n2doc

n2doc's Journal

October 1, 2015

New clay tablet adds 20 lines to Epic of Gilgamesh

A newly discovered clay tablet in the Sulaymaniah Museum in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq has corrected the order of chapters, filled in blanks and added 20 lines to the Epic of Gilgamesh. Since the invasion of Iraq and subsequent orgy of looting, the museum has a matter of policy paid smugglers to keep artifacts from leaving the country, no questions asked. The tablet was acquired by the museum in late 2011 as part of a collection of 80-90 tablets sold by an unnamed shady character. Professor Farouk Al-Rawi examined the collection while the seller haggled with museum official Abdullah Hashim. When Al-Rawi he saw this tablet, he told Hashim to pay whatever the seller wanted: $800.

Even caked in mud the tablet’s importance was instantly recognizable to the expert. Once it was clean, Al-Rawi identified it as a fragment of Tablet V of the Standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh.

The tablet is the left half of a six-column tablet written in Neo-Babylonian. It’s composed of three fragments that have been glued together, oddly enough, probably either by the original excavators or the seller. It is 11 centimeters (4.3 inches) high, 9.5 cm (3.7 inchs) wide and three cm (1.2 inches) thick.

The tablet adds new verses to the story of how Gilgamesh and Enkidu slew the forest demigod Humbaba. Gilgamesh, King of Uruk, gets the idea to kill the giant Humbaba, guardian of the Cedar Forest, home of the gods, in Tablet II. He thinks accomplishing such a feat of strength will gain him eternal fame. His wise companion (and former wild man) Enkidu tries to talk him out of it — Humbaba was set to his task by the god Enlil — but stubborn Gilgamesh won’t budge, so Enkidu agrees to go with him on this quest. Together they overpower the giant. When the defeated Humbaba begs for mercy, offering to serve Gilgamesh forever and give him every sacred tree in the forest, Gilgamesh is moved to pity, but Enkidu’s blood is up now and he exhorts his friend to go through with the original plan to kill the giant and get that eternal renown he craves. Gilgamesh cuts Humbaba’s head off and then cuts down the sacred forest. The companions return to Uruk with the trophy head and lots of aromatic timber.

more

http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/38631

October 1, 2015

Elizabeth Warren is on the hunt again

Elizabeth Warren, collector of corporate hides, is on the hunt again.

Fresh from her triumph Tuesday over the Brookings Institution in which she forced the ouster of a corporate-backed scholar, the populist Democratic senator from Massachusetts was at Lutheran Church of the Reformation on Capitol Hill, firing up a crowd of housing activists Wednesday afternoon.

Facing the pews, with a large brass cross behind her, Warren blasted the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Federal Housing Finance Agency, both run by Obama appointees, for selling troubled mortgages to hedge fund investors at a discount.

“These Wall Street investors made money by crashing the economy, got bailed out and now they’re back to feed at the trough again,” she said, “scooping up these loans at rock-bottom prices so that they profit off them a second time — and it is up to us to stop that!”

The activists cheered.

more

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/elizabeth-warren-is-on-the-hunt-again/2015/09/30/0e21163a-67be-11e5-8325-a42b5a459b1e_story.html

October 1, 2015

Biden's Abortion Record Could Cause Him Problems in a Presidential Bid

As Democrats fret about Hillary Clinton's electoral prospects, Vice President Joe Biden has emerged as a viable alternative and steadily risen in the polls. Unlike the outright socialist Bernie Sanders, Biden and Clinton have largely fallen into the Democratic consensus on policy issues over their decades in politics. (Their one noted area of divergence, on how aggressive America's foreign policy should be, has not been a dominant topic so far in the presidential election.)

But there's one domestic issue on which Biden has occasionally strayed from the Democratic mainstream during his more than 40 years in politics. Biden has been an inconsistent supporter of reproductive rights, sometimes backing the legal right of women to choose how to handle a pregnancy, while often hewing to his Catholic faith and moralizing against all abortions. Even today, when he and Clinton would most likely agree on most of the policy substance of ensuring access to abortion clinics, Biden sticks to a pro-life view in his personal politics.

During the early part of his career, abortion rights groups griped about Biden as an unreliable ally. "Joe Biden moans a lot and then usually votes against us," a Planned Parenthood official said in 1986.

When he first entered national politics, Biden was willing to stand alongside politicians who wanted to make abortion illegal. In a Washingtonian profile published the year after the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision established a nationwide right to abortion, Biden unequivocally criticized the ruling. "I don’t like the Supreme Court decision on abortion," he said. "I think it went too far. I don’t think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body."

more
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/09/joe-biden-abortion-roe-wade

October 1, 2015

Insanity- Half the USA thinks the government poses an ‘immediate threat’ to them....

By Chris Cillizza October 1 at 7:30 AM
I've spent an inordinate time of late trying to understand the rise of Donald Trump and what it tells us about how Americans view politicians, politics and the state of the country more generally. I came across this chart, which was released recently by Gallup, and thought it told the "why" of Trump as well as anything I've seen.

Half of the country believes that the federal government "poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens. HALF! The party breakdown is even more remarkable. Two-thirds (65 percent) of self-identified Republicans believe their government poses an immediate threat to their rights and freedoms. (Worth noting: Just 32 percent of Democrats feel that way.)

That is a startling number -- and speaks not only to the massive disgust and disenchantment among Republicans toward the government, but also the urgency of the perceived threat that it poses. The idea of the government swooping in to restrict your rights is not an abstract discussion for many people -- especially those who identify as Republicans. It is a real and present danger.

The chart above also suggests the idea of the government as an active threat to personal liberties is rapidly rising. A decade ago, only 37 percent of the public called the federal government an immediate threat, and as recently as 2003, only three in 10 people viewed the government that way. Explains Gallup head honcho Frank Newport: "Republican agreement with the 'immediate threat' statement has been higher during the Obama administration than was Democratic agreement during the Bush administration, thus accounting for the overall rise in agreement across all national adults."

more

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/10/01/65-percent-of-republicans-think-the-government-poses-an-immediate-threat-to-them/