Down (South)….But Not Out

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This is for all my well-wishers out there who’ve taken the time to poke this blog to see if it’s dead or merely comatose.

I’m  here. I’m alive. I just got tired of the off-line harassment  –  snooping on my private life through illegal surveillance of my home, my family and friends, private  conversations, and email correspondence…. that’s in addition to the online stuff.

I’ve talked about it before.

So that’s how the game is played in the US of A, in these early years of the 21st century.

Of course,  I have no interest in becoming a pawn sacrifice  nor in wasting my life keeping track of a chess-game I didn’t ask to play.

That’s the background.

The foreground is my personal life, which has kept me occupied quite well.

I’ve been traveling again. It helps with perspective.

The US is a mess of controlled media and staged terror. But other countries are as bad…. or much worse.

The whole globe is awash in the same inane, idiot-making advertising of the neo-liberal marketplace and the global war on terror.

Meanwhile, tectonic shifts are taking place, not just in Iran, China, or Pakistan (check out the spate of earthquakes in those regions), but in the economies and polities of any state so unwise as to join the Global War on Terror either as friend or foe.

In India, the so-called national paper, The Hindu, has been taken over in a kind of publishing coup and in flagrant violation of Indian law, by a US citizen, Siddharth Varadarajan. Siddharth is the left-leaning brother of the Wall Street Journal editor, Tunku Varadarajan, a right-leaning advocate of the War on Terror.

The paper today is one long hard-sell of overpriced property.

Whole pages are also devoted to gold ornaments, a known outlet for speculative profits.

Building colleges through trusts that enjoy favorable tax status is also a favorite way of laundering money in India (see also this article). The government-builder mafia is often behind the plethora of new institutions springing up everywhere.

Where I am, down in the sunny South, such unwisdom is poisoning not just the media, but just about everything…from the banking system to technology to transport ….

(more later)

Note: Links on some of these posts I’ve referenced have vanished. This keeps happening to certain posts, whether for technical reasons or for others…

Bear with me. I’ll add them back when I get a moment.

Shankar Sharma: Some Insider Trading More Legal Than Others

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At last. One honest journalist out there has the spine to tell the truth about the Western establishment’s vengeance against upstart South Asian finance,  known to the moron masses as the Galleon group/Gupta insider trading (non) case.

Here’s businessman and journalist Shankar Sharma in a piece that puts to shame the drivel emanating from the entire western press (Bloomberg included), not to mention the rags published by various Indian satraps (Livemint etc):

“On July 21, 2008, Hank Paulson, the then US treasury secretary, met around 15 major hedge fund managers at the offices of Eton Park in New York — itself one of the biggest hedge funds in the world. At least five of the 15 who attended were ex-Goldman Sachs, the firm that was headed by Paulson before he became the treasury secretary.

That very morning, Paulson had spoken to The New York Times reporters and editors and had assured them that the government was looking into the book of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and that this would calm the markets that had been fearing an imminent bankruptcy of these firms.

This was material, non-public information, being selectively disseminated to a group of people whose jobs were to profit from such information. And, by no less than the serving treasury secretary. (Imagine the brouhaha if something like this were to happen in India.)

Those who attended were the who’s who of Wall Street: Taconic Capital, James Chanos of Kynikos Associates (a known short-seller), Steve Mandel of Lone Pine Capital, Dinakar Singh of TPG Axon, GSO Capital (part of Blackstone group), Daniel Och of Och-Ziff and Roger Altman of Evercore Partners.

Seven weeks later, on September 6, the government did indeed take over Fannie and Freddie and put it into conservatorship, wiping out the equity holders. Their stock prices fell 85 per cent from September 5 to September 6, i.e. overnight. Precisely as Paulson had told the hedge fund group.

The government gave scanty information on the names of those present at the July 21 meeting to Bloomberg, who sought this information under the Freedom to Information Act. Paulson’s press secretary told Bloomberg to refer to Paulson’s book on the financial crisis, On the Brink. Except for the little inconvenient fact that there is no mention of this meeting in the book at all.

Now, here is an interesting thing: the fund manager who recounted this tale to Bloomberg, was already short the stock at the time of the meeting. And, he did not cover his short position after this meeting because Paulson had clearly informed the group that the government was going to “wipe out the equity holders”. So, by not cutting his already short position in these names, that fund manager ended up profiting handsomely, by riding the short position all the way to the bottom… all based on Paulson’s generous advice.

And, what is even more significant is that given the negativity surrounding Fannie and Freddie at that time, it is almost given that nearly all those who attended that Paulson meeting would have been short these stocks. The whole world was short Fannie and Freddie (for the record, short interest in both these stocks rose after the July 21 meeting to hit a yearly high on July 24). Paulson revealing the government’s hand made the decision very easy for all these funds: “Don’t cut your shorts, since these stocks are going to zero.” Perfect.

What is even more curious is: why would Paulson reveal this to a bunch of hedge funds? Revealing this to commercial bankers would probably have some minuscule sense attached to it, i.e. to get them prepared for an impending catastrophe. But, hedge funds? And, an even more damning question arises: why would Paulson reveal negative information to these hedge funds, i.e. that the equity investors would get wiped out by the government takeover? This sort of information from a regulator/government official is unheard of: they are supposed to give out generally positive information, not catastrophic, unsettling information like this. Paulson’s information could lead to only two trading outcomes: one, hang on to your shorts in Fannie and Freddie, or, two, go short some Fannie and Freddie. This short-trade generating advice coming from a regulator, and that too a seasoned pro like Paulson, is extremely suspicious, to say the least.

If this is not giving out material, non-public information, then what is? If Rajat Gupta is guilty, why isn’t Paulson? If Gupta had given Raj Rajaratnam information that Goldman Sachs was going to get an investment from Warren Buffet (and suppose, if Rajaratnam had not sold an already long position in Goldman stock based on this material, non-public information), would this have amounted to a criminal offence on Gupta’s part?

Of the many things I don’t like about this Rajat Gupta affair, one is the Indian media’s sickeningly fawning portrayal of the American justice system as one that “doesn’t spare the rich and powerful, unlike ours where the well-connected get away”, and “how justice is dispensed speedily in the US”, and so on.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. The US protects its own rich and powerful better than we can ever do. Paulson got away clean. Not even an investigation. No investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission into the trading by these attendee hedge funds. Nothing. Just a conspiracy of silence.

Then, we have the strange case of David Sokol. He was Buffet’s No. 2, and was widely tipped to take over from the old man. Sokol bought shares of Lubrizol, prior to getting Buffet to buy the company outright. After the deal was done, Sokol told Buffet of this purchase. Buffet waved it aside, saying it was no problem. No problem? Sokol traded on inside knowledge of material, non-public information, and Buffet joined him in keeping this a secret.

When the problem came out, Sokol resigned, Buffet shrugged. And, that was it. The cover up had happened. Because any serious investigation would have led to Buffet himself becoming a party to any offence, since he chose not to report this to the authorities. Consideration for his old age? Well…

But in the meeting with the hedge funds later that day, Paulson sang a completely different tune: he revealed in precise detail (according to someone who attended that meeting) what the government proposed to do with Fannie and Freddie. He told the elite group, whose sole business was to profit from any superior knowledge and analysis of events, that the government planned to seize the two firms, and place them into “conservatorship”: a move that would allow the firms to stay in operation, but would wipe out the equity holders.

Rajat Gupta Trial: Nonsense sentence by Rakoff

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So Rajat Gupta gets two years in the Federal penitentiary for gossiping about Goldman with a close associate.

Let me recount the ways in which this is a confused sentence.

If, as Judge Rakoff contends, what Gupta did was “disgusting” and a horrendous crime, then obviously two years is far too light a sentence. I mean, you can go to jail that long for a few traffic offenses or getting caught with some pot, neither of which any reasonable person would call depraved or “disgusting” behavior.

By giving Gupta only two years, Rakoff tacitly conceded that what Gupta did wasn’t really all that big a deal at all. He conceded that all the verbiage of outrage and offense was only so much moral puffery for the Occupy crowd, for whom a rich man is always guilty as charged.

And to be foreign and rich, now that really is a capital offense.

Let’s be honest.

What Bernie Madoff did was disgusting. What Job Corzine did, what Hank Paulson did, what Alan Stanford did – they were swindles and are disgusting.

What Gupta did (if he did do it) was something too trivial for this hooplah.

Except that it was an officer of a publicly-traded company who profited from the trading, you’ll say.

Except that he didn’t profit, I’ll reply.

And we don’t know if the guy even knew his good buddy Raj was trading on his words.

So, then, what we’re left with is a guy who said something to some other guy about something that was highly “confidential” but still being discussed at water-coolers round the country, a tip from which at least one Goldman board member, the very very waspy Byron Trott, later profited.

That sort of profiting, you’d think, would be insider-trading too, except, for some reason it isn’t. It never is when very very waspy people with monosyllabic Saxon names and Roman numerals behind them do it.

Everyone was talking about it.  Other Goldman board members were talking among themselves about it. How secret could it have been?

At least one of those board members, and maybe two or three, were known to talk about Goldman affairs outside school.

So Gupta wasn’t alone in what he did.

And what he did isn’t even regarded as a crime by dozens of learned economists from Milton Friedman to Murray Rothbard.

Over here, I am not a learned economist, so I can think straight, and sure, gassing about confidential stuff when you have a fiduciary responsibility to keep your lips zipped, is clearly unethical, and an infraction deserving a penalty.

But it’s an infraction against the folks to whom you owe that responsibility.

That would be Goldman Sachs.

Whose middle name, I can confidently assert, is not fiduciary responsibility.

In fact, Goldman Sachs’ business model for some decades has been insider-trading.

That is roughly what the commodity and bond business is built on.

At notorious gold trading firm J. Aron, Lloyd Blankfein, Gupta’s principal nemesis on the witness stand, was not famous for either fiduciary responsibility or squeaky clean ethics.

Neither was Gary Cohn, his bosom buddy.

In fact, for Blankfein to finger Gupta on the stand, is like Ted Bundy giving testimony against Shelly the Shoplifter.

It would be hilarious, except that it’s not. It’s pathetic and, yes, disgusting.

If Gupta broke Goldman’s rules, Goldman should be hauling him over the coals. Since when is it the government’s job to police Goldman’s corporate culture?

As for the idea that Gupta somehow cheated Goldman public shareholders, that too is laughable. There is good evidence to show that insider trading actually profits non-insider buyers. And non-insider sellers are surely selling voluntarily, are they not? No one puts a gun to their heads to do it, right?

What’s more, there’s nothing to show that having insider information leads to a successful trade. Many’s the punter who’s lost his shirt over what he took to be a sure thing.

Besides all that, why should anyone give a rat’s ass about Goldman shareholders?

How super-ethical can any shareholder in Goldman Sachs be, in the first place? Here’s a company so dirty it’s a by-word in the markets, yet you have investors that want to hold directors to such high standards  quite content to sink their money into this cess-pool.

Yeah. What a bunch of angels.

If Gupta really did do something that ripped off Goldman Sachs and its “little investors,” I for one would pin a gold medal on him.

The “little investors” knew that by buying Goldman they were subsidizing its graft and crime. But it didn’t matter, so long as they made money.

Why is that any less unethical than trading against Goldman?

In my book, it’s worse. Anyone who helped this firm, was profiting from its criminal actions and fueling them. Anyone who hurt it, was actually doing a public service.

I say, everyone who bought Goldman shares enabled its sleaze.  And profited from its insider-trading. And Goldman’s insider trading was of a scale that makes Raj’s Galleon look like the good ship Lollypop.

If Gupta truly did do something that was horrendous – say, defraud a company – he deserved ten years.

Personally, I think he deserves at least five for ever working for an organization like Goldman Sachs. Directing Goldman or McKinsey is not the hall mark of a man of integrity in my book. Resigning from them would have been. But the morality of crony capitalism not what’s at issue here, is it? If it is, then Bill Gates, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg and several thousands of other CEOs should be joining Gupta in the pokey.

The two years Rajat Gupta got shows that the whole trial was a contemptible charade and the figure at the center of it only a scapegoat to appease a crowd slavering for blood.

Rajat Gupta was right not to grovel.

He should chalk this down as experience, and then put up a real fight:

1. Refuse to reimburse Goldman

2. Appeal Rakoff’s absurd rulings.

3. Get his rich friends to help him run the biggest investigation possible into Goldman Sachs and its cronies.

4.  With his gold-plated Rolodex, he can sound out his government and corporate contacts to coordinate an investigation across the world. We have only seen the tip of the iceberg that is Government Sachs.

5. Finally, Gupta should counter-sue Sachs and its flunkies under international racketeering laws.

Rajat Gupta was an “uncle” to the son of his nemesis

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Even the son of Anil Kumar, the man who “cooperated” to put Rajat Gupta in jail, thinks highly of “Uncle” Rajat.

Here’s a big selection of letters written in support of Rajat Gupta, from Bill Gates and Mukesh Ambani, to his daughters and wife.

The most interesting part for me was the section in Mrs. Gupta’s letter where she describes Goldman Sachs’ interactions with Gupta. Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein first wanted to kick Gupta out for wanting to consult for KKR (which other Goldmanites were doing).

Then, when GS got into trouble, Blankfein wanted him back.

Gupta – stupidly – went back, trying to be loyal to them.

They rewarded him for that loyalty by setting him up as a patsy when the sharks at the DOJ began circling.

Gupta -again, foolishly – trusted the system. The system did what it usually does. Chewed up the innocent (at least, relatively innocent) and rewarded the unscrupulous and powerful.

Blankfein hired a PR firm, took up gay rights activism, and came out smelling, if not like a rose, at least, somewhat less like a sewer.

Dobelli and Taleb discuss what makes for happiness

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I saw this at Nassim Taleb’s “Fooled by Randomness” site:

Dobelli [Lucerne, Switzerland] Can you increase happiness by knowing your cognitive errors (and by
avoiding them)?

(A side note: I believe that happiness is not equal to the absence of disaster – or vice versa. It’s not a linear opposite. The two properties (happiness and unhappiness) are somehow correlated, but in a strange way. But that’s for the happiness researchers to figure out, for the Dan Gilbert types.)

Taleb [New York] Let me repeat my statement about small mistakes. You will not increase happiness by
increasing cognitive fitness and rationality. Happiness requires some wisdom about big things, but childishness with the small things.

Comment:

Rolf Dobelli, one of the genuinely brilliant minds of the business world, has shown himself at home in philosophy, fiction, business, and finance.

He has a great book out called “The Art of  Thinking Clearly” where I his talent for pithy aphorisms and philosophical analysis is, once again, on display.

I hope to read the book soon.  Any book that promises to make the task of managing the “monkey mind” easier has to be at the top of my “to do” list.

Here’s a brief account of the book, which has sold an amazing 500,000 copies and been translated into 25 languages.

Modest, yet outgoing,  with the intellectual equipment of a scholar and the conviviality of the bon-vivant, Dr. Dobelli also manages to be an approachable nice guy, a creature apparently found in more abundance in Switzerland than in certain other geographical locations.

Maybe his next book should be “The Art of Being a Good Guy.”

Seems like that would fill a huge vacuum, say, around the DC beltway and hinterland.

Dobelli’s comment about happiness is insightful. Happiness is not unrelated to being free of unhappiness, as he points out. But the two are by no means mutually exclusive, either.  There is asymmetry in the correlation.  It is non-linear.

Meanwhile, Taleb’s assessment also struck home with me.

The “childish small things” I fancy are animals and… soft toys.

I “rescued” a brown and white fluffy rabbit the other day, left right on top of the dumpster, hardly a stain on his synthetic fur, looking all forlorn, one ear up and one down, his nylon whiskers askew.

Wetted down with a damp towel and soap, then sun-dried,  he now has pride of place among the silent muses and “angels” I keep around me to guard that space of joy that no circumstance in life will ever take from me again.

Soft toys embody my love of story-telling, carried over from an idyllic childhood filled with books, music, imaginative play, and loving family. Even thinking back to it brings back a smile to my face, even in the blackest mood.

As a child, I would go to bed, telling stories to anyone who would listen, a patient, half-asleep sib or my weary parents, if I was lucky.

Otherwise, I had to content myself with the menagerie of teddy bears, giraffes,  tinker-bells, baby elephants, dolls, and stuffed dogs that were my imaginary playmates and the compliant actors in the tableaux I staged across my bedroom with pillows and sheets for building blocks.

I’ve no doubt anyone who came across me today, in one of my ventriloquist moods, animating a toy rabbit, would think I was crazy to enjoy make-believe at this age.

But, in fact, the older I get, the more I like fantasy, children’s stories, and theater.  There seems to be something of the gods in these things.

When I look out the window, on the other hand, all I see is that trivial, vulgar thing called, for some inexplicable reason, “real life” ….and, along with it, too many stunted beings who shrink with each passing second, yet glory in being called “grown ups.”

One shade of trash.. (Updated)

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In a brilliant piece of debunking, Barackryphal proves that the pictures being circulated libeling Obama’s mother as a porn star are fabricated and might well expose the creator of them to charges of circulating child porn.

“This [a picture of Obama’s mother] picture appeared in Exotique #23, on page 22. In 1958. When Ann Dunham was only 15 years old. Two years before Ann Dunham even moved to Hawaii.

It can also be found reprinted in volume 2 of the 3-volume Exotique hardcover collection.

We may never know who the mystery model is. But the Dunham family didn’t move to Hawaii until the summer of 1960. Unless Ann Dunham had access to a time machine in the 1960s, it simply cannot be her.

Moreover, Joel Gilbert knows this. He found that opera glove photo; it was not circulating the web as an ‘Ann’ photo prior to his videos. He knows it came from Exotique, a magazine that ceased publication in 1959. From WND: “Gilbert found that several of the photos in the collection appeared in a magazine called Exotique, published by pin-up photographer Leonard Burtman, who worked in New York City.”

Thus he knows this picture was published two years before Ann first stepped foot in Hawaii, years before she could have met Frank Marshall Davis. And yet he explicitly claims, multiple times, that the photo was TAKEN at Christmastime 1960. This is not a lie of ignorance or mistake; it is a lie of pure, fully-informed malice.

And that’s the BEST-case scenario for Gilbert. Gilbert knows that Ann was born in 1942, and he knows he found these pictures in 1958 magazines. If Gilbert truly believes that these ARE somehow pictures of a 15-year-old Ann, then he’s been distributing hundreds of thousands of DVDs featuring nude and erotic pictures of someone he believes to be an underage girl.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Gilbert has thus far refused to disclose the actual sources of the erotic photos he put in his videos. He identified six issues, none of which checked out, and five of which contradict his 1960 date anyway. As shown above, to disclose the true issues would be to destroy his own claim that the photos are of Ann, and to let his audience know that he’s lying to them. And so he refuses to cite his sources, even when they’re just magazine issue numbers.

So there you have it. The people who’ve said ‘Frank Davis took naked pictures of Stanley Ann Dunham in December of 1960’ are provably wrong. The woman they claim is Ann was having her photographs from this very shoot published at least as early as 1958. When Ann was a 15-year-old in Washington, years before she ever stepped foot on Hawaii or could have conceivably even met Frank Marshall Davis. Joel Gilbert has unnecessarily obscured the actual publication dates of the pictures he found, because he knows those simple facts will prove to everyone that he’s lying about them being taken in 1960, and lying about Frank Marshall Davis taking them of Ann, and lying about them being evidence of an intimate relationship between Frank and Ann.

As I wrote in my first post in this series, “I can’t promise that I’ll convince everyone that Joel Gilbert is a charlatan and his film is a joke, but I think by this time next week, anyone who continues to trust Gilbert has some depressingly low standards for what they’ll believe.” I’m sure some people will still prefer to believe in him and his photos, and nothing will convince them otherwise. To them, I can only say this: just as Joel Gilbert has known for months, you now know that his photos were being published in 1958. Possibly even earlier. So if you still want to believe that the woman in those photos is Ann Dunham, that means you also have to believe that the woman in those photos is no more than 15 years old. Keep that in mind as you talk about them, and post them online, and save them on your computer. I know you’re not doing anything illegal or morally disgusting (because it’s not Ann), but what are you telling yourselves?

Finally, even though I’ve reached #1 in this series and I think I’ve solidly proven my case, I had two more research developments on Monday that I’ll be typing up in the next few days. So be sure to keep an eye out for those to come.”

Comment:

American media culture gives me a severe migraine with its schizophrenia.

It’s a proud achievement that merits putting her on Time’s list of the hundred most influential people when one Erika Leonard  promotes pedophilic bondage and sadism…..

And it’s positively chic for the French president’s wife (or is it his ex-wife? I lost track..) Carla Bruni, to have actually posed for explicit photos and have a collection of them hovering in the background, ready for use for blackmailing at any time.

It’s super for Gore Vidal to have been a  pederast…and have endorsed and promoted the work of the documented child-abuser Alfred Kinsey,

It’s hip for women of all persuasions (from Wendy McElroy on the right to Naomi Klein on the left) to publicly discuss their sexual histories…

But if some one digs up some highly questionable photos purporting to show a woman who doesn’t even look much like Obama’s dead mother in soft-porn poses, then porn is suddenly a sign of degeneracy, perversion and immorality, the end of the republic is at hand, and Alex Jones gets to pound the table to tell us he’s mad about it.

Which is it?

The American media and the public can’t make up their minds.

To me it looks like it amounts to this:

Porn is chic and wonderful when our kind of people.…white – especially Jewish, liberal/libertarian, wealthy, aristocratic (or with pretensions to aristocracy) do it …. and when one of our favorite corporations or corporate honchos are selling it and making tons of money off of it.

It’s suddenly terrible and awful when we use it to smear someone who isn’t one of us…who’s half-black, a socialist, possibly a foreigner, maybe even, God forbid, a “Muzzie.”

I saw this story in 2008.  But it’s far too speculative, irrelevant to public interest, and a horrendous abuse of privacy. It is really nothing more than an excuse to trash a dead woman in titillating terms that translate into website hits and media.

The sexual histories of presidential candidates (unless there is the possibility of blackmail) should be off-limits.

Even if there is a story involved (as in the Clinton sexual harassment/assault cases), it should be handled in a discreet manner, consonant with the dignity, right to privacy, and presumption of innocence of all people, even government operatives/bureaucrats.

The sexual histories of family members of political candidates are even less relevant than the candidates’ histories.

Besides those considerations, the photos themselves don’t amount to much. Anyone can dig up a picture on the net that bears a resemblance to someone. Ann is a common first name. There is surely an Ann of roughly the same physical proportions as Ms. Dunham who worked somewhere in the porn industry at some time.  A little photo-shopping, a refusal to cite sources (thank god for anonymous sources – they can tell you anything you want about your enemies, right?) – and there – a human being can be turned into a whore, pedophile, pimp, or anything else.

The dates don’t match. The photos don’t look alike. The whole thing is bogus.

But the damage is done.

A woman who isn’t here to defend herself is maligned in the worst way in a medium that is indelible, eternal and global.

This is the real truth of  the so-called “woman” friendly face of the West.

Scholar’s discovery reignites controversy over Jesus’ “wife”

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Theologian Mark D. Roberts explains why he’s not overwhelmed by new research that has turned up a 4th century fragment that refers to someone named Jesus having a wife. Notice how many of these “fragments” of later centuries keep showing up in revisionist texts. Before this, there was the Secret Gospel of Mark, which was used to argue that Jesus had homosexual relations with Lazarus and other young men who “loved him.”

I’m now waiting for “Fifty Shades of Jesus,” wherein it will be proved, in the style of all those sites promoting Christian porn or Christian BDSM, that Jesus was actually a sado-masochistic cannibal, who invited his followers to eat him and enjoyed his flagellation, torture and killing on the cross. [Note: THIS IS SARCASM]

The disturbing fact is that in an age of multiple-choice tests and zero-sum debates, the ability to place things in context, balance the weight of a piece of evidence against contradictory claims, the ability to study a text on its own terms without projecting onto it the prejudices and obsessions of the contemporary world, has vanished.

No matter how carefully a scholar frames a question, all the nuances are thrown aside when the media gets hold of a piece of information.

Mind you, I wouldn’t be surprised if Jesus was married.  It was a requirement among Jewish rabbis. Perhaps he was married when he was younger and his wife died. Or she herself became a teacher.  Or maybe she was a silent part of his ministry.  Who knows. Even, if against all odds, this new research finds support in the future,  I fail to see how it affects Jesus’ explicit teaching about sexuality. Nor does it alter the judgment of his contemporaries, as recorded in the Gospels, that “there was no sin found in him.”

Since they were looking very very hard for it, I think that’s fairly conclusive just there.

However, knowing that there are many people who have an axe to grind with the traditional Christian teaching that elevates celibacy (which is also elevated in Buddhism and Hinduism), I also know that it isn’t dispassionate scholarship or intellectual curiosity or respectful disagreement that drives these debates. Rather it is political activism that wants to rewrite the people and events of the past into forms more palatable to modern sensibility.  I have advice for them. If  you don’t like what Jesus had to say, don’t read him or follow him or try to follow him. Get a teacher after your own heart.

Dr. Mark D. Roberts:

“Did Jesus have a wife, after all?

Major news outlets, such as the New York Times, are reporting on the discovery of a new document that refers to Jesus’ wife. More precisely, a small fragment from a previously unknown document contains a statement by a character named “Jesus” referring to “my wife.”

Does this give us new historical evidence for the literal marriage of Jesus of Nazareth to some woman, perhaps Mary Magdalene?

Professor Karen King displays the fragment of the so-called Gospel of Jesus’s Wife. Photo from http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/090512_AncientPapyrus_1714_605.jpg

No, says Karen L. King, the scholar who recently revealed the existence of the manuscript fragment in which “Jesus” speaks of “my wife.” In an article to be published in the Harvard Theological Review, King writes:

This is the only extant ancient text which explicitly portrays Jesus as referring to a wife. It does not, however, provide evidence that the historical Jesus was married, given the late date of the fragment and the probable date of original composition only in the second half of the second century.

Near the end of her article, King, with contributions by AnneMarie Luijendijk, reiterates:

Does this fragment constitute evidence that Jesus was married? In our opinion, the late date of the Coptic papyrus (c. fourth century), and even of the possible date of composition in the second half of the second century, argues against its value as evidence for the life of the historical Jesus.

Of course, King’s measured judgment here will do little to stop the coming tidal wave of claims that we now have definitive evidence if not proof that Jesus was actually married. Dan Brown and his spokesman, Sir Leigh Teabing, appear to have been right all along! At least this is what we’ll hear in the days to come.

In fact, as Karen King rightly observes, the discovery and publication of the fragment known as the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife in fact tells us nothing about the first-century man we know as Jesus of Nazareth. If it is genuine, the fragment of the otherwise unknown document will tell us something about the beliefs of people who lived a century or two after Jesus, though what exactly we should conclude on the basis of this small piece of an ancient manuscript is yet to be determined.”

NBC video: Straining at gnats and swallowing camels

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Talk about straining at gnats and swallowing camels.

While pedo-rape-romance “Fifty Shades” has got its author a spot on the 100 most influential people in the world, in Walmart and on every magazine and news outlet, without much criticism, NBC has pulled a video of female athletes at the London Olympics because of  alleged “porny” content.

If you think showing athletes in admittedly skimpy outfits doing what they do in slow-motion with music behind is “porny,” by today’s standards, you must come from another planet.

Or, perhaps there’s an agenda?  NBC is after all the major media.

Is this a way to defuse criticism about the pornification of culture? Concede the issue where it’s non-existent, so you one can let the real offenders fly under the radar?

Sort of like celebrating Ramadan in the White House but toning down the Christian accoutrements, on one hand, while slyly promoting anti-Muslim rhetoric and psyops on the other.

Nader: Obama worse than Bush

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Update: Notice that Nader is the author of the piece on  Ron Paul on the list of top 100 influential people on Time’s 2012 list.

That list is pretty much a list of elite–approved figures. Of the two Indian figures on the list –

Anjali Gopalan is a gay rights advocate and her bio is written by Suketu Mehta (author of Maximum City and a Marxist writer given the “brown” beat in New York) and Mamata Banerjee is the  “strong woman” from Bengal who can out-Marx the Marxists.

The 2012 list also included E. L. James (the alias of Erika Leonard) of “Fifty Shades of Grey” (read by many astute critics as a manual of pedophilic rape and grooming), who is coyly described as a writer of “saucy” stories whose work has “deeply stirred” people.  The book, in my estimation, is not simply a mainstreaming of BDSM, or even of pedophilic rape (see my earlier blog post), but almost certainly an elite psyop full of trigger words and memes for any careful reader. If one believes in the existence of “Monarch mind-control” – and the evidence I’ve seen is suggestive but mostly speculative – this is surely an instance of it.

That Ron Paul figures on such a list is almost as good as placing a sticker on him with the word “elite-approved” on it.

His presence on the list also belies the notion that he is somehow a dark horse, being suppressed by the media.

I also noticed another figure promoted a lot at LRC – Salman Khan. And his write up is by Bill Gates.

ORIGINAL POST

Ralph Nader on the pros and cons of voting for Obama:

“He’s below average because he’s above average in his intellect and his knowledge of legality, which is violating with abandon.”

“I don’t know whether George W. Bush ever read the Constitution,” said Nader. “This man taught the Constitution, and this is what we got.”

Nader gave Obama this much: He’s the lesser of two evils when compared to GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney. But he said Obama is “the more effective evil because he brings credibility, he brings the democratic heritage to it, he has legitimized the lawless war-mongering and militarism abroad of George W. Bush.”

Comment:

This is why I don’t recommend voting for Obama, even if he is more the “peace” candidate than Romney… on paper.

In the first place, peace or war can be thrust on a president by external circumstances, so we can end up with war even if we did vote for Obama.

Second, Obama is quite an effective and plausible imperialist, being both brown-skinned (and thus more palatable when he’s assassinating brown folk) and smooth-talking. You could make a good case that ineffective evil is always to be preferred to effective evil. Having a Goldman Sachs-related, Wall Street hustler in office, with a Mormon background (not that I have anything against Mormons), might make it quite easy to unite people against the empire.

So, as I’ve been saying, forget about voting.  Don’t waste your time or energy or money. Save them for yourself.  Leave the handicapping to people paid to do it and take care of yourself first.

Anti-Zionist sites flirting with Nazism

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By a series of links involving the holocaust of Russians during the Stalin years, I landed up on a blog called ZionCrimeFactory.

Like many such blogs, it conflates being anti-Zionist with being pro-Nazi. While there is no need to exaggerate or embellish what Hitler did, there is a point when these sorts of blogs actually break with reality.

ZCF (which I won’t link) claims that Hitler wasn’t the murderous psychotic of  history books.

Fortunately, there was a time in my early teens when I was immersed in WW II history, and I still remember such books as the memoirs of Hitler’s chief of foreign intelligence, SS General Walter Schellenberg.

Schellenberg, a highly-ranked Nazi, describes the eugenicist projects of the Nazis, the arrangement of sexual unions between racially “superior” types, and many other repellent features of the Hitler regime that developed well before the events of the Holocaust.

To portray these developments as simply German nationalism resurgent is delusional.

Psychiatry online has a piece about the Nazi eugenicist program (h/t Henry Makow):

“By 1940, six killing centers designated as euthanasia institutions were established at Brandenburg, Grafeneck, Hartheim, Sonnenstein, Bernburg, and Hadamar. The Hadamar Psychiatric Institute near Wiesbaden, Germany, code-named “Facility-E,” was refashioned for use as a psychiatry euthanasia facility in November 1940. From mid-January 1941 under Dr. Ernst Baumhard’s direction, with a staff of approximately 100, busloads of patients arrived daily at the killing operation. The patients were offloaded, weighed, photographed, and led to the gas chamber disguised as a shower room in the cellar. At least 10,000 mentally ill adults were gassed and cremated at Hadamar in the first 9 months of 1941. In August 1942, after a short break, the facility again functioned as a euthanasia center, using lethal medication doses or starvation. After removal of various organs for medical research, the bodies were buried in F1 located on the hospital grounds. The killing center remained operational until its liberation by American troops on March 26, 1945 (4).

Operation-T4 claimed approximately 200,000 lives. Psychiatric euthanasia institutions served as training centers for the Schutzstaffel (SS) who used the experience to construct larger killing centers (Auschwitz, Treblinka, etc.). The psychiatrist Dr. Imfried Eberl, Treblinka’s first commandant and the only physician to command a death camp, established the facility following his experience as superintendent of Brandenburg Psychiatry Hospital (2).”

Back to ZionCrimeFactory, which sports the German double-eagle on its mast.

Here is typical headline on one of its articles: “Disease infested cockroach Nutanyahoo is a schizoid.”

This is of course the obverse of the racist language of Zionists about Muslims:

“When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.” Raphael Eitan.”

I don’t know who runs ZFC, but it’s amazing that genuinely anti-Semitic sites thrive and flourish, while reasonable criticism is marginalized.

It makes you wonder if such sites are set up by intelligence (or encouraged) to track potential trouble-makers or if there is really a resurgence of neo-Nazi thinking at the grass-roots.

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