Gandhi: Violence Is Better Than Cowardice

M.K.Gandhi:

No Cowardice

“I want both the Hindus and Mussalmans to cultivate the cool courage to die without killing. But if one has not that courage, I want him to cultivate the art of killing and being killed rather than, in a cowardly manner, flee from danger. For the latter, in spite of his flight, does commit mental himsa. He flees because he has not the courage to be killed in the act of killing. (YI, 20-10-1921, p335)

“My method of nonviolence can never lead to loss of strength, but it alone will make it possible, if the nation wills it, to offer disciplined and concerted violence in time of danger. (YI, 29-5-1924, p176)

“My creed of nonviolence is an extremely active force. It has no room for cowardice or even weakness. There is hope for a violent man to be some day non-violent, but there is none for a coward. I have, therefore, said more than once….that, if we do not know how to defend ourselves, our women and our places of worship by the force of suffering, i.e., nonviolence, we must, if we are men, be at least able to defend all these by fighting. (YI, 16-6-1927, p196)”

Is Peter Schiff A Racist?

Business Insider has run an article claiming that Peter Schiff, and by extension, all libertarians who believe in freedom of association, are actually covert (and not so covert) racists. The claim is they want to avoid hiring minorities, and are using “libertarianism” as a cover for that.

Well, freedom of association is not a cover for anything.  It is a cardinal principle of liberty.  Peter Schiff can and should be able to hire whom he wants in his private business.

But while Peter might not be a racist, he is almost certainly a good German..that is to say, a good Zionist. Which, these days, is also a good American. And latterly even a good Indian.

Like most good Americans, most good Israelis, and even quite a few good Indians, he sees the Anglo-Israeli “lebensraum” as legitimate, justified, and extending to other people’s property.  Indeed, everywhere. Full spectrum lebensraum.

What is the sound of a property right, if it is bull-dozed away in the night?

Can you hear it? Can you defend it?

If you don’t, doesn’t that make you a good Zionist? And isn’t a good Zionist no different from a good German?

What were the Germans doing except “getting what they had been denied before” ? Room to live. Even if the room was already occupied. Even if it meant driving the occupants into the streets. Or killing them. Or robbing them.

What are the property rights of Palestinians? How many Muslim lives does it take to keep Christendom guilt-free of its own Judenhass?

And should the rest of us, whose consciences aren’t burdened by any such guilt, make sure that no future age will judge us guilty likewise

The ISI And 9-11

Abid Ullah Jan, Pakistan Tribune, July 14, 2006

“With CIA backing and massive amounts of U.S. military aid, the ISI developed [since the early 1980s] into a parallel structure wielding enormous power over all aspects of government… The ISI had a staff composed of military and intelligence officers, bureaucrats, undercover agents and informers estimated at 150,000.6

The ISI actively collaborates with the CIA. It continues to perform the role of a ‘go-between’ in numerous intelligence operations on behalf of the CIA. The ISI had, and still has, access to considerable funding from the CIA. According to Selig Harrison, a leading American expert on South Asia with access to CIA officials, distribution of these funds has been left to the discretion of the ISI itself with whom “The CIA still has close links.” Harrison spoke to an audience of security experts in London at a conference on “Terrorism and regional security: Managing the challenges of Asia” in the last week of February, just before the Taliban’s destruction of the Buddha statues of Bamiyan. As a senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace from 1974 to 1996, he had been in close contact with the CIA.7

The ISI directly supported and financed a number of operations and organizations without realizing the seeds of destruction it was sowing for Pakistan. Mossad (the Israeli government’s intelligence agency) also became involved in these operations, in order to have access to the structure and operations of the ISI and Pakistan’s military. These are the lesser well-known facts.

The growing body of evidence suggests that the ISI was actively involved in part of Operation 9/11, where it was required to use its intelligence assets to frame Osama bin Laden for the planned 9/11 attacks. An elaborate operation was undertaken to develop evidence, linking Arabs to the 9/11 attacks, to pave the way for the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. A transfer of funds to the lead hijacker on the orders of the ISI chief is just one piece of the bigger picture. The FBI had this information—they knew exactly who was transferring funds to whom. Less than two weeks later, Agence France Presse (AFP) confirmed the FBI’s findings. According to the AFP report, the money used to finance the 9/11 attacks had allegedly been “wired to WTC hijacker Mohammed Atta from Pakistan, by Ahmad Umar Sheikh, at the instance of [ISI Chief] General Mahmood [Ahmad].”8 Dennis Lormel, director of the FBI’s Financial Crimes Unit, has confirmed that Saeed Sheikh transferred $100,000 to Mohammed Atta at the behest of General Mahmood Ahmed, head of the ISI, before the New York attacks.9 According to the AFP (quoting the intelligence source): “The evidence we have supplied to the U.S. is of a much wider range and depth than just one piece of paper linking a rogue general to some misplaced act of terrorism.”10

The questions remain: What did the U.S. government do with the information provided by the FBI and other sources with regard to the ISI’s involvement in 9/11? Why has there been no meaningful action and investigation? Why are U.S. officials not telling the truth? In a May 16, 2002 press conference on the role of General Mahmood Ahmad, a journalist asked Condoleezza Rice about her awareness of “the reports at the time that the ISI chief was in Washington on September 11th, and on September 10th $100,000 was wired from Pakistan to these groups.” She was also asked why General Mahmood was in the United States, and about his meeting with Condoleezza Rice. She replied: “I have not seen that report, and he was certainly not meeting with me.”11

Michel Chossudovsky concludes in his June 20, 2005 report, published by the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) that the ISI and CIA have developed close relationships, and that Condoleezza Rice was covering up the ISI Chief’s involvement in 9/11″

Malcolm X Fills In The Blanks For Peter S.

Somehow, in libertarian Peter Schiff’s vigorous and commendable defense of capitalism, he missed two crucial things, which, it seems, his fairly ignorant but feisty OccupationWallStreet interlocuters sensed, even if they too did not articulate it:

1. If capitalism is a moral system (which it is), then Peter Schiff is wrong to defend the system we have today as capitalistic.  Clearly it is not.

If Schiff was defending an ideal abstraction that he called capitalism that is not yet in place, he missed making that clear.

2. If OWS is wrong to deny the property rights of those who acquired them legally, then, Peter Schiff  commits another error, one of omission. He omitted any reference to the imperial foreign policy that undergirds the economy and ultimately delegitimizes Schiff’s own claims to his property as unassailable. of course, it also delegitimizes the claims of every other citizen of this country and of the rest of the Anglo-American imperium, as well as all other who profit from empire

But since OWS tried to attack Schiff’s property claims by asserting their own illegitimate claims, he was able to easily and (within that limited frame of reference) correctly refute them.

Thus, the media confrontation, in effect, only produced  the familiar propaganda binary:

Welfare Socialism in OWS

Versus

Warfare Capitalism in Schiff

And it did so even though I believe both OWS and Schiff wanted to articulate and plead for the real thing.

With the caveat that I believe violence in self-defense to be justifiable, I offer this from Malcolm X:

If violence is wrong in America, violence is wrong abroad. If it is wrong to be violent defending black women and black children and black babies and black men, then it is wrong for America to draft us, and make us violent abroad in defense of her. And if it is right for America to draft us, and teach us how to be violent in defense of her, then it is right for you and me to do whatever is necessary to defend our own people right here in this country.”

Malcolm X (1925 – 1965)

Who Guards The Guardian?

Gate-keeper of the left, The Guardian, has been attacking Gilad Atzmon for the “anti-Semitism” of his book on Jewish identity “The Wandering Who?” which tackles controversial questions about origin myths, race, and religion. It’s not the first time, and Atzmon is not the only one.

Wikileaks and Assange, as well as Chomsky, Hermann, and others, have come in for bashing.

Of course, I, like others, have had my problems with Assange and with Chomsky too. But for altogether different reasons.  Both seemed to me to be engaged in a kind of misdirection. Others whom I respect have agreed with that take.

But The Guardian‘s criticism, especially of Assange, seems to stem from professional rivalry.  I say that because The Guardian supported the intervention in Libya, while Assange, though he has distanced himself from NATO’s bombing, takes credit for inspiring the rebels.

So it is likely not really a difference in ideology that’s split them.

Wikispooks explains:

“The Guardian’s discrediting of the “left” – the left being a concept never defined by the paper’s writers – is far from taking place in a fair battle of ideas. Not least the Guardian is backed by the huge resources of its corporate owners. When it attacks dissident writers, they can rarely, if ever, find a platform of equal prominence to defend themselves. And the Guardian has proved itself more than reluctant to allow a proper right of reply in its pages to those it maligns.

But also, and most noticeably, it almost never engages with these dissident writers’ ideas. In popular terminology, it prefers to play the man, not the ball. Instead it creates labels, from the merely disparaging to the clearly defamatory, that push these writers and thinkers into the territory of the unconscionable.

A typical example of the Guardian’s new strategy was on show this week in an article in the print edition’s comment pages – also available online and a far more prestigious platform than CiF – in which the paper commissioned a socialist writer, Andy Newman, to argue that the Israeli Jewish musician Gilad Atzmon was part of an anti-semitic trend discernible on the left……..

….As is now typical in this new kind of Guardian character assassination, the article makes no effort to prove that Atzmon is anti-semitic or to show that there is any topical or pressing reason to bring up his presumed character flaw. (In passing, the article made a similar accusation of anti-semitism against Alison Weir of If Americans Knew, and against the Counterpunch website for publishing an article on Israel’s role in organ-trafficking by her.)

Atzmon has just published a book on Jewish identity, The Wandering Who?, that has garnered praise from respected figures such as Richard Falk, an emeritus law professor at Princeton, and John Mearsheimer, a distinguished politics professor at Chicago University.

But Newman did not critique the book, nor did he quote from it. In fact, he showed no indication that he had read the book or knew anything about its contents…..

… the Guardian was happy to offer its imprimatur to Newman’s defamation of Atzmon, who was described as a conspiracy theorist “dripping with contempt for Jews”, despite an absence of substantiating evidence. Truly worthy of Pravda in its heyday.

The Atzmon article appeared on the same day the Guardian carried out a similar hatchet job, this time on Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks. The paper published a book review of Assange’s “unauthorised autobiography” by the Guardian’s investigations editor, David Leigh…..

…..The low point in Leigh’s role in this saga is divulging in his own book a complex password Assange had created to protect a digital file containing the original and unedited embassy cables. Each was being carefully redacted before publication by several newspapers, including the Guardian……

….Some of this clearly reflects a clash of personalities and egos, but it also looks suspiciously like the feud derives from a more profound ideological struggle between the Guardian and Wikilieaks about how information should be controlled a generation hence. The implicit philosophy of Wikileaks is to promote an ever-greater opening up and equalisation of access to information, while the Guardian, following its commercial imperatives, wants to ensure the gatekeepers maintain their control.”

Hitler Was Not A German Nazi; He Was A “German Nazi”…

NOTE:

When I wrote about Christian Zionism and the targets of my criticism were Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and others, I really do not recall getting anything but positive mail. No-one took me to task for criticizing Christians or Protestants or Anglos or blacks. Nor did anyone criticize me for attacking Hindutvadi ideologues. But when the target is Zionism and the person is Jewish, how suddenly the tune changes. How suddenly I am told that the word itself is “racist” and anti-Jewish.

There is a word for this. Servility. It is beneath the dignity of any writer to bow and scrape for the privilege of throwing out a few scraps of truth.  I would not bother to blog if I had to be mealy-mouthed and opportunistic in my thinking. I would not call that thinking, but a kind of abasement of the spirit.

ORIGINAL POST

The Daily Bell explains why it is entirely false to say Hitler was a German Nazi. He was actually only a “German” and a “Nazi” not a German Nazi.

Still don’t get it? Me neither, but here it is, with some substitutions made to clarify things:

“We don’t buy off on the meme of the evil, Zionist Jew, evil, Nazi Germans, either. We would tend to categorize this as yet another promotional meme of the elite – that Israeli Zionists Nazi  Germans ran the world.Germany. Those who talk this way are inevitably branded as anti-Semites anti-German, their sentiments devalued, their credibility undermined. And that’s the plan, isn’t it?

Impossibly powerful “Jewish” “German” central banking military families have ensured the effectiveness of this meme over the past 50 years.”

Comment:

This seems to translate into the following:

“Nazi Germans did not run Germany. That was just a meme intended to discredit people who used it by inviting allegations of anti-Germanism. Only anti-Germans could possibly consider Nazi Germans to be evil. They weren’t even Nazis. They were six thousand year old diabolical pedophile Satanists pretending to be “Nazis.” Thus we should analyze Satanism, not Nazism, for an explanation of the Holocaust.”

So, you have libertarians who think that the last 6000 years of history in the West and every ideological stream and major conflict in it were creations of a handful of powerful Satanic families sharing the same bloodlines (!) who are “Jewish” but not Jewish.

And that, for your information, is NOT anti-Semitic.

But if someone writes that the Anglo-American imperium is a  Zionist operation, and calls Zionism a racist political ideology, then that is anti-Semitic, or liable to being read as such.

The analysis is as strange as anything I’ve read, with all due respect to the hard-working Bell editors.

Anti-Semitism is no more than a censor’s term. It  censors the deconstruction of a racist ideology, which, as I have said any number of times, uses Israel.

Israel is thus a central part of the ideology, but Zion itself doesn’t refer solely to Israel.

Nor are Zionists Israelis, necessarily. A whole lot of them are Americans (like Bush, Cheney, and Obama) or Europeans (Sarkozy, Blair). Some are Iranians and Indians. Some are Christians ( like Michele Bachmann), Hindu (check out the Facebook page of Hindu Zionists), and even Muslim.

Zion, one last time, refers to the Promised Kingdom, to the “Shining City On A Hill” (that would be what Ronald Reagan meant when he equated America to the city on the hill).

It is the kingdom of god on earth. It is thus a Utopian ideology, as many such ideologies are.

I leave it to any sensible reader to figure out which of the two descriptions of the origins of the globalists’ new order –   in early modern politico-theological ideology, or in a six-thousand-year old Satanic cult –  is credible, and which is simply a hoary trope that really does have racist implications.

What is my explanation of these strange locutions?

The Bell is based in Switzerland, which is subject to European law. Under European law it is considered anti-Semitic to even equate Zionism to Nazism or to oppose the legitimacy of Israel, or to attack Zionism, without in the same breath attacking Islamicist ideologues and terrorists. [Of course, this standard doesn’t apply to any other religion or race or country, which on its face is evidence of the frankly supremacist thinking behind Zionism]

Well, that is the case also in the US. However, in Europe and in Canada, you can also go to jail for flouting the prohibition. In the US, so far, you will not.  In fact,  websites that are really anti-Semitic, espousing biological determinism, and advocating legal sanctions against Jewish people, have not vanished.

Contrary to popular opinion, anti-Semitism is not what gets you cybergulag, libel suits, and other such intimidation. No sir. The elites love anti-Semitic rhetoric, as they love racist or misogynistic rhetoric. It drives ratings and controversy.

What the elites cannot stand are two types of critic:

1. Critics who deconstruct the elites rationally in a way that is consistent with the elites’ own intellectual sensibilities and moral yardsticks, thus providing a defensible intellectual basis for political action against them.

2. Whistle-blowers or researchers who provide the evidence for effective legal/political action against them.

One cannot prosecute lizards, shape-shifting reptiles, Merovingian bloodlines, German death-cults or by-gone Frankist heresies.

Not so with Zionist financiers.

If what I said were not true, ask why it is that 9/11 research and naked-short selling are also taboo? Ask why the Tea-Party, which did not see either bankers or money as evil, was quickly demonized and co-opted by the media and the corporate elites, but OccupationWallStreet, which really does see money and banking as evil, has been embraced by them? [Correction, Nov. 1]:

Part of OWS, the part that wants more regulations and wants more debt, has been embraced by the elites. The part that is against financial crime Wall Street financiers and against Zionism has been demonized. That should tell you in which direction any sane opponent of globalism should head. We should be supporting the prosecution of financial crime at the highest level, and here again, nuance is needed. We should oppose the demonization and prosecution of petty financial wrong-doers, who become scape-goats for public anger, and should pursue the highest level. In other words, crimes directly connected to 9-11 and the financial coup.

Notice where the counter attacks have been directed.

Jimmy Carter was targeted with a lawsuit for writing critically about Israel. Eliot Spitzer former NY AG has been sued. In a  Salon piece, Spitzer identified Marsh & McLennan officials as corrupt (M&M is one of the outfits close to the 9-11 story). He has now been sued for libel for $90 million.

The financial site, Deep Capture , which attempts to trace the connections between the media, the Russian Jewish mafia, Islamic jihadi networks and the market collapse, has been blocked on the web, following a Supreme Court order from British Columbia.  The American courts have not allowed RICO to be invoked in Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne’s lawsuit against Goldman Sachs.

It goes on.

Each time, the target is always someone with information that could unravel the actual mechanism by which the globalists hijacked this country and the “international community,” a.k.a. Anglo-America, Europe and their satellites and allies.

Short answer: Uncovering the truth about 9-11, prosecuting criminal market manipulation, and ending the fiat-money scam will stop the whole globalist/Zionist juggernaut.

The 20..er 4… Companies That Rule The World..And The Folks Who Rule Them

Some bi-partisan unveiling going on here.

From Forbes (via DailyBell):

The Top Twenty Corporate Owners

1. Barclays plc
2. Capital Group Companies Inc
3. FMR Corporation
4. AXA
5. State Street Corporation
6. JP Morgan Chase & Co
7. Legal & General Group plc
8. Vanguard Group Inc
9. UBS AG
10. Merrill Lynch & Co Inc
11. Wellington Management Co LLP
12. Deutsche Bank AG
13. Franklin Resources Inc
14. Credit Suisse Group
15. Walton Enterprises LLC (holding company for Wal-Mart heirs)
16. Bank of New York Mellon Corp
17. Natixis
18. Goldman Sachs Group Inc
19. T Rowe Price Group Inc
20. Legg Mason Inc

Forbes again:

McGraw-Hill, which owns Standard & Poor’s, Northwestern Mutual, which owns Russell Investments, the index arm of which runs the benchmark Russell 1,000 and Russell 3,000, CME Group which owns 90% of Dow Jones Indexes, and Barclay’s, which took over Lehman Brothers and its Lehman Aggregate Bond Index, the dominant world bond fund index. Together, these four firms dominate the world of indexing. And in turn, that means they hold real sway over the world’s money.

: McGraw-Hill, which owns Standard & Poor’s, Northwestern Mutual, which owns Russell Investments, the index arm of which runs the benchmark Russell 1,000 and Russell 3,000, CME Group which owns 90% of Dow Jones Indexes, and Barclay’s, which took over Lehman Brothers and its Lehman Aggregate Bond Index, the dominant world bond fund index. Together, these four firms dominate the world of indexing. And in turn, that means they hold real sway over the world’s money.

Comment

I looked up who owns McGraw-Hill and found this table:

Institution Name Shs Held Shs Chg %Chg $Chg* %Out %Port Rpt Date
Capital World Investors 31,159,100 -6,339,850 -16.9 -171,580,752 10.6 0.5 06-30-11
State Street Global Advisors (US) 13,046,371 -173,089 -1.3 25,926,684 4.4 0.1 06-30-11
Vanguard Group, Inc. 13,022,395 321,411 2.5 45,349,804 4.4 0.1 06-30-11
OppenheimerFunds, Inc. 11,553,986 -29,548 -0.3 27,836,312 3.9 0.8 06-30-11
BlackRock Institutional Trust Company, N.A. 11,437,422 -273,183 -2.3 17,944,520 3.9 0.1 06-30-11
T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. 9,984,354 -138,706 -1.4 19,595,712 3.4 0.1 06-30-11
Dodge & Cox 9,054,283 1,909,006 26.7 97,941,088 3.1 0.4 06-30-11
Fiduciary Management, Inc. 6,596,124 354,690 5.7 30,531,056 2.2 2.6 06-30-11
AllianceBernstein L.P. 5,046,393 4,467,373 771.5 188,680,944 1.7 0.1 06-30-11
Independent Franchise Partners LLP 4,588,798 425,243 10.2 28,272,456 1.6 7.3 06-30-11
Fayez Sarofim & Co. 3,838,121 -173,010 -4.3 2,817,090 1.3 0.7 06-30-11
Deutsche Asset Management Americas 3,793,296 -76,183 -2.0 6,519,562 1.3 0.3 06-30-11
Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM) 3,603,487 722,926 25.1 34,675,364 1.2 0.1 12-31-10
Pioneer Investment Management, Inc. 3,379,654 -17,436 -0.5 7,795,953 1.2 0.6 06-30-11
Robeco Institutional Asset Management B.V.

I followed up on that and came across the interesting and little-known fact that the largest securities company in the world is something called State Street Corporation (which owns the second-largest number of shares in McGraw-Hill). Fortunately, I didn’t have to dig further, since the hard-working folks at Firedoglake had already done the spade-work:

Firedoglake:

“State Street Corporation is listed on the NYSE, ticker symbol STT, and let me express my surprised face, to discover that a major holder of State Street Corporation is BlackRock at 2.4%.

So BlackRock invests in State Street who owns Blackrock’s nearest competitor who then both have major positions in McGraw-Hill which maintains the wholly owns subsidiary S&P. Where is the line drawn between one company and the other? Legally I am sure its all up and up since their lobbyists wrote the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act which Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan, and my personal favorite Larry Summers who told then President Clinton was a fantastic idea. Time Magazine then trumpted them ‘The Committee To Save The World‘. How’d all that savey-world stuff work out for ya?

Then there is BlackRock. They are a massive globo-zilla private equity firm formed in 1988 by Laurence Fink (from what is now called Credit-Suisse First Boston) and Robert S. Kapito. They are now the largest manager of the State Street invention “Exchange Traded Funds”. Also they are a private equity firm so they do not have the regulatory burden lapdog the SEC would have imposed on them. That is if SEC actually did their job instead of serving corporate masters rather than the large and small investors they are supposed to be protecting from fraud.

Laurence while still at First Boston co-created the first Collateralized (sic) Mortgage Obligations for… wait for it… Freddie Mac way back in 1983!”

Nude Posture Photos: Eugenicist Past Of The Ivy League

The ideas that have come out of America’s Ivy League (Keynesianism, radical feminism, cultural Marxism) tend to be granted the presumption that they’re “progressive” or “liberal” or at least “high-minded”. It’s time this presumption was erased. We’ve known for a while that leading universities have pursued such ethically questionable areas of research as bio-weapons and mind-control.

But, as this 1995 article shows, even their routine practices have been tainted: the nude photographing of  entering students at prominent colleges surely displays a disturbing resemblance to eugenicist practices from the Nazi period.

The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal

Ron Rosenbaum, NY Times, 1995

“To Elderkin, Sheldon was no mere body-typer: he was a true philosophe, “the first to introduce holistic perspective” to American science, a proto-New Ager. Elderkin became Sheldon’s research associate, his trusty cameraman and a kind of private eye, compiling case histories of Sheldon’s posture nudes to confirm Sheldon’s theories about physique and destiny. He also witnessed Sheldon’s downfall.

…….

In 1987, the curators of the National Anthropological Archives acquired the remains of Sheldon’s life work, which were gathering dust in “dead storage” in a Goodwill warehouse in Boston. While there were solid archival reasons for making the acquisition, the curators are clearly aware that they harbor some potentially explosive material in their storage rooms. And they did not make it easy for me to gain access.

On my first visit, I was informed by a good-natured but wary supervisor that the restrictive grant of Sheldon’s materials by his estate would permit me to review only the written materials in the Sheldon archives. The actual photographs, he said, were off-limits. To see them, I would have to petition the chief of archivists. Determined to pursue the matter to the bitter end, I began the process of applying for permission.

Meanwhile, I plunged into the written material hoping to find answers to several unresolved mysteries. Although I did not find substantiation in those files for Hersey’s belief that Sheldon was actively engaged in a master-race eugenic project, I did find stunning confirmation of Hersey’s charge that Sheldon held racist views.

In Box 43 I came across a document never referred to in any of the literature on Sheldon I’d seen. It was a faded offprint of a 1924 Sheldon study, “The Intelligence of Mexican Children.” In it are damning assertions presented as scientific truisms that “Negro intelligence” comes to a “standstill at about the 10th year,” Mexican at about age 12. To the author of such sentiments, America’s elite institutions entrusted their student bodies.

Another box held clues to the truth behind Nora Ephron’s tale about smoking and organ size. It turned out to be true that a research arm of the tobacco industry had sponsored studies on the relationship between masculinity and smoking, and that the studies had involved Sheldonian posture photos of Harvard men — although there is no evidence that the criterion of masculinity was the “obvious one” referred to by Ephron. I located a fascinating report on this research in a December 1959 issue of the respected journal Science, a report titled “Masculinity and Smoking.” According to the article, and contrary to the rumor, it is “not strength but weakness of the masculine component” that is “more frequent in the heavier smokers.” Here, perhaps, is the most profound cultural legacy of the Sheldonian posture-photo phenomenon: the blueprint for the sexual iconography of tobacco advertising. If, in fact, heavy smokers looked more like Harvard nerds than Marlboro men, why not use advertising imagery to make Harvard nerds feel like virile cowboys when they smoked?………

….THREE MONTHS LATER, I FINALLY SUCCEEDED IN gaining permission to study the elusive posture photos. As I sat at my desk in the reading room, under a portrait of Chief Blue Eagle, the long-sought cache materialized. A curator trundled in a library cart from the storage facility. Teetering on top of the cart were stacks of big, gray cardboard boxes. The curator handed me a pair of the white cotton gloves that researchers must use to handle archival material.

The contents of the boxes were described in an accompanying “Finder’s Aid” in this fashion: BOX 90 YALE UNIVERSITY CLASS OF 1971

Negatives. Full length views of nude freshmen men, front, back and rear. Includes weight, height, previous or maximum weight, with age, name, or initials. BOX 95 MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE PHOTOGRAPHS

Negatives. Made in 1950. Full length views of nude women, front, back and rear. Includes height, weight, date and age. Includes some photographs marked S.P.C.

Among the other classes listed in the Finder’s Aid were: the Yale classes of ’50, ’63, ’64, ’66 and ’71; the Princeton class of ’52; Smith ’50 and ’52; Vassar ’42 and ’52; Mount Holyoke ’53; Swarthmore ’51; University of California ’61 and ’67; Hotchkiss ’71; Syracuse ’50; University of Wisconsin ’53; Purdue ’53; University of Pennsylvania ’51, and Brooklyn College ’51 and ’52. There were also undated photos from the Oregon Hospital for the Criminally Insane (which I could not distinguish in any way from the Ivy League photos). All told, there were some 20,000 photographs of men — 9,000 from Yale — and 7,000 of women……..

… the faces of the women were another story. I was surprised at how many looked deeply unhappy, as if pained at being subjected to this procedure. On the faces of quite a few I saw what looked like grimaces, reflecting pronounced discomfort, perhaps even anger.

I was not much more comfortable myself sitting there in the midst of stacks of boxes of such images. There I was at the end of my quest. I’d tracked down the fabled photographs, but the lessons of the posture-photo ritual were elusive.

“THERE’S A TREMENDOUS LESSON HERE,” MISS manners declares. “Which is that one should have sympathy and tolerance for respectable women from whose past naked pictures suddenly show up. One should think of the many times where some woman becomes prominent like Marilyn Monroe and suddenly there are nude pictures in her past. Shouldn’t we be a little less condemning of someone in that position?”

A little less condemning of the victims, yes, certainly. (I speak as one myself, although it turned out that my photo was burned in the Yale bonfire of the late 70’s.) But what about the perpetrators? What could have possessed so many elite institutions of higher education to turn their student bodies over to the practitioners of what now seems so dubious a science project?

It’s a question that baffles the current powers that be at Ivy League schools. The response of Gary Fryer, Yale’s spokesman, is representative: “We searched, but there’s nobody around now who was involved with the decision.” Even so, he assures me, nothing like it could happen again; concerns about privacy have heightened, and, as he puts it, “there’s now a Federal law against disclosing anything in a college student’s record to any outsider without written permission.”

In other words, “We won’t get fooled again.” Though he is undoubtedly correct that nothing precisely like the posture-photo folly could happen again, it is hard to deny the possibility, the likelihood, that well-meaning people and institutions will get taken in — are being taken in — by those who peddle scientific conjecture as certainty. Sheldon’s dream of reducing the complexity of human personality and the contingency of human fate to a single number is a recurrent one, as the continuing I.Q. controversy demonstrates. And a reminder that skepticism is still valuable in the face of scientific claims of certainty, particularly in the slippery realms of human behavior.”

The New World Order: Bear-Baiting, But No Bread….

From Craig Murray.org

The barefaced lie about Gadaffi being killed in the crossfire bodes ill for the openness, transparency and good government we can expect to see now in Libya. But today I am worrying about the effect on our society of human death as entertainment. I have never been an apologist for Gadaffi, but if his regime tortured and murdered, the remedy is not to torture and murder him – even the Nazis were given due process.

This murder is becoming the norm. It was a NATO air strike which took out Gadaffi’s escaping convoy and first wounded him. Two days ago two teenage sons of Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical US/Yemeni cleric executed without trial last week, were executed by a US drone attack as they had dinner. They were aged 16 and 19. They had committed no crime I can find alleged against them. There has been no publicity.

All this killing brings triumphalist politicians smirking on our screens. We seem to have become as dehumanised as ancient Rome. Little human pity is expressed for the way Gadaffi was killed – indeed there is notably less media reflection of pity or revulsion than there was at the (at least judicial) hanging of Saddam Hussein. Is that a measure of the descent into bloodlust barbarism in our society? The complete lack of empathy towards the traveller families being torn from their homes at Dale Farm is part of the same brutalism towards “the other”. Why don’t we go the whole way and have them eaten by lions in the ring?

History shows that bloody appetite once aroused feeds upon itself. We have already had Defence Secretary Hammond on Sky News today positing NATO action now against Syria, while the current US proto-pretext for attacking Iran – the fantasy plot against the Saudi Ambassador – is as believable as Gadaffi’s death in the crossfire.

More death is on the way, to keep the circus going. Then the crowds may not notice there is no bread – no jobs, and their earnings and income eaten up by huge state enforced transfers to the bankers, whether by bailouts or “quantitive easing”.

Comment:

If anyone by now cannot see that US foreign policy, post 9-11, has been radically anti-Christian, no matter how much “Judeo-Christian” rhetoric about “ethics”, “human rights,” and “the rule of law” is thrown around, they are willfully blind.

This is not war on Islam alone. Islam is simply a proxy for the traditional world, its values, its beliefs, its worth.  This is war that dispenses with all of it.  This is war, started by covert action, waged by deception and lies, and completed with savage blood-letting of a kind repugnant to any notion of just war or law, in traditional religion or humanism.

Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, presumably Syria and Iran as well.  The Zionists – for that is who they are – declare themselves against all standards. The pretense of humanism and secularism has long been dropped. The glorying in power is evident in the response of the elites to the killing of Gaddafi.

Hillary Clinton, uncrowned queen of the future feminist supranational order of Gaia, heiress apparent to the bankers’ throne,  cackled.

Father Coomaraswamy On The Soul Of The Church

Father Rama Coomaraswamy on the compatibility of Hinduism and Catholicism:

“Let me speak to the matter of my conversion in which discussion I sense an ad hominum intent. Conversion is both a complex and a simple matter dependent on the grace of God. If I was taught as a Hindu to love and serve God, why would I not continue to believe that when I became a Catholic? And what is surprising about feeling uncomfortable in a purely secular society? I studied the Faith for some two years before seeking baptism.

I have a somewhat unusual background, Deo gratias. My family has included both Jesuit priests and Hindu monks. I was as young man first introduced to the reality of God by a Tibetan monk. I have lived with Hindus and Sufi Muslims as well as with many wonderful Catholics. Many of these individuals feel about their religion much as I do about mine, I proffer no judgment about their beliefs, I know they are men of prayer and love God and feel they may well fall into those that St Pius X said belong to the soul of the Church. But as Muslims are fond of saying, “God knows best.” This does not mean that I am against conversion, and I am happy to preach when opportunity arises, “Christ, and Christ Crucified.” It should be absolutely clear that no one can be saved by error. Those outside the Church who are saved, are saved by the divine Word (logos) which is Our Lord Jesus Christ.

Since my conversion I have never departed from the traditional Catholic faith, though I have often fallen from grace. I think my writings bear witness to my orthodoxy. I think any aspersions cast upon my Catholicism are completely unjustified.”