The Pantheon Outcast

Unless you’ve been vacationing in Antarctica, you’ve seen or at least heard of the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina. Thousands dead, thousands more displaced, billions in damages, blah, blah, blah. You can’t flick on the TV, radio, or fire up the ol’ computer without hours of footage from every possible angle. And just as the media buzzards seem to be running out of carrion to feed upon, out of left field comes Jack Shafer, some sort of editor at large of ultra-liberal Slate.com. In Mr. Shafer’s opinion, it’s not that the hurricane isn’t getting enough coverage, it’s that the victims aren’t being properly identified as “black victims”. Huh? Read first , and I’ll be here when you get back…. Done? Ok, anyone want to tell me Jack’s point? Anyone? Anyone? Beuller? Didn’t think so. In the article itself, Jack mentions how 67% of New Orleans is black, and close to 30% is at the poverty level. And then he wonders why the TV news is showing so much footage of poor, black Hurricane survi...

I realize that there’s a war going on. On one side you have a country hell-bent on democracy and freedom and safety and security, and on the other, a rag-tag bunch of lunatics who think that their invisible man will give them a bunch of raisins if they kill anyone who even so much as talks about another invisible man. Gee, it’s really difficult to decide which horse to bet on there. Let’s be honest here, war is a good thing for it decides irrevocably where mere words have failed miserably. Diplomacy is good for, say, high school debate teams, and union negotiations. On the other hand, only a lightning bolt from above (or thermonuclear warhead) can sway the minds of those who murder and torture thousands of innocent people, especially in the name of invisible people. There are those who say “two wrongs don’t make a right”, but most likely they were the ones beaten up for their lunch money in school. Lex Talionis, my tye-dyed friends, an eye for an eye – that is the very definition of tr...

If you mortals can't even get along within your own country, then Zeus help you when it comes to that "World Peace" thing certain groups are always blathering on about. Take a look at this item here A judge from Georgia, presumably one of America's more progressive states, pardoned a woman who had been executed over 60 years ago. Now, I'm obviously all for justice, but was something like this really worth the time and money put into it? Does Georgia not have other ill-charged prisoners languishing in prison? A quick look at crime statistics shows that Atlanta has a murder rate 4.52 times the National Average and an overall violent crime rate 3.30 times the National Average. That sounds like a pressing concern. More so than dredging up old crimes which may or may not have been prosecuted correctly. But if you read a little further into the article, you can see a variable that seems consistent with a lot of the problems you mortals keep running into: The exonerated...

From where I’m standing (hovering, actually), Planet Earth is being torn apart due to war, famine, disease, racial and religious infighting, and just plain stupidity. The population of your little ball of rock is straining at 6 billion and in ten-fifteen years, 10 billion of you fleshbags will be wandering around, sucking up every available resource in order to drive bigger cars, eat pre-packaged string cheese, and fornicate ad nauseum. Instead of banding your best and brightest together in a word-wide intellectual oligarchy, it seems that your insatiable drive for self-expression and meaningless individuality has fractured your world’s greatest thinkers into two distinct groups: Intelligent people who toil in laboratories attempting to translate the human genome in an effort to clone even more of you and Pseudo-intellectuals who make it their life’s goal to impress other pseudo-intellectuals with their increasingly ridiculous concepts, theories and proposals. The second group, while n...

Why is this site called The Pantheon Outcast? Simply because I’m fascinated with religion and theology and the motivations behind people worshiping one god or another. I may not be able to walk on water or toss thunderbolts around, but I believe that what I have to say is just as significant as any divine being. Your name isn’t really Valannin, is it? No, it’s not. I thought it would be clever to write from the point of view of a lesser-known deity as he observes human behavior. But you don’t write that way anymore. It stopped being clever. What is that symbol next to your name supposed to be? And where is the quote under the title from? The symbol is a phoenix, the Egyptian mythological bird who immolated himself and then rose from the ashes. I kind of adopted it as my personal motif, to reasons known only to a select few. It has nothing to do with a penchant for Harry Potter, I can assure you. The quote is from Maid of Orleans by the poet and playwright Johann Christoph Friedrich vo...