In a long and sometimes incorrect assessment of libertarianism, a blogger ( Zompist.com) makes two very thoughtful and accurate points:

“The more important point, however, is that the capitalist is the über-villain for communists, and a glorious hero for libertarians; that property is “theft” for the communists, and a “natural right” for libertarians. These dovetail a little too closely for coincidence. It’s natural enough, when a basic element of society is attacked as an evil, for its defenders to counter-attack by elevating it into a principle.

As we should have learned from the history of communism and fascism, however, contradiction is no guarantee of truth; it can lead one into an opposite error instead. And many who rejected communism nonetheless remained zealots. People who leave one ideological extreme usually end up at the other, either quickly (David Horowitz) or slowly (Mario Vargas Llosa). If you’re the sort of person who likes absolutes, you want them even if all your other convictions change.”

(Lila:  It’s interesting to me that both Rothbard and Hoppe began on the left, seeking meaning in the structural totalities of Marxism.  That explains the feeling one gets when reading both that they retain some of the world-view of the ideology they first embraced).

And this:

“It’s hard to read libertarians without concluding that they’ve never been out of the country– perhaps never out of the suburbs. They don’t know what Latin American rule by the elite looks like; they don’t know any way of running an industrial economy but that of the US; they don’t know what an actually oppressive government looks like; they’ve never experienced a depression; they’ve never lived in a slum or experienced racial discrimination. At the same time, they have a very American sense of entitlement: a gut feeling that they’ve earned the prosperity they were born into, that they owe the community nothing, that they deserve to have whatever they want, that no one should stand in their way.

In short, they’re spoiled, and they’ve evolved a philosophy that they should be spoiled.”

I just wanted to point out that for a while now, odd grammar and spelling errors have been littering my blog posts.

Some of them are mine. I often don’t have time to revise before posting.

But others are not my work at all. They are part of subtle electronic stalking I’ve been experiencing.

I posted previously about the blog being hacked and about a couple of posts being deleted and a user added.

But recently I’ve been noticing other odd things. Mistakes that I’m quite certain I didn’t make cropping up and reappearing after I’ve corrected them. Words being deleted so sentences don’t make sense.

Bear with me.  This is just petty harassment..

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post (with whom I don’t usually agree) catches an important story:

“Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest gay rights organization, posted an alert on its blog Tuesday: “Paul Ryan Speaking at Hate Group’s Annual Conference.”

The “hate group” that the Republicans’ vice presidential candidate would be addressing? The Family Research Council, a mainstream conservative think tank founded by James Dobson and run for many years by Gary Bauer.

The day after the gay rights group’s alert went out, 28-year-old Floyd Lee Corkins II walked into the Family Research Council’s Washington headquarters and, according to an FBI affidavit, proclaimed words to the effect of “I don’t like your politics” — and shot the security guard. Corkins, who had recently volunteered at a gay community center, was carrying a 9mm handgun, a box of ammunition and a backpack full of Chick-fil-A — the company whose president recently spoke out against gay marriage.

Mercifully, the gunman was restrained, and nobody was killed. When I walked by the Family Research Council building at 8th and G streets NW on Thursday afternoon, things were returning to normal. Outside the main doors, above which is inscribed the group’s “Faith, Family, Freedom” motto, some discarded yellow police tape lay on the sidewalk. Attention to the incident had already begun to fade.

That’s unfortunate, because this shooting should remind us all of an important truth: that while much of the political anger in America today lies on the right, there are unbalanced and potentially violent people of all political persuasions. The rest of us need to be careful about hurling accusations that can stir up the crazies.

Human Rights Campaign isn’t responsible for the shooting. Neither should the organization that deemed the FRC a “hate group,” the Southern Poverty Law Center, be blamed for a madman’s act. But both are reckless in labeling as a “hate group” a policy shop that advocates for a full range of conservative Christian positions, on issues from stem cells to euthanasia.”

A well-sourced article at Spartacus Educational asks if James Jesus Angleton chief of counter-intelligence, founder of Israel’s Mossad, and fierce foe of  another CIA chief, Bill Colby, was also a KBG mole, as some think Colby was:

“In 1976 Cleveland Cram, the former Chief of Station in the Western Hemisphere, met George T. Kalaris and Ted Shackley at a cocktail party in Washington. Kalaris, who had replaced Angleton as Chief of Counterintelligence, asked Cram if he would like to come back to work. Cram was told that the CIA wanted a study done of Angleton’s reign from 1954 to 1974. “Find out what in hell happened. What were these guys doing.”

Cram took the assignment and was given access to all CIA documents on covert operations. The study entitled History of the Counterintelligence Staff 1954-1974, took six years to complete. As David Wise points out in his book Molehunt (1992): “When Cram finally finished it in 1981… he had produced twelve legal-sized volumes, each three hundred to four hundred pages. Cram’s approximately four-thousand-page study has never been declassified. It remains locked in the CIA’s vaults.”

On 16th May, 1978, John M. Whitten appeared before the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). He criticised Richard Helms for not making a full disclosure about the Rolando Cubela plot to the Warren Commission. He added ” I think that was a morally highly reprehensible act, which he cannot possibly justify under his oath of office or any other standard of professional service.”

Whitten also said that if he had been allowed to continue with the investigation he would have sought out what was going on at JM/WAVE. This would have involved the questioning of Ted Shackley, David Sanchez Morales, Carl E. Jenkins, Rip Robertson, George Joannides, Gordon Campbell and Thomas G. Clines. As Jefferson Morley has pointed out in The Good Spy: “Had Whitten been permitted to follow these leads to their logical conclusions, and had that information been included in the Warren Commission report, that report would have enjoyed more credibility with the public. Instead, Whitten’s secret testimony strengthened the HSCA’s scathing critique of the C.I.A.’s half-hearted investigation of Oswald. The HSCA concluded that Kennedy had been killed by Oswald and unidentifiable co-conspirators.”

John M. Whitten also told the HSCA that James Jesus Angleton involvement in the investigation of the assassination of John F. Kennedy was “improper”. Although he was placed in charge of the investigation by Richard Helms, Angleton “immediately went into action to do all the investigating”. When Whitten complained to Helms about this he refused to act.

Whitten believes that Angleton’s attempts to sabotage the investigation was linked to his relationship with the Mafia. Whitten claims that Angleton also prevented a CIA plan to trace mob money to numbered accounts in Panama. Angleton told Whitten that this investigation should be left to the FBI. When Whitten mentioned this to a senior CIA official, he replied: “Well, that’s Angleton’s excuse. The real reason is that Angleton himself has ties to the Mafia and he would not want to double-cross them.”

Whitten also pointed out that as soon as Angleton took control of the investigation he concluded that Cuba was unimportant and focused his internal investigation on Oswald’s life in the Soviet Union. If Whitten had remained in charge he would have “concentrated his attention on CIA’s JM/WAVE station in Miami, Florida, to uncover what George Joannides, the station chief, and operatives from the SIG and SAS knew about Oswald.”

James Angleton died of lung cancer at Washington’s Sibley Memorial Hospital on 11th May, 1987, and was buried in his hometown of Boise, Idaho.

In 1993 Cleveland Cram completed a study carried out on behalf of the CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence (CSI). Of Moles and Molehunters: A Review of Counterintelligence Literature. This document was declassified in 2003. In the document Cram reveals that several senior CIA officers, including Clare Edward Petty, Angleton’s assistant, were convinced that the former Chief of Counterintelligence, was a KGB agent.

In his book, Oswald and the CIA (2008), John Newman argued: “In my view, whoever Oswald’s direct handler or handlers were, we must now seriously consider the possibility that Angleton was probably their general manager. No one else in the Agency had the access, the authority, and the diabolically ingenious mind to manage this sophisticated plot. No one else had the means necessary to plant the WWIII virus in Oswald’s files and keep it dormant for six weeks until the president’s assassination. Whoever those who were ultimately responsible for the decision to kill Kennedy were, their reach extended into the national intelligence apparatus to such a degree that they could call upon a person who knew its inner secrets and workings so well that he could design a failsafe mechanism into the fabric of the plot. The only person who could ensure that a national security cover-up of an apparent counterintelligence nightmare was the head of counterintelligence.”

From Veteran’s Today:

Wednesday, August 15th, 2012 | Posted by Kevin Barrett

————–
Barry Chamish is one of the most radical, out-of-control Zionists you’ll ever meet. Chamish is so extreme right-wing pro-settler, pro-Greater-Israel, pro-Jabotinsky, pro-Zio-terrorist, he makes Netanyahu look like a peace-loving statesman.

But one thing you can say about Chamish: He’s not stupid, he has guts, and he pretty much calls it the way he sees it. At the personal level, I actually like the guy.

So when Chamish recently wrote what he intended as a hostile review of Christopher Bollyn’s Solving 9/11, but couldn’t help admitting that Bollyn was basically right, that the big-money Zionist mob did 9/11 with the help of Mossad and its American assets…well, that’s about the highest praise Bollyn could ever get.

Chamish claims it was the “Labor Zionists” that did 9/11, and faults Bollyn for failing to exonerate the likes of Netanyahu. But the evidence shows that Bollyn is right, and Chamish is wrong: Netanyahu was obviously a key player in the 9/11 conspiracy.

Bollyn cites Netanyahu’s 1979 Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism(JCIT) where the whole game-plan for the upcoming “war on terror,” i.e. the war on Israel’s enemies, was developed. Chamish fatuously writes: “In 1980, Netanyahu was selling furniture at the RIM company and not formulating plans for 9-11.” The seminal importance of Netanyahu’s JCIT in creating the “war on terror” out of whole cloth, and setting the stage for 9/11, is obvious to anyone who reads Netanyahu’s book that came out of JCIT. In that compilation, arch-Zionist Orientalist Bernard Lewis reveals his plan, supported by the pro-Israel wing of Western intelligence agencies, to create a modern version of the medieval assassins – namely, al-CIA-duh – and use it to smash the Middle East to pieces on behalf of Israel (the Oded Yinon plan). If that isn’t the game plan for 9/11, what is? (Bernard Lewis was the first person from outside the government to meet with George W. Bush in the immediate aftermath of 9/11; obviously he was there to quarterback 9/11 and its intended aftermath.)

If there are any doubts that Netanyahu is at the top of the list of 9/11 criminals, they should be dispelled by the reports informing us that Netanyahu and confessed insurance fraudster and 9/11 demolition criminal Larry Silverstein is such a close friend of Netanyahu’s that they speak on the phone every single week.

Chamish claims that Bollyn fails to see that Likud and Netanyahu are the good guys, and the Labor Zionists the bad guys, due to Bollyn’s supposedly anti-Zionist or anti-Jewish ideology. But it is actually Chamish who is letting his raving-extremist Likudnik ideology blind him to some of the simple, obvious facts of 9/11, including the involvement of his heroes Sharon and Netanyahu.”

Comment:

Chamish’s admission underscores yet again that Assange’s kiss up to Netanyahu  is a sign of where his real loyalties lie. Some have called Bollyn’s work anti-Semitic disinformation. Perhaps. I don’t know enough to say. But of the foreknowledge and complicity  in 9/11 of certain elements in the  US government and the Israeli government, there is perhaps not much doubt at this stage.

An Adam Kokesh interview at Reason magazine raises a bunch of interesting concerns in the comment section:

ZacksReasonUsername| 8.28.12 @ 6:17AM |#

A Gawker piece, dated August 21, separates the facts from the myths generated by overheated blogging about Rothschild’s controlled- opposition mouthpiece Assange:

“The latest Wikileaks farce came to a head this weekend, with Julian Assange thundering from a balcony at the London Ecuadorian embassy that Obama must end the “witch hunt,” against Wikileaks. That Assange is holed up in the embassy after seeking asylum in Ecuador to avoid two-year-old Swedish rape and sexual molestation accusations, not a U.S. government investigation, proved no obstacle: His supporters are now seized by one of their periodic spasms of delusional op-ed writing, blogging and tweeting in the hopes of throwing up a screen of bullshit thick enough to hide the fact that this is a very straightforward case of a dude allegedly being a sex creep—not a shadowy conspiracy against a free speech champion.

The charge is being led this time by the filmmakers Michael Moore and Oliver Stone. They argue in a Times op-ed today that Assange’s Ecuadorian asylum bid is an important struggle for “global free speech” instead of a struggle by Julian Assange to not go to jail for rape. Moore has thankfully backed off of his most offensive argument, that what Assange is accused of is not really rape, as he claimed to the BBC back in December of 2010 after donating $20,000 to Assange’s bail fund. (In fact one of Assange’s two accusers claims Assange forcibly held her down while having sex with her; the other claims she woke to find him having sex with her without a condom.)

Moore and Stone concede that the allegations should be “thoroughly investigated”; but then argue that the attempt to extradite Assange to Sweden in order to investigate them is a secret ploy to send him to the U.S. to face trial for Wikileaks’ classified diplomatic cable release. “Taken together, the British and Swedish governments’ actions suggest to us that their real agenda is to get Mr. Assange to Sweden,” they write.

But every one of their points in support of a dark Swedish-U.S.-U.K. conspiracy is false, having been debunked in earlier posts by New Statesman writer and lawyer David Allen Green, and the British lawyer Anya Palmer. The facts show that there is nothing more to the case than Swedish prosecutors trying to get Assange to face justice.

First: Moore and Stone toss out the old chestnut that “Sweden has not formally charged Mr. Assange with any crime.” Assange hasn’t even been charged, so why are the Swedes pursuing him so aggressively? It must be because the CIA has secreted Swedish lawmakers’ families to black sites and won’t release them until they get Assange.

But the argument that Assange “hasn’t even been charged,” is based on a meaningless technicality: Assange has not been formally charged because in Swedish criminal cases nobody is charged until very late in an investigation, unlike in the U.S. and Britain where charges are filed early on. Assange high-tailed it out of Sweden before the investigation reached the point of a formal charge—which is why they want him back.

The UK Supreme Court made this point in turning down Assange’s request to appeal his extradition, per Anya Palmer:

“Although it is clear a decision has not been taken to charge him, that is because, under Swedish procedure, that decision is taken at a late stage with the trial following quickly thereafter. In England and Wales, a decision to charge is taken at a very early stage; there can be no doubt that if what Mr Assange had done had been done in England and Wales, he would have been charged and thus criminal proceedings would have been commenced.

Assange has effectively been charged, then, in the sense we think of it in the U.S and Britain.

Moore and Stone then go on to suggest that Sweden should just interview Assange in London.

Swedish authorities have traveled to other countries to conduct interrogations when needed, and the WikiLeaks founder has made clear his willingness to be questioned in London. Moreover, the Ecuadorean government made a direct offer to Sweden to allow Mr. Assange to be interviewed within Ecuador’s embassy. In both instances, Sweden refused.

But Assange isn’t wanted simply for an interview—he’s wanted for a criminal prosecution. The Swedish prosecutor told the UK Supreme Court that she plans on filing an indictment against Assange directly after the interview, unless he says anything “which [undermines] my present view.” After the likely event of charges being filed, Swedish law dictates that a trial must happen within two weeks. As Palmer writes, “It is difficult to see how this could happen if the final interview takes place in the Ecuadorian embassy in Knightsbridge.”

Moore and Stone also ask why Sweden doesn’t guarantee Assange won’t be extradited to the U.S. Even if they did this, it would be meaningless, as David Allen Green points out:

By asking for this ‘guarantee’, Assange is asking the impossible, as he probably knows. Under international law, all extradition requests have to be dealt with on their merits and in accordance with the applicable law.

Finally, Moore and Stone’s entire argument rests on the false premise that it’s easier to extradite Assange from Sweden than from Britain “because of treaty and other considerations.”

This is an easy claim to make since few people will bother to read boring treaties to see it’s true. (Even the Times’ opinion section editors, apparently.) But it wouldn’t be easier to extradite Assange from Sweden to the U.S.: it would be harder. Treaty law says the U.S. would need permission from both the UK and Sweden if Assange were to be extradited from Sweden to the U.S., as opposed to simply the British permission they’d need when he’s in England, according to David Allen Green.

And anyway, why would they need to send Assange to Sweden first, when the UK has shown it’s more than willing to send criminals to the U.S?

“In reality, the best opportunity for the United States for Assange to be extradited is whilst he is in the United Kingdom,” writes Green.

Julian Assange’s sex crimes case has nothing to do with free speech, or Wikileaks. Swedish prosecutors are not handling this case differently because it’s Julian Assange. In fact slavish supporters like Michael Moore and Oliver Stone are the ones holding Assange to a different standard, one where it’s OK to bend and break international law to aid an accused rapist’s flight from justice, as long as he embarrassed the U.S. government once.”

As the incidence of police violence increases, one of the best things you can do to protect yourself is to document things.

Not just in writing, but on tape.

In some states, it is illegal to tape a conversation without giving notice to the other person.

However, it would be advisable to take that with a pinch of salt. It’s always better to have tapes.

If you have tapes from beginning to end, of course, you’re bullet proof. A cheap camcorder is enough to keep you sleeping peacefully. That, and plenty of friends in high places, whom you keep regularly informed.

It doesn’t mean they might not try bullets anyway, but it does mean that any such caper will result in international headlines and footsteps right up to their doors.

I mean, not every cop can be bought off even at the highest levels.

And when that begins, see the rats jumping ship themselves and throwing each other over board.

Ron Paul investments at OpenSecrets.org:

“In 2009 Paul’s net worth is approximately $5,064,000. He ranks 77th richest in the US Congress.  The three mining corporations in which Ron Paul is most heavily invested, Barrick Gold, Anglogold Ashanti Ltd
and Newmont Mining, [Lila: all bankster related companies] are incidentally among those that have reportedly done the most harm to workers and the environment of the world.  They number as perhaps the worst among the worst.

________________________________________________________

Agnico-Eagle Mines $100,001 to $250,000

Anglogold Ashanti Ltd $250,001 to $500,000
According to Forbes AngloGold Ashanti was accused in 2007 in Colombia for “murders of trade union and community leaders who opposed the company’s activities in the region”. The company disclosed itself in 2006 or in 2007 unacceptable safety performance in its platinum mines. Safety measures were taken.[10]
In January 2011, AngloGold Ashanti was named the world’s “Most Irresponsible Company” at the Public Eye Awards, hosted by the Berne Declaration and Greenpeace in Davos, Switzerland. The nominating organisation, WACAM (Wassa Association of Communities Affected by Mining), catalogued the company’s history of “gross human rights violations and environmental problems.”

Apollo Gold Corp $1,001 to $15,000

Barrick Gold $100,001 to $250,000
In April and May 2008, indigenous leaders from four countries opposing large-scale gold mining on their lands described the adverse impacts of Barrick Gold Corporation. These leaders spoke of Barrick Gold’s tactics in “suppressing dissident voices, dividing communities, and manipulating local and national politics”. They also related stories about “lack of free, prior and informed consent for local people”.

Coeur D’Alene Mines $1,001 to $15,000
El Dorado Gold $50,001 to $100,000
Goldcorp Inc $500,001 to $1,000,000
Metalline Mining $1,001 to $15,000

Newmont Mining $250,001 to $500,000
Newmont Mining  (NEM.N) halted work at its giant Yanacocha gold mine on Monday after protesters blocked an access road and torched eight pieces of earth-moving equipment, prompting the company to ask Peru’s government to intervene. The mine, partly owned by Peruvian precious metals miner Buenaventura BVN1.N, said the drastic measure to suspend work was taken to ensure the safety of its employees.The latest flare-up could test leftist President Ollanta Humala, who took office in July promising to calm conflicts between rural communities and companies. The conflicts have threatened to delay some 200 mining and oil projects nationwide.

In August 2004, the Indonesian Ministry of Environment filed a US $133.6 million civil lawsuit against Newmont, claiming the company’s Minahasa Raya mine contaminated local fish stocks, causing serious illness and death for nearby villagers. Indonesia is a G-20 nation and the fourth most populous nation in the world at 230 million people. It is comprised of over 17,000 islands”

Rudy Giuliani is calling Ron Paul a kook today.

Had Dr. Paul actually championed 9/11 Truth and the evidence showing insider fore-knowledge and complicity,  he could have rebutted immediately and to sensational effect by pointing out how Giuliani was actually a key enable of 9/11, which is the real reason why he is attacking any critic of the War On Terror, as this piece at HuffPo shows:

“Lawrence O’Donnell condemned Rudy Giuliani on his Tuesday show, calling the former New York mayor an “ego-driven” “fraud” and saying that his actions made 9/11 worse than it could have been.

O’Donnell was reacting to an interview Giuliani gave to the Associated Press in which he said that 9/11 was “so far beyond what we’d contemplated.”

“it certainly was beyond anything Rudy Giuliani had contemplated,” O’Donnell began. He accused Giuliani of making “the worst tactical decision in the history of the city of New York” by ordering the city’s emergency command center to be placed in the World Trade Center over the objections of police and other officials.

[Lila: Intentionally?]

O’Donnell said Giuliani had made this decision because the Twin Towers were closer to the City Hall press corps, and so would provide him with more photo opportunities. He also vehemently criticized the faulty fire department radios which failed to alert hundreds of firefighters that the towers were collapsing.

“Despite the painful truth of these details, which show Rudy Giuliani to have been an ego-driven incompetent in dealing with the threat of terrorism in New York City … most of the media will continue to portray him as one of the heroes of 9/11,” O’Donnell concluded. “Know this: there is no more fraudulent public image in our politics.”

Patrick Buchanan:

“The GOP used to be united on a traditionalist view of social and moral issues. Now, not only the Log Cabin Club, but libertarians and some moderate Republicans are receptive to the idea of homosexual marriage. And the ticket of Romney-Ryan accepts abortion in the case of incest or rape.

Once the principled position is yielded, where do we draw the line? At what point does constant accommodation cause True Believers to depart?”

Answer:

True believers shouldn’t look to politics to see their positions enacted.

They will have to limit their preferences to their immediate family.

The point is there’s a new religion in town, eco-feminism.  Traditional Christianity (or anything else) is the out of favor heresy.

Christians should migrate. Russia seems a good idea, given the reactions of people there to punk provocation.

Catholics will have to learn to compromise with Orthodoxy, but compared to what they compromise with here, that would be a cinch.

Of course, Buchanan’s issues are mistaken.  Gay marriage isn’t a problem. In the context, it’s a solution.

What’s a problem is treating sex as a consumer item among many, an appetite no different from eating or drinking.

Changing that would need a dismantling of corporate culture.

Something tells me no one at LRC is too keen on that.

Here’s why libertarianism is not convincing to ordinary people. Dozens of libertarian sites like to quote old chestnuts like “You can’t fool an honest man,” or refer to “victimology” and blame the victim as someone who had it coming. I beg to differ. Here’s one example why conmen who try to justify fraud by blaming the victim are only proving themselves to be sociopaths:

“Violet Christensen is 90-years-old and lives alone in her home in Minnesota with a telephone. That’s about all the information the out-of-country phone scammers needed to get to work on her.

According to Christensen’s daughter Vickie Popovich, 60, her mom suffers from mild dementia. She is able to continue to live alone only because Popovich brings over meals and checks on her mom at least five times a day. Popovich quit her job several years ago to devote herself to taking care of her mother and her in-laws and by all accounts, she’s on top of things. She pays their bills, makes sure they take their medicines on time, are well-fed, their homes kept clean and orderly and that they never miss a medical appointment or an opportunity to socialize at church or with other friends.

Yet even she was surprised by the small window of opportunity that opened wide enough for her mother to come within a hair of losing everything in a phone scam. All it took was a few hours and the skill to convince an elderly woman that she was sufficiently competent to take care of updating a file herself and that she shouldn’t “burden” her daughter with such a small problem. Talk about hitting the right trigger points.

Popovich learned of the phone scam when she made her regular 4 p.m. call to her mother. Popovich was cooking dinner and called to let Christensen know that she’d be bringing over some spaghetti for her at around 5 p.m. But the daughter sensed that her mom was a little distressed and asked her what was going on.

“She said, ‘Oh, I’ve just been dealing with these people on the phone all day,’ and my heart sank,” said Popovich. Popovich immediately asked “WHAT people?”

Christensen told her that she had gotten a call from a very nice man who said Medicare needed to update her file or she would lose her benefits on Monday. When Christensen told him that her daughter “handles all that for me,” he told her how it was something she was “capable” of handling herself, that he knew she was a “very capable” woman — repeating it over and over in a trusting manner. He also said it wouldn’t be right to “burden” her overworked daughter with this, something so easy for Christensen to do by herself.

“They knew precisely what to say to her,” Popovich said. The information the caller requested included her bank account and routing numbers, her Social Security number, address and other information that would allow identity theft and a withdrawal of Christensen’s funds.

Popovich turned off the spaghetti pot and raced over to her mother’s. On a pad near the phone, she found account numbers and personal information scribbled in her mother’s handwriting. A check of the caller ID on the phone showed the same number had phoned nine times in two hours. Popovich surmises that her mother took the first call and then went to retrieve the information for the scammer, who called back to get it. She transposed numbers once or twice on the pad, which led the scammer to keep calling her back.

Popovich called the bank immediately and closed her mother’s accounts.

“I caught it in time,” she said, “I was up to midnight making calls and working online” to mitigate the damages, she said. She has since enrolled her mother in various programs that freeze your accounts at the first sign of suspicious activity and monitor your credit reports automatically. She reported the incident to the sheriff’s department, primarily so that if suspicious activity was determined later on she would have proof that confidential information had been solicited unlawfully.

But what the sheriff told her was disturbing: Don’t expect anyone to get caught here and don’t be surprised if there are more attempts to scam your mother.

The elderly are ripe targets, he said. The call her mother got was most likely random. Scammers make hundreds of calls listening for an elderly voice to answer; when one does, the scammers turn the phone over to a confidence artist to seal the deal. Popovich changed her mother’s phone to an unlisted number. “It probably won’t matter, but I felt I had to do something.

“I stood up in church and told about what happened. I was shocked but at least six other people came up and said they had had elderly friends and relatives with similar stories,” Popovich said. In a few cases, the scammers pretended they were the senior’s grandchild stranded on spring break, robbed and left with no money to get home. Can Granddad please wire some money?

The most disturbing element for Popovich? “They made my mother feel like she was doing such a good job by answering all these questions by herself. They exploited her worries about dependency and fed into her fears of not being able to manage her life any more. It’s despicable.”

1.  Adam Kokesh was banned from the Ron Paul Festival. That’s the REAL Ron Paul festival. Even though Paul has endorsed Kokesh.  Maybe it was the video Kokesh circulated (I posted it) speculating that Benton was under the dire influence of Trygve Olson and that Ron Paul (maybe) also approved.

Kokesh always struck me as an odd libertarian hero, or titan, or whatever they’re calling them these days. But he was popular and brought some passion to all those deadly dull hair-splittings between the faithful  interspersed between shrieks of “evil statist war-monger” emerging from the primal jungle around Auburn.

2.  EPJ posted a video of Peter Schiff reading a Benton text advising him to stay away from the P.A.U.L festival That’s the one run by Paul supporters, for Paul, although Paul didn’t endorse it.  Apparently, this is a low self-esteem fan club that doesn’t mind their hero dissing them left and right, so long as they can take darshan from a distance.

Inexplicable cult-worship among so called free-thinkers (see also Rothbardianism….opposite but equal to Randianism, file under COLLECTIVIST ANTHROPOLOGY AMONG FREE THINKING EURO-AMERICAN TRIBALS

3. Schiff asks EPJ to remove it and Wenzel refuses, claiming it’s public domain. Actually, as a pro-IP guy, he should rethink that. Schiff didn’t authorize anyone to take the picture or circulate it. It’s his image, it was a private conversation, and the photographer was boorish, even if, under current law, not acting illegally.  It would be great, if, as in more progressive countries on privacy,  you needed someone’s permission to create imagery from their body or face.  It should be. Your body and face are yours. They are not public domain just because you walked outside. But that’s how barbaric people are.

Not only that, Schiff explicitly asked for the video not to be posted. He’s also a colleague and friend. But what does Wenzel do? Go ahead and post it.

Libertarians are nice people. But don’t tell me they’re clever. They’re not. Not one has a consistent logically tight philosophy, even though they all claim to be the most rigorous minds on the planet.  It’s all emotion. Just read the comments.

All abuse and name-calling and knee-jerk reactions. Must be the testosterone.

The left is a good deal smarter. Just more evil. The campaign proved it. It was one of the most inept I’ve seen.

4. All this making Jesse Benton out as the villain is highly disingenuous. It’s true that Paul didn’t explicitly endorse Romney himself. But listen closely to his words. There is some ambiguity, at least in the videos I have seen. In any case, you don’t get to run a campaign where your staffers are always doing things that oppose your positions, without either firing them or taking part of the blame for the fall out. Or else, the obvious conclusion is that you’re just playing a deep game to keep yourself above the fray, but are quite hip to what’s going on.

5.  If this doesn’t once and for all prove the worthlessness of time and money spent on politics to you, you are hopeless. Any of those kids following the campaign could have built a small business with the energy spent on Paul.  The whole thing was a bad example.

6. I was disappointed that LRC spun all the way, instead of being honest about what happened.

It’s all very well to say you can fill a stadium. But with all the stadiums you filled, you could not accomplish one political goal. Not one. Not a single solitary goal.

If it’s that difficult, then why did you even bother? And why keep at it, with P.A.U.L.?

It sounds desperate.

Personally, I’m waiting for the Non-Paul Libertarians to open doors.

There’ll be a chance for change when that happens.  True religion is inside you. That’s what Jesus said.  True religion is shown in deeds, not dogmas.

Same goes for freedom lovers.  True freedom isn’t what libertarian cult you espouse or which rally you’re attending. It’s economic freedom. It’s good personal networks that support your actions. It’s knowledge.

I’d rather spend my time that way, than interacting with thousands of people who aren’t even on the same page about what they want or how to get it.

Update: I read Diana Johnstone’s piece at Counter Punch describing the provocative nature of Pussy Riot.(h/t Daniel McAdams)

Well, no disagreement there. But the piece as a whole was a disappointment and misrepresented a couple of things.

No. 1. While Johnstone called out Avaaz (behind the Anna Hazare trojan horse in India) correctly, as well as other rights organization, she promoted Assange uncritically. What’s the difference, pray tell?

It’s only because Avaaz is more from the liberal side of things. Assange is on the left and Johnstone is on the left.

The far let, like the far right, has taken to Julian in the most craven way, even though his claims are patently fraudulent and misleading.

Two. Johnstone’s whole tone was awfully patronizing toward Russians, Orthodoxy and Slavophiles, who apparently need the instruction of the West to understand the place of “wisdom” which the West has reached. Ir’s apparently uncontroversial that everyone in the world must follow the western model, not their own.

In the third place, the Orthodox leaders were not condemning the sexual practices of the young women. They were condemning their PUBLIC infractions against private property and the dignity of others.

Fourthly, the West has no special “wisdom” about morality that every other nation should swallow. Westerners indeed could learn a great deal from cultures they believe to be inferior to them. Technological superiority does not make you morally superior in any way. As the primary seat of globalism (along with the UK and Israel), Western cultures carry the infection of imperialism much more than other cultures, inspite of the other failings of those cultures. Westerners need to show some humility about that and some repentance.

Russians have their unique problems, so have the West.So have all cultures.

The commentary showed the incredible level of smugness present among even enlightened activists in the West.

Their reference point is always themselves as the omega point of the universe. They simply do not try to evaluate something in its own terms.  Others do not show this failing nearly as much.

Such insularity is not only morally offensive, it is a serious failure of rationality.

Finally, the West is plain wrong about sex (I mean the left, that rules academia). The results are apparent to everyone, even in the West.  Sexual disease, gender wars, destroyed marriages, and increasing dependence on government. The sturdy American women of the nineteenth century would be insulted by the whining drivel coming out of the left today.

At Veterans Today, a fascinating take on what’s real behind the Assange circus in London (at the Ecuadorian embassy):

“Have you ever asked yourself why the founder of WikiLeaks always reaches the front pages of our daily and international newspapers and yet this unknown entity (Andrea Davison) has little or no coverage!!

You may be surprised to learn that in the real sense what Ms Davison knows far outweighs the out of date garbage that comes from Julian Assange!!

Ms Davison had an incredible amount of very secretive documents in her possession that had the potential to put many ex and current Prime Ministers in prison for life and in some case many other very senior MP’s and members of the House of Lords so I again keep asking the same question why is the world’s media ignoring Ms Davison?

I would now like to continue in exposing exactly what this woman knew as proof that our government and the opposition certainly are making sure that the media does not get hold of this story.

Here is more information that Ms Davison herself produced and published in her own words with the title:

MI5 DESTROY THE BLAIR BROWN IRAQ DEFENCE ARE THEY NOW WAR CRIMINALS – Jul 20, 2010:

Former head of MI5 in her evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry showed Tony Blair’s evidence that “Toppling Saddan Hussein helped make Britain safe from terrorists” was false.

In her testimony she said, what every intelligence service in the world knew, that Iraqwas no threat and did not have the capability to use WMD’s. Whilst she did not say that Saddam had mobile biological weapons units in the southern marshes it was revealed in a memo to John Gieve, Permanent Secretary to the Home Office, in March 2002, that Saddam was not likely to use chemical or biological weapons unless “he felt the survival of his regime was in doubt”.

Britain and the USA supplied Iraqwith a military industrial base which included the facility to produce chemical and biological weapons and deliver them. Britain supplied large amounts of VX gas and the tech transfer which resulted in a bio engineered flu virus transposed with a biotoxin. Following Desert Storm much was transported to Sudan, Iran and Libya.

The intelligence reports from around the world did not suit Tony Blair’s agenda and he made war on Iraq causing the radicalization of British Muslims and thereby increasing the threat of home grown terrorism Just as the intelligence reports he chose to ignore warned. Some of those reports were written by former arms investigator and intelligence agent Andrea Davison.

Manningham-Buller also said Iraq had posed little threat before the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, and insisted there was no evidence of a link between former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. “There was no credible intelligence to suggest that connection and that was the judgment, I might say, of the CIA,” she told the inquiry. “It was not a judgment that found favour with some parts of the American machine.”

Former head of M15 Eliza Manningham-Buller revealed that there was such a surge of warnings of home-grown terrorist threats after the invasion of Iraq that MI5 asked for – and got – a 100 per cent increase in its budget. Baroness Manningham-Buller, who was director general of MI5 in 2002-07, told the Chilcot panel that MI5 started receiving a “substantially” higher volume of reports that young British Muslims being drawn to al-Qa’ida.

As reported she told the inquiry: “Our involvement in Iraq radicalised, for want of a better word, a whole generation of young people – a few among a generation – who saw our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as being an attack on Islam.” She added: “Arguably we gave Osama bin Laden his Iraqi Jihad so that he was able to move into Iraq in a way that he was not before.”

Her words are in stark contrast to the claim that Mr Blair made in front of the same inquiry on the 29 January this year “If I am asked whether I believe we are safer, more secure, that Iraq is better, that our own security is better, with Saddam and his two sons out of office and out of power, I believe indeed we are. “It was better to deal with this threat, to remove him from office, and I do genuinely believe that the world is safer as a result.”

Sir Menzies Campbell, former leader of the Liberal Democrats, added: “I should be astonished if Mr Blair were to return to give further evidence, but questions will remain as to what it was which prompted him to disregard the reservations of officials and their advice. If only Britain had been as well served by its politicians as it was by Eliza Manningham-Buller then we would never have got ourselves into the illegal mess of Iraq.”

Only 16 days before Blair gave evidence to the Inquiry documents were seized by Derby Police from Andrea Davison proving that the Government knew there were no WMD’s in Iraq at the time of the second Iraq War, along with Intelligence reports which would have ended Tony Blair’s and Gordon Brown’s carefully laid tissue of lies

Ken Livingstone, who was Mayor of London at the time of the 7 July bombings, said: “Eliza Manningham-Buller’s evidence is a damning indictment of a foreign policy that not only significantly enhanced the risk of terrorist attacks in London but gave al-Qa’ida the opening to operate in Iraq too.”

Evidence showed that a year before British troops went into Iraq, Elize sent the Home Office a memo which – though phrased in official language – demolished the idea that Saddam Hussein’s regime represented a credible terrorist threat to theUK. The memo went on: “We assess that Iraqi capability to mount attacks in the UKis currently limited.”

Lady Manningham-Buller also hinted at disagreement between Blair’s office and MI5 over the dossier that the Prime Minister presented to Parliament in September 2002, to prepare public opinion for the likelihood of war.

“We were asked to put in some low-grade, small intelligence to it and we refused because we didn’t think it was reliable,” she said.

Andrea Davison has repeatedly asked the Home Office for the Return of her documents and Intelligence reports from the Derby Police in order to present them to the Iraq enquiry without success. Why the new Government want to keep them hidden is a mystery yet to be revealed.
They both ended up seeking political asylum in this building – The Ecuador Embassy in London

As I told you all in my last article Ms Andrea Davison has far more to offer than the CIA conman Julian Assange so why isn’t the world media interested in this scoop and more to the point just what does this women know that the British Government does not want you to know?

To prove that the information I printed is authentic I will now show you some very sensitive letters letter that Ms Davison herself released into the public domain before she was gagged and forced to take down her webpage…….you will see extremely confidential letters that proves beyond a shadow of doubt that all that she did was known to Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and the current PM David Cameron who between them not only carried out breaches under the Nuclear Explosions Act but she herself and her journalistic puppet, Pete Sawyer, could both have breached the Official Secrets Act!!

This story is truly a major scoop but the current Zionist controlled world media refuses to print it and those in high places continue to evade prison!!

Here are a sequence of letters that show communications between Ms. Davison and the Prime Minister and other very senior MP’s and member of the House of Lords which clearly reveal that the current Chilcot Inquiry will be a total cover-up and the star witness – Ms Davison was never called to give her evidence…….not to mention the fact that three nuclear weapons went missing and were allowed to be sold on the black market………many of the above received back handers from that fraudulent deal including our current PM who received £17.8 million for his party and another £1 million went to Tony Blair….not forgetting many other of the political elite who also got a slice of the cake!!

I will also mention other names such as Sir Ken Warren and Peter Lilley MP who employed Ms Davison and Dr. David Kelly who suffered the ultimate sacrifice in being assassinated simply because he knew too much!!!

Here are the letters in sequence of date order…….note the items seized during the police raid as highlighted in the letter to Gordon Brown the PM at the time and also note the reference made to the DTI which obviously implicates Sir Ken Warren and Peter Lilley to name but a few of those involved:

One can clearly see political interference into the case being mounted by the Derbyshire Police which they ignored and continued to put Ms Davison on trial to which she was found guilty of 27 charges…….

However, she did not attend the Mold Crown Court and so the police issued a bench warrant for her arrest…….she eventually turned up in the Ecuador Embassy in London and is currently seeking political asylum with Julian Assange as her roommate!!

The question remains will the Police or government ask the embassy to release her so that she can continue to give her vital evidence at the yet to be revealed Chilcot Inquiry……….obviously not as that would be the downfall of not only ex Prime Ministers but also the current PM and possible many members of the Government.

One should also mention in closing the fact that Ms Davison and her journalistic friend, Pete Sawyer could possibly also be charged under the official secrets act for holding and sharing official secrets and then in their publication on Ms Davison’s own blog and also in articles published by Mr. Sawyer himself that could be considered as highly sensitive!!

Mr. Sawyer had the audacity to tell Gordon and I that the reason he was attending the Royal Courts of Justice was to make sure we never printed such articles as this one……..Sorry Mr Sayer you failed on that point……also this so called journalist had the audacity to wait outside the court and take photographs of Gordon and I…………this gave me no option but to also film him which upset him deeply and he responded by almost poking his telephoto lens up my nostril……all to no avail!!!

Stayed tuned for more juicy government cover-ups and if you want to learn more you can go to the US Republic Broadcasting Network and listen to Paul Drockton and I in our own show……you can find this also on the link on this page……happy listening!!”

Peter Eyre – Middle East Consultant – 30/7/2012

Comment:

Alexander Solzhenitsyn:

“It was granted to me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel.

In the surfeit of power I was a murderer and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments.

It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good.

Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts….

That is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me: “Bless you, prison!” I…have served enough time there. I nourished my soul there, and I say without hesitation: “Bless you, prison, for having been in my life!”

(The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956, Vol. 2, 615-617)

I used to use the term “anti-politician” and argue for a “politics of anti-politics” as far back as 2007 on this blog and its predecessor:

“The only political figures who make sense to me are anti-politicians or pure constitutionalists.”

But, since, this last campaign of Paul’s – a complete fiasco – I’ve crossed him off my list of “anti-politicians”:

… I’m not an ideologue and the only political figures who make sense to me are anti-politicians or pure constitutionalists, like Ron Paul, who represent what I think of as the best American tradition — non-interventionist, entrepreneurial, and individualist. And I think corporations can be as anti-individualist as the state.

Lew Rockwell, on the other hand,  has decided he wants to call Paul just that

“In fact, he didn’t do any of the things we associate with politicians. What his supporters love about him has nothing to do with politics at all.

Ron is the anti-politician.”

Hey, Lew, quite right. We’re flattered you read us.

That IS what his supporters did like about him.

But guess what?

He isn’t an anti-politician any more. He’s an ex-politician.

He ran a political campaign, with political ads, that used political rhetoric, replete with sins of omission, if not commission. He spoke like the rest of the frauds.

He was in it to win, or so he said, and so all his supporters said too.

He took real money, not anti-money, and real time, not anti-time, and real effort, not anti-effort from his supporters.

And he handed the whole thing over to a real politician, not an anti-politician – Mitt Romney.

You can’t have it both ways, Dr. Paul.

You either remain an honest elder statesman, a lovable father figure, in which case you stick to that role throughout.

Or you become a politician, in which case, you get to shade your meanings, talk out of both sides of your mouth, play partisan hard-ball,  take expedient positions, and join the rest, walking on earth, not on water.

Remember wrapping yourself in Reaganism? Think that brought you favor with pro-Reagan or anti-Reagan folks?

It’s all very well for your friends to start a festival called P.A.U.L to save something of the brand value to help their marketing and publishing business.

A clever idea. Worthy of genius marketers.

I would have preferred a little humble-pie. Like, “we were wrong.” “Our campaign helped Mitt Romney and hurt conservatives who actually showed us some respect and whose ticket we could actually have joined.”

But we preferred to make nice to our liberal network.

Now that we’d done the damage, we just do a little revisionism and claim to be “anti-politicians” again.

Ha ha.

You lose your cherry, that’s it. There’s no delete button. You don’t get to rewind and undo what you’ve become.

At least, not without a lot more than a rebranding campaign.  You’d need an admission of reality, to begin with.

No. Paul was an anti-politician in 2007.  In 2012, he is a failed politician.

He played the game and failed. He sold his support and the credibility of hundreds of thousands of his supporters for a mess of pottage for his son, who doesn’t look he’s going to be dining, anyway.

The father lost with the son.  That’s how it goes with these things.

Wenzel can delete a couple of those blog posts and comments talking up the campaign as “genius marketing.” That’s his privilege. But he can’t delete my memory of them.

We like you guys. But we actually do worry for you. We don’t think you know what the stakes really are or how you are being played….

Or are you – sickening thought – players?

Whether it was rigged and Paul is one more tool of the elites co-opting the opposition, or simply old and unable to manage, it does not reflect well on him, in either case.

I would have made a statement that took some blame, myself. I would have given some explanation.

But no.

Double- down on the self-approbation and forget the mea culpas  that a level-headed glimpse of the truth would warrant.

But, of course, marketing isn’t about truth, is it?

It’s about selling.

So sell away, boys.

Just make sure you’re not selling your souls in the bargain.

You can’t press rewind on that, either.

From Oriental Review.org, a good dissection of the CIA-sponsored cultural terrorism of Pussy Riot.

It doesn’t matter that Putin isn’t a “good guy”. Putin’s goodness is irrelevant to the ethics of CIA interference and mind-control operations. The fact that your neighbor is beastly to his wife doesn’t mean you have a right to assault his daughter:

“To illustrate the Russian public reaction on pussy-provocation we are posting a fragment of the open letter to Sir Paul McCartney written by a Russian priest. (He replied to the recent touching message of the British star in support of the ‘rioters’).

“Dear Sir Paul,

Some months ago Russia witnessed an act of evil. We, Russian believers, perceive this event in this way. In the church, built in honor of freeing Russia from Napoleon’s invasion, in the church which for us is the greatest national shrine, four young girls began to dance right before the altar swearing, singing sacrilegious songs and offences to Patriarch, who is for all of us the spiritual leader and honorable man. All this Bacchanalia was filmed and blown the world. Needless to say what a shock and spit in the soul we, Russian orthodox religious people, had experienced.

Several weeks before this event Pussy Riot tried to do something similar in another Moscow church. They were politely asked out without giving this public utterance. They conducted a similar action in the Red Square, just exactly where you, dear Sir Paul, gave your concert. And again, sacrilege and twisting were left without any consequences. At last, before the “action” in the Church of Christ the Savior members of Pussy Riot cropped up and performed an act of group sex with their partners in the State Zoo Museum in the broad daylight and in the presence of visitors including children. Video and photos of this effrontery were also made public in Internet and shown over the central Russian TV channels.

Sir Paul, I would like to ask you whether you consider these actions normal? What could happen in future if these so called punk rock performers who in reality have nothing to do either with punk movement or with rock music were not stopped? Of course, times are changing and in the “civilized world” this is probably considered normal, but I cannot imagine that musicians of Beatles group even with their nonconformity would allow something alike in the presence of children in a museum. There exist some norms of moral, decency, ethic, good and evil, not necessarily connected with this or that religion, which nobody can neglect. Because if the people overstep this limits, they will lose the character of Homo Sapiens and become the animal.

Dear Sir Paul, I am sure that you and other famous musicians were misled as to the essence of this latter event and came out for Pussy Riot without knowing these details. That is why I ventured to let you know the position of Russian believers. In your letter addressed to Pussy Riot you struggle for the freedom of art and self-expression. Nobody is against. Everything – freedom, art and self-expression – are elementary rights which God gave every man. As Lord Jesus Christ is teaching us, You shall know the Truth, ant the Truth shall make you free (The Gospel According to John, ch. 8, para. 32). Christianity is the religion of lovers of liberty and free-thinking people.

And in the present Russia our desire to be free is multiplied by that life experience in totalitarian communist state which we, Russians, had. Sir Paul, please note that the Russian Orthodox Church did not call upon to punish Pussy Riot: judicial proceedings took place upon the court petition of private persons who had been deeply offended by their act. And I understand those people. When Pussy Riot blasphemes in the street, it is their private affair. Many people do the same. But if they break into our church disturbing praying people, blaming our God, out faith, our Patriarch, they offend personally each of us.

Please tell me, Sir Paul, what would be your reaction if during your concert somebody run onto the scene and began to break your instruments, hindering your performance and then took your microphone and in dirty words offend everything that is dear and sacred for you, i.e. your wife, your parents, your art, your moral values? Would you call it self-expression and freedom of art or consider it as usual disorderly conduct? And what would you do in such a situation? I think that as a man possessing chivalry you would not wait for the guard but take actions against such a person yourself.

Probably the sentence for Pussy Riot is somewhat severe. But it was passed by the judiciary bodies. Wishing these young women good, please understand also us, orthodox believers. To nobody we wish ill, prison, long time in prisons, but at the same time we wish that our shrines for which not in so far past our fathers and grandfathers spilled blood, were subjected such an affront. It was not us who pitched the members of Pussy Riot group but it were they who plunged into our church and insulted deeply the present people and thousands of Internet users, which saw the movie with this sacrilege. They mocked before the God’s altar. And we wish not long terms in prison for these ill-educated and disorderly women but only that something similar will never take place in any of our churches.

With all due respect,

Hegumen Sergy (Ribko),

Rector of Moscow Church of Holy Spirit,  in the 1970s – drummer of a rock-group and member of hippies movement.”

Comment:

Some have pointed to Pussy Riot’s elaborate and thoughtful (I would say, pretentious) political statements as proof that the group is genuine.

I read through the manifestos and was even more convinced that the whole thing is yet another intelligence psyop.

The girls compared themselves, modestly, to Jesus, Dostoevsky, Socrates, Solzhenitsyn etc. etc.

Tut.

Pompous, rude twits AND bad artists.

A too-fer.

Pussy Riot talks too much to be genuine rebellion.

The trio remind me of one of those modern paintings with ten paragraphs of explanation for each boring blob. Anything that needs that much explanation in polysyllabic words shows the dead hand of  agitprop not the living touch of art.

I got news for ya, sweets.

Art ain’t big on manifestos.

Jesus – never wrote a book. Spoke in parables. Threw the merchants out of the temple. Didn’t desecrate it.

You’re thinking of Aleister Crowley, not Rabbi Yeshua.

Socrates – never wrote a book. Asked questions and drew out answers from the man on the street.

Solzhenitsyn – wrote good books, not pamphlets. Submitted himself to his tradition.

Dostoevsky –  Real books, not agitprop.

Books take effort and thought. Agitprop takes ego. Especially, lascivious, bigoted agitprop.

Rioting is not rebellion.

Meanwhile, the hypocrisy of the West in all this takes away the breath.

In the US, there is NO major media outlet that dares to expose things as they really are, without adding its sly twist, its sin of omission or commission into the mix.

Each has an agenda, some more, some less. With millions of agendas clashing, the noise is continuous. We can barely hear our own thoughts through them, let alone our consciences.

We have marine vets threatened with psychiatric confinement for two sentences on Facebook.  Every word written or spoken by activists is monitored, collected and analyzed. Even casual words spoken by ordinary citizens.

TV and print media are a pack of lies or distraction, for the most part.

Drive down the road and forget a paper, you are liable for hundreds of dollars. Do that a few times, you pay in the thousands, more than the average man earns in a month.

If they even think you have contraband, they pull down your pants, bend you over and search your anus manually.

Women are spreadeagled like whores over the front pages, shaved and displayed like specimens in a lab, categorized like butchers’ cuts according to the shape, size and age of the parts.

Girls are spread out like this.

This is called “sexy.”

We live and die for “sexy.”

Yes. This is sexy like factory-farming or a slaughterhouse is sexy. It is the sexy of  serial killers and psychopaths.  It is John Wayne Gacey sexy.

This is empowerment of women, our special gift to the world.

And we have our own Defender of the Vagina, Naomi Wolf, to speak up for the new cloacal revolution.

For this joy of letting it all hang out, without consideration or feeling or judgment or modesty or shame or any shade of feeling, except the one supreme one of modernity – utter shamelessness.

The shamelessness not even of the brazen, but of the utterly ignorant. The shamelessness not of people who reject their forefathers, but of those who don’t even know they have them.

What’s the matter, mama. People acting like they got no mamas, Kuzhali Manickavel likes to say.

People acting like they have no teachers, no churches, no histories.

Each day brings a fresh propaganda assault, a new idiocy.

Blogs are hacked, wikipedia is manipulated, activists are harassed and jailed.  Public office is bought and sold, journalists lie, stalk, and assault people for a living, calling it freedom of expression.

TV is filled with porn propaganda or war propaganda.

The women on them are cretinous puppets, giggling and shaking their cleavages in hopes it will make up for the drivel spewing out six inches up.

From left to right, activist leaders have shown us their clay feet and their idle talk.

They are all eunuchs, every one of them, and their followers too, leading us no where, blowing soap bubbles and massaging our backs in the tub, while the house is on fire,  while the mandarins of global order relentlessly add piece upon piece to their master plan, while the spymasters run non-stop assaults on our souls with twisted lies.

And this is the culture from which Putin is denounced?

If Russia today has cancer, in which part of the world did the cells first metastasize?

Wasn’t it here?

Was Marx a product of Russia?

Who spits out the global porn industry, which has turned the diminutive for a beloved pet into slang for genitals?

Isn’t more than 80%  of porn from the US?

We are the p**** peddlers of the world.  The kings of the sex-trade and the sultans of child-rape.

The masters of  huckstering and packaging and hyping and pimping everything, including our sons and daughters.

Who controls the drug trade? Who sells the arms? Who instigates and meddles and lectures and bombs? Who has been at war every year with now this, now that country?

Who meddles in the currency and trade of every country?

Who dumps its waste in pitiful backwaters in the third world, and bribes the worst elements there to the top? Who hides in off-shores havens and manipulates economies to extract their value, then runs, leaving ruin behind?

Who sells junk financial products of no value – none – and extracts real value from everyone else?

Isn’t this slavery?

Aren’t we the slave masters of the world, fat, crude, and lascivious, our tongues out, drooling in front of every base act, sniggering and leering, peering, and calling this freedom?

Freedom to be base and barbaric.

Freedom of pornocracy and fascist finance and race supremacism and hatred of goodness that masquerades as universalism and rights and liberalism and freedom.

It’s not a free world we have. It is an enslaved world.  A world of slaves.

Bondage and submission, indeed.

Bondage to the flesh and submission to the father of lies.

Our p****** can riot and our c**** can party.

But upstairs, our brains have been foreclosed on and the debts have come due on our souls.

“Remember it is better to take the largest plate within reach and fling it at a woman’s head than it is to wriggle like a worm whenever she looks at you!”

From Murder in Mesopotamia circa 1936, Agatha Christie (h/t to Alphagameplan.blogspot.com)

From comments at EPJ this morning:

Taylor ConantAugust 26, 2012 10:22 AM

Too bad Ron Paul’s truth machine didn’t. Imagine if the RP campaign had spent all its funds on witty TV ads explaining basic economic and political principles not connected to Ron Paul’s campaign instead of… whatever the hell they spent it on that was ultimately a waste because his campaign is now dead.

Well said, Taylor Conant.

The excellent reference site ISGP.EU (formerly pehi.eu) run by Joel Van Der Reijden has not disappeared. It is now housed at wikispooks.

It was an original and serious multi-researcher project attempting to compile lists of members of important secret societies influential in world politics and economics.  ISGP stands for the Institute for the Study of Globalization and Covert Politics. I came to the site only in 2010 and I changed my mind about the extent and significance of child sex abuse after reading its account of the Dutreux scandal.

In “Mobs,” (2007) I  included a section about it, as an example of moral panics, at the suggestion of my co-author, who had seen what was happening in France in the nineties, as I had seen the equivalent panic in the US. For my research, I relied mainly on the account of Alexander Cockburn, the co-editor of Counterpunch, who took the view that the child sex abuse scandals had been vastly exaggerated by sensational accounts.  That was my view too, from reading about it, with the caveat that I came to believe the panic was manufactured in some way. Since then, my research leads me to believe that the moral panic was fanned in order to create a cover for real, intelligence-related sex rings, used to entrap and blackmail politicians and other prominent or influential people.

Posted at the Lew Rockwell blog:

Brandon Raub Ordered Released By Circuit Judge

Posted by Christopher Manion on August 24, 2012 11:30 AM

In a stinging rebuke to the FBI, the Secret Service, and other self-appointed Thought Police, Hopewell Circuit Judge W. Allan Sharrett ordered the immediate release of Brandon Raub, whom Virginia authorities had imprisoned last week because of anti-government comments that he had posted on the Internet.

Judge Sharrett found “that a document ordering Raub’s transfer this week from a Hopewell hospital to the Salem VA Medical Center was faulty and “so devoid of any factual allegations that it could not be reasonably expected to give rise to a case or controversy.”

Special thanks and congratulations are in order for the vital role played by the Rutherford Institute, which immediately came to Raub’s defense and exposed the scandalous series of illegal actions on the part of Virginia officials that railroaded Mr. Raub into a psychiatric jail for a thirty-day term without being charged of any crime.

Readers should note that every level of government, from the federal to the local police in Chesterfield County, here in Virginia, were complicit in this illegal arrest and incaceration. No one at any level of government stepped forward to defend Mr. Raub’s First Amendment rights until the Rutherford Institute initiated legal action in his defense and took the matter to court. That includes Virginia Republicans Rep. Bob Goodlatte and former Senator and current Senate candidate George Allen, both of whom did not respond to requests I placed with their respective offices.

This should be a lesson — and a warning — for us all

Comment:

I’ve been thinking this case is very strange (see my comments under my post about the Sikh temple shootings) and I’ve held my tongue about it for the same reason.

This sudden release confirms my feeling. There’s something more going on here and I wouldn’t be surprised if this was not just a misstep on the government’s part but a staged arrest to let the blogosphere know what could be in store for it if it steps out of line. I think it is especially aimed at homecoming vets who might be inclined to lead any “revolutions” or “sharpen their axes” for the generals, as Raub put it on his Facebook page.  I don’t think Raub is what he seems to be.

It’s a kind of intimidation, just as the massive militarization and purchases of arms by the DHS is  intimidation. The government could also be worrying about a possible insurrection from the vets, who would make credible foes that could unite the country behind them.

More on this to come…

The Ulsterman Report has an insightful analysis of the publishing block-buster, “Fifty Shades of Grey,” the first of a trilogy of erotic novels based on a fan-fiction take-off on the vampire-genre “Twilight” series.

I have been reading about and around this story for a while, including wading through the first volume in e-book format, where it allegedly first made its name, looking for clues to bolster my hunch that this is an elite media psyop.

I started out believing it was about mainstreaming BDSM (Bondage-discipline, Dominance-Submission, and Sado-Masochism), but  because of the virginal nature of the heroine, I saw it as a romanticizing of an abusive relationship between an inexperienced young woman and a sociopath.

That would be bad enough.

The Ulsterman report however goes further and argues that the story line is a cover, a sop to mainstream sensibilities, which is marketing it as “mommy porn”.  The report argues that Fifty Shades is actually a sick joke at the expense of American mothers and what it actually glamorizes is the pedophilic rape of a just pubescent or pre-pubescent child.

The analysis of the book’s sub-text is disturbing and thoroughly convincing, but there is yet another angle it leaves out that I will address in another post on the piece. I strongly advise anyone who has the time to put pressure on public libraries to withdraw this book from their shelves. On my part, I will also talk to local Walmarts where they are piling up this piece of dangerous propaganda, to cease and desist.

I hear that a couple of public libraries in Florida and New Jersey (?) have already done so. No need to censor it and turn the book into a first amendment issue. Let people read it privately. But it sure as heck needs to be boycotted in the public square.

Here’s the piece:

50 Shades of Grey – Pedophilia Hiding In Plain Sight

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The story of convicted child rapist Jerry Sandusky is well known.  So too is the 50 Shades of Grey phenomena, a book that has become so popular among women that some are referring to it as “Mommy Porn” for the masses.  That description is actually a lot more disturbing than a lot of folks are currently realizing.

Yes, 50 Shades is pornography. Like most pornography, the storyline is weak, the characters one-dimensional, while the sex itself graphic, detailed, but formulaic.  The underlying theme to 50 Shades is something far more sinister and appalling though than your mere run-of-the-mill porn.  It is pedophilia.  It is child porn.  Kiddie porn.

Now I know after saying that, many female fans of 50 Shades, many of them mothers, will naturally put up a defense against that kind of description.  These women, being mothers, are naturally wired to protect kids.  People like Jerry Sandusky are viewed with hatred, revulsion, and disgust.  Rightfully so.  What mother would want to condone anything having to do with the sexual abuse of children?  Of innocents?

But that is exactly what 50 Shades of Grey is really about.  It is a story of a girl being sexually molested, over and over again, by a male figure with all the power, all the control.  It is the classic abuse scenario.  And mothers are, in some cases, quite literally getting off on it, which takes the disgust of this phenomena to a whole other frightening level.

So having put that out there, and I hope I haven’t lost any of you just yet.  I owe you an explanation after having made that kind of accusation about a book some of you may be reading right now.  I’ll start with a bit of background first.

My professional experience centers around nearly 20 years with Child Protective Services.  Over that time, I’ve seen situations that do, literally, keep me up at night.  The amount of abuse that is going on in our society, that sexualization of our kids…well basically, what you hear about, what is reported in the news, that is only a small sample of just how large of a problem and the disgusting acts that are going on every day.  Kids are being raped.  Kids are being abused.  Every single day.  Over and over and over again.

I didn’t seek out 50 Shades of Grey.  It was brought to my attention by a longtime friend who is also a clinical psychologist at a university.  She’s a bit older than me.  She grew up in the counter culture era and did her fair share of experimentation of all kinds.  So she’s hardly a prude.  What she today though is a mother and grandmother.  And she’s smart.  One of the things that fascinates her is this age of cultural phenomena.  How due to technology things now spread so quickly throughout society and become the next big thing at an increasingly rapid pace.  She says sometimes this phenomena is pretty much harmless, and other times it can be very damaging to kids and or adults who begin to emulate something out of a need to belong to the “next big thing”.

Her reaction to 50 Shades of Grey though was much more aggressively negative than anything I could recall her talking about before.  It came up because I mentioned it to her offhand.  I had seen a couple mentions of it on the news and knowing her interest in cultural trends, asked her about it.  She stopped talking, looked right at me, and said the book was about pedophilia.   And it was her who then connected it to the Sandusky tragedy where so many young boys had been sexually abused. Sandusky committed his acts of crime under the cover of actually helping youth.  That is how he gained access.  My friend said 50 Shades was basically the same exact thing.  Its cover was a story of a young woman engaging is a very graphic sexual relationship with a somewhat older man.

The problem for her, and it was a BIG PROBLEM, was that the narrator in the story, was in fact, an underage girl.  My friend indicated, based on the use of language in the narration, that this girl was likely no more than 12 or 13 years of age.  I made mention that the girl in the story was actually getting ready to graduate college.  My friend, a woman with years of experience as a clinical psychologist, whose expertise I had personally witnessed a number of times over the years, shook her head and told me that she would not be able to convince me by simply talking about it.  She said I should read the book myself, but do so with the eyes of somebody whose job it had been for many years to try and protect children.  As someone who has seen over and over the signs of abuse, and the damages of abuse.   Because there are always warning signs.  I know that.  How many times have I heard people horrified in saying “I can’t believe I didn’t see that”  “How couldn’t I have known?”  Or even worse, “I knew something wasn’t right but I didn’t want to believe they were capable of doing something like that.”

I’ll try and summarize my friend’s words at this point as best I can.

“Sexual predators are cons.  They almost always have a cover.  It’s that cover which allows them access.  50 Shades of Grey is a con.  It now has access to millions of readers.  It is a story about abuse from beginning to end.  And it’s not just the abuse of a man and a woman – it’s the abuse of a man and a girl.

When you read it, look for the signs.  They are all there.

The female character has no sexual experience.  None.  She is given the age of 21, but that age is itself a cover.  Her true emotional age is much-much younger.  She has never even masturbated.  She has never even experienced an orgasm.  That alone is one of the greatest attractions to the pedophile.  That is the psychology of that kind of act.  You get off on taking purity.

But move from the fact the girl has no sexual experience whatsoever.  Now pay attention to her narrative dialogue.  Really listen to how she talks.  Again, she’s not talking like a young woman, she’s talking like a girl.  She talks about cartwheels, and skipping, over and over again it is the language and the imagery of a girl.

After that this girl has her innocence taken from her.  The abuser, the older man, makes her think its her choice.  Again, you and I both know that is one of the primary tools of the pedophile.  They create an environment where the child feels it’s their idea.  It’s what they want. But what happens after that innocence is taken away?  Then the abuser becomes more openly abusive. Controlling.  In this story he tells the little girl how to speak.  What to wear.  What to eat.  He is Daddy and she is daughter.  When you read it read it like a mother who is also a woman who is experienced with the real life tragedy of abuse.

And there is many more themes about that abuse in this book.  There is spanking and the use of Baby oil.  Why baby oil?  Think about it.  The girl wears pigtails.  She complains that he is treating her like a child.  He says she acts like a child.  There is even a scene where the abuser creates a situation to take her innocence from her again.  He rips out her tampon and engages in forceful sex yet again.  Her hymen is ripped, and the bloody remnants of it are again symbolized in an act of pedophile rape.”

She went on to say there are women now defending the book, and she understands that, but it concerns her.  A great deal, because she is absolutely convinced the book is purposely advocating the raping of a child and attempting to normalize that atrocity.

So, I left that conversation thinking maybe my friend was exaggerating.  I had a hard time believing something so popular could actually have such a sinister and revolting theme, and while I respected her expertise and experience, thought this time she had to be seeing something that just wasn’t there.

I got the book, I sat down, and I read it.

The first thing that struck me was how poor the writing was.  It wasn’t just bad.  It was horrible.  But horrible writing is no crime, (thank goodness or I would have been put away a long time ago) and it doesn’t make the content of the story evil.  But in my reading of it, just like my friend said, the theme of child abuse, of pedophilia, was right there in plain sight.  I remember being told a long time ago that sometimes the best way to hide something is in plain sight.  That is what 50 Shades of Grey is really doing.

The main character had no sexual experience.  None.  She was an innocent.  She was a kid who had just had her first drink of alcohol.  No way that was an accident by the author.  That author had to have purposely made her, despite her given age of 21, by any other measure, a little girl.  At that point, it struck me as odd.  In my business, we call that a warning signal. A sign we may have a problem.

From there, just like my friend had warned, it got worse.  Much worse.  And she was right, her telling me about it did not have the impact of me reading it myself with eyes open.  She had given me the signs to look for, and as I turned the pages, those signs confirmed it over and over again.

The narration, which is the voice of the girl talking to the reader, was the voice of a little girl.  It’s unmistakable.  There is very little emotional maturity and absolutely no sexual maturity.  She is seduced by this man in the very same way a pedophile seduces a child.  The male character is Gerry Sandusky.  He makes a show of his money, his power, the things he can buy for her, but while this is going on, we are reading the thoughts of a child.  We are reading the seduction of a little girl by a pedophile.  She is almost completely powerless.  She is naïve even for a teenager, and certainly much much more naïve than a college student.  She is incapable of even making the most simple of every day decisions and must be told what to do by her abuser, who in turn though spends a lot of time and effort convincing this child this is really what she wants.  I’ve seen this before.  Too often.  Too many times.  And it always leaves me sickened.

We are reading child pornography.  Remove the false age of the girl, which has no basis in reality, and what we are actually reading is the abuse of a little girl.

The main character is described in pigtails, given words like “Holy Cow”  “down there”, “jeez”  “double crap” she can’t operate a computer (but is supposedly a college graduate), describes skipping and doing cartwheels, repeatedly says she is made to feel like a child, has her imaginary friend (inner goddess) feels shame, is spanked and slathered in BABY OIL, told what to say, what to eat, what to do, until finally and sadly so predictably, is physically beaten.  (But she returns to him soon after, which is again, a very common theme of abuse, including pedophilia)

And beyond all of this evidence there is the fact that the male character is himself a product of sexual abuse at the hands of a pedophile.  The girl whose thoughts we listen in on as she is being abused, recognizes this aspect of the male abuser, but apparently, is too naïve or unwilling to realize she has continued this cycle of abuse herself. (Which again reinforces the idea that she is actually herself just a child)  There is no way the author did this by accident.  She puts out the theme of pedophilia openly, therefore hiding it in plain sight.

People who have had to deal with the real world of sexual abuse of children will understand this perhaps more easily than others.  How the pedophile is so often themselves victims of earlier abuse.  They enter society, they become fathers or mothers, but so often they too become abusive.  They seek out dominance, control, and the taking of innocence just as it was taken from them.  Those who were once abused, become the abuser.  It is the sad sick and tragic cycle of pedophilia.

With 50 Shades of Grey this abnormal condition is trying to be normalized.  Thanks to the insight of my friend, and my own experience,  I know it for what it truly is – a story of the sexual abuse of child, wrapped in the cliché cover story of a mysterious and troubled wealthy man.  That is another thing my clinical psychologist friend pointed out later.  Take away the aspect of money, and the character of the abuser becomes much less attractive and therefore it would have been much more difficult to pull of the deception.  Are women actually that shallow?  Yes, we can be.

But women, the vast majority of us, are not people who knowingly condone the sexual abuse of children.  We do not condone in any way, the horror that is pedophilia.

Sadly though, that is exactly what is happening with the popularity of 50 Shades of Grey.  It’s a pedophilia con.

It is one of the most horrible and sickening acts against the most powerless of our society, hiding in plain sight.

Maybe my friend put it best when we talked all of this over.  50 Shades of Grey didn’t excite her.  She didn’t find it interesting, sexy, or romantic.

50 Shades of Grey made her weep.  It made her sick.  It made her think of the abuses of all of those kids by a demented, warped monster like Jerry Sandusky, who, just like the pedophilia of 50 Shades of Grey, was hiding in plain sight.

Half-sigma, another manosphere blogger, describes how value is created by Asian employees and extracted, via “Ivy League” brand marketing, top-heavy corporate structure, and inflated management/investment banking salaries, by largely white elites.

The same thing can be said of practically everything else in the state-capitalist fiat money system:-

“A blogger called Education Realist (whom I found on Steve Sailer’s blog) wrote the following:

If you read of a school that’s suddenly moved to elite status or seen a dramatic rise in test scores (e.g., AIPCS), or heard that a test prep process has gotten out of control, it’s a sure thing that it’s become “an Asian school,” as we call them in my area. Once a school “goes Asian”, hitting a tipping point of about 40%, it’s a short step to 60-80%. Check out the top-scoring comprehensive high schools by SAT average, and the highest ones will be “Asian schools”. They end up Asian because of white flight. It’s not that whites don’t like Asians, but their kids will lose access to AP/honors courses and get lower GPAs—not because they have lower abilities, but because the white parents haven’t managed to convince their kids that the world will end of they don’t get straight As.

I love learning stuff like this from bloggers. Until now, I never really thought about how there’s an Asian tipping point in public schools. But of course, it makes perfect sense.

* * *

BrunoBrazil writes:

Sigma, what the heck do you have against asians that have their noses to the grindstone, work hard, grind to tests, become betas with average families and suceed in situations where people from other ethnicities fail? As far as I can see, it is at least a culture that doesn´t promote eliteness, but makes socially adjusted individuals who are much better off than whites or blacks in the same context.

I don’t have anything against. Asians. I enjoy calling out SWPLs for their racist and hypocritical behavior.

But as I previously explained, Asians are acting against their children’s interests with their Asian parenting style:

The Chinese parenting style will no doubt produce workers who are good value creators, and their corporate employers will love them, and they will be paid far less money than the value they create, the excess value being transferred to white people who got into better colleges because their curricula vitae had more leadership and sports activities, and with those more prestigious educational credentials they got into higher paying value transference career tracks like investment banking and upper level management, and now enjoy the value created by those Chinese cubicle employees who are doing the real work and the real value creation.”

Don Boland, a lecturer at the Center for Thomistic studies in Sydney, Austrialia, argues that the errors of post-Christian society far exceed the errors of post-pagan society:

In his book “The Well and the Shallows” G. K. Chesterton has a chapter entitled “Sex and Property”. In it he says: But even the stink of decaying heathenism has not been so bad as the stink of decaying Christianity. The corruption of the best. . .

He was referring to public sexual immorality as it manifested itself in the ancient world and as it was in his time beginning to manifest itself in the modern world. Gross and obscene as the pagan practices may have been, Chesterton sees reason to compare them favorably with the modern. Thus he says: In one way all this ancient sin was infinitely superior, immeasurably superior, to the modern sin.

What is this way in which, despite its decadence, the ancient was superior to the modern worship of sexual pleasure? The answer follows on immediately: The ancient sexual perversity, as all historians agree, was connected to the cult of Fruitfulness… Hence, Chesterton observes; It was at least on the side of Nature. It was at least on the side of Life. The modern “sexual revolution”, however, has completely severed the natural connection of sexual pleasure with life. It has been left to the last Christians, or rather to the first Christians fully committed to blaspheming and denying Christianity, to invent a new kind of worship of Sex, which is not even a worship of Life. It has been left to the very latest Modernists to proclaim an erotic religion which at once exalts lust and forbids fertility.

He goes on to add: this unnatural separation, between sex and fruitfulness … even the Pagans would have thought a perversion. Today, this perversion even to the dissolute Pagans has become so widely accepted and practiced that it is claimed to be as “natural” as sexual intercourse which is apt, barring natural impediments, to produce offspring, and any moral denunciation of it is beginning to be treated as perverse, even by legislators. One can only contemplate with dismay how this socially “moral” turnaround must end.

Chesterton noticed this unnatural separation that characterizes the modern attitude to sex in the early part of the twentieth century. The subsequent years between then and now have seen the gradual re-education of society’s attitude to sex so that its divorce from any natural connection with the continuation of human life is made as complete as possible. The introduction of the contraceptive pill played a decisive part in this disconnection process.

The educators in de-perversion having done their job, in relatively recent times social sexual practices have followed suit till we have reached the stage where “sex” between consenting adults, of whatever degree of depravity, is not only looked upon as “normal”, but is also given social respectability and legal recognition.

This, however, is not an isolated phenomenon. As the title of his article indicates, Chesterton sees that something analogous has happened in relation to our attitude to property or wealth. Put shortly, it is that our desire for wealth too has been separated from its natural end. In moral terms this means that, just as the propagandists for the new sexual morality have exalted pure lust as the rationale for engaging in sexual relations, so have the proponents of the new economic morality elevated pure greed or avarice to be the primary motive for engaging in wealth-getting.

How can this occur? Obviously, at root there is moral fault. But there is no moral fault or sin without a corresponding mental error. This latter is what we are mainly concerned to analyze here. Chesterton thus says: In both departments [sex and property] there is precisely the same fallacy; which it is quite possible to state precisely. The reason why our contemporary countrymen do not understand what we mean by Property is that they only think of it in the sense of Money ,,, in the sense of something which is immediately consumed, enjoyed and expended; something which gives momentary pleasure and disappears.

That is to say we have ignored the proper purpose of wealth, to satisfy our natural needs and rational wants, and gone for the pleasure that accompanies the possession of property, as if this could satisfy by itself. Now there is nothing wrong in enjoying one’s God-given wealth, provided it is being used for what it is created for, namely, to satisfy our desires for material goods within reason, or in accordance with nature. This pleasure in possession of wealth is epitomized in the possession of money, as it can stand for all wealth. But what happens is that money, being a pure means, disconnects us even further from the natural end of wealth. So we can be deceived into seeking to have money for its own sake, or simply for the pleasure attached to having much wealth.

Chesterton thus continues the analogy: Now the notion of narrowing property merely to ‘enjoying’ money is exactly like the notion of narrowing love merely to ‘enjoying’ sex. In both cases an incidental, isolated, servile and even secretive pleasure is substituted for participation in a great creative process; even in the everlasting Creation of the world.

Pleasure, as Aristotle noted, is not something bad but good. But it does not and cannot stand alone; it complements some naturally good act. It is not, therefore, properly an end in itself. If we try to possess it without respecting the natural end of the act to which it belongs it vanishes as something without substance, without any support. To pursue pleasure for its own sake is to pursue a delusion, and to achieve not pleasure but misery, which accompanies the unnatural disorder put in the place of the natural order of things. The sweet smell of natural goodness turns quickly into the stink of decadence, though for a time the person concerned may “enjoy” the sickly odor of decay.

What the pleasure of possession thrives and survives in is the achievement of the natural and creative ends of wealth and production. They do not understand that we mean by Property something that includes that pleasure incidentally; but begins and ends with something far more grand and worthy and creative.

Chesterton then makes an interesting observation about Communism and Capitalism. The modern mistake regarding sex and property is not peculiar to the capitalist West. For, it is an attitude that has its roots in the decline of Christian civilization and the rise of the modern secularized world.

The same basic attitude towards enjoying money is noted by Chesterton to be just as much present in the communist society as in the capitalist. From the first, it is admitted, that the whole system was directed towards encouraging or driving the worker to spend his wages; to have nothing left on the next pay day; to enjoy everything and consume everything and efface everything. That is to say Consumerism was a matter of deliberate policy.

Indeed, many would think that Chesterton goes too far in saying that Communism ironically took to its logical extreme, and implemented by force, what is inherent in the psychology of Capitalism about the pursuit of pleasure and money, but is there left, at least in theory, to the initiative of individuals to realize. The two sinister things [the mistaken modern beliefs about sex and property] can be seen side by side in the system of Bolshevist Russia; for Communism is the only complete and logical working model of Capitalism. The sins are there a system which are everywhere else a sort of repeated blunder.

But perhaps Chesterton was more perceptive than most. Certainly, Capitalism in the West, hardly able to resist the temptation to regard the sudden and unexpected demise of Communism as confirmation of the truth of its liberal ideology, seems to be drifting more and more towards the same sort of totalitarianism, as if driven by an inexorable internal logic.

The psychology of sex, despite the apparent difference in its political “management”, is also noted by Chesterton to be something common to both the modern West and East. But it will be noted that exactly the same spirit and tone pervades the manner of dealing with the other matter. Sex also is to come to the slave merely as a pleasure; that it may never be a power. He is to know as little as possible, or at least to think as little as possible, of the pleasure as anything else except a pleasure; to think or know nothing of where it comes from or where it will go to, when once the soiled object has passed through his own hands. He is not to trouble about its origin in the purposes of God or its sequel in the posterity of man. In every department he is not a possessor, but only a consumer;

There is no difficulty in recognizing this as also a description of the self-made slave of sex in the Western world. Chesterton thus sums up with a hint of what all this has led to – the culture of death instead of life:

Thus there is an exact parallel between the two modern moral, or immoral, ideas of social reform. The world has forgotten simultaneously that the making of a Farm is something much larger than the making of a profit, or even a product, in the sense of liking the taste of beetroot sugar; and that the founding of a Family is something much larger than sex in the limited sense of current literature; which was anticipated in one bleak and blinding flash in a single line of George Meredith; “And eat our pot of honey on the grave.”

Don Boland

G.K., an Indian-American “manosphere” blogger at The Futurist analyzes the financial crisis in terms of feminist social engineering, in the following excerpt, part of a long, provocative post on yet another bubble that might be in the process of popping – the bubble in misandry:

“The ‘Mancession’ and the ‘Sheconomy’ : I would be the first to be happy if the economic success of women were solely on the basis of pure merit.  For many of them, it is.  But far too much has been the result of not market forces or meritocracy, but political graft and ideology-driven corruption.

In the recent recession and ongoing jobless recovery, the male unemployment rate continues to be much higher than the female unemployment rate.  If this was simply due to market forces, that would be fine.  However, ‘feminist’ groups have lobbied hard to ensure that government stimulus funds were steered to boost female employment at the expense of assistance for men.  The leftist Obama administration was more than eager to comply, and a forcible transfer of wealth was enacted, even though it may not have been the best deployment of money for the economy.

Maria Shriver, a woman who has the most fortunate of lives from the vast wealth earned first by her grandfather and then by her husband, recently published ‘A Woman’s Nation : The Shriver Report’, consisting of gloating about how women were now outperforming men economically.  The entire research report is full of all the standard bogus feminist myths and flawed statistics, as thoroughly debunked here, as well as the outright sexism of statements like ‘women are better managers’ (imagine a man saying the reverse).  Furthermore, the report reveals the typical economic illiteracy (evidenced by, among other things, the ubiquitous ‘women are underpaid’ myth), as well as belief that businesses exist to act as vehicles of social engineering rather than to produce a profit.

All of this bogus research and organized anti-male lobbying has been successful.  As of today, the male unemployment rate is worse than the female unemployment rate by an unprecedented chasm.  The ‘mancession’ continues as the US transitions to a ‘sheconomy’, and among the millions of unemployed men, some owe prohibitive levels of ‘child support’ despite not being the ones wanting to deprive their children of a two-parent household, landing in prison for lack of funds.  Furthermore, I emphasize again that having 10-30% of the US male workforce living under an effective 70% marginal tax rate will kill their incentives for inventing new technologies or starting new companies.  It is petty to debate whether the top federal income tax bracket should be 35% or 39.6%, when a slice of the workforce is under a 70% tax on marginal income.  Beyond the tyranny of this, it also costs a lot of taxpayer money to jail a growing pool of unemployed men.  Clearly, moving more and more men out of a tax-generating capacity and into a tax-consuming capacity is certainly going to do two-fold damage to governmental budgets.  The next time you hear someone say that ‘the US has the largest prison population in the world’, be sure to mention that many of these men merely lost their jobs, and were divorced against their will.  The women, in the meantime, are having a blast.

The Government Bubble : While public sector vs. private sector workforce distribution is not highly correlated to gender, it is when the focus is on women earning over $100,000 or more.  This next chart from the Cato Institute shows that when total compensation (wages + benefits) are taken into account, the public sector has totally outstripped the private sector this decade.  Has the productivity of the typical government employee risen so much more than that of the private worker, that the government employee is now paid twice as much?  Are taxpayers receiving value for their money?

It goes further.  The vast majority of social security taxes are paid by men, but are collected by women (due to women living 7 years longer than men on average).  That is not troubling by any means, but the fact that women consume two-thirds of all US healthcare, despite most of this $2.5 Trillion annual expenditure being paid by men, is certainly worthy of debate.  It may be ‘natural’ for women to require more healthcare, since they are the ones who give birth.  But it was also ‘natural’ for men to finance this for only their wives, not for the broader community of women.  The healthcare profession also employs an immense number of women, and not just in value-added roles such as nursing, but even in administrative and bureaucratic positions.  In fact, virtually all government spending except for defense and infrastructure, from Medicare to Obamacare to welfare to public sector jobs for women to the expansion of the prison population, is either a net transfer of wealth from men to women, or a byproduct of the destruction of Marriage 1.0.  In either case, ‘feminism’ is the culprit.

This Cato Institute chart of Federal Government spending (click to enlarge) shows how non-defense expenditures have steadily risen since 1960.  The decline in defense spending, far from being a ‘peace dividend’ repatriated back to taxpayers, was used to fund more social programs.  No one can seriously claim that the American public receives better non-defense governance in 2010 than in 1960 despite the higher price, and as discussed earlier, most of this increase is a direct or indirect result of ‘feminism’.  When state and local government wastage is added to this, it would appear that 20% of GDP is being spent just to make the government a substitute for the institution of Marriage, and yet still has not managed to be an effective replacement.  Remember again that the earnings of men pays 70%-80% of all taxes.

The left has finally found a perfect Trojan Horse through which to expand a tyrannical state.  ‘Feminists’ can lobby for a transfer of wealth from men to women and from private industry to the government, while knowing that calling any questioner a ‘misogynist’ will silence him far more effectively than their military fifth columnist, environmentalist, and plain socialist brethren could ever silence their respective opponents.  Conservatives are particularly vulnerable to such shaming language, and most conservatives will abandon their stated principles to endlessly support any and all socialism if it can be packaged as ‘chivalry’, the opposition to which makes one a ‘misogynist’.  However, there is reason to believe that tax collection in many parts of the US, such as in states like CA, NY, NJ, and MA, has reached saturation.  As the optimal point has already been crossed, a rise in tax rates will cause a decrease, rather than an increase in revenue, and the increase in Federal tax rates exactly one year from today on 1/1/2011 is likely to cause another recession, which will not be so easily transferred to already-impoverished men the next time.

When men are severed from their children with no right to obstruct divorce, when they are excluded from the labor market not by market forces but rather by social engineering, and when they learn that the society they once believed in and in some cases joined the military to protect, has no respect for their aspirations, these men have no reason to sustain such a society.

The Contract Between the Sexes : A single man does not require much in order to survive.  Most single men could eke out a comfortable existence by working for two months out of the year.  The reason that a man might work hard to earn much more than he needs for himself is to attract a wife amidst a competitive field, finance a home and a couple of children, and ultimately achieve status as a pillar of the community.  Young men who exhibited high economic potential and favorable compatibility with the social fabric would impress a girl’s parents effectively enough to win her hand in marriage.  The man would proceed to work very hard, with the fruits of his labor going to the state, the employer, and the family.  80-90% of a man’s output went to people other than himself, but he got a family and high status in return, so he was happy with the arrangement.

The Four Sirens changed this, which enabled women to pursue alpha males despite the mathematical improbability of marrying one, while totally ignoring beta males.  Beta males who were told to follow a responsible, productive life of conformity found that they were swindled.

This superb article explains how men who excelled under the societal rules of just two decades ago are often left totally betrayed by the rules of today, and results in them refusing to sustain a society heavily dependent on their productivity and ingenuity.  Rather than restate the case, go over and read that article, from which I will quote a few sentences.

“The media is now denouncing Sodini as a monster, which he is, but he is a monster that could only be spawned by a monstrous society. The sort of society that could send a hardworking, honest man down the path of insane, murderous rage is not only a society that will not survive, but doesn’t deserve to.”

“A man like George Sodini, who listened to his cultural elites and followed their dictates to the letter only to get swindled, had no reason to love America. In fact, he had every reason to lash out at the society that screwed him over and make its denizens feel some of the pain that they had inflicted on him.”

“You could stop this madness tomorrow by refusing to follow your vaginas straight into the arms of scumbags, and actually live up to your claims of wanting nice guys – but I doubt you will. You’ve made your bed, ladies – now sleep in it.”

Comment:

Mark Ames has a perceptive analysis of the Sodini shootings at eXile that isn’t too far from this manosphere analysis.

I get a kick out of reading what are called “conspiracy” sites and trying to figure what their angle is.

Not all of them do have an angle, of course. Some are actually well-researched and largely truthful websites, even if the evidence on them would not meet academic approval.

The nature of the subject makes that difficult in many cases.

But there are times when they peddle some laugh-out-loud error that needs to be administered a good hard kick.

One such boo-boo is on Henry Makow’s more-than-somewhat misogynistic site.

This is not to trash the site. I find a lot of very interesting information on it. A recent piece on theosophy and the Indian independence movement, for example, highlights a whole bunch of interesting associations among independence activists and leaders.

But Makow’s narrative, his history of the independence movement, like his history of banking, is simply not accurate.

In fact, it’s wildly off-base on important things. And that undermines not only his credibility, but the credibility of anyone else offering alternative views of history that cover the same ground.

That’s the problem.

Again, I’m not trashing Mr. Makow or his viewpoint.

And I sincerely respect these kinds of popular conspiracy sites, however bizarre or ludicrous they might seem to the official media or to academia.  No matter what the motivation that lies behind them, my reasoning is that if they do nothing else, they help to loosen the grip of official historical dogmas on the mass mind. This is enormously important.

Births are always accompanied by a lot of hollering and mess.

From the cumulative efforts of thousands…if not millions…. of sites like this, something new, some new consciousness is being born.

A new consciousness that undermines the stultified hagiography and propaganda served up to us by the state, academicians, and the media.

That is why, errors and all, these new populist web histories are intellectually and psychologically freeing.

Nonetheless,  in the interests of not veering off into lunacy, the errors should be noted and corrected.

I’m thinking especially of the piece on the Indian independence movement, but I’ll dissect that at another time. It will take too much time now.

Here, I’ll content myself with this small gem, from an article on the Beatles:

“John Lennon sings ‘gai guru deva’ (all hail to the devas). In Theosophy, a deva is a spiritual entity, i.e. demon, which exists behind the scenes manipulating and directing human behavior. Luciferians believe they are possessed by these entities when they rape, torture and kill innocent victims.”

I hope no one gets their introduction to Hinduism from the Beatles, but if they do, the phrase is “Jaya Guru Deva.”

That translates into “Hail to the teacher (the guru), the divine.”

A deva is literally a god, but can be translated here as divine.

The guru is your spiritual master, the one who keeps you on the straight and narrow.

Most gurus (apart from the glitzier ones catering to the West or various charlatans) follow ancient traditions reaching back directly to the Vedic past, that were handed down to them by their gurus.

Anyone who taught any new-fangled innovation would soon be caught out by other gurus in that tradition.

What do gurus teach?

The scriptures (the Vedas and commentaries on them), meditation, control of the breath and the senses, spiritual practice. If the guru is a guru of dance or music or yoga, he will teach those disciplines.

Nothing to do with theosophy or demons raping or killing anyone.

It would take five seconds to find that out on the net today.

Ye gods!

Update:

I’m marveling at the hypocrisy of the mainstream media in trashing Gandhi as a pedophile, when there is not a jot of evidence that he had sex with any of the post-pubertal women who attended him.

Gandhi was renowned for talking about every single thing he did and thought, so his words can easily be taken out of context and used against him.

Yet on Gore Vidal’s actual documented promiscuous pederasty, about which he talked volubly and publicly, for his open and proud support for removing all age-of-consent laws (whatever you think about them), and on his well-known support for NAMBLA  (the pro-pedophile advocacy group) there is complete silence in the mainstream media.

Why? Because Vidal was one of them.

But why the adulation for Vidal in the alternative media?

Because he was antiwar.

A good enough reason.

But, still, any genuine assessment of Vidal’s life and work should put his antiwar statements into context. Where they become much less admirable.

Vidal was anti-war, because America was involved in war, and, first and foremost, he hated things that were quintessentially American and middle-class.

So he hated Christianity and  Judaism and monotheism itself.

He was a militant atheist who wrote books that didn’t just criticize but mocked figures sacred to Christianity, making Jesus into a kind of buffoon.

With the  sado-masochistic sexologist and pedophile-enabler Alfred Kinsey, whom he admired, he mainstreamed homosexuality and pan-sexualism, including pederasty…in keeping with his love for the Greeks. He believed in global warming and gun-control. He loved Hillary and Bill Clinton, thought Obama too good for Americans, name-dropped incessantly, and adored the Kennedys.

He had good words for blacks and women, because they were ideological allies, not because he was anything but naturally misogynistic and implicitly Eurocentric.

He claimed to hate  “identity,’ but like most people who attack “essences” on ideological grounds, he was notably ready to adopt the language of identity whenever he wanted – referring to Obama as a “slave,” calling himself a “fag,” calling Buckley a “crypto-Nazi,” calling Polanksi’s victim a “hooker,” and indulging the racial paranoia most characteristic of liberals – fear of “Asiatics” or yellow domination, as he put it.

He claimed to loved humanity, but in fact hated a large number of human beings around him, being notoriously unable to say a good word for his rivals.  He once called humanity a virus and believed  reducing the human population was the most important task at hand.

He was liberal in calling other people names. He just didn’t want to be called that one name that tormented him.

Tellingly, there was nothing new about Vidal’s critique of America. It was a reworking of Ezra Pound’s criticism, with which he was surely familiar, both as an erudite man and as a member of an aristocratic Southern family, in which such criticism was widespread. Vidal also lived for a large part of his life in an Italian town  not too far from Pound’s Italian home.

Vidal’s critique of America didn’t hurt him one bit. There was no courage involved in making it. In fact, it made him a member in good standing in the elite, cosmopolitan, European circles in which he moved.

Antiwar writing did nothing to set him back either socially, professionally, or personally. It only helped him. It was even a kind of therapy for the psychic wounds he wore on his sleeve.

To make him out to be a kind of Western Solzhenitsyn is really quite thick. Solzhenitsyn suffered. He lived for a decade in the Soviet gulag and then he had cancer.  He belonged to no popular circle and even when he was a critic of communism, never became a friend to the West on that account.  Solzhenitsyn rose above the binaries of modern propaganda and state-craft.

Vidal, on the contrary, was firmly a part of it. He was a leading spokesman of one pole of it.

This is a man, after all, who was close friends with Larry Flynt (the pornographer and documented child abuser) and with Hugh Hefner (the founder of Playboy), as well as with Alfred Kinsey.

He was, in brief, a perfect tool of Foundation-funded ideology.

Vidal would have taken up any dogma  that would express his hatred for hetero-sexual white Republican America (that is, his family).  Most importantly, he would have taken up with anyone and anything against the monotheism of that group.

In him the political WAS the personal, even if he was unaware it was.

His fundamental problem was with the concept, not even of monotheism, but of a divine giver of moral law, indeed, of any kind of moral law that would judge his actions.

He wasn’t sorry about things he did to people. He just wanted to create an alternate universe in which there would be no judgment of his actions.

A universe in which he was good and God was evil.

A thorough-going hedonist, materialist and atheist, he hated the notion of a moral law which might find him wanting, as it finds all of us.

Only he differed in this from most of us.

Instead of correcting himself, he made it his aim to set right his creator

ORIGINAL POST

I posted Johann Hari’s piece (Huffington Post) on the strange way people are defending pedophilic molestation, when an artist in involved. It refers to Vidal’s defense of Polansky’s rape of a 13 year old girl.

Hari’s piece is especially interesting as he’s gay and admits to having been approached by an adult when he was a teenager.

VIdal’s defense deserves a little more attention, in light of claims that he was a vocal supporter of NAMBLA (the North American Man-Boy Love Association), which was founded in 1978.

SIDE NOTE:

I posted the piece twice, as well as a link to NAMBLA’s papers (you can google for the link) that shows that Gore Vidal spoke out against an anti-gay  witch-hunt (in the PC version of the story) at a meeting of a group (the Boston-Boise committee) that later went on to found NAMBLA. That’s not the same thing as being involved in the founding of NAMBLA, so I made a correction to my original post and added the link.

At that point, my blog broke. I called in to technical support, who told me that a couple of files had been corrupted, apparently by someone who’d hacked the blog.  The technician restored it and I noticed that the Hari post, as well as the correction about NAMBLA had both disappeared. I reposted them, and voila, the blog promptly broke again. I tried asking for a restore again, but it didn’t work, so I tried deleting my post and the link to NAMBLA. That seems to have worked. No idea what that was all about….

Anyway, check out the Hari piece…it’s from a while back.

POST CONTINUES

To return to the NAMBLA allegations, if you google the magazine Pan, you can find a statement that only Allen Ginsberg, the poet, spoke out publicly in favor of NAMBLA at the time it was created.

Conservapedia refers to Vidal’s support of NAMBLA, with a link to an interview in the Paris Review in 1978. But I couldn’t find anything of the sort in the only interview of Vidal’s I read there (I didn’t read all the pieces referring to him, so it might be there somewhere).

I did find this (http://www.williamapercy.com/wiki/images/Great_moments_in_politics.pdf) enthusiastic endorsement by Vidal of the gay magazine Fag Rag, created by the founder of the outfit (the Boise-Boston committee) that created NAMBLA.

Also, see the Fag Rag interview (1974) in “Conversations with Gore Vidal,” ed. Peabody and Ebersole, 2005. Vidal and the interviewer are quite unambiguous about his (Vidal’s) preferences::

Vida: “I don’t flatter the young, either as a writer or a performer (LR: sexual performer, from the context LR: correction: actor). And I don’t flatter them sexually. That doesn’t mean I don’t like them.”

And from the same interview, discussing the meaning of the word “jam,”:

Vidal:: “Jam was a much used  word. Kind of trade, but not really trade. Pretty hard to get. Perhaps when the fact was removed, the word withered away too. No one seemed to be impossible. “Jam” referred only to boys. “You’ll find “jam” in the City and the Pillar, I think. I think I did a little glossary in there in my World Almanac way. “Dirt” was a word. That was for a bad piece of trade. I’m supposed to have coined the phrase, “Last year’s trade is this year’s competition.”

And then comparing his sexual interactions with the young with those of Paul Goodman:

Vidal: “I think flattery has a lot to do with his sexual techniques. It has nothing to do with mine.”

See also this comment in The Telegraph:

” Certainly, he tells Fag Rag in 1974, “the quality of trade has fallen off”. When he was young, many construction workers, firemen and cops “would sell their ass for a period of their lives”. Vidal’s life and work prove that some guys have all the luck.”

“Young” does not necessarily mean underage, of course.

Additional evidence of Vidal’s extreme promiscuity include his admission that he’d had more than 1000 partners before he was 25, his collaboration with Albert Kinsey in Kinsey’s controversial research into human sexuality, his documented preference for anonymous interactions at bathhouses or with prostitutes, even while being almost completely celibate with his partner of fifty years, Howard Auster (also, Austen).

Vidal called Kinsey the most important man of the decade on BBC and stated publicly that he had collaborated with him in his research.

While academic pedophile advocates and pan-sexual activists continue to defend Kinsey,  new research and interviews with adults used in the Kinsey experiments when they were children show show that Kinsey did not simply analyze the reports of one paedophile; he was encouraging and organizing paedophilic abuse and rape,  even corresponding sympathetically with Nazi paedophile, Fritz Von Balluseck, who abused hundreds of children when he was a commandant in Poland during the second world war. Balluseck was later convicted of the murder of a child.

It is now clear that Kinsey himself was a sado-masochist who routinely coerced colleagues into his sexual experimentation, filmed them in his attic,  and used his persona as a research-scientist as cover for his 24/7 obsession with every variety of sex.  He is reported to have included the sexual diaries of the notorious occultist Aleister Crowley and the ongoing molestation of children by around nine paedophiles (including Balluseck) in his work.

This is the man to whose research Vidal contributed. This is the man whose views on sex Vidal also said were very much like his own.

What were those views? Human sexuality, to Kinsey, has no more moral component in it than the coupling of any other creature and should thus be regarded as benign in all its variations. These dicta can be seen on NAMBLA’s website, and Kinsey is seen by its members as a god-father.

Kinsey, like Vidal, was a strong atheist, materialist, and hedonist.

There is nothing in the Kinsey experiments that relates sex to procreation or motherhood.

The Kinsey-Vidal world view is expressed in Vidal’s attitude toward most of his partners, except for Auster, and is  illustrated in a 2008 interview published in the Independent:

There are rumours that you have a daughter from a relationship with a woman living in Key West, Florida [in the 1950s]; are they true?”

“Possibly. I don’t believe so. The father was either me or a German photographer. I believe the mother is dead. The child was a girl. Every Christmas, I would receive ‘ a picture of them all around the tree, and there’s the little girl, looking like me. I could have a daughter, yes.”

“Have you tried to contact her?”

“No. Why would I?”

“Because you might have a sense of responsibility, which, in the age of DNA…”

“I sent her mother money for an abortion. Which she used to go to Detroit, where she found a rich man.”

In the play Terre Haute, the writer Edmund White, also gay and a friend, referred to Gore Vidal’s support for and interaction with Timothy McVeigh as a “raging crush”. Apparently, Vidal accepted the description before the play came out and then afterwards tried to sue. Nothing came of it but the two friends broke off after that.

McVeigh was of course in his twenties, but the incident does suggest that in at least some cases Vidal’s political positions had for their source his sexuality.

Given all this, there may well be truth to the allegations of support/involvement in NAMBLA at a time when Vidal definitely belonged to the set of openly homosexual (in his case, pansexualist) advocates of radical sexual liberation.

At least publicly, NAMBLA focused mostly on eliminating all age-of-consent rules and catered more to pederasts than to pedophiles, as commonly understood. It would certainly be right up the alley of an open and radical activist, as Vidal was.

Vidal himself said that he had done everything except incest and folk-dancing, a typically clever line.

Whatever the case,  Vidal’s Polansky comment is more revealing than anything else than can be said on the subject, in its dismissive coldness and fundamental misogyny.

[Just saw this line of his – about Obama’s speech-making ability: “Slaves have a hard time making poetry, unless it’s got a beat.”]

That being so, there’s probably no sense in tarring a dead man with matters from his private life, since just as cogent criticism of him can be made simply on the basis of what he said over and over quite publicly.

Still, aristocrat, Democrat icon, and populist hero that he was..and apparently still is… this blog might not be the best place to make them now.

Company overview of The Aspen Institute, from Businessweek.com

The Aspen Institute says it is an international non-profit educational institution focusing on discussion and inquiry into global issues. It offers leadership seminars, policy studies, and fellowship programs and has campuses in Aspen, Colorado, and Wye River, Maryland. It also has international partners in Aspen Institutes located in Berlin, Germany; Rome, Italy; Lyon, France; Tokyo, Japan; as well as in Gurgaon, Haryana, India. A key partner of the Indian Aspen Institute is The Confederation of Indian Industry. It offers programs that help develop business leaders and foster social change. I noticed one program related to climate change and sustainable development.

The Aspen Institute was founded in 1950 and is headquartered in Washington, District of Columbia.

Indians on the Board of Directors have been highlighted:
Aspen Institute, The INSIDERS ON BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Name (Connections) Relationships Title Age
Walter Isaacson   167 Relationships Trustee, President and Chief Executive Officer 55
Peter Reiling   90 Relationships Executive Vice president for International and Policy Programs and Trustee —

Other Board Members on Board of Directors
Name (Connections) Relationships Primary Company Age
William Mayer   266 Relationships Park Avenue Equity Partners, L.P. 67
Henry Catto Jr.  116 Relationships Catto & Catto Insurance Company 75
Lester Crown   257 Relationships Henry Crown & Company 83
Merv Adelson   206 Relationships Avalon Digital Marketing Systems Inc. 78
Paul Anderson   90 Relationships Aspen Institute, The —
William Davis   90 Relationships WLD Davis Holdings, LLC —
Patrick Gross   186 Relationships Taleo Corp. 63
Sylvia Earle Ph.D.  198 Relationships Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies 72
Mercedes Bass   90 Relationships Sid R. Bass Associates L.P —
Nina Houghton   90 Relationships Wye Institute —
David Koch 155 Relationships Koch Industries, Inc. —
James Ferguson   154 Relationships Vion Pharmaceuticals Inc. 82
Stephen Carter   90 Relationships Yale University —
David Gergen 184 Relationships John F. Kennedy School of Government 66
Timothy Krauskopf   171 Relationships Round Lake Designs LLC 42
Andrea Cunningham   119 Relationships ZeroOne – the Art and Technology Network 49
Elaine Greenawalt   90 Relationships Princeton University —
Frederic Malek   178 Relationships Thayer | Hidden Creek 71
John Mascotte   130 Relationships The Continental Corporation 64
Charles Powell   257 Relationships Textron Inc. 67
Karl Muhr   142 Relationships Austrian Airlines AG —
Elinor Munroe   91 Relationships Elinor Bunin Productions, Inc. —
Lynda Resnick   132 Relationships Roll International Corporation —
Vin Weber   220 Relationships Lenox Group Inc. 55
Donald Roth   90 Relationships Music Associates Of Aspen, Inc. —
Albert Small   123 Relationships Southern Engineering Corporation 82
Berl Bernhard   333 Relationships DLA Piper US LLP 78
Alice Young   114 Relationships Kaye Scholer LLP —
Francis Cundill CFA  90 Relationships Mackenzie Cundill Recovery Fund (Can) —
Madeleine Albright 189 Relationships The Albright Group LLC —
Tarun Das   118 Relationships Confederation of Indian Industry 69
Prince Bandar Ibn Abdulaziz   90 Relationships Aspen Institute, The —
Michael Eisner   180 Relationships The Tornante Company, LLC 65
Henry Gates Jr.  271 Relationships Harvard University —
Alma Gildenhorn   109 Relationships John F. Kennedy Center For The Performing Arts —
Sidney Harman   176 Relationships Harman International Industries Inc. 90
Ann Hudson   90 Relationships Javelina Partners —
Bonnie McCloskey   90 Relationships Cornerstone Holdings L.L.C. —
Leonard Lauder   203 Relationships Institute for the Study of Aging, The 75
Ann Richards   188 Relationships Public Strategies, Inc. 74
William Nitze   111 Relationships The Gemstar Group, Inc. 65
Lloyd Schermer   92 Relationships Lee Enterprises Inc. —
Andrew Stern   138 Relationships Service Employees International Union, Pension Arm —
Thomas Pickering   118 Relationships Business Executives for National Security 76
Roderick von Lipsey   107 Relationships Goldman Sachs Private Wealth Management —
Frederick Whittemore   180 Relationships Chesapeake Energy Corporation 78
Mortimer Zuckerman   522 Relationships Boston Properties Inc. 70
Robert Malott   173 Relationships FMC Corp. 81
Ann Korologos   167 Relationships Harman International Industries Inc. 66
Jack Valenti   167 Relationships Legend Ventures, LLC 86
Clare Munana   90 Relationships Ancora Associates, Inc. —
L. John Doerr III 221 Relationships Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers 57
Gerald Greenwald   124 Relationships Greenbriar Equity Group LLC 72
Jerry Murdock Jr.  122 Relationships InSight Venture Partners 48
Carl Bildt   91 Relationships Akin Gump Global Solutions 59
Michael Powell J.D.  164 Relationships American Tower Corp. 45
Stephen Friedman   274 Relationships Crestview Partners, L.P. 71
W. Hipp   143 Relationships Liberty Corp. 67
Gerald Hosier   90 Relationships Aspen Institute, The —
Robert Hurst   526 Relationships Crestview Partners, L.P. 62
Anne McNulty   90 Relationships Aspen Institute, The —
Roberto Meza   113 Relationships Agrícola Industrial Salvadoreña, S.A. —
William Donaldson   146 Relationships Aetna Health Management, Inc. 76
Jay Sandrich   90 Relationships Aspen Institute, The —
Alan Fletcher   90 Relationships Aspen Institute, The —
Melva Bucksbaum   127 Relationships Aspen Institute, The —
Ann Friedman   90 Relationships Aspen Institute, The —
Marc Nathanson   148 Relationships Mapleton Investments 62
Jacqueline Novogratz   189 Relationships Acumen Fund —
Anna Smith   90 Relationships Aspen Institute, The —
Shashi Tharoor   90 Relationships Aspen Institute, The —
William Joy Ph.D.  90 Relationships Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers 53
William Budinger   90 Relationships Aspen Institute, The —
Leonhard Fischer   119 Relationships Cartica Capital LLC —
Mircea Geoana   90 Relationships Aspen Institute, The —
Arjun Gupta   286 Relationships Telesoft Partners 44
Yotaro Kobayashi   252 Relationships Sony Corporation 74
Elisabeth Lulin   90 Relationships Aspen Institute, The —
James Manyika   90 Relationships Aspen Institute, The —
Queen Noor   90 Relationships Aspen Institute, The —
Margot Pritzker   90 Relationships Aspen Institute, The —
Isaac Shongwe   114 Relationships Letsema Holdings Ltd. —
Giulio Tremonti   90 Relationships Aspen Institute, The —
Jerome Huret   90 Relationships Nortel Networks Corp. 65
Eleanor Merrill   90 Relationships Capital Gazette Communications, Inc. —
Olara Otunnu   123 Relationships Carnegie Corp. of New York —
Michel Pébereau   269 Relationships Galeries Lafayette SA 66
Robert Steel   134 Relationships Goldman Sachs Group Inc. 56
Jamshyd Godrej   161 Relationships Godrej & Boyce Mfg. Co. Ltd. 59

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun2009/tc20090610_155027.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index+-+temp_technology

The Hindu Online has a piece by an independent consultant on what happened to the power grid on July 30 and 31.

“Demand-supply mismatch has been endemic, going by the reports of hearings being conducted by the regulator on the subject of grid indiscipline. Another uneventful night would have passed, had it not been for a trigger — which in this case was the reported tripping of a loaded line (400 kV Bina/Agra/Gwalior).

Further loss of load in a scenario where there already exists oversupply, overfrequency, (and presumably over-voltage) proved to be the proverbial last straw. Frequency went beyond trip settings, resulting in a series of generator and line shutdowns, known as a cascade tripping, because each tripping worsens the operating parameters for the surviving plant and has a snowballing effect.

So before we proceed to the events of July 31 (which were of a different type) we first need to identify the issues from the grid failure of July 30. These are broadly as follows:

Underdrawal vis-a-vis schedule by the constituents (States) at the time of the incident.

Excess generation vs schedule by the generators

Actions if any taken by the Northern Load Despatch Centre (NLDC)/Regional Load Despatch Centre (RLDC) to correct the imbalance.

Reason for tripping of the line/equipment which triggered the grid failure.

For a demand/supply mismatch which resulted in a grid frequency of 50.4 Hz it is certain that there was violation of grid discipline by some or all sections of the constituents, and/or failure of the NLDC/RLDCs to correct it in time.

The event of July 30 was a matter of ‘oversupply’ and not ‘overdrawal’ as widely reported in the media and by Power Ministry spokesmen, though the eventual outcome was the same — a grid collapse.

…AND THE SECOND

Having said this we can now turn to the events of July 31. It is difficult to piece together with any degree of exactitude the events leading up to this failure, but one thing is clear — there was excess drawal vis-a-vis schedule by certain constituents at a time when the grid was in a fragile condition, and a trigger event like a line/equipment tripping took place, thus exacerbating an existing demand- supply mismatch.

The lessons from both events are the same. Persistent underdrawal or overdrawal in disregard of LDC instructions amounts to grid indiscipline and needs to be firmly dealt with. Likewise, oversupply by generators, or failure to meet schedules also amounts to failure of grid discipline.

The action or otherwise of the NLDC/RLDCs is the next contributory factor, and all of these combine to produce catastrophic failure when a crucial line trips due possibly to poor maintenance, or some other random cause.

Therefore, State and generator discipline, and grid maintenance and operation all need more attention. All this is well within the competence of our power sector professionals and regulators, provided, of course, that they are not subjected to political interference.

The intent of the Electricity Act, 2003, is quite clearly to distance the Government from day-to-day operations of the power sector. A beginning can be made by further empowering the load despatch centres and making them independent of their respective State governments.

Respected professionals like those from Powergrid can be fully relied upon to take care of our grid and ensure reliable power supply, as they have done for the past 11 years.”

(The author is an independent consultant. blfeedback@thehindu.co.in)

From an excellent report by Peter Foster in The Daily Telegraph:

“Energy theft in India is endemic

As regular visitors to India will know, every other street corner in every other housing colony has a clothes-pressing wallah who uses gigantic irons filled with hot coals to press the laundry of India’s well-to-do.

Usually the pressing man and his family all seem to live together in the back of the pressing man’s tent. However a new racket in east Delhi, where my Hindi teacher lives, threatens to put the old hot-coals men out of business in some areas.

She tells me that in the compound of eight blocks of flats where she lives, the basements of each of them are filled with pressing-wallahs using electric irons plugged into the sockets in the basement car-parks.

My teacher, who says she suffers power-cuts of four to six hours every day, often takes her laundry down the ironing men to be pressed.

However she is always perplexed to discover that the ironing-wallahs seem to have power when the rest of the block does not.

And when she asks the ironing man who’s electricity meter is being billed for the power he’s using he suddenly goes all coy, but promises that “it’s nobody from ‘upstairs'”.

True to the spirit of India’s nosy-neighbourhoods, my teacher is now conducting a survey of the area, convinced that the local electrician has siphoned off a mains power cable which supplies a major new park which lies behind her flats and, for reasons of public safety, has a guaranteed power supply.

I wait with some interest to see what her investigations will reveal. The local electrician, who takes a 50 rupee cess from the ironing wallahs is, apparently, fearless – which means he has almost certainly cut a deal with someone at the power corporation for hassle-free access to free power.

On a serious note, India’s chronic power shortages are partly created by this endemic electricity theft which leaves too many people like my Hindi teacher leading difficult lives, sweating all summer, freezing all winter and reading by candle-light half the time.

In some places more than 50 per cent of power in Delhi is stolen or ‘lost’ to the grid thanks to poor infrastructure – however when I discover these rackets, there is a tiny corner of my heart which admires their entrepreneurial spirit.

As the electrician says with a shrug of his shoulders when confronted by my teacher’s complaints – ‘Hamne ghar chalana hai.’ – literally, “We have to run our house…” but translated in English as “We have to make a living” or “We all have to get by.”

It’s a saying which excuses a lot of the not-strictly-legal – or downright illegal – things that most people do to get by in this country.

I make no judgment on that given that in my privileged position I don’t have to chose between breaking the law and feeding my family.”

Comment:

I remember the power cuts when I was growing up in India.  Sometimes they were predictable, sometimes out of the blue.

You wake up pouring sweat in the middle of the night as the ceiling fan clunks to a stop. It’s too hot to sleep, so you spend a couple of hours fanning yourself with a magazine or one of the palm-leaf fans that are ubiquitous.

If  the cut starts in the evening, you’re in more trouble. Because if you have homework, then you have to get out the hurricane lantern and study in its flickering light.   I remember everyone in the family feeling their way around the dark for the lantern, which was always kept ready in the corner, with matches and candles as a supplement.  This happened often during the monsoon season.

It was a race between shutting all the windows to keep the rain from getting through the mosquito netting and getting the lamp and candles out before the current went off.

No time for boredom, ennui, existential angst and the other afflictions of modern man.

Everyone knew that workers (manual laborers, dhobis, coolies etc.) stole electricity, whichever way they could.  But there were many others who did too.

There was not too much anyone could do about it, since the policeman took his cut and wasn’t likely to stop them.

Around 25-30% (I wrote 40-50% before, which I’m told is an exaggeration) of electricity in India is stolen in this way. That is gigantic and far more than any other country suffers from theft(China’s transmission losses are 3%).

Most obviously, slum-dwellers steal by running wires from external transmission lines. But there are also middle-class people who tamper with meters and there is widespread theft by businesses, extensive, but hard to gauge.

Total losses to the state (most of the power supply is in the hands of the government) come to around $10 billion a year.

Two private companies, Tata and Reliance (headed by Mukesh Ambani) have begun to supply electricity to Delhi in conjunction with the government and they claim to have cut “transmission losses” (theft) from 50-30%, but there is still a long way to go.

Both Tata (Rothschild affiliated) and Reliance have ties with the state and the global elites, and it’s hard to see this as more than crony capitalism.

The farmers and the politicians always seemed to have enough electricity though.

We’d be studying and cooking in the dark, with candles, while in the town, in the maidan,  the pandals would be lit up 24/7 with colored bulbs.  Radios blared film music at a level that would puncture your ear-drums and cars jammed up the streets already overcrowded with thousands of pedestrians, bullock-carts, cycles, and rickshaws.

If anyone tried to take away the subsidies, the beneficiaries would make common cause with rivals to stir up trouble.  There would be bandhs, strikes, road-blocks, threats of arson or self-immolation. The would-be reformer would back down. The political process in all its gangsterism (“do what we want or else”) shows its face…

The masses of people are illiterate  and half-starved but shrewd and tough. They have little to lose and everything to gain through the process. The politicians have every reason to foster poverty, since they benefit from the vote-bank it provides.

The middle-class is too busy trying to survive in a world that demands international standards to enter the market.

Nice exposition of the anti-state position on Molyneux’s show. Molyneux gives him plenty of time to speak, doesn’t mock him or question his intelligence. Or call him a closet racist or a stooge/agent of the money-power.

Now, just a day after power is restored in India, following the largest power outage in history,  the government in the US is hyping up the threat of a cyber attack on critical systems here:

CNN:

“The Senate debated a bill on Wednesday to improve America’s cyber security. The Department of Homeland Security said we’ve seen a 20-fold increase in computer attacks recently. So how vulnerable are we?

After 24 years with the FBI — many spent as the bureau’s top cyber cop — Shawn Henry has come face to face with the Internet threat. And he’s worried.

“I think that it is very, very likely,” said Henry when asked if a serious cyber attack against critical system in the U.S is inevitable. “I’m quite frankly surprised it hasn’t happened yet.”

Every day, U.S. government and private computer systems are being probed by cyber thieves and state-sponsored hackers from China and Russia.

“There are estimates that there are attempted breaches in the millions of times per day. They’ll just continuously knock until they find an edge to get in,” Henry said. Asked whether they have gotten in, Henry replied: “They get in regularly.”

In 2011, Henry led the FBI in breaking up an international hacker ring that had infiltrated 4 millio”n computers, including some at the U.S. space agency NASA.

The head of the U.S. Cyber Command estimates corporate and government losses may already total $1 trillion. Many companies don’t even know they have been hacked.”

Comment:

Is this all coincidental? The Indian government talks about the possibility of a large cyber attack in June. In July rioting breaks out, with no apparent cause, in a very strategic area in NE India, displacing vast numbers of people. PM Manmohan Singh goes there. Immediately after, the NE grid collapses, triggering a multi-state power outage, affecting some 300 plus million people.  This is repaired. Then the next day, a large outage shuts down power for double the number of people, mostly in north India, far from where Western corporations are located. This follows on cyber-attacks on Indian’s naval HQ that seem to come from Chinese IP addresses.

[The Chinese, although apparently having IQs higher than even the Ashkenazi, seem to leave their signature behind when they commit attacks. Somewhat like that Arabs leaving their passports behind after 9-11. But then Arabs and other darkies don’t have high IQs, so that must be it.]

Notice that Rajat Gupta, who was convicted in June, in lieu of the major perps at Goldman Sachs, is the poster boy for Manmohan Singh and the liberalization of the economy.

He headed McKinsey, the consulting firm most associated with the outsourcing and the loss of American jobs, which is a primary focus of the anger on main street and in the OccupyWallStreet movement, although outsourcing was not the cause of the financial crisis.

Social media references to the Gupta trial played on the word ‘untouchable,” which means the very lowest-caste in India, but also, in the neo-liberal regime, refers to someone whose job is beyond outsourcing. The double-entendre gives the game away.

The take-down of Gupta was co-ordinated by the elites to play to the anarchist, anti-globalization crowd and distract them from the sleight-of-hand surrounding the prosecution of Wall Street crime, which had begun to knock on the doors of the real perps.

Similarly, the Indian power outage, noticeably hyped in the Western media, was described in the social media with many references to “dark ages,” a phrase which contrasts with the slogan of the Indian liberalization regime of the 1990s, which was “India Shining.”

The Dark Ages also refers to the pre-Enlightenment, medieval, and religious world-view, which is, more generally, the target of the Illuminist/Zionist power elite.

Hence the contrast between so-called “shining India” plunged in the dark, because of her “Dark Ages,” (that is, because of her medieval, or religious backwardness) and the illumination of the “New Jerusalem,” “the city on the shining hill,”  which is the self-image of  London, both as the seat of the City (the banking establishment), as well as the head of the restored British empire, now a world empire, declaring itself  to the assembled royalty of Europe.

From Racial Reality a good criticism of the patently biased Lynn assessment of race and IQ

“Richard Lynn has long been criticized for his controversial studies on intelligence, but this latest series of criticism might just be the final nail in his coffin. Focusing on his much-condemned African IQ studies, it reveals serious flaws in his methodology and calls him out on manipulating and falsifying data, which has wider implications that make his entire body of work (and that of his associates) untrustworthy. It begins with Wicherts et al. 2010:
Although these estimates of national IQ are claimed to be “highly valid” (Rushton, 2003, p. 368) or “credible” (McDaniel, 2008, p. 732) by some authors, the work by Lynn (and Vanhanen) has also drawn criticism (Barnett & Williams, 2004; Ervik, 2003; Hunt & Carlson, 2007; Hunt & Sternberg, 2006; Lane, 1994). One point of critique is that Lynn (and Vanhanen)’s estimate of average IQ among Africans is primarily based on convenience samples, and not on samples carefully selected to be representative of a given, targeted, population (Barnett & Williams, 2004; Hunt & Sternberg, 2006). Unfortunately, in many developing countries, such representative samples are lacking (McDaniel, 2008).

A literature review is necessarily selective. Despite Lynn’s objective of providing a “fully comprehensive review of the evidence” (Lynn, 2006, p. 2), a sizeable portion of the relevant literature was not considered in both his own review, and in reviews with Vanhanen. Nowhere in their reviews did Lynn (and Vanhanen) specify the details of their literature search. Our own searches in library databases resulted in additional relevant studies that may be used to estimate national IQ. For instance, Lynn and Vanhanen (2006) accorded a national IQ of 69 to Nigeria on the basis of three samples (Fahrmeier, 1975; Ferron, 1965; Wober, 1969), but they did not consider other relevant published studies that indicated that average IQ in Nigeria is considerably higher than 70 (Maqsud, 1980a,b; Nenty & Dinero, 1981; Okunrotifa, 1976). As Lynn rightly remarked during the 2006 conference of the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR), performing a literature review involves making a lot of choices. Nonetheless, an important drawback of Lynn (and Vanhanen)’s reviews of the literature is that they are unsystematic. Unsystematic literature reviews do not adhere to systematic methodology to control for potential biases in the many choices made by the reviewer (Cooper, 1998; Light & Pillemer, 1984). Lynn (and Vanhanen) failed to explicate the inclusion and exclusion criteria they employed in their choice of studies. Such criteria act as a filter, and may thus affect the estimate of national IQ. Lynn (and Vanhanen) excluded data from several sources without providing a rationale. For instance, they used IQ data from Ferron (1965), who provided averages in seven samples of children from Sierra Leone and Nigeria on a little-known IQ test called the Leone. For reasons not given, Lynn (2006) and Lynn and Vanhanen (2006) only used data from the two lowest scoring samples from Nigeria. Most of the remaining samples show higher scores, but those samples were not included in the estimation of the national IQ of Nigeria and Sierra Leone. Likewise, Lynn (and Vanhanen) did not consider several relatively high-scoring African samples from South Africa (Crawford Nutt, 1976; Pons, 1974). It is unfortunate that Lynn (and Vanhanen) did not discuss their exclusion criteria. In some cases (Crawford Nutt, 1976; Pons, 1974), the Raven’s Progressive Matrices was administered with additional instruction. Although this instruction is quite similar to an instruction as described in the test manual (Raven, Court, & Raven, 1996), some have argued that this instruction artificially enhances test performance (cf. Rushton & Skuy, 2000). Given the likely differences in opinion on which samples to include or exclude in a review, inclusion and exclusion criteria should be explicated clearly and employed consistently. It is well known that unsystematic literature reviews may lead to biased results (Cooper, 1998; Light & Pillemer, 1984). Another problem is that the computation of statistics in literature reviews is quite error-prone. Indeed Lynn’s work contains several errors (Loehlin, 2007).
Lynn responded, attempting to defend his work, and Wicherts et al. fired back immediately with an even stronger rejoinder, repeating their previous criticism of his methodology and flat out accusing him of cherry-picking data that supports his position while ignoring the rest:
In this rejoinder, we criticize Lynn and Meisenberg’s (this issue) methods to estimate the average IQ (in terms of British norms after correction of the Flynn Effect) of the Black population of sub-Saharan Africa. We argue that their review of the literature is unsystematic, as it involves the inconsistent use of rules to determine the representativeness and hence selection of samples. Employing independent raters, we determined of each sample whether it was (1) considered representative by the original authors, (2) drawn randomly, (3) based on an explicated stratification scheme, (4) composed of healthy test-takers, and (5) considered by the original authors as normal in terms of Socio-Economic Status (SES). We show that the use of these alternative inclusion criteria would not have affected our results. We found that Lynn and Meisenberg’s assessment of the samples’ representativeness is not associated with any of the objective sampling characteristics, but rather with the average IQ in the sample. This suggests that Lynn and Meisenberg excluded samples of Africans who average IQs above 75 because they deemed these samples unrepresentative on the basis of the samples’ relatively high IQs. We conclude that Lynn and Meisenberg’s unsystematic methods are questionable and their results untrustworthy.
Then in a later paper, Wicherts et al. dug even deeper, finding that in addition to picking and choosing, Lynn actively seeks out and uses data that’s not reliable or representative:
The samples, considered by Lynn (and Vanhanen), but discarded here, are given in the Appendix. Besides the two samples described above (Klingelhofer, 1967; Zindi, 1994), these are Wober’s (1969) sample of factory workers, and Verhaegen’s (1956) sample of uneducated adults from a primitive tribe in the then Belgian Congo in the 1950s. Verhaegen indicated that the SPM test format was rather confusing to the test-takers, and that the test did not meet the standards of valid measurement. In Wober’s study, the reliability and validity were too low (Wober, 1975). In three of the samples in Table 1, the average IQ is below 70. These are Owen’s large sample of Black South African school children tested in the 1980s, the 17 Black South Africans carefully selected for their illiteracy by Sonke (2001), and a group of uneducated Ethiopian Jewish children, who lived isolated from the western world in Ethiopia and immigrated to Israel in the 1980s (Kaniel & Fisherman, 1991). The last two samples cannot be considered to be representative.

[…]

Our review of the literature on the performance of Africans on the Raven’s tests showed that the average IQ of Africans on the Raven’s tests is lower than the average IQ in western countries. However, the average IQ of Africans is not as low as Lynn (and Vanhanen) and Malloy (2008) maintained. The majority of studies on IQ test performance of Africans not taken into account by Lynn (and Vanhanen) and Malloy showed considerably higher average IQs than the studies that they did review. We judge the reviews of Lynn (and Vanhanen) and Malloy to be unsystematic. These authors missed a large part of the literature on IQ testing in Africa, failed to explicate their inclusion and exclusion criteria, and made downward errors in the conversion of raw scores to IQs (Wicherts, 2007). Lynn (and Vanhanen)’s estimate of average IQ of Africans of around 67 is untenable. Our review indicates that it is about 78 (UK norms) or 80 (US norms). These means are somewhat lower than the means of Africans on other IQ tests, which lie around 82 (Wicherts et al., 2010). These results undermine evolutionary theories of race differences in intelligence of Lynn (2006), Rushton (2000), and Kanazawa (2004) (Wicherts, Borsboom, & Dolan, 2010a; Wicherts et al., 2010b).
Lynn responded to that too, accusing Wicherts et al. of deriving their higher estimate of average African IQ from elite samples, but they once again showed that his lower estimate results from the unsystematic use of samples that are not random or representative.