Author Archives: Lila

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.

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.”

Draupadi Disrobed: India Strip-Searched By US…..

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Draupadi disrobed in the Mahabharat

Credit for image of Draupadi vastraharan to Naari.com

“When the US tows away a Russian diplomat’ car in Washington for a parking violation, six US diplomatic cars disappear in Moscow. The Russian car then magically appears with apology.

That is the type of diplomacy we need.”

This was a comment I saw posted at the Indian news site, Firstpost.com, below an article on the unequal “relationship” between the US and  India, as evidenced in the Devyani Khobragade case.

India is claiming “victory” …….even though a senior female diplomat still faces indictment and a possible 10 year sentence and was strip-searched and cavity-inspected, for an allegation over what amounts to a routine visa issue.

Meanwhile, not even a criminal case was registered against Wayne May (the State Dept Security chief in New Delhi who is behind the whole affair.

May was guilty of subversion of the Indian judiciary, actual trafficking, and tax and visa fraud.

Further clarification of  a canard being circulated that Khobragade was lying.

Devyani Khobragade says she was strip-searched, DNA swabbed, and cavity-searched, multiple times.

The US Marshals deny that she was cavity-searched but admit she underwent a standard procedure strip-search.

So who is telling the truth? Devyani or the Marshals?

BOTH. There is just a confusion of terms.

Under US law today (ratified by Supreme Court in a 2012 case), arrests are accompanied by strip-searches.

1 The standard procedure of a strip-search

This is what the US Marshals admitted happened.

It involves the removal of all clothes and examination of all bodily cavities, including mouth, nose, ears, eyes, genitals and rectum.

It involves “baring of the labia.” That can be done multiple times.

It includes DNA swabbing and recording (for security purposes).

As we now know, the US has a vast espionage and surveillance network and nearly all sensitive nodes of telecom and electronic communication are monitored centrally.

Thus, images of such a search WOULD HAVE BEEN RECORDED AND SHARED WITH SPY AGENCIES. THAT IS GUARANTEED.

These images can then be transferred to private corporations, working with the United States Government (and Israel.

Israel has complete access via backdoors in the electronic equipment as well as more directly).

Corporation working with the spy agencies and with the USG include Facebook, Microsoft,  Google, Digg, Verizon, Brighthouse and many many more.

There is immense  potential here for black-mail against a political figure like Khobragade, from a political family tied to the Dalit vote-bank (voting power of the lower caste/untouchable community), a prize for both Congress and the BJP.

Indeed, we don’t know that black-mail has not ALREADY occurred behind closed doors.

Extortion of the Khobragade family would mean extortion of the Ministry of External Affairs (foreign office of New Delhi), in which Uttam Khobragade, Devyani’s father, has power.

The MEA and the US Embassy in New Delhi were at logger-heads for some time before this episode

“Jail Strip Searches: The light at the end of the tunnel was not a train,” Gary W. De Land, Directors of Jail Operations, Utah’s Sheriff’s Association gives a detailed history of the litigation over strip-searches as well as the often confused terminology, from the perspective of someone in favor of more wide-spread use of strip-searches.  His description of the standard strip-search, including visual inspection of cavities (which he terms relatively useless since the cavities cannot actually be seen)

“The early strip search cases created a bit of confusion over what a strip search is. Part of that confusion was use of the term “body cavity search” or “visual body cavity search.”

The terms seem to imply searches actually probe or look inside of the rectum or vagina which was not the case.

The body-cavity searches were those where the male was required to lift his genitals for visual inspection to see if contraband was being hidden and bending or squatting to allow visual inspection of the anus (an external inspection). For females, prisoners were required to bend and spread their buttocks and/or squat to permit an visual inspection of the external genitalia and anus.

The Supreme Court commented on the different and confusing meanings that have been applied in various cases to “strip searches.”

The term is imprecise. It may refer simply to the instruction to remove clothing while an officer observes from a distance of, say, five feet or more; it may mean a visual inspection from a closer, more uncomfortable distance; it may include directing detainees to shake their heads or to run their hands through their hair to dislodge what might be hidden there; or it may involve instructions to raise arms, to display foot insteps, to expose the back of the ears, to move or spread the buttocks or genital areas, or to cough in a squatting position.

The impact of the Florence ruling is that the term “strip search” now covers each of the different levels of intrusion listed above. Since the so-called visual body-cavity searches are permitted without reasonable suspicion, then certainly the less intrusive strip searches are also authorized. It is now appropriate for jail officials to simply refer to levels levels of unclothed searches as strip searches.”

B. The procedure called a “cavity search”

Devyani mistakenly used this term, when she should have used the term “cavity inspection.”

That is understandable since in India, BOTH procedures would be considered custodial rape.

Cavity search (probe)  involves digital probing of the cavities (insertion of fingers or fists into rectums or vaginas).

This is literally sodomizing of an innocent person, on mere charges or suspicion.

“Probing” did NOT happen, which is why the US Marshals are denying the story.

Devyani used the wrong term, but she is not lying, just using the wrong terminology.

The standard inspection of the cavities would in fact be brutal and demeaning enough on its own.

The US apparently misjudged how people would react and then tried to muddy the affair by flooding the media with allegations and statements from the US prosecutor and the alleged victim.

In effect, this is a way to try the case in the media and cover up their own outrageous position.

The hoax video that was released on the net, showing the gang-rape of  Devyani, was apparently intended to muddy the story.

Perhaps that was so as to make it appear that the reaction was a misplaced reaction to exaggerated reports.

My first book “Language of Empire” dealt with such “hoaxes” and the problems they create.

Notice, as well, that almost immediately after the Facebook statements of the May surfaced, how another “gang-rape” allegation has surfaced from Delhi, this time by a Danish woman.

Yet, the police did not find any injuries consistent with a gang-rape and she refused to undergo a medical examination in Delhi.

She is using medical evidence from Denmark to press her case.

This is an extraordinary case from the point of view of setting precedents, because it means that the Delhi police might from now on be sued based on evidence cooked up abroad and concocted for political purposes.

Now, we see the political motivation behind the drum-beat about a “rape crisis” in Delhi

even while the rate of rape in the UK, for example, is ten time that in India, and although India is not to be found in the top ten countries for high rape rates, while the US, the UK, New Zealand, Sweden, and Belgium all are.

Read about the 25 signs of the Nazification of the US police-state.

“Language Of Empire” Influences Lankan Human Rights Debate

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Lankan minister and eminent writer/teacher Rajiva Wijesinha gave a  thumbs-up to “Language of Empire” in March on Lanka Web.

I couldn’t be more pleased. The minister, a part of the Rajapaksha government, was sent the book by someone who wanted to inform him about the depth of propaganda in the Western media.

Wijesinha, like many others, had been wondering about the manipulation of the international “human rights” agenda (the game of who gets to call what a genocide).

This manipulation has been termed Human Rights Imperialism by Jean Bricmont.

In this case,  the manipulators are the Tamil Tigers and Eelam separatists and their new-found supporters in the West, including Ron Paul’s legal advisor, one Bruce Fein.

The evident purpose of the manipulation is the continuance and augmentation of a covert war on the island….and on India….in an area of great strategic importance to Western interests

….that is not too far from Tamil Nadu with its huge concentration of foreign and domestic corporate interests and its nuclear reactors – one at Chennai and the other at Kudankulam, bordering the ocean, just opposite Sri Lanka. Kudankulam has been the site of intense anti-nuclear activism, which seems to have a covert political agenda and is apparently financed from abroad.

Of-course, India’s nuclear policy itself  seems to have come with foreign strings attached, so there is nothing to choose between the two sides.

Rajiv Malhotra’s “Breaking India” describes this long-term policy and its role in creating, sustaining, and manipulating Dravidian identity politics in Tamil Nadu as part of the creation of a larger Afro-Dravidian identity that has global consequences that play into Western geopolitical goals.

The manipulation of Nicholas Berg’s killing makes for interesting reading from this angle and throws a good deal of light on, among other things, the images of the alleged torture and assassination of Tiger leader Prabhakaran’s son, Balachandra, which became a cause celebre in the strange, seemingly “fanned” anti-Lanka rioting in Tamil Nadu, in March-April.

Wijesinha writes (“Dealing With Allegations of War Crimes,” March 10, 2013, LankaWeb):

“Some weeks back I was sent, by a friend in England, a book entitled The Language of Empire: Abu Ghraib and the American Media. It was by someone called Lila Rajiva, but doubtless that was not the only reason to assume it would interest me.

I took some time to start on the book but, once I did so, it had to be finished. Published in 2005, it is a graphic and convincing account of the manner in which the Americans ignored all moral restraint in the war against terrorism they were engaged in.


Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq

That part was convincing, and simply fleshed out what one knows anyway, that countries in pursuing their own interests will stop at nothing. What was more startling was the suggestion that the wholesale prevalence of this absolutist mindset also represented a takeover of the ruling political dispensation by a culture of chicanery that strikes at the heart of supposedly predominant American values.

At the core of this transformation is the corporate supremacy represented most obviously by Rumsfeld and Cheney, and the takeover of much supposedly military activity by private contractors and special agents, who move with seamless dexterity from one world to another. Exemplifying this, and indicative of what C S Lewis would have described as a Hideous Strength which finds its own partisans dispensable, is the strange story of Nicholas Berg, the shadowy contractor whose beheading served to deflect the story of torture at Abu Ghraib, and in some minds excuse the institutionalized torture that was taking place there.

Weapons of mass destruction

The book should be essential reading for those concerned not just with human rights, but with human civilization….”

Read the rest at Lanka Web.

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.

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.”

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.

The three qualities of action and the chakras

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From Hinduism Today:

“Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami, my Gurudeva and founder of Hinduism Today, gave” a succinct description of our divine nature: Deep inside we are perfect this very moment, and we have only to discover and live up to this perfection to be whole. We have taken birth in a physical body to grow and evolve into our divine potential. We are inwardly already one with God. Our religion contains the knowledge of how to realize this oneness and not create unwanted experiences along the way.”

These opposite perspectives on man’s nature–sinner and divinity–were candidly juxtaposed during a 2012 interfaith panel discussion in Midland, Texas, at which I represented Hinduism. The issue arose as clergy from five faiths responded to the question “In your faith, is humanity considered a one family?”

My answer was: “The Hindu belief that gives rise to tolerance of differences in race and nationality is that all of mankind is good; we are all divine beings, souls created by God. Hindus do not accept the concept that some individuals are evil and others are good. Hindus believe that each individual is a soul, a divine being, who is inherently good. Scriptures tell us that each soul is emanated from God, as a spark from a fire, beginning a spiritual journey which eventually leads back to God. All human beings are on this journey, whether they realize it or not.”

The next speaker, Dr. Randel Everett of the Baptist Christian faith, put forth a distinctly different perspective. “The idea of the oneness of humanity–this is where Christianity would differ from some of the religions. We do believe in the oneness of humanity but that the oneness of humanity is that we are a fallen people. We do not believe that we are inherently good. We believe we are inherently selfish and self-centered, and that’s why we need to be rescued or redeemed–that Christ rescues us from the domain of darkness.” (You can view the entire 2-hour interfaith panel discussion here.)

Looking more closely at the Hindu belief that man is not inherently sinful–rather, the essence of man is divine and perfect–a further question arises: “What is the Hindu view of sin?” Gurudeva responds in Dancing with Siva: “Instead of seeing good and evil in the world, we understand the nature of the embodied soul in three interrelated parts: instinctive or physical-emotional; intellectual or mental; and superconscious or spiritual…. When the outer, or lower, instinctive nature dominates, one is prone to anger, fear, greed, jealousy, hatred and backbiting. [Lila: This is tamas guna. I would say fear, envy, and sloth are tamasic. Anger seems rajasic to me.)

When the intellect is prominent, arrogance and analytical thinking preside.

{Lila: Rajas. It also includes greed, ambition).

When the superconscious soul comes forth, the refined qualities are born–compassion, insight, modesty and the others. {Lila: Sattvic).

The animal instincts of the young soul are strong. The intellect, yet to be developed, is nonexistent to control these strong instinctive impulses. When the intellect is developed, the instinctive nature subsides. When the soul unfolds and overshadows the well-developed intellect, this mental harness is loosened and removed.”

This understanding of man’s three-fold nature–instinctive, intellectual and spiritual–explains why people act in ways that are clearly not divine, such as becoming angry and harming others. There is more to man than his essence or inner nature. We also have an outer nature. However, man’s actions, whether beneficial or harmful, sinful or divine, are all expressions of a one energy. That energy finds expression through the chakras, fourteen centers of consciousness within our subtle bodies.

[Lila: seven chakras in front and seven corresponding in the back, I assume]

Many of us have seen the system for water usage at temples in India: a long pipe with faucets along its length from which many people draw water to wash their hands and feet before entering the temple. That’s a nice analogy to energy and the chakras. Our subtle body is like a pipe with fourteen spigots. Water is water; it can come out of any of the spigots. It’s still water. Energy can come out through any of our chakras; it’s still energy.

Energy flowing through the higher chakras expresses the superconscious or spiritual nature. How do we control or direct our energy to keep it flowing through the higher chakras? Gurudeva used to say, “Energy goes where awareness flows.” We control our energies through consistent meditation and devotional activities in the home shrine, chanting, performing puja, attending puja and going to the temple on a regular basis. Listening to and playing refined music and performing traditional dance and other creative arts are also ways of channeling the energies through the higher chakras.

Our regular activities determine how our energy flows. If we are engaged in spiritual pursuits, occasionally we might get up to the chakra of divine love. And hopefully we frequent the chakra of direct cognition, in which we are able to look down on our mind and understand what we like and don’t like about ourselves, and work steadily to change what we don’t. And we get into the chakra of willpower. These are the qualities we tend to manifest if we are engaged in regular spiritual/religious activities.

If we are not elevating the energies, we are just living an ordinary life in the force centers of willpower, reason, memory, maybe fear and occasionally anger. If we see the flow of energy impersonally, then we can control it through the activities we choose to engage in.

I like to say that we have an inner perfection and an outer imperfection. We can take heart in identifying more with the inner perfection, our soul nature, and realize the outer has its problems, which we can work on–and that is the purpose of our life on earth, to work on ourselves, to learn, evolve and ultimately know God. With this attitude, born of the belief in our divinity, we are more detached from our shortcomings and difficulties. It’s just energy flowing through our various chakras, more water flowing through one spigot or another. It is not who we are. We realize that we can control that energy flow. “Which spigot shall I turn on today? How do I want my energy to flow? Which negative habit do I want to improve today?” It all becomes easier to tackle because we look at it in an impersonal way.

The concept of the fourteen chakras can help us put our failings into perspective so that we do not become discouraged by them. Shortcomings, such as occasionally being hurtful toward others, do not at all change the fact that our essence is divine. We can deepen our experience of inner divinity and overcome shortcomings by consistently following the various practices found in the Hindu religion. When we feel good about ourselves, we can more readily identify negative patterns and change them. If we have a negative concept of our self, believing that we are inherently flawed and sinful, we are not in such a good position to advance on the spiritual path. And one thing we can all feel good about is that Hinduism assures us not only that we are not sinners, but that every human being, without exception, is destined to achieve spiritual enlightenment and liberation.”