or grain-shaped clay figurines that represented a certain amount of the commodity.  This was so the temple "priests" could remember just how many sheep Sumerian-so-and-so gave back to the gods from their herd in thanksgiving for... whatever the "priests" said the "gods" did for the farmer-husband and his little family farm.  This wasn't quite yet money because you couldn't trade, say, sheep for grain (the sheep-tokens would eat the grain-tokens, duuh!), so it wasn't a true medium of exchange.  THAT invention would be left to the Lydians.

No, that's Lydia the Tattooed Lady,
not the Lydians!

The Lydians were a bunch of sea-going salesmen who predated the Phoenicians, although they were later driven out of business in the eastern Mediterranean by the aggressive (read "deadly") business practices of said Phoenicians.  It was the Lydians who invented the world's very first coins in order to have a way for their customers pay for the stuff they were selling.  They took a disc of silver or gold, stamped it with the image of a fearsome lion, and just like magic, folks all over the eastern Mediterranean were practically throwing their food, cloth, dye, timber and olive oil at the nearest Lydian they could find, in the hopes that he had some coins on him they could have in exchange.  In their over-eagerness, the peoples of the eastern Med forgot that they couldn't exactly eat the coins in times of famine, but hey, coins were shiny and everybody else was using them, so the only thing they wanted more of were those cool Lydian coins.

Which brings up a small problem.  Sure, coins as a medium of exchange were a great convenience --people didn't have to pay in sheep any more, though you still had the odd rube who wanted to.  The problem was this: if someone tried to steal your sheep, you or your dog, or certainly your sheep, would notice it and stop the thief in their tracks.  But coins were smaller --an enterprising thief could quite literally pocket an entire year's work of farm production and blow it on... well, an entire year's worth of farm production.  Or hookers --they had been doing a booming business ever since the discovery of sex.  What to do?

Sure, but will she work for coins?

The first bank was probably a strongbox inside somebody's house guarded by a dog and a guy named Joey-Two-Times or Benny-the-Knuckle-Crusher.  And it probably just contained the owner's pile of coins, unless they were a person one could rely on to give one's coins back on demand.  Rich people were already making loans during Greek and Roman times.  We know this for a fact, because debtors who defaulted on their loans were enslaved by the debt holder.  This was usually only done in cases of complete, utter inability to pay, because Greek and Roman moneylenders also employed the above-mentioned Joey and Benny to "lean-on" debtors who were slow in their repayments.

It was during Greek and Roman times that temples (note the continued connection between religion and money?  Shysters know their own kind.) added the big innovation of accepting deposits and "changing" money.  This was a big deal, because temples had by then gotten out of the grain-and-livestock trade and were on an all-cash basis by the time Jesus took a nutty and drove the money-changers out of the Temple in Jerusalem.

"Get out and STAY out!  Wall Street is over there.  Jesus Chr..."

But to really, really have a bank in the modern sense of the term, we have to turn to that crazy crowd that gave the world pizza, pasta and the Maffia --and I don't mean the Americans, the Chinese or the Sicilians.  I'm talking about those paisanos, the Renaissance Italians of Florence, Genoa and Venice.  And Jews.  This is because Jews were allowed to do something Christians were not: charge interest on loans.  The Church called this practice a sin (hear THAT, B of A?!?) and since Jews were already going to Hell for being Jewish, why not use them to do the dirty work of getting rich off of loans.  

This is also where the term "bankrupt" enters into financial nomenclature. A banco was the little bench our Jewish friend would set up to do his business in the piazza of the town.  Rupto  happened when our Jewish friend's banco was smashed up-side his head when he couldn't pay his investors the promised return on their investment.  Said banco could also be smashed just for shits-and-grins around Easter, Christmas, the Feast of Our Lady of Padua, or any other Christian holiday that  reminded good Christians to beat-up on the Jews for not believing in Jesus.

Everybody but cartoonists hated the
Jews during the Renaissance

Once the Houses of De Medici and Rothschild got started, nothing besides the odd panic, bank-run, "bubble," recession or Great Depression could stop those bankers.  They added a ton of services, including paper money, bills of lading, bills of exchange, double-entry bookkeeping, letters of credit, cheques, travelers  cheques, credit cards, stock margin-purchases, commodity trading, sub-prime mortgage bundling and hedge funds, just to name the top dozen money-makers --for the banks.  

Because that's exactly what banks do: make money --for their owners, which these days include a lot of non-human entities.  No, aliens haven't invaded Wall Street and the City of London (or have they?).  I'm talking about corporations, yet another creature of this viper's brood spawned by human greed.  A corporation is an artificial "person" who can own property, buy and sell property, sue and be sued in court, and rape young maidens with impunity (ok, rape is never funny, I get it, I'm sorry, won't do it again).  Actually corporations were invented in order to protect investors from those rapacious (not the same thing as rapists :-P) bankers!  How ironic is it that the banks that are "too big to fail" are all owned in whole or part by corporations?  Cosimo de Medicci is having a big laugh about that in his grave right now.

Yes, I have a huge honker,
but I'm not Jewish, you racist

Don't get me wrong: overall, I like banks.  Hell, I used to work for one in my younger days.  I especially like community credit unions, who loan money to local people and businesses with an eye more towards community betterment than towards shareholder dividends.  Remember George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life and his building & loan society?  He's MY kind of banker.

Even the big commercial banks have their uses.  Without adequate financial resources, the U.S.A. couldn't maintain its totally kick-ass, nuclear missile-loaded armed forces, which makes it suicide for a respectable country to attack us --in fact, the only successful attackers as of late were suicide-minded asshole hijackers.  Without the dough-re-mi, there wouldn't have been a man on the moon or a robot leaving the solar system.  Money, and lots of it, is needed for everything from our road infrastructure to our gas, electric and sewer networks.  Money is being used to turn nuclear energy into electricity (and toxic waste.  Don't forget the toxic waste), wind into electricity, falling water into electricity, coal into electricity, natural gas and oil into electricity so that the whole world can watch commercials on their flat-screen T.V.'s.  For banks.  Starring has-been celebs.

They pay us tons to do their commercials,
which keeps us famous.  Win-Win.

So my friendly reader, give-it-up for banks.  Maybe Jefferson was wrong when he called large concentrations of capital inherently inconsistent with individual liberty.  Maybe, just maybe, Adam Smith's Invisible Hand is doing much more than just giving us an Invisible Hand-job.  Maybe money IS good for people.  But have you ever noticed that the people who lust after money the most are the poor? --rich people treat it like a burden that needs to be locked up.  In a bank.  Where only they can fondle it.  Wow, what would Freud say about the psychosis behind today's banking industry?

Sometimes it really IS a
dick up your ass.  What?