The Red Pyramid
The Red Pyramid, constructed 2575–2563 BCE (4600 years ago) by Pharoah Sneferu. Located at the Dahshur necropolis, 55 kilometers south of Giza, Egypt. Photo taken November 3, 2024.
The Red Pyramid, constructed 2575–2563 BCE (4600 years ago) by Pharoah Sneferu. Located at the Dahshur necropolis, 55 kilometers south of Giza, Egypt. Photo taken November 3, 2024.
The long-delayed Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), originally scheduled to open in 2013 and house more than 100,00 artifacts from Ancient Egypt, including the complete collection from the tomb of Pharoah Tutankhamun, finally opened on October 16th — except for the complete Tutankhamun collection. That, for the time being, remains at the old Egyptian Museum downtown at Cairo’s Tahir Square. Last year at this time, Emma and I and our Saudi friend Tariq, who resides in Cairo, were given a private tour of the GEM’s central atrium, a tour that the GEM operated as a trial run before its grand opening. It was wonderful, whetted our desire to see the GEM’s thousands of artifacts. With 81,000 square meters (872,000 square feet) of floor space, GEM is the world’s largest archeological museum and is located adjacent to the Great Pyramids of Giza. So, Emma and I have now decided to return to Egypt next month and see it. We’ll invite our friend Tariq. We’ve now renewed our visas. This will be our fourth trip to Egypt since 2022. We are gradually becoming old Cairo hands.
I avidly and sincerely plan to lose some social media Friend’s and acquaintances this month: I expect that perhaps 30 or 40 of my current 944 Facebook ‘Friend’s and maybe another 50 or so on X (‘Twitter’), Instagram, Threads, and other social media platforms, will ‘Unfriend’ or ‘Block’ me Most of these people will be upset by me or, at best, feel alienated. Some of these are people who I have known since my childhood. I don’t mind political differences and discussions about contentious issues. I grew up with a father who was a Boston Democrat and a mother who was from a Connecticut Republican family. Each of their votes cancelled out the other’s. Moreover, they owned and operated a 140-year-old daily newspaper whose editorial pages [had] to take stands on issues of public controversies. And a fundamental factor was that anything their daily newspaper printed had to be verifiably true lest someone sue them for libel and, if such a lawsuit were successful, my parents lose their business and livelihood. That legal requirement to be truthful is a factor that the average person doesn’t face when expressing his opinion about controversial issues. But it shaped me. Why in the world would I endeavor to lose friends, angering or alienating anyone? So, why should I endeavor to lose any social media ‘Friend’ or follower? Because people who intentionally or knowingly lie recklessly or evilly erode their communities, be it a physical or an online community. In other words, I have a fundamental problem with three categories of deceivers: Why do I endeavor to lose social media ‘Friend’s and acquaintances who are racists? I’ve no difficulty answering that. Racists are liars because they condemn entire races or religions or nationalities, despite knowing what anyone who has walked more than a thousand paces beyond their crib learns: that there are good people, as well as bad people, among every race, religion, or nation and that the good significantly, often extraordinarily, outnumber the bad. A particularly evil dynamic of racism, in person or online, is that the most prolific racists are otherwise affable, rather than irascible, people. That’s because irascible or cranky people make few friends, yet affable racists tend to make many more friends (particularly at times when they aren’t being racist) than irascible racists do. Why do I endeavor to lose social media ‘Friend’s and acquaintances who knowingly lie or knowingly […]
The words in red above, bookending someone’s racist posting on Facebook, are mine. Only if they donned white cotton robes and matching conical hats, then set life-sized crucifixes afire, could the fecal scum who concocted, posted, and ‘Like’d this despicable posting on Facebook be more satanically racist. If you find what I write here to be blunt, Known that its bluntness is justified. I won’t tolerate racism. The October 7, 2024, terrorist attack on Israel by the political party Hamas of the Gaza Strip, an atrocity that killed 1,139 Israeli citizens, absolutely was a Crime Against Humanity (as were the Al-Qaeda terrorist attacks on the United States during 2001) and Hamas must be eradicated (like Al Qaeda was). No, all those statements are demonstrably racist. As clearly are the scantily-educated white men (gee, isn’t it always?) who concocted, posted, ‘Share’d, or ‘Like’d, this excremental graphic on Facebook. Do these rabidly racist mental runts believe that all 2.2 million Palestinians who live in Gaza attacked Israel on October 7th last year? Including the 1.4 million Palestinian women and children in Gaza? Do they know that in 2006 the Hamas political party of terrorism violently overthrew the Gaza’s previous government? And that, much like the Russian-occupied eastern European nations during the Soviet Era, all subsequent Gaza ‘elections’ under Hamas terrorist have been staged by Hamas? Were the people of Armenia, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and the Ukraine, themselves responsible for the crimes of Lenin’s and Stalin’s Soviet Communist Party? Do the human shits who posted this graphic think that the German people themselves were, rather than the NAZIs, were culpable for the Holocaust? Yet the diarrhea these racists spew blames all of the world’s 1.9 billion Muslims, 25 percent of the world’s population, for what a the estimated 60,000 Hamas party members (that’s Israel’s estimate of their number) among the 2.2 million Palestinians living in Gaza. That’s only 2.6-percent of the Gaza’s population, a percentage probably not coincidentally similar to the 3 million to 6 million Protestant-Americans who were members of the Ku Klux Klan (that’ the FBI’s estimate, which was 2.5-percent of the United States’ population of 123 million then) during mid-1920s; Klansmen who killed thousands of African-American citizens. The execrable racists who concocted, posted, ‘Share’d, or ‘Like’d this monstrous posting on Facebook, probably consider themselves good or devout Christians–much like so many of the white […]
The #1 ranked steakhouse in North America, which also is the #4 ranked steakhouse in the world, is a Korean cuisine restaurant in New York City’s Flatiron District.
Dealing with purported Evangelical Christians who are ignorant not only about other religions but apparently so too about Christ’s teachings.
A camera drone’s short flight over the lighthouse of Maspalomas (‘el Faro de Maspalomas’) on Gran Canaria in the Canary Islands.
Why durians and mangosteens are my favorite fruits. If you don’t know these, discover them.
Trump is merely a symptom of a larger problem facing civilization as the pace of technological change accelerates.
This “Red’ vs. ‘Blue’ map of who won which counties during the 2020 Presidential Election tells everything.
You won’t see the staffs of airlines from Europe or the Americas doing this, or giving service as good.
I regret that I have to deal here with some people with whom I grew up that have become bigots or outright liars. This tells why.