This article has a quick guide found here.

Quick guides provide a brief summary of the steps needed for completion.

Spiritual Enlightenment is a part of the Tales of the Arc miniquest series.

To begin, speak to The Assassin (Ling) on the island of Aminishi. She asks for help finding the monk, Yulong, but keeps her reasons secret. Ling suggests fighting the Acolytes of Seiryu on the northern portion of Aminishi to obtain clues.

Killing any monks of Aminishi will allow you to receive the three books. The books are The Path of the Monk, The Path of the Elemental, and The Path of the Dragon. The books have a 1/16, 1/32, and 1/64 chance of being dropped respectively. As you obtain the books, read them to progress in the miniquest. Be sure to save at least a few of the Spirit dragon charms you obtain, as you will need them later.

The three types of monk are the Sotapanna, Sakadagami, and Anagami. They require 90 Slayer to damage. All three types of monks are weak to Air spells.

Yulong in the Spirit Realm.

Once all three books have been obtained and read, return to the southern shore and speak to Ling. You must speak to Ling before you can interact with Yulong. Then, with a few Spirit dragon charms in your inventory, head to the centre of the island, near the Sakadagami. Interact with the dragon statue to be sent to the Spirit Realm. A Spirit dragon charm is consumed per minute spent in the Spirit Realm. Run to the southern shore of the island (where Ling stood before) and speak to Yulong. Charms aren't consumed while you're talking to him. You must decide to either tell Ling where he is or agree to keep him hidden.

Once you finish speaking to Yulong, return to the statue and exit the Spirit Realm. Run back to the beach and speak to Ling. Depending on your earlier choice, you will either reveal Yulong's location or keep it a secret. Ling admits that Yulong was not a target for her to assassinate, but rather a childhood friend and ex-member of the Death Lotus assassin. Finish your conversation with Ling to complete the mini-quest.

Read more here:

Spiritual Enlightenment | RuneScape Wiki | Fandom

Individuals and groups seeking to establish political and economic hegemony over others have utilized religion as a means of dominating others since humanity saw its first sunrise.

This abuse of religion is certainly not rooted in real spirituality but in a desire for achieving secular social control over others.

The formula is actually quite simple: take a purely spiritual belief system that works to glorify God and bring individuals close to God, and then hijack it and declare that an individual or group is Gods representative on Earth and declare that the individual on Earth controls access to spiritual enlightenment.

Then declare that to oppose the secular will or to question the individual or groups hegemony is to oppose Gods will.

Middle Ages European Royalty called this Rule by Divine Right and declared that any political opposition to their rule or any questioning of their edicts constituted blasphemy.

Southern slave holders and northern racists used the strategy of Rule by Divine Right to achieve social control over African-American slaves and free African-Americans in the North before and after the Civil War and up into the mid 20th century.

Slaveholders utilized the Biblical teachings of Saint Paul that taught slaves in the Roman Empire to be obedient to their masters. They conveniently failed to add that the reason Saint Paul taught that was that in the ancient Roman system of slavery it was common for slaveholders to free their slaves for loyal service. Therefore, it behooved slaves to be hardworking and loyal slaves in Ancient Rome.

However, southern slaveholders rarely freed their slaves for good service, and they abused Christianity as a means of achieving social control over African-Americans in order to motivate them to stay subordinate.

Northern racists used much the same strategy, arguing that African-Americans were morally weak and lacked impulse control, and thus it was their Christian duty to assert that European-American Christians had to direct their Little Brown Brothers in correct Christian theology to curb the childlike African-Americans lack of emotional and impulse control.

Northern racists, of course, did not choose to acknowledge that much of the lack of impulse control was born of a quite natural negative reaction on the part of African-Americans before and after the Civil war to enduring systematic racial discrimination in their daily lives.

True Christian spirituality does not see color. However, southern slaveholders and northern racists coopted Christianity as a means of establishing social control over African-Americans.

Grady Atwater is site administrator of the John Brown Museum and State Historic Site.

Go here to read the rest:

Religion can be manipulated to control others - Miami County Republic

Part 1

This piece will focus on how and why some Ashkenazic Jewsboth religious and (later) secularadopted the Sephardic pronunciation of Hebrew because they deemed it superior to the Ashkenazic one.

In the last two decades of the 18th century, concurrent with the rise of the chasidic movement in Eastern Europe, a pietist group was emerging in Germany. It was led by Rabbi Nathan Adler of Frankfurt. Rabbi Nathans followers regarded him as a man of God and a miracle worker. Under his influence they studied Kabbalah, demanded extreme standards of abstinence and self-purification, and conducted separate prayer service according to a special rite based on the prayer book of Rabbi Yitzchak Luria.

R Adler was a very controversial figure in the Frankfurt Jewish community and was eventually excommunicated in 1779 and again in 1789. A booklet entitled Maaseh Tatuim was published anonymously in 1790 (a copy of which I have in my collection) that attacked the actions of Adler and his followers. Some of the chief accusations against Adler included the complaint that they introduced substantial changes in both the text and the conduct of prayers: praying in the Sephardic rite known as Siddur HaAri and (unlike the chasidim) also of using the Sephardic pronunciation in prayer.

The historian Simon Dubnow now doubted the existence of a direct link between the formation of Adlers circle and the emergence of chasidism, and most other scholars who have considered the question agree. Some reconsideration of this position is now required, as the scholarly world has recently revised its view of the spiritual nature of early chasidism and embarked on a new assessment of its religious and social features. The new approach studies the beginning of chasidism in the context of the religious awakening then taking place in the world of kabbalistically oriented pietistic groups active in 18th-century Europe. We are therefore justified in attempting a reassessment of the link between the different manifestations of religious pietism appearing at the same time in Eastern and Central Europe. The Frankfurt pietist circle and the chasidic groups in Eastern Europe were established at approximately the same time: the early 1770s; both trends looked to the same sources for inspiration and sought to create a new ritual expression for new spiritual currents; both used the Hebrew term chasidim; they recognized the power of charismatic leaders and their authority to innovate new practices and there was a striking similarity between the two in prayer rites and other customs as well as in the nature of their deviations from accepted norms in their respective communities. (Elior, Rachel: Rabbi Nathan Adler and the Frankfurt Pietists)

The Jewish Enlightenment Looks to Sepharad as A Positive Model

The literature abounds on the subject of the Reform movement in Germany, using Sephardic Jewry as a positive model of what progressive Jewry ought to look like. Interest in all things Sephardic was all the rage among the Wissenschaft crowd in Western and Central Europe.

Todd Endelman writes in his article, Benjamin Disraeli and the myth of Sephardi superiority:

From the late 18th century, Sephardim throughout Western Europe, as well as Ashkenazim, deployed the myth to promote their own cultural, political and social agendas The pioneers of Wissenschaft des Judentums and the leaders of the Reform movement constructed an image of Sephardi Judaism that stressed its cultural openness, philosophical rationalism, and aesthetic sensibilities in order to criticize what they disliked in their own traditions, i.e., its backwardness, insularity and aversion to secular studies. In France, Austria, Germany, Hungary and the United States, communal and congregational boards erected imposing synagogues of so-called Moorish design, assertive symbols of their break with the unenlightened Ashkenazi past.

Before the end of the century, the myth of sephardi superiority was widely disseminated and available for appropriation by Jews and their enemies alike In their battle against racial myths about Jewish deformities, Jewish anthropologists drew on the Sephardi mystique to create a counter myth of their own: that of the well-bred, aesthetically attractive, physically graceful Sephardi, a model of racial nobility and virtue. In their work, John Efron notes, the Sephardi served as the equivalent of the Jewish Aryanthe physical counterpart to the ignoble Jew of Central and Eastern Europe.

This Ashkenazic sense of inferiority was obviously something new. As Ismar Schorsch put it: There is little doubt that beyond the worldwide influence of Lurianic Kabbalah (of which Adlers group and the chasidim of Eastern Europe are one exampleJ.D.), the religious culture of Spanish Jewry held but slight allurement for a self-sufficient and self-confident Ashkenazi Judaism in its age of spiritual ascendancy.

In fact, until the 16th century, Ashkenazi culture enjoyed higher status than the Sephardi one, (perhaps since Ashkenazi Jews had not converted to any other religion, i.e., had not become Marranos). Around 1500, when the first scholarly Hebrew grammar books were published in Europe, the authors naturally took the language of Jews living in France and Germany, that is Ashkenazi Hebrew, as the basis of their work, and Sephardi was regarded as a curiosity. In the epoch making grammar book (De Rudimentis Hebraicis, 1506) of Johannes Reuchlin (1455-1522), Ashkenazi Hebrew was the living language. It was only in the 17th century that European Hebraic scholarsthe so-called Christian Hebraistsdecided in favor of Sephardi reading. It was accepted by the great grammar (1817) of William Gesenius (1786-1842) as well, which formed the basis of modern Hebrew linguistics. Since the 17th century, everyone considered the Sephardi usage to be the scholarly standard and used it exclusively. Jewish scholarship (Wissenschaft) was now committed to Sephardi, and it became the ideal for the initiatives of the Reform movements.

With the advent of emancipation in Central Europe, German-speaking Jews gradually unhinged itself from the house of Ashkenazic Judaism. Inclusion in the body politic sundered a religious union born of common patrimony. Historians have tended to focus on the institutional expression of this rupturethe repudiation of the educational system, the mode of worship, and the Rabbinic leadership intrinsic to Ashkenazic Judaismwith special emphasis on the Western tastes and values that propelled the transformation of all areas of Jewish life With surprising speed, German Jews came to cultivate a lively bias for the religious legacy of Sephardic Jewry forged centuries before on the Iberian Peninsula without which they would have cut loose from Judaism itselfenabled them to redefine their identity in a Jewish mode.

The author is an independent scholar of history and translator of Hebrew text. Please contact [emailprotected] Check out Channeling Jewish History on Facebook for daily updates in your inbox.

Here is the original post:

Ashkenazim and the Sephardic Pronunciation of Hebrew - Jewish Link of New Jersey

Born on 18 February, 1836, Gadadhar Chattopadhyay, who came to be known as Ramakrishna later in life, hailed from a poor Brahmin family from Kamarpukur village, in the Hooghly district of West Bengal.

Most accounts say that the saint was given the title of Paramahamsa (a Sanskrit religio-theological appellation honor bestowed to Hindu spiritual tutors who have attained enlightenment) by his Vedantic guru, Totapuri, a naked monk from Punjab.

In the 19th century Bengal, the transcendent guru became the leading figure for resurgence of Hinduism during a period of strong spiritual crisis and severe collapse of humanism. He was known for his kindness, devotion and adored for his nonconformity.

Ramakrishna was known to breakdown complex spiritual folktales in the most coherent custom for the benefit of his disciples. The yogis preaching engrossed the atheist Narendranath Datta who turned into his most wekk-known disciple, Swami Vivekananda.

On Ramakrishna Paramahamsas 184th birth anniversary, here are some interesting facts about the visionary master of the 19th-century:

-- He went to school till the early age of 12, but discontinued as a formal education did not interest him.

-- At the age of 23, he got married to five-year-old Saradamoni Mukhopadhyay, who later came to be known as Maa Sarada.

-- When Saradamoni came of age and joined the sage at Dakshineshwar, Ramakrishna had already entered the reclusive life of a hermit.

-- Apart from being well-versed in the Puranas, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and the Bhagavata Purana, he was devoted to Goddess Kali.

-- His chief disciple Vivekananda established the Ramakrishna order, which eventually aided the spread of mission posts across the globe. The Mission formed the fundamental core of a universal spiritual movement known as the Ramakrishna Movement or the Vedanta Movement.

-- As per the existing chronicles, Ramakrishna asked Vivekananda to look after the welfare of the disciples and asked him to "teach them" after his death.

-- Ramakrishnas disciples believed he was an avatar or incarnation of Lord Vishnu.

-- Shri Ramakrishna Paramhansa suffered from clergyman's throat, which steadily matured into throat cancer and he breathed his last on August 16, 1886.

Follow News18 Lifestyle for more

Get the best of News18 delivered to your inbox - subscribe to News18 Daybreak. Follow News18.com on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Telegram, TikTok and on YouTube, and stay in the know with what's happening in the world around you in real time.

Read more here:

Ramakrishna Paramahansas Birth Anniversary: Interesting Facts About the Indian Mystic - News18

I was born in a household that supported the Labour party. For three years, I was a senior advisor to Britains most successful Labour prime minister, Tony Blair. Capitalism was a dirty word in my social circles. Conservatism was seen as uncool and stuffy. Yet I knew I harboured an inner hypocrisy: my parents, as with so many British Muslims, bought their own home thanks to Margaret Thatchers capitalist and conservative policies. With the passing of time, experience of travels, reading, reflections, and conversations with conservatives, my views have progressed to grasping why, for five reasons, modern conservatism and liberal Islam are more aligned than we know. And combined, can save Western civilisation from internal and external threats.

First, the prophet Mohamed, the founder of Islam, was a capitalist. In seventh-century Mecca, a city of trading and commerce for Arabia, he was a fund-manager for the Lady Khadijah. He represented her stocks and assets in the markets of Mecca, Damascus and others parts of the Levant. His success in increasing her profit margins with honesty and integrity led her to proposing marriage to Mohamed. Islam is the only religion, therefore, to be instituted by a businessman.

Mohamed struggled with the clamour and chaos of commercial Mecca. It was during his spiritual retreats in Mount Hira that the divine voice inspired the poetry and passages that became the Quran.

Shall we teach you a more profitable and ever-lasting trade? asks God in the Quran, again and again. The parables with trade are many. When in the year 622 Mohamed migrated to the city of Medina, the first action he took was to create a mosque for his community of believers. When the land was offered as charity, he refused and insisted on buying it as private property. Unlike Platos Republic, Islam has always honoured property rights, a fundamental difference with Marxism or socialism. Mohamed then went to the market with his companions and they traded freely with others. When a famine hit Medina, some lobbied him to fix prices: he refused. Supply and demand should not be interrupted.

Second, Islam was and is an inherently conservative faith and civilisation. The Burkean adage that we must change to conserve has been the hallmark of Islam since its beginning. Wherever Muslims conquered, the governance and social structures were conserved. The Umayyad caliphs from Damascus and into Spain ruled as the Romans did with law, taxes, and imperial expansion. But with Muslims, Jewish people thrived as viziers and senior officials. Early Muslims protected the pyramids of Egypt as symbols of knowledge and civilisation. Euclids principles informed the architecture of new mosques. The great Al-Farabis tenth-century philosophy revived Plato and Aristotle, but al-Farabi was also a musician, botanist and mystic who deeply influenced the prodigious Rabbi Maimonides. In India, the Muslim Moghuls honoured Hinduism and initial emperors even included Hindus as people of the book. Under the Ottomans, Constantinople remained a Christian-majority city until the nineteenth century. Islam did not seek destruction and revolution, it merely sought to inject the spirit of one God into existing ways.

Britains most important conservative philosopher, the late Sir Roger Scruton, defines conservatism as an attitude, an inheritance, a respect for custom and convention, and love for freedom and civilisation. Muslim history and belief naturally reflects that vision. Granted, there were periods of hostility and imperialism, but we must never forget that in the ancient world the unwritten code was conquer, or be conquered.

In that ethos, Islam sought to conserve, rather than abolish.

Third, it was in that spirit of creating and conserving civilisations, Ibn Khaldun in the fourteenth century, penned his 1377 book al-Muqaddimah on history, sociology and economics. Ronald Reagan and Boris Johnson have both cited Ibn Khaldun. Mark Zuckerberg recommended Ibn Khalduns book. He was the first thinker to analyse the workings of an economy, the role of technology, foreign trade and specialisation in economic surplus, and the role of government in the economy. Four centuries before Adam Smith, Ibn Khaldun argued that the division and specialisation of labour serves as the basis for any civilised society. The principles of modern capitalism were, arguably, pioneered by Ibn Khaldun with his writings on production, supply, cost, consumption, demand and utility. Muslims were a trading people: Mohameds business ethics and charity, compassion, and giving to the travellers and orphans were in tandem with profit. Adam Smiths important first book The Theory of Moral Sentiments went in conjunction with his The Wealth of Nations. Only in the Marxist caricature and amoral cartels of corporatism is capitalism corrupted. At its core, for Ibn Khaldun and Adam Smith, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, ethics and enterprise went together.

Fourth, conservatism, as Scruton reminds us, was an outcome of the European Enlightenment and a bulwark against the excesses of liberal individualism. When the disciples of Rousseau and Voltaire overthrew the French monarchy in 1789, and cast away religion and tradition, it was Edmund Burke who warned against the pursuit of unknown, untested, and unrealistic ideas in the abstract. He coined the term terrorism to predict rightly the disasters of the French revolution. This commitment to the natural order, to convention, custom, and preserving our inheritance mattered for conservatives. For Burke this was the partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

The sharia, as taught by the earliest Muslim jurists such as the eleventh-century Imam al-Juwayni, and preserved and practised for ten centuries, has as its higher aims or maqasid to preserve life, provide security, allow for worship, protect the family, and fully uphold property laws. These maqasid, tried and tested, are fully aligned with natural law conservatism. Free from abstract ideology inspired by the French revolution, be it Marxism or political Islamism, we find a harmony in the forces of Islam and conservatism if understood historically.

Fifth, it is not an accident that these great ideas were pioneered and applied in Britain. A century before the French, the English beheaded King Charles I and then hastily re-instated the monarchy after learning the lesson of Oliver Cromwells own attempts at a new dynasty. Neither is it an accident that the oldest political party in the world, the Conservative party in Britain, understands that Burkean balance of monarch, merchants, the masses and clerics. From this island, the English charter of liberties spread around the world. Absent of this understanding, in Turkey, Libya, Iran, Egypt and Iraq, monarchies have been destroyed and political disorder, extremism and economic imbalance reign supreme. There are deep and valid reasons why Britain stands as an attractive model of a constitutional monarchy for many Muslim nations today, including Morocco, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman and others. American presidents cannot dispatch a Prince of Wales in the way Britain can and then command immense prestige for doing so. The soft power of conservatism still sways billions of people.

Conservatism as a body of thought, as an inheritance, is now at risk in Britain, its natural home. And if it withers here, it will elsewhere too. For us, for our children, for the future of civilisation, we must ensure that we ward off the growing threats to this great tradition. And Muslims at home and abroad should be our natural allies.

The danger to conservatism is internal and external. Many in the Conservative party and conservatism more broadly wish to parrot on about policies on roads, police, schools or housing. While these are important, without understanding the ideas underpinning society we risk becoming bureaucrats and apparatchiks. We are pruning the trees while the soil is being poisoned. What makes us unique is our thoughts and heritage, not budgets and bureaucracy. Worse, the arrogance of some from within the conservative tradition, when it comes to issues of class, sexism, racism, keeps at bay many millions of our natural allies among women and ethnic minorities as well as family and faith-loving conservatives. These traits arrogance and ignorance must go, or we risk negating our very essence.

Then there are several external threats. Across university campuses, there is the return of the 1970s alliance of the Red-Greens, the Islamist-Marxists in Iran. That alliance in Iran that toppled the Shah, only for the Greens to then eradicate the Reds. In Britain, for almost 25 years now, this Islamist-Marxist alliance has been wreaking havoc in northern towns, communities, campuses and civil society organisations. They both seek utopias: a caliphate for Islamists, and communism for Marxists, or socialism in the first instance. George Galloway can go from Tower Hamlets to Bradford because of this alliance. Labour can dismiss the Jewish vote and widespread fear of anti-Semitism because it knows it has the Islamist-Leftist bloc in over 30 constituencies at work. This same bloc intimidates Jewish students on campuses in more than 20 campuses. Our allies across the Middle East are threatened with revolutions and extremism by the very same Islamist-Leftist alliance of resistance. Anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Semitism are their hallmarks.

Along with politics, comes a culture of repudiation of the past. They roundly condemn every element of past slavery in the West, but will be silent on slavery in China, India or the Ottoman Empire. They dismiss Greek and Roman philosophers as dead white men, they wish to uproot the patriarchy, but are silent on south American dictators or Stalins mass murders. Wilberforce led attempts to ban slavery; Victorians began to honour children with education and protection; Disraeli and other Tories extended the vote and established the first foundations of the modern welfare state. The West did nothing right in the past; all must be repudiated, and a new world of liberation created. And for that new moral framework, a culture war is underway.

Identity politics is the new culture war. Where Martin Luther King taught us to judge by the content of our character, now a new generation seeks to hate all white, middle class straight men for their privilege. Gay, female, transsexual, Muslim, black, non-binary and other characteristics are the central features of identity. And to make it all worse, there is a constant allegation that white men and whiteness are powerful, and all other groups are victims at an intersection where grievances merge. The Madness of Crowds by Douglas Murray masterfully unpacks the inner contradictions of this new craze. Their sworn enemy is anything remotely conservative, yet their entire provision to think freely, blaspheme, offend, rebel, subvert, and confront are all freedoms provided by the men and patriarchy they despise: Whigs, Liberals and Tories. Who will explain to this generation that they owe it to their future progeny to preserve the best of the West, and stop the behaviour of this self-destructive cultural suicide bomber?

Unless conservatives understand our heritage, have the confidence to defend and advance it, cherish the best of the West then we allow the Islamist-Leftist alliance to grow and culture wars spread further. Conservatism is about much more than only winning elections. Love for our people, love for our country, love for our music, art, history, books, cuisine, landscape, architecture, churches, temples, synagogues, mosques, and monarchy. From love stems the greatest defence for all that is worth defending.

View original post here:

Profiting from the Prophet - Reaction

I will destroy the sorcery you practice, And you shall have no more soothsayers. Micah 5:11 (The Israel Bible)

witchcraft (courtesy: Shutterstock)

A group of self-professed Christian witches announced they will be holding their annual convention on Easter in Salem, Massachusetts. The gathering of Witches, Sorcerers/Soceresses, Wizards, Warlocks, Necromancers, Readers and like-minded Magickal Beings is being organized by Rev. Valerie Love (aka KAISI). Scheduled for April 10-12, it will coincide with the Christian holiday of Easter and feature elements of witchcraft as well as Christian prayers.

Love bills herself as a spiritual life coach and ordained Minister of Spiritual Consciousness. On her website, Love claims to have been born a witch, and, as a child, saw spirits and communed with otherworldly entities.

She also claims to be a practicing Christian Witch and founded the Covenant of Christian Witches Mystery School which she claims is in the Solomonic tradition. In an Instagram post, Love stated that the Book of Psalms is really a book of spells.

The convention will include lectures on Magickal Practice in the Christian Witchcraft Tradition, a cemetery walk, Tarot, palmistry, and Angel readings. There will be a Harry Potter-themed costume party. The witches convention will culminate with a Church service on Sunday.

On her personal website that focuses on personal enlightenment, love also offers coaching programs for an investment of $5,000 to $50,000. Love also holds seances.

Despite Loves claim that witchcraft can coexist with a Bible-centered existence, the Bible explicitly prohibits witchcraft in two separate places.

You shall not tolerate a sorceress. Exodus 22:17

A man or a woman who has a ghost or a familiar spirit shall be put to death; they shall be pelted with stonestheir bloodguilt shall be upon them. Leviticus 20:27

The Prophet Micha states that witchcraft will be eliminated in order to prepare the world for the Messiah.

I will destroy the sorcery you practice, And you shall have no more soothsayers. Micah 5:11

Incorporating witchcraft into Christianity is the most recent manifestation of what is becoming a common trend as black magic makes a comeback, even surpassing the Church. A later study by the Pew Research Center in 2014 found that 0.4 percent of Americans, or around 1-1.5 million people, self-identify as Wiccan or Pagan. To put this in perspective, a report in the Christian Post on this study compares this to other religions.

There may now be more Americans who identify as practicing witches, 1.5 million, than there are members of mainline Presbyterianism (PCUSA),1.4 million, the article wrote.

But modern witchcraft is taking on new forms. A new Disney animated television series released by Disney Television Animation titled The Owl House follows a young girls adventures in an alternate universe as she strives to become a witch. In a bizarre political use of the dark arts, a group of people used social media to gather in order to hex President Trump. Despite being billed as an arts festival, the annual Burning Man Festival held in the Nevada desert incorporates many idolatrous elements. Satan-themed fashion shows have even been held inside churches.

Link:

Convention of 'Christian Witches' to Gather In Salem on Easter Sunday - Breaking Israel News

By Segun Awofadeji

As part of activities marking its 32 years of existence, the Federal Road Safety Commission (FRSC) has offered medical outreach to motorists in Bauchi State just as it declared that the high rate of road accidents across the state is due to the failure of motorists to obey road traffic regulations.

The Zonal Commanding Officer of the FRSC, Zone 12, comprising Borno, Yobe and Bauchi States, Assistant Corps Marshall Imoh Etuk, disclosed this while speaking in an interview Thursday during a sensitization rally and free medical outreach to motorists in Bauchi to mark the commissions 32 years anniversary.

The FRSC boss, who warned motorists to obey road traffic regulations, said that it will not spare any of its officers found to be extorting money from members of the public while carrying out their duties.

According to him, the free medical outreach to motorists was part of its corporate social responsibility of giving back to the public while celebrating 32 years of its establishment.

He said: FRSC is 32 today and we are grateful to God that he helped us these years to carry out the statutory objectives of the establishment act 2007 which says we should reduce crashes to the barest minimum, clear obstructions, do public enlightenment.

It could have been a lot worse if not that the government intervened about 32 years back. We are telling the drivers that they dont need to drive at night. They should do proper journey management so that they dont have to drive at night.

The crashes that occur, quite frankly, occur at night. Yes, we are supposed to do rescue operations 24/7, but you know rescue at night is not the same thing with that of the day.

Members of the public should obey road traffic regulations, not to overload their vehicles, ensure that their vehicles are in good shape and they shouldnt drive under the influence of drugs. A lot of drugs, Tramadol and many others are being sold in parks. Thank God we have been sensitizing them not to sell but these drivers always find a way of taking these drugs before driving and the influence of drugs is not palatable.

On extortion of motorists by men of the corps, the zonal commander said that the FRSC will not leave anything unturned but will ensure that all bad eggs are rid out of the service.

We have always said that both the giver and the taker are guilty and many of them face guard room trials, many of them are being investigated. It is not as if we dont have bad eggs but we urge members of the public to report those bad eggs, those people that are spoiling the corporate image of the corps because it is the corporate image of the corps that is at stake. The bad eggs are always fished out and they are punished.

I have sensitized them that anyone caught will not escape the wrath of the law. We do monitoring and surveillance, we do sensitization lectures in-house, we talk to them, and this is not to say that there wont be a few pockets of indiscipline here and there, but we are urging members of the public to report such to us and we will deal with them accordingly, he warned.

Etuk said that apart from the public enlightenment and rally to mark the anniversary, the FRSC is also giving back to the society urging the people to check their blood pressure, their eyesight, their weight, so that they dont just go on the road without knowing exactly what is wrong with them.

According to him, The medical outreach is necessary because drivers must have a healthy mind and healthy body and they must ensure that all their faculties are working because if your faculties are not okay, your eyesight is not proper, if you are diabetic or you have high blood pressure and something suddenly happens, you wont be able to control.

But once you know, you will be able to control it. Its a whole package that we give them not only to overload their vehicles, not to drink and drive or drive and drink but to also check their eyesight.

He said that FRSC at 32 is a wake up call to them to do more to ensure that road crashes are reduced to the barest minimum, when you see overloading, when you hear of crashes at night or anywhere, it makes you want to do more.

He called on traditional rulers, spiritual leaders and stakeholders to team up with the FRSC to reduce road crashes in the state.

Also speaking, the state Chairman, Road Transport Employers Association of Nigeria (RTEAN), Bauchi State chapter, Abdullahi Mohammed, who felicitated with the FRSC at 32 said RTEANs relationship with the corps has been very cordial.

He called on the federal government and other major stakeholders to help the FRSC with more operational vehicles to enable them respond to emergency situations.

If you notice now, if theres an accident along Bauchi-Jos road for instance, once the FRSC vehicle conveys the victims to the hospital and another crash occurs somewhere afterwards, they wouldnt be able to go because they dont have enough vehicles. The federal government should provide them with more vehicles to ease their work, he pleaded.

Go here to read the rest:

32nd Anniversary: FRSC Offers Free Medical Outreach to Motorists in Bauchi - THISDAY Newspapers

As you might know, Robert Anton Wilson (1932 - 2007) is one of Boing Boing's patron saints. Raw's humor, skepticism, optimism, and ability to reveal the deep weirdness underlying almost everything were deeply influential to Carla and me when we launched bOING bOING as a zine in 1987. In fact, we kind of started the zine as an excuse to interview RAW at his house in Santa Monica that year. I'm very grateful I was able to get to know RAW, and honored that he wrote a regular column for bOING bOING. I'm also grateful to have become a friend of Bob's daughter, Christina, a delightful person who is active in keeping her father's books in print. Here's an essay Christina wrote about a new edition of Ishtar Rising, a book originally published by Playboy Press called The Book of the Breast. Mark

A while back, we knew that Hilaritas Press would soon be working on releasing a new edition of Robert Anton Wilson's Ishtar Rising, prepping it for publication by removing tons of typos (thanks to Gregory Arnott, Chas Faris, Rasa, and a few select others), and inserting a timely new foreword by Grant Morrison. We were excited to be manifesting what we had intended; to publish and make available as many of RAW's books as we could. I had originally read the book in its The Book of the Breast form in my early twenties, having just returned from India (yep, went to gain enlightenment, but instead gained disillusionment which has served me well!) with a goal of starting a small business that would enable me to be financially and emotionally independent. What did I think of it then? Bleh. Not much, I was simply too undeveloped.

What I learned in India was this; after running away from a 10-day vipayan training (because I was sure an inner darkness would eat me up) I ran into a young beggar woman, of India's lowest caste, the Dalit. She stood there begging, with a toddler at her feet and a new baby in her arms. I suddenly had a moment of clarity into how truly different our reality tunnels were; she had no options, and I had many. She was resigned to her position in life, I was not. As a woman, and as an American, I had opportunities that girls my own age around the world had absolutely no concept of, or access to. I suddenly understood that I had the truly amazing GRACE of CHOICE. I stood up, aware that many had died to give me the freedoms I had; and yes, maybe these freedoms were curtailed and stunted by the idiocy of gender discrimination, the power of the "wealthy over poor," and countless belief systems that were like juggernauts of insanity ruling from unconscious thrones; but freedoms I had, and I was profoundly grateful. I could decide to change my life, so I did.

Looking back, I admit I read The Book of the Breast at that time without much contemplation on what it was saying. However, in re-reading it last year, I really enjoyed a peek into Bob's head during the time when I myself was beginning to experience puberty, and as I am now 63 with a lot more life experience under my belt, the book has touched me in a very profound way.

While the The Book of the Breast was being written, we lived in Chicago, on Paulina Street, where we had just moved to. I was in 5th-6th grade, and 3-4 boys had discovered the great joy of pestering me (we all became great friends over the next couple years). They would ride on their bikes to my house, throw pebbles at the window, and then we would exchange tons of adolescent banter. Bob and Arlen shrugged it off good naturedly. I think they were just glad I was home! One day one of the boys, Alan, needed to come in to the house to use our bathroom, and unbeknownst to me, had peeked into Bob and Arlen's bedroom. Where, GASP, he saw the huge collage of women's breasts made with magazine photos Bob had meticulously cut out and adorned one wall with. (He WAS writing The Book of the Breast, at the time you know...) Their bedroom was a large room, today we would probably call it a master bedroom although it did not have a bathroom of its own. My parents slept on a bare mattress on the floor at one end of the room, with one dresser, a couple of bookcases, a card table with Bob's typewriter on it, and a folding chair for him to sit on. The collage was the only thing decorating the whole wall. As far as young Alan was concerned, it was a MIRACLE!

Oh My God.... Alan raced out of the house, beet-faced and squealing "Breasts! There's pictures of breasts!" of course the guys (aged 11-13) all went semi-hysterical, asking me a kajillion questions "I can't believe your dad works for Playboy!" "Why does your dad have breasts on the wall?" "Does your mother mind?" "Can you get us magazines?" ... The last question was asked by just about every boy in my classes for the following two years, until I graduated eighth grade. I never did get them magazines, but they sure tried!

So there's my personal early memory attached to The Book of the Breast. Bob wrote it pretty quickly, and the breast collage morphed into other artwork going up. I do remember when I had asked him about it, "Why do you have that up?" he mused and said something along the lines of "to remind me of the marvelous differences of every breast..." I was like "Uh, okay." Seemed kind of useless to me. But what did I know? I was 11-12 years old!

Some 40 years later, rereading the book, not only did I realize I had childishly dismissed its cultural value, I also began to experience a deep desire to present the manuscript as Bob had intended originally; with as many of the original photographs as possible that he had chosen, and with their captions, as it really helps to flesh out the concepts in the book. This became somewhat of a passion/obsession of mine, and I would often get stuck for hours in the process of researching internet images over the past half year! Poor Rasa [owner of Hilaritas Press], who was excited to get the project completed, would regularly say, "How are the pictures coming along?" Did I tell him finding one image the night before had led me to spend hours researching archeological findings from early Mesopotamia? Or that looking for photos of Clara Bow had led me to investigate deeply into the American silent film era, and the transition to sound? No way! But I did learn a lot about photography, and the logistics required to reprint images legally. I, of course, had rather naively thought that because the images were in the original book, of course we could print them! Nope! Each and every one needed to be researched to determine the current ownership status, and then I needed to seek permission to use the images again in the reprint. For a few images, the process took months. Others were done in minutes. Overall, it cost several thousand dollars to have the rights to reintegrate most of the original pictures as best we could, while also adding a few new images when necessary.

I wanted to put almost every photo I found in the book, and was only stopped by the cost of printing in color. Of course some of the images are in black and white, as that's how they were taken. But I must say I am delighted to be presenting a book with vivid, lovely, and sometimes thought provoking images, in color, and I have a hunch RAW would be delighted.

I can assure you that as a living breathing female of our half-baked species, I have much to say on the weird imbalance of our gender crisis. For me, this imbalance lies at the root of most of the destructive forces of our world. There is no balance; we live in a sort of culture model that I see as based on "vertical thinking" (tends to be more masculine-oriented) as opposed to "lateral thinking (tends to be more feminine-oriented) Vertical access is great, but where does it stop? Growth is everything!!! (think Amazon, Google, etc.) - Grow, Grow, get rich, get powerful! POWER! If you have it you are to be RESPECTED! But what good is power when the ecosystem collapses and you cannot breathe the air? What good are your riches if you live in a gated gilded castle but cannot dare to leave because your fortress is surrounded by despairing, angry masses that have grown to despise you, hate you, and blame you for the source of their woes? Does this give you freedom? Not really, at least not the sort I crave. I see our species in general as ignorantly pursuing an unsustainable and ultimately deadly form of materialism that puts all life in fact, all that is sacred at risk. Perhaps it is a form of spiritual cancer; I have been told cancer is the result of cellular mutations that cause UNRELENTING cell growth to occur, which either kills the host, or the host needs to kill it, often at great personal expense. Cancer teaches us that unrelenting growth is not progress, it is a death sentence, and to live, one must shift direction.

Lateral thinking is more like "hmmm, let's see, what ARE the long-range consequences of this decision, and will it impact my children, grandchildren, my neighbors, the life on planet earth negatively or positively?" It is thinking that spreads outward, more engaged in the network of it than the "one-pointed goal" like "we gotta get to the Moon first, because then we win!" And what did we win? Not really much of anything from my perspective; yes, some medical breakthroughs, and engineering breakthroughs, but did we attain the illusory goal of POWER? Not from my perspective!

Let us become stronger by acknowledging both masculine and feminine are not truly balanced without fully engaging the other; it is both the vertical spires and the lateral trusses that give a building strength; the interweaving, as it were, to strengthen the whole. So. We have choice, my friends. Shall we deny the truth of what is being messaged all around us, and be blown away? Or shall we learn to flex with wonder and gratitude, weaving our very beings with the elemental powers gifted to us by our Elemental Parents, dual complementary Aspects of the One, enabling us to thrive?

I will finish with these words that come from the introduction RAW wrote in 1973 to The Book of the Breast;

Most men, after all, are on their best behavior when under the spell of that double catenary curve; they stare or feed or caress and are as cozy as puppies one cannot imagine them a threat to the earth, the animals or other men. But once they leave this central sacrament of existence and begin thinking about how the universe (or other people) might be improved, they are apt to go a bit wild and start brandishing clubs or cannons or hydrogen bombs. Nobody knows why the rest of us put them in government mansions instead of mental hospitals when they get stirred up that way, but they would certainly be better off contemplating Helens breasts (or Sophias or Marges or Jaynes or Mollys). Earth would not resemble hell quite so much if men attended to such earthly matters more and were not up in the air over ideologies.

So read on, my friends; enjoy and share!

Much love, Christina

A Note From Hilaritas Press:

Decisions about how to put together the new Hilaritas Press edition of Ishtar Rising presented us with an array of issues that arise from the books historical iterations. The 1974 Playboy Press edition, The Book of the Breast, a commissioned work from the magazine, had photographs interspersed throughout the text with captions written by Bob that followed the written narrative.

When Bob regained the rights to the book from Playboy Press in the mid 1980s, he decided to republish it with the text largely as originally written, but with a new title and a new foreword. This new edition was published through a small publishing house, New Falcon Publications. The book that emerged in 1989 (sadly filled with typos), was quite different from the original. The New Falcon edition had inserted new photos and only SOME of the original photos, and all the photographs were clumped together in the center of the book, with no photo captions. We can only surmise that the effort of obtaining legal rights to all of the original photographs was deemed either too expensive or too daunting, as the New Falcon photo choices were quite different from the original. We also are guessing that if you couldnt get all the original photos, then entering Bobs original photo captions on just some of the images probably did not make sense.

In the new Hilaritas Press edition of Ishtar Rising, we have attempted to honor Bobs original guidelines, and recreate the Playboy layout as much as possible. We took the time, effort and considerable expense of tracking down and gaining rights to as many of the original photos as possible. For those photos for which we could not locate permissions, we found suitable substitutions that worked with Bobs photo captions. In many cases, when finding images that Playboy used, we were able to obtain the same image but at a much higher quality. Because of improvements in digital processing and printing, we can not only offer superior graphics, but also an Ishtar Rising in full color.

Follow this link:

Robert Anton Wilson's daughter Christina on the new edition of her father's book, Ishtar Rising - Boing Boing

It isnt advised and I wouldnt necessarily advise it but for me, the occasional trauma of seizures is preferable to the daily misery of headaches, nausea and incoherent drowsiness. I doubt most epileptics would be willing to go so far, especially those with catastrophic forms of the disease. If my condition were much worse, I would most likely find the viselike press of a permanent headache preferable to the alternative. Neurologists tend to be impatient with pickiness about medications, and perhaps they have a point. Things used to be much worse, and we ought to be grateful. But one at least imagines the saints to be sympathetic.

Which is not to say that premodern societies were especially solicitous regarding the welfare of epileptics. The historical record indicates that civilizations dating back to antiquity were aware of people who had seizures chronically and that they struggled to figure out what to make of them. Around 400 B.C., an anonymous physician compiled a monograph on the subject titled On the Sacred Disease, which was meant to dispel the apparently widespread belief that epilepsy had some magical aspect.

His effort to establish epilepsy as an ordinary medical phenomenon was valiant, but long in the vindication. By the Middle Ages, seizures had become associated less with prophetic insight and more with demonic activity, though some physicians held to the ancient idea of epilepsy as a natural disease. Supernatural explanations for seizures lasted through the Enlightenment, and then modernity bestowed its own strange gifts upon epileptics.

In the proceedings of the first annual meeting of the National Association for the Study of Epilepsy and the Care and Treatment of Epileptics, in Washington in May of 1901, a philanthropist listed only by the name I.F. Mack wondered how many such hopeless, helpless, unfortunate creatures there must have been in the United States, all in want of internment in residential colonies for their kind. By his count, thousands were already locked away in such centers, and thousands more would be over time.

In fact, Buck v. Bell, the 1927 Supreme Court decision that enshrined involuntary, eugenic sterilization in law, regarded a woman who was held at the Virginia State Colony of Epileptics and Feebleminded, though she herself was neither. Nevertheless, untold numbers of epileptics were sterilized against their will under the ruling, which has never been overturned, though forced sterilizations declined significantly in the second half of the 20th century.

Follow this link:

What My Epilepsy Taught Me About the Value of Time - The New York Times