Category Archives: Pols and Pundits

Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble: Mt. Gox goes poof!

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Mt Gox has gone bust.

Ahem.

We’ll take a quick bow (along with Gary North, Robert Wenzel, Bionic Mosquito, and several others).

We Bitcoin-deniers stood our ground in the face of relentless and shameless]pumping, supported by rent-a-libertarians, like the former chief editor of the Daily Reckoning, Joel Bowman and shameless other opportunists

[On rereading this, I think I want  soften my tone, since the anti-BTC’s have been proved by events.[

See the two MBP posts below:

BTC: My Comments at EPJ

Bitcoin: My Comment at EPJ and Block’s Reversal

See also the following anonymous comments at EPJ in December and November 2013:

My comments are anonymous, because I was worried that the elites might attack people who criticized BTC, just as they trashed Assange critics all over the net:

Comments at EPJ on December 3

 

  1. Anonymous (Lila )

  3. Stick with Gary North, Wenzel.

    Better the known devil than the unknown.

    And talking about unknown devils, who is this Paul Rosenberg from Cryptohippie?

    Who owns Cryptohippie?

    Might they have connections to TOR, Wikileaks, Assange, and/or the Internet billionaires (Zuckerberg, Brin, Thiel, Omidyar)? If so, can DARPA be far behind?

    How would we know since Bitcoin is so mysterious……

    In fact, how would we know if Bernanke himself wasn’t moonlighting as an “anti-Fed” bit-coiner?

    Answer is we wouldn’t.

    Also, what reason could there be for the inventor of an invention of this magnitude (purportedly) to coyly refrain from taking any credit or recognition?

    Another question, why does Julian Assange tout it?
    These are the things which must be investigated before anyone other than fools and gamblers will go near this scheme.

    Anonymous (Lila Rajiva)

  4. Maybe they gain something personally from promoting Bitcoins? Credibility with the hacker-anarchist world, for instance. Maybe even money. How do you know?

    It takes a big person to stick to his guns, even when peer pressure might suggest otherwise.

 


 

Comments at EPJ on December 12:

 

  1. Anonymous (Lila)

  2. @anonymous

    I don’t have time to refute step by step.
    Just the obvious points.

    You claim bitcoin allows you to transfer any amount of wealth anywhere in the world almost instantly and almost free.

    Actually, you can already do that with an ACH transfer (upto 10K), wire transfer ($25 for any sum) cash (as much as you can stuff undetected into your suitcase or cash cards. You can also do hawala.

    The limits in all these cases don’t arise from the medium, but from government restriction, which could be enforced much more thoroughly through BTC than by other means.

    Second. Bitcoins aren’t “free.” They require not only a very good computer, but an excellent internet connection, encryption of a very high order not only for the connection but for the hard drive.. and considerable technical knowledge to thwart the net-savvy people who swarm around bitcoin users.

    None of that is free or widely prevalent.

    In most countries, you don’t even have good enough internet.

    Plus, all of it can be snooped on and shut down.
    That is just one objection out of dozens I could raise.

    Reply

 

1.  Nov. 25, 2013 comments at EPJ

 

  1. Anonymous (Lila)

  2. Shame on anyone who is so credulous to believe this is the “free market” at work.
    Shame on anyone who supports this kind of elaborate con played by the very cartels that anarchists are supposedly fighting.

    Bitcoin is a Rothschild-backed intelligence-funded pump-and-dump. The purpose is to destabilize the dollar and provoke demand for a global single currency.

    It is the global elite-backed “controlled opposition,” using spokesmen from the CIA-infiltrated/ hard-money or “libertarian” community. The ones pitching it will make money as the proles rush in.

    It is easily tracked, easily gamed.
    More so than the dollar or gold.

    This massive swell of interest and pumping by all and sundry is a sure sign of intel involvement.

  3. People promoting this might as well have INTEL stamped on their forehead.

  4. Or FRAUD.

 

Anonymous (Lila)

 


 

November 25, 2013 at 5:21 PM

 

@Philip, Anonymous, edward.

 

Intelligence and government are multi-layered, not unitary.

 

The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. Sometimes even the left hand doesn’t know. Just a finger or a nail knows.

 

Intelligence might take a while to understand the potential in something their scientists come up with. So it might take a year or two or more. Then they embrace it.

 

The MSM media is brain-washed one way – the obvious mainstream, Keynesian brainwashing.

 

The alternative media, including hard money people, are past the mainstream brainwashing, but they fall for the second-level brainwashing – they fall for Snowden, Assange, Hacktivism, Crypto-currency, Wikileaks, and all such black operations, meant to appeal to gullible, egoistic anti-govt types.

 

There are legions of agencies involved who profile dissent and come up with the red herrings that will be swallowed by the maximum number of fools and opportunists.

 

The economic dissenters trust their hard-money gurus, but that crowd is filled with two-bit cons who will fit their agenda to whatever the intelligence agencies tell them.

 

Please go back and look at when Bitcoin mania started and look at who has promoted it.

 

Be wise as serpents, my friends. Wenzel’s instincts are right. I hope he will not be dazzled by Mayer’s “expertise” and misled into supporting this con game.

 

As for sources. Do some research directly yourself and see what you find.

 

Reply

 

their ‘endgame’ …. .

 

 

Anonymous (Lila)

 

November 26, 2013 at 1:34 PM

 

@Phil McKreviss, EndtheFed,

 

There are a few libertarian (rightist and leftist) blogs where Assange and Snowden have been deconstructed thoroughly. No need to reinvent the wheel here. Let your fingers take a walk and you will see that they are both mouthpieces for the global elites.

 

Some reliable sources you could read: Cottrell, Rappaport, Creighton, Rajiva, Madison…off the top of my head.

 

China – China is a COMMUNIST country, my friends. Goldman Sachs has a big presence there.

 

End-game is control – maximum control over your assets, your money, your movements, your writing, your thoughts – so they can harvest it all for themselves.

 

The elites would be gods…and for that, they need for you to be less than men. They need for you to be little BITS of a machine.

 

Read everything critically, inwardly, not in this trusting fashion.

 

Rest assured, when something shows up on the internet, with this much fanfare, the elites approve.

 

Freedom is hard.

 

It will not come without sacrificing some time, effort and along the way, some favorite delusions and consolations too.

 

Biggest delusion is to believe that there is any quick simple remedy whereby you get to make a ton of money quicker and liberate “the world” too.
All that is Grimms Fairy Tales in a special edition for libertarians.

UN legal body endorses Khobragade’s immunity

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Anil Nauriya, who advocates before the Supreme Court of India, has added an important point (in the Comment section):

Regarding the arrest of a Consular official, the Vienna Convention requires that this may be done [in the case of a grave offence] “pursuant to a decision by the competent judicial authority”?

The question is whether even a PRE-TRIAL judicial warrant of arrest would be such a “decision”.
The focus in much of the discussion has been on the meaning of “grave offence”.


I would argue yet another aspect of the question : that the pre-trial arrest even of a Consular Official [without full diplomatic Immunity] is of doubtful legality and, in any event,  had to be the subject of a pre-arrest hearing leading to a pre-arrest judicial decision on such liability for pre-trial and pre-indictment arrest.

Before such a pre-arrest hearing, all that the “competent judicial authority” could have done is to issue a summons and pass an order preventing the Consular official from leaving the US pending such a pre-arrest hearing.

The Deccan Herald reports that the UN legal office supports Khobragade’s claim:

” A United Nations agency has endorsed New Delhi’s claim that Indian Foreign Service officer Devyani Khobragade enjoyed full diplomatic immunity when she was arrested by the United States law-enforcement officials in New York on December 12 last.

The opinion of the UN Office of Legal Affairs (OLA) supports New Delhi’s argument that Khobragade enjoyed full immunity at the time of her arrest as she had already been accredited to the international organisation as a representative of India since August last year.

Khobragade’s lawyers have cited the UN OLA’s view in a court in Manhattan to counter the recent move by Preet Bharara, the US district attorney for southern district of New York, to dismiss New Delhi’s claim.

Stephen Mathias, UN Assistant Secretary General for Legal Affairs, on January 27 last wrote to India’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the international organisation conveying the UN OLA’s views on the issue. ”

He wrote that representatives of all members of the United Nations “to the principal and subsidiary organs of the United Nations and to conferences convened by the United Nations, while exercising their functions and during their journey to and from the place of meeting, enjoy the privileges and immunities set forth in Section 11 of the General Convention”.

SAC Case: Should Be About Racketeering, Not Insider-Trading

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Previous Mind-Body Politic posts related to Steve Cohen, in reverse chronological order (incomplete):

Rajat Gupta Trial: The other Goldman insider ring, MBP, June 10, 2012

More on Einhorn’s rumour-mongering about Lehman, MBP, April 15, 2010

Third-point, Goldman trading chiefs exist together, Madoff programmers indicted, March 18, 2010

Hedge-funds: top ten earners in 2007-2008, MBP,  January 13, 2010

Steven Cohen: third-biggest owner of Sotheby’s in 2009, MBP, Dec. 30, 2009

Secretive Steve Cohen on talk-show, discussing relationship with ex, MBP,  Dec. 27, 2009

SAC spin-offs fail, even when they succeed, MBP,  Dec. 26,2009

SAC subpoenas former SAC trader Grodin, MBP,  Dec. 25, 2009

Den of Thieves: Hedge-hogs go into SAC remote mode, MBP, Dec. 23., 2009

Sad SAC: Reuters spikes hedge story on complaints from Steven Cohen, MBP.com, December 22, 2009

Ex-Sith lady uses RICO on Sith lord? Mindbodypolitic, December 17, 2009

ORIGINAL POST

In his piece at Deep Capture, “SAC Capital (and Steve Cohen too) should be convicted”, researcher Mark Mitchell is far more sanguine than I am that Preet Bharara really means to go after the chief of the mega-hedge fund SAC,  Steven Cohen, after he puts away  various underlings, like Michael Steinberg and Indian-born Matthew Martoma.

“By fixating on the insider-trading angle in all his cases, Bharara, in my opinion, undermined the whole credibility of his prosecution and opened himself up for charges that he is merely targeting politically-viable low-hanging fruit.

Lila: As I’ve documented thoroughly at this blog, Bharara hasn’t had much credibility in his Wall Street prosecutions for at least a year now, regardless of how successful his other prosecutions might have been in some people’s eyes. I’m glad to see some main-stream voices coming around to my view.

I think I know a little about the Steven Cohen investigation, from my conversations with some of the principals at Deep Capture, where the investigation of Cohen began

Here’s a piece I wrote which they picked up, back in 2009:

Steve Cohen, the anti-Midas (Judd Bagley at Deep Capture):

Here are Lila’s observations on the matter:

1. The high number of SAC traders who seem to have gone off into their own businesses.

You’d think with all that money and the fund’s record as the most consistently successful in the business (only one bad year on record), their traders would stay forever. Quite the opposite.  People seem to have been leaving all the time to form their own businesses.

But SAC was also said to be a very tough environment. You produced, or you left.

So maybe that’s why Lee and Far, Grodin and Goodman, all left to found their own firms?
Could be. But I’m not convinced.

2. None of the spin-off firms seems to have been very successful.

Why not? Why couldn’t these hot-shot traders make money on their own?

The Reuters piece suggests that perhaps the SAC experience didn’t foster business ability. And that perhaps SAC traders flounder without SAC’s huge supporting cast.

But those things are likely to be true of other firms as well, not solely SAC.

Still not convinced.

Furthermore, consider this.

3. A spin-off fund that didn’t get money from Cohen ended up quite successful:

“Healthcor, a healthcare industry focused fund, had raised $3.2 billion by June 2009 since launching four years ago. The fund returned 25 percent in 2006, 18 percent in 2007, and was up 4 percent last year, when the average hedge fund lost 19 percent. In the first 10 months of 2009, Healthcor was up 7 percent.

Healthcor, founded by Arthur Cohen and Joseph Healey, opened without any financial support from SAC. In fact, soon after Cohen and Healey struck out on their own, SAC sued the pair, accusing them of breaching their employment contracts. The matter ultimately was settled. (Healthcor’s Cohen is not related to SAC’s Cohen).”

4. Even spin-offs that were doing well were shut down.

When Stratix started in 2004, it had $60 million given to it by SAC. When it shut down, in 2007, it was up 17% and had $530 million under management. Yet it shut down. Why did it shut down? Those numbers sound pretty good.

Another spin-off, Fontana Capital, started out in 2005 with $50 million of SAC money. It grew to $325 million by 2006.  But sometime in 2007, Cohen pulled out all his money. And in 2009, Fontana was down to $16.1 million, despite being down only 7.69%, compared to the average S&P Financial index loss of 57%. Again, that sounds like it wasn’t doing all that bad.

Reuters quotes someone familiar with the record of ex-SAC traders:

“So many of the ex-SAC people seem to have this model where they attract you with fantastic returns in the first year but in year two or three or four you get annihilated,” said a person who is familiar with several former SAC employees’ records.

Shades of Bernie Madoff….

Someone need to look closely at what happened to the money at these firms…

Lila:

Unlike some, I don’t think the fact that Bharara has an agenda means that Martoma is necessarily innocent, either.

I just think that even guilty as charged, Martoma is small fry.

He’s Cohen’s employee and by every account I’ve read, Cohen kept notoriously tight control of his business and tolerated no dissent.

He was not the kind of hands-off employer who can plead ignorance after the fact, even though that’s just what he did.

So Martoma might be guilty as heck, but it’s beside the point.

Insider-trading, outside the  issue of racketeering, is an irrelevant and minor side-show.

Insider-trading as part of systemic racketeering is another thing.

But Bharara hasn’t shown that, nor does he even look like he’s trying to show that.

He looks like he’s polishing his resume for a move into politics.

Anyway, here’s Mark Mitchell at Deep Capture:

Deep Capture: SAC Capital (and Steve Cohen too) should be convicted….

“During the trial of Martoma, DOJ prosecutors confirmed that SAC Capital traded on inside information provided by a doctor at the University of Michigan, which was all well and good, but as I documented in my book, SAC Capital not only traded on inside information from another University of Michigan doctor, but also profited from short selling Dendreon’s stock after multiple doctors (some of whom had demonstrably corrupt relationships with Milken) conspired to undermine Dendreon’s treatment by convincing the FDA (also corrupted by Milken and his associates) to delay approval of the treatment (which had been proven effective).

Some journalists and their Wall Street sources have argued that insider trading is an essentially harmless offense and that SAC Capital deserves leniency, but their arguments obscure the fact that SAC Capital’s insider trading has involved the wholesale corruption of the FDA and some of the nation’s most prominent doctors, all of whom have (as my book documents in detail) shown themselves more than willing not only to provide Steve Cohen and his associates, including Milken, with inside information, but also to undermine pharmaceutical companies with effective treatments while promoting companies (i.e. companies that are financed by Milken and his associates) whose treatments are actually killing people.”

Lila: Exactly. But then, in that context, Matthew Martoma is actually the lesser offender.

He was after all a portfolio manager, a trader. His employment depended on his getting an edge.

When he stopped getting that edge (illegal, as it turned out), he was fired.  Since Martoma has been attested to be very knowledgeable in his field by the doctors with whom he interacted, it follows that his competitors in the field must also have been getting their “edge” in the same way.

Industry-wide corruption of that kind isn’t best addressed by throwing the book at some representative pawn/small fish in the game.  That only makes the prosecutors’ office look biased or politically motivated.

Which it usually is.

If the nation’s top doctors were engaged in corrupt activities, why aren’t some of them being prosecuted before Martoma?

And, if Steven (don’t call me Stevie) Cohen is a racketeer, prove that.

Then give yourself a gold medal. Not before.

Note: See John Cassidy’s piece at the New Yorker, “Has Steven A. Cohen bought off the US Government?” November, 4, 2013

Birth-Control Fatwas & Oops Factors

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denver colorado skyline

Zahir Ebrahim, author of The Poor Man’s Guide to Modernity, brings up a problem in the comment section to my previous post.

I reproduce it here as a separate post, because it’s something that has stumped me, as well.

Briefly: How to get in front of false-flags, red herrings, and black ops before they unfold, or, at least, how to derail them after they’ve begun?

How indeed.

Bloggers and activists who write as things unfold are quietly censored through Internet filtering and monitoring, (eg. Google). and content manipulation (eg. Wikipedia).

Or, we are dismissed as “conspiracy theorists” by the mandarins of the mainstream media, because we cannot reach into our pockets and come up at once with documents in triplicate with signed confessions from the Mossad and CIA to prove our claims.

Of course, some forty years hence, some appointed mouthpiece will, at tax-payer expense,  force open the requisite dusty archive where half-redacted memos, still greasy with guilt, will give the game away.

Masks will briefly slip from Olympian profiles, but until then…..

….even if activists do get heard, the media prince-lings who deign to respond, choose their place and time in ways that leave us bloodied and the issues even more bedraggled.

During the ruckus that ensues, the false-flag or black operation unfolds with the panache of an Augustan comedy….except that to those of us in the peanut-gallery it is tragedy.

That is how, as Zahir Ebrahim writes, no less than the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran fell victim to the Malthusian disinformation of the banking cartel:

“Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini introduced Birth Control through a fatwa (I haven’t seen the fatwa myself, only read or heard about it), as the population of Iran had almost doubled from the time of the Shah by the time of this fatwa in the late 1980s.

Well in the 2000s (I do not recall the year), the successor Ayatollah had to issue a new Fatwa encouraging families to have more children and not less children.

According to the understanding given to me on this topic, the first fatwa on birth-control had been issued because of the fears of over-population and Iran not being able to feed itself under the Malthusian construct.

(Not obvious how this fear was implanted in Iran under the Ayatollah, for he was always most wary of the Western agenda. But then again, he also fell victim to it in uncontrollably waging the eight-year war against Iraq — a war that was foisted by the West upon both the peoples of Iran and Iraq equally, and not just Iran alone ,which the people of Iran always tend to forget.)

Anyway, After the birth rate among the Shia Muslims declined drastically, while the minority Sunni Muslims (aprox. 20% of Iranians) had ignored the fatwa and had concentrated on having more and more children (Sunni Muslims do not accept Fatwas from Shia theologians, and vice versa), the demographics of Iran suddenly started to change. T

The Sunni strategy, I imagine both intellectually and financially supported from somewhere, was to come to key positions of power in Iran through the change in demographic. All legal, nothing subversive about it. In fact, it is the method that Palestinians have been employing to overwhelm their Israeli conquerors these past six decades. A most effective strategy!

This strategy, and the declining birth-rate among the middle class in the Shia households, woke up the Iranian government to the folly of the previous “ill-conceived” and “flawed” fatwa.

Now the impetus in Iran is to encourage more children — but not unsurprisingly, the next generation of the middle class and upper middle class, those whose parents or themselves grew up under the directive of the first fatwa, don’t seem to be energetically inclined towards having more children. Career paths dominate in Iran as much as they do in the West. A more detailed study of this is of course necessary. This is just the anecdotal version.

What this shows me however, is that “oops” cannot always be avoided — we are all human. But surely, as you put it: “that the ultimate source of such laws is an ideology crafted with MALEVOLENT intent by the foundation-funded think-tanks and research institutes.” can always be recognized and interdicted. No?

Provided of course that the government machinery, its media, and its intellectuals, are not already co-opted into either silence, acquiescence, or actually putting down their signatures to their own enslavement.

This is the real problem facing both India, Pakistan, and South East Asia. How to overcome our “asininity” which continually leads us to “oops” ex post facto?

British Charity “Rape Crisis” Is A UK Govt Front

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From LibertarianAlliance.wordpress.com:

“One of the points I made was that RC [Rape Crisis] can hardly be regarded as an independent voice.

Bearing in mind that it gets the majority of its funding from the Home Office and the Equalities Unit, it should be regarded as a front for the British State – ie, it’s another fake charity.

I didn’t actually accuse RC of corrupt motives, but did draw attention to the scale of funding and the fact that HMG would dearly love to put Julian Assange on the first plane to Stockholm.”

Sean points to the accounts, the most recent set available, which is not very recent by company-or-private-sector-standards and would get them heavily finded for lateness if they were a simple plumber or small retailer…which says in the small print at the back that:-

(1) “Rape Crisis” received in 2008, £6,285 from charitable and fundraising activities, and £103,750 from the Home Office, “Lankelly Chase” (which must be some place or other), “UNISON” and the Government Equalities Office”.

(2) In 2009, it received £11,214 from charitable and fundraising activities, and  £196.685 from the various collectivist sources stated just now above.

http://www.charitycommission.gov.uk/Accounts/Ends80/0001119680_ac_20090331_e_c.pdf
I think that makes it a “fake charity, don’t you? It seems to exist to do PR to lobby the government into bring in laws that the government wants brought in.

Fake “Rape Crisis”: UK rape rate ten times Indian

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One feminist notices something odd in the hype about the Indian rape crisis:

QUOTE:

“Let’s look at the numbers for India, population 1.2 billion (about 48% of whom are women):

In 2011 there were 24,206 reported rapes. Of these 26 per cent resulted in convictions.

The UK has a population of about 56.2 million.”

Lila: This  article was written in January 2013.  I don’t know where the author got her numbers.

The UK population in 2011 was 63.3 million. The population in 2012 was 63.7 million.

The Indian population in 2011 was approx. 1.21 billion.    In 2012 it was 1.22 billion.

That means that the UK has a population that is roughly 20 times smaller than India’s.

The article continues:

QUOTE:

“Fifty-one per cent are female.

In 2011 there were 14,624 rapes reported. Of which 24 per cent resulted in a “conviction or caution”.

Lila: If these rape statistics are in any way accurate, then the rape numbers in the UK are nearly half those in India, even though the Indian population is 20 times greater.

That means that the per capita rape rate in India is TEN TIMES smaller than that in the UK, a settled and developed country, with high levels of prosperity and education, one of the major powers.

Moreover, the UK rape rate is this high, even though Britain is a heavily policed country, with perhaps the most extensive surveillance networks in the world that routinely and illegally snoop on British citizens.

Britain also has a large and complex criminal justice system with multiple agencies to protect women and an academic culture that often shills for the feminist agenda.

But nonetheless the British rape rate is ten times that of India.  Where is the outrage?

Remember that the Indian rape rate is ten times smaller, despite extensive and severe poverty in India, few social networks outside kinship networks, and a very low per capita rate of policing.

Remember that India also has a very large population of illiterate young males, many without jobs and routinely experiences huge influxes of migrant workers into  severely overcrowded cities, already suffering from near-collapse in infrastructure and utilities.

Remember that India suffers from critical energy and water shortages, from soaring food and gas prices, from inflation and endemic corruption.

It has some of the world’s most congested and dangerous roads and some of the world’s most dangerous terrorists and separatists.

It is the target of unrelenting espionage and interference from the major powers.

India suffers in addition all the extraordinary stresses of very rapid economic development coupled with the crushing impact of  an alienating foreign culture on its traditional social fabric.

Finally, remember that behind the Indian rape rate are financial incentives created by feminist laws that reward women with windfall sums for bringing rape charges.

The Indian law privileges women as rape-victims while denying even the possibility that women might molest and rape, thus erasing the male as victim of sexual violence.

India has a jurisprudence weighted in favor of the woman coupled with a  feminist leadership that nonetheless demands even greater privileges and exemptions.

It has a media culture that is sensitive to every outrage to women and silent on outrages against men.

And yet, incredibly, the rape rate in India is ten times smaller than that in Britain.

So, where, I repeat, is the outrage?

Where is the United Nations study on the parlous condition of women in the United Kingdom, which rapes at ten times the rate of India?

Where is the UN study on the US, which rapes at higher rates than India?

Where is the UN study on South Africa, which rapes at higher rates than India?

“Non-interfering” Kerry Cheers Overthrow Of Ukrainian Gvt

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Daniel McAdams at LRC blog comments on John Kerry’s interventionist position on Ukraine:

“I am on RT today discussing John Kerry’s Munich trip, where he met the Ukraine opposition parties and said that the US is “fully behind” those seeking to overthrow the democratically-elected government by force — right before he warned any outside powers against interfering in Ukraine’s internal affairs.”

See also “US and Europe stand with people of Ukraine, says John Kerry,” The Guardian, Feb. 1 , 2014

NATO has joined Kerry to bully the Ukrainians government not to crack down on violence:

“Nato’s chief, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said he was “very concerned by attempts to involve the military in the crisis”.

The equivalent in terms of international provocation would be if the Russian President were to proclaim solidarity for the Occupy movement on US soil and warn American police against any militarized response.

While Kerry was double-dealing with the Ukrainians and thumbing the American nose at Russia, a little research turns up the interesting point that the largely peaceful Ukrainian protest suddenly turned violent at the same time as  Kerry’s visit and stepped-up support for it.

“Russia slams West’s support for Ukraine opposition,” AP, The Washington Post, Feb. 1, 2014

“The protests had been mostly peaceful until mid-January, when demonstrators angered by the new anti-protest laws launched violent clashes with police. Three protesters died in the clashes, two of them from gunshot wounds. Police insist they didn’t fire the fatal shots.“

See also “Russia slams as circus Kerry Ukraine opposition meetings,” Daily Star, Feb 1, 2014

“Russia’s outspoken Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin called Kerry’s upcoming meetings a “circus” in a tweet on Friday.

“It’s also necessary to involve Verka Serdyuchka in the talks,” he said in apparent sarcasm, referring to Ukraine’s bombastic drag queen pop star.

“Her/his authoritative opinion should be heard by the White House and taken into account!”

Is this another covert destabilization effort in the tradition of the color revolutions?

Evidently so.  At Storyleak.com, Michael Thomas breaks down the history:

“What is particularly surprising about the current color revolution unfolding in the Ukraine is that this nation was the site of the very same CIA implementation plan back in 2004/2005.  The Orange Revolution, as it was known at the time, was a classic CIA-engineered plot to impose their political outcome on the Ukrainian people. And they succeeded with flying colors.

That CIA-sponsored coup d’etat was so successful that it has since been used as a model for every other CIA-manufactured scheme that has toppled governments and reversed fair election outcomes the world over. In fact, the Ukraine is where the various social network utilities were used so effectively that the new MO has become known as the digital blitzkrieg. Never in human history have so many citizens been stampeded in the direction of overthrowing their government while being completely ignorant of the real forces manipulating the cattle prods.”

The article suggests that the Ukrainian government seems to be master-minded, as well the protesters. The result is that the Ukraine is being shepherded into the Eurozone, a communistic/fascistic scheme that will allow the patrons of the Eurozone to replenish their depleted treasuries:

“…. the Ukraine is looked to as a temporary savior because of its many large and robust markets, well established industrial base and transportation links to Asia, as well as it vast natural resources and raw materials.”

UN study slanders Asian men as rapists

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I need to expand more on the way that “rape” is being used to slander Asian societies as a whole in the Western mainstream media, controlled ultimately by a small group of owners.

The basis for the slander is a UN-led study:

The UN multi-country study on men and violence in Asia and the Pacific.

The study is sponsored by Partners for Prevention—on behalf of UNDP (UN Development Program), UNFPA (UN Population Fund) UN Women, and UNV (UN Volunteers).
and is described as follows:

From 2010 to 2013, over 10,000 men in six countries across Asia and the Pacific were interviewed using the UN Multi-country Study on Men and Violence household survey on men’s perpetration and experiences of violence, as well as men’s other life experiences. The countries included were Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Papua New Guinea. The study was a collaborative effort involving partners from academia, research institutes, civil society, the United Nations family and governments around the globe

Vietnam is also included, though not mentioned in the paragraph above.

The UN Population Fund’s goal is very clearly defined, behind the rhetoric of “rights.”

It is monitoring population growth and migration, ensuring family-planning through contraception and abortion, and securing female emancipation with a view to ensuring the previously-stated goals.

QUOTE:

The goals of UNFPA – achieving universal access to sexual and reproductive health (including family planning), promoting reproductive rights, reducing maternal mortality and accelerating progress on the ICPD agenda and MDG 5 – are inextricably linked. UNFPA also focuses on improving the lives of youths and women by advocating for human rights and gender equality and by promoting the understanding of population dynamics. Population dynamics, including growth rates, age structure, fertility and mortality and migration have an effect on every aspect of human, social and economic progress. And sexual and reproductive health and women’s empowerment all powerfully affect and are influenced by population trends.

The findings of the UN study were trumpeted uncritically in the major media:

See “Nearly quarter of men in Asia-Pacific admit to committing rape,” Kate Hodal, The Guardian, Sept 9, 2013.

However, a few critical observers found gaping holes in the methodology used:

“One in four men in Asia “admit to committing rape”? It doesn’t add up,” Stuart Brown, The Guardian, Sept 18, 2013.

Brown points out the incredibly shoddy and tendentious reasoning behind the statistic that claims that one in four Asians are rapists.

QUOTE:

“The shocking headline figure that 25% of the men surveyed admit to raping a partner or a stranger appears to offer unequivocal confirmation that Asian women are the victims of a deep-rooted, cultural problem.As with many studies of this type, however, what we’re witnessing is the wide dissemination of one hopelessly misleading statistic, while the rest of the research in the report – the stuff that actually matters – is ignored.”

The study covers Bangladesh, Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia, China, Sri Lanka, and Papua and New Guinea.

That itself is odd. Why would Korea, India, and Japan be left out?

The second oddity is that  the samples are not even representative nationally.

For instance, for Papua and New Guinea, the sampling is drawn entirely from one place – the island of Bougainville.

The third oddity is that there are only two places where “yes” responses to rape are over 25% and they are both areas with a recent history of violent conflict. A higher incidence of rape would be expected in such areas.

Without those two areas, the proportion of “yes” answers falls to 18%.

Finally, except in the case of Bangladesh, the question signifying admission of rape doesn’t even clearly indicate the use of force, but runs as follows:

“Have you had sexual intercourse with your partner when you knew she didn’t want to, but believed she should agree because she was your wife/partner?”

In the Bangladesh sample, where the question most directly mentions force, the number of “yes” answers is also the lowest.

This suggests that the results of the whole study have been dramatically skewed by the ambiguous structuring of a question that doesn’t even deal with what most people would call rape, but rather with the inherently problematic dynamics of marital relations.

But, even apart from the bogus nature of the questioning itself, there is the sheer ludicrousness of slandering the whole of Asia – some 4 billion plus people – on the basis of a questionnaire circulated to some 10,000 people, replete with elementary methodological flaws.

Indeed, the study looks less like a study and more like the kind of  public relations concoction that has armed the “anti-trafficking agenda” with equally sensational and equally flimsy claims.

See “Women’s Funding Network Sex Trafficking Study is Junk Science,” Village Voice, March 23, 2011.

Like bogus sex trafficking research, the bogus rape research seems to be driven by the need to come up with lurid statistics to draw funding, media attention, and political backing.

And what could be the goal of the study’s political backers, which are departments of the UN?

That too is evident.

The UN has always pursued the goals of the Western elites, under cover of internationalism.

Those goals include the need to corral and control the populous nations of Asia, lest they compete too strongly with those of the West for resources.

See the following:

George Kennan, Head of the US State Dept. Policy Planning Staff, Memo PPS23, Feb 28, 1948:

QUOTE:

In the face of this situation we would be better off to dispense now with a number of the concepts which have underlined our thinking with regard to the Far East. We should dispense with the aspiration to “be liked” or to be regarded as the repository of a high-minded international altruism. We should stop putting ourselves in the position of being our brothers’ keeper and refrain from offering moral and ideological advice. We should cease to talk about vague and—for the Far East—unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.

We should recognize that our influence in the Far Eastern area in the coming period is going to be primarily military and economic. We should make a careful study to see what parts of the Pacific and Far Eastern world are absolutely vital to our security, and we should concentrate our policy on seeing to it that those areas remain in hands which we can control or rely on.

Thus, the obvious implication of formulating bogus “rape studies” targeting Asian countries, let alone drawing wildly exaggerated conclusions from them, is the need for more surveillance and control of Asian populations by the international proxies of the Western elites.

Given the results of such surveillance and control in the US, where the prison population is the highest in the world and overwhelmingly black and brown, it is shameful that Asian media and government have not called out the slanderous characterizations of the UN study for what they are –

– Racist propaganda masquerading as social-science.

If the targets of the study had been African Americans, there would be no doubt that the researchers would have immediately been unmasked as latter-day theorists of classic scientific racism.

Fake Indian “rape crisis” driven by Western elite media

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Update: My blog post on the bogus nature of UN rape studies:
http://mindbodypolitic.org/2014/02/02/the-highest-rape-rates-by-country/

ORIGINAL POST
An Indian “rape crisis” has been evoked in the major media in the wake of the infamous Delhi gang-rape of 2012.

The “rape culture” narrative about India has come to signal the regressive, medieval nature of traditional Indian masculinity.

Palash Ghosh argues that Indian men, who, after 9/11, were conflated with the category “terrorist,” are now being conflated with the category, “rapist.”

Delhi gang-rape trial: A new and negative image for Indian men? Palash Ghosh, Ibntimes.com, Feb 5, 2013

I would suggest that this conflation is intentional and it is typical of the demonization campaigns carried out by the Western state media against countries targeted for intervention, whether that takes the form of bombing or of proxy wars or of NGO psyops.

 

I would suggest that there is no “rape crisis” in India in need of such international intervention.

There is, however, an over-hyped, UN-backed,  elite-manufactured issue that functions as a site for state intervention.

The ” rape crisis” is actually the creation of  the left-liberal ideology that fronts for the corporate interests of Western elites.

This can be readily deciphered from the media stories about the Delhi gang rape.

The major media (Western elite) coverage of the Delhi rape posited it as typical of the medieval village culture characterizing Delhi, in which no Westernized/modern woman can ever be safe.

In contrast, the truly cosmopolitan cities of the West protect women, ran the elite narrative.

Statistics, of course, do not bear this story out.

Poulami Roychowdhury has argued as much in her lengthy academic analysis of the story:

“The Delhi Gang Rape: The Making of International Causes.”

QUOTE:

“CNN likened the assailants to men in other “traditional societies” who “see improvements in the status of women as a challenge to their own” and who use rape as a weapon of power against such advances.”

Roychowdhury shows how the international media created a false narrative of a Westernized, modern woman attacked by traditional, patriarchal, village men.

The truth is both the victim and her assailants were remarkably similar in moving from lower-class agricultural backgrounds into an urban setting.

The international media narrative also ignored the Indian man who attempted to save the victim.

He was also stripped and assaulted.

But the media erased him entirely from public consciousness.

QUOTE

“It goes almost without saying that Pandey’s case illustrates the ongoing resilience and appeal of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “white men saving brown women from brown men.”
Spivak’s theory illuminates why Pandey’s male friend, Awindra Pandey, disappeared from the pages of international media while Pandey and her assailants took pride of place in the discussion. Commentators seemed to forget that Awindra was even on the busand was also physically assaulted, stripped naked, and dumped on the side of the road. He disappeared, Firstly, because his body stood outside the economy of international care: white men are not in the business of saving brown men from other brown men. He also had to disappear because brown men are not typically viewed as allies of brown women.”

Chowdhury also demonstrates how the  emancipated female subject in the third-world  exists in a  narrative that ties her emancipation to her full participation in the neo-liberal economy.

She is described as going to malls and movies on her own, wearing Western clothes and accoutrements.

Meanwhile  the atavism of her male attackers is tied to their lack of integration into that economy.

Neither construction is accurate.

The “rape crisis” was a creation of  radical feminism embedded in the neo-liberal market-place, not an off-shoot of traditional Indian culture.

ITEM A The rape crisis is driven by financial incentives created by misguided, if not malicious, laws put in place by feminist ideologues.

See, “India to pay women big money to cry rape,” False Rape Society, January 8, 2010

It describes the law which has driven the “crisis of rape” now bearing fruition.

” It [India] has decreed that every woman who testifies that a male raped her will be handed the equivalent of 4,374.96 US dollars, a not-insignificant sum anywhere, but a huge payday in India.”

[Lila: in terms of Indian salaries, this would be the equivalent of $200,000 in the West, if we use the exchange rate prevalent at the time. Of course, this translation doesn’t account for the differing purchasing powers of the currencies, but $4, 374.96 is nonetheless a very large sum in India.]

ITEM B

The “rape  crisis” is driven by cultural Marxism

The goal of cultural Marxism is to create morally and biologically neutral “genders” that are fungible and detached from the traditional family structure.

Indeed, it is to construct “gender” so that it is inimical to family life.

In that regard, it’s notable that the man behind many of the protests following the Delhi gang-rape case was a left-wing radical.

 

He was a communist radical from the hot-bed of left-wing ideology, Jawaharlal Nehru University.

The protests following the rapes were also organized mainly by left-wing radicals.

Many of the protests turned violent, injuring nearly 150 people.

QUOTE:

“The protests, largely by students, saw hooligan elements mingled in the crowd uproot wooden poles erected for the Jan 26 Republic Day event and set them afire at five places. They upturned vehicles, smashed window panes of buses and other vehicles and also hurled stones and water bottles on policemen in response to tear gas and baton attacks to prevent protesters from marching towards Raisina Hills, where prohibitory orders were put in place.”

Pictures of the protests were circulated world-wide, bringing even the UN into the picture.

The UN made official pronouncements about a “rape culture” in India.

 

This led to the usual politically-motivated commentary from the liberal-left spectrum of the Western media.

However, a few conservative/men’s rights blogs didn’t buy the story and correctly diagnosed the “rape crisis” as a concoction of left-feminist ideological activism.

Similar accusations of an American “rape-culture” have been accurately deconstructed by Dr. Christina Hoff Summers

“Researching the “rape-culture” of America,” Christina Hoff Summers, False-rape.net.

Only a year after the Delhi gang-rape case, the JNU communist who was behind the Indian “rape-crisis” agitation was himself accused of rape. He became the subject of the usual  trial-by-media-innuendo-and-womyn’s-assertion.

He killed himself, a victim of the left-anarchist monster he created.

The extremist ideology behind the “rape crisis” is evident in the new unequal laws in India.

In the case of rape:

See “Only men can be booked for rape,“ Nagendra Sharma, Hindustan Times, March 5, 2013

“Bowing to pressure from women activists, the government has decided to restore the term rape in criminal law that states only men can be booked for committing the offence against women. It has also decided to lower the age of consent for sex from 18 to 16 years.”

This is not gender-neutrality but gender-privileging.  It means that a female assault of a male, or a male assault of a male, or a male or female assault of a male child, are lesser crimes, to be treated under the separate section in the Indian legal code that pertains to unnatural sexual acts.

But that section does not make the rape of a male a crime against a person. Instead, it treats it as a crime against nature, like voluntary homosexuality.

That means female rapists/molesters of men or children can be guilty of unnatural acts, but not of rape, a most significant perversion of equal justice under the law.

In the case of domestic violence:

A woman can get a restraining order against her husband or boyfriend if he threatens suicide.

Under Indian law, threats of suicide by a man, however, are treated as domestic violence against the woman.

The reverse does not obtain.

If India were really a woman-hating patriarchy, as the feminists proclaim, would such laws pass?

At one men’s rights site, an activist writes:

[Note added: Paul Elam, the founder of the site, “A Voice for Men,” seems to have anger management problems that have led him to make incendiary statements I do not in any way endorse. I also do not support the harassment of feminist activists.]

“We’ve already seen men in that country [India] forced to the back of buses like African-Americans in 1950s America.  We’ve seen them beaten up by members of the public and female police officers alike for accidentally boarding the “female only” carriage of a train.  And now we’re seeing the government actively denying them equal protection under the law in sexual assaults.“

Conclusion: What is going on in India is not a rape crisis but a crisis of misandry.

1. “Indian Communist feminist Khurshid Anwar commits suicide after rape allegations,“ Anil Kumar, A Voice for Men, Dec. 30, 2013.

2.” Woman should be booked for filing fake rape case, says HC,” Urvi Mahajani, DNA India, August 1, 2013

3. “Be vigilant about false rape cases: HC to trial judges,” Harish Nair, Hindustan Times, May 24, 2013

4. “18% rape cases false, study,” Times of India, Dec. 27, 2008

5.  Delhi gang-rape case: Police find discrepancies in victim’s statement,” FirstPost, Jan 28, 2014

6.  Activists: Indian media sensationalized Delhi gang-rape case, Venus Upadhyaya, Epoch Times, October 11, 2013

7. Attributing rapes to unique Indian culture reeks of bias, Gajanan Khergamker, Eurasia Review, March 28, 2013

8. Indian government – men don’t matter, David Cuspis, A Voice for Men, March 29, 2013

9. One in four men in Asia ‘admits to committing rape’? It doesn’t add up, Stuart Brown, The Guardian, Sept 18, 2013.

10. A sad day for male rape victims in India,  Toy Soldiers, March 6, 2013

Jamaicans Oppose Homophile Thought-Control

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Update: Just to be clear, I don’t believe in criminalizing homosexuality.  My attitude to the question of gay marriage is,  whatever…

If gays want to get married and churches want to marry them, that’s between them and their churches.

I don’t think Christianity sanctions it, but then Christianity also doesn’t sanction psyops, market manipulation, total war, and any number of other things that society (and many churches) accept wordlessly.

However, I do have a problem with the gay lobby preventing people from expressing their views, by demonizing traditional morality as hate-speech. And  I abhor fraudulent history…

ORIGINAL POST

From MassResistance.org

Why is free-speech in opposition to homosexuality being shut down as “hate speech” or a form of mental illness? A Jamaican church group involved in mass resistance to the pro-gay lobby makes the case:

The Jamaican-Gleaner, May 27 2013

“He [Dr West] added: “So to say we are all mad and irrational is an insult. ‘Homophobia’ was deliberately constructed by a psychologist to make persons against any same-sex act to have a phobia, which in medical language is a mental illness.”

Yesterday the coalition took out a full-page advertisement in The Gleaner, declaring that ‘Speaking Truth is NOT Homophobia’, but that it is common sense, medical sense and economic sense.

Urging persons to reject the homosexual lifestyle, the advertisement quoted statistics from researchers at Johns Hopkins Center University for AIDS Research in the United States, published in the medical journals Lancet and AIDS Behaviour.

Among the findings quoted were that 98 per cent of the difference in HIV rates between MSM (men who have sex with men) and heterosexuals can be explained by anal receptive intercourse; MSM is the only group with increasing HIV in countries of all income levels; HIV is out of control among MSM in France; HIV rates in black MSM are 100 times that of the general population in the United Kingdom, United States and Canada; and HIV is disproportionately high and increasing among MSM in the US, despite significant increases in ‘rights’.

Evidence clear

“We think it is important that in public discussion facts are brought to bear rather than simple ideology. And these are the facts that there is clear medical evidence that same-sex intimate behaviour among MSM is detrimental, these are the reasons why we reject it, not because we are all mad,” West stated.

He said the main reason for the ‘irrational’ label was to silence the discussion.

“What we have found is that in countries where this political homosexual lobby is advancing, they seek to silence you. You are labelled as homophobic, you are mad, you are not worth listening to, your opinion is of no consequence. But these are fundamental sociological changes and we must have these discussions,” he stated.

“Fight evidence with evidence. If you have a problem with what we are saying, then bring the evidence, don’t just dismiss us as mentally ill.”