Twice-Named Places........
 

Sing Sing Correctional Facility

Named for Native American tribes, both Walla Walla and Sing Sing are double named places, and as such, very magickal, and homes to high security prisons which are strong attractors of dark forces. Sing Sing Correctional Facility is in what is called Ossining now, formerly known as Sing Sing or Sinck Sinck (Synch Synch) which means "stone upon stone." The Washington State Penitentiary is in Walla Walla ("the town so nice they named it twice"), which means "Place of Many Waters."

Vintage Postcard, Greeting from Walla Walla's Washington State Penitentiary

Walla Walla is famous for good wine and sweet onions. Magic, The Gathering, was invented at Whitman College in Walla Walla. In Looney Toons cartoons the Acme Corporation was located in Walla Walla.

The village of Briarcliff Manor, named by Andrew Carnegie, and located mostly in Ossining, brings to mind American Horror Story's Briarcliff Mental Institution. The term "up the river" as an expression meaning going to prison, refers to Sing Sing up the Hudson River.
Some other fun double named places: Bora Bora, Pago Pago, Baden Baden, Pukapuka, Wagga Wagga

Wikipedia notes the following famous residents of Ossining:

David T. Abercrombie, co-founder of Abercrombie & Fitch
John Barrett, entrepreneur, brew master of Up The River Brewing Co.
John Cheever, author
John Chervokas, advertising executive
Kara DioGuardi, singer-songwriter
Peter Falk, actor
Anne Francis, actress
Khalid Khannouchi, American record holder for the marathon
Sonny Sharrock, jazz guitarist
Matt Striker, WWE interviewer and commentator
Don Draper and family – Main protagonist of Mad Men


Wikipedia tells us about these famous Walla Wallians:

Lebanese poet, writer, and philosopher Mikha'il Na'ima, author of "The Book of Mirdad", began his writing career in Walla Walla in 1919.
American scholar of Islam and author - voted one of the West's most influential Muslim scholars by The Guardian - Shaykh Hamza Yusuf, was born in Walla Walla.
NFL Quarterback Drew Bledsoe lived in Walla Walla while he was in high school before entering Washington State University in 1990. He was the first pick in the NFL draft in 1993, going to the New England Patriots, where he played until 2001. He later played for the Buffalo Bills and Dallas Cowboys before retiring in 2007.
The actor Adam West, TV's Batman, grew up in Walla Walla. Then known as Bill Anderson, he attended Walla Walla High School during his freshman and sophomore years before moving with his family to Seattle. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Literature and a minor in Psychology from Whitman College in Walla Walla.
United States Army general and World War II hero Jonathan Wainwright was born in Walla Walla.
Actor Connor Trinneer, from Star Trek: Enterprise, was born in Walla Walla.
Silent film actor and studio makeup artist, Bert Hadley, was born in Walla Walla.
Ryan Crocker, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq (2007–2009), and Pakistan (2004–2007), and who also served as Ambassador to Syria, Kuwait, and Lebanon, graduated from Whitman College in 1971. NFL wide receiver Charly Martin of the Carolina Panthers was born in Walla Walla in 1984.
William O. Douglas attended Whitman College in Walla Walla, graduating in 1920. He went on to become the longest-serving justice in the history of the United States Supreme Court.
The Brode triplets, Wallace, Robert, and Malcolm, all of whom became distinguished scientists, were born in Walla Walla in 1900.

Mulligan's Stew Column by by AP's Hugh Mulligan from the Nashua Telegraph, February 16, 1984, "The Postman Always Rings Twice in Bora Bora and Walla Walla"

Joan Crawford as Sadie Thompson stuck in Pago Pago in the movie, Rain.

At the Kurhaus Casino and Spa at Baden Baden

Pukapuka dancers in the Cook Islands. from Glennis' Blog page.

FREELOADERS!

John Bonanno Painting, The Dive

Mitt Romney's screed on the 47% of the people who are "freeloaders" because they do not pay the income tax is most revealing about Mitt and his true constituency. His error was letting the cat out of the bag, even if it was among friends at a hoity-toity fundraiser. A more intelligent plutocrat would have been more careful with his words, even among peers. 

The income tax was presented as and sold to the people of the United States in 1910 as a tax that would ONLY affect the rich. The average pay at that time was 22 cents an hour, about $500 a year. When the income tax started, only 4% of the population was subject to it since there was a $3,000 exemption with an additional $1,000 for married couples.  So the first $4,000 for most people was not taxed.   Income over that exemption, up to  $453,292 a year, huge money back then, was taxed at only 1%.
I went to Measuringworth.com to calculate what a $4,000 income in 1913 is worth today.  

"In 2011, the relative value of $4,000.00 from 1913 ranges from $69,500.00 to $1,540,000.00.
 
A simple Purchasing Power Calculator would say the relative value is $93,700.00. This answer is obtained by multiplying $4000 by the percentage increase in the CPI from 1913 to 2011.

This may not be the best answer.

The best measure of the relative value over time depends on if you are interested in comparing the cost or value of a Commodity , Income or Wealth , or a Project . For more discussion on how to pick the best measure, read the essay "Explaining the Measures of Worth."

If you want to compare the value of a $4,000.00 Commodity in 1913 there are three choices. In 2011 the relative:
real price of that commodity is $93,700.00
labor value of that commodity is $381,000.00(using the unskilled wage) or $546,000.00(using production worker compensation)
income value of that commodity is $481,000.00
 
If you want to compare the value of a $4,000.00 Income or Wealth , in 1913 there are three choices. In 2011 the relative:
historic standard of living value of that income or wealth is $93,700.00
economic status value of that income or wealth is $481,000.00
economic power value of that income or wealth is $1,540,000.00
 
If you want to compare the value of a $4,000.00 Project in 1913 there are four choices. In 2011 the relative:
historic opportunity cost of that project is $69,500.00
labor cost of that project is $381,000.00(using the unskilled wage) or $546,000.00(using production worker compensation)
economy cost of that project is $1,540,000.00"

Any way you slice it, back in 1913, the income tax was a rich man's tax. You had to be making the equivalent in today's dollars anywhere from $70,000 to $1,500,000 a year, depending on how you look at it, to even start paying a 1% tax on everything over that. As Willie Sutton said, he robbed banks because "that's where the money is." 

You tax the rich for the same reason...and that is true now more than ever. But you have to hand it to the greedy bastards that they have been able to confound the meanings of Income and Wage and Salary. Traditionally wages were paid for labor by the hour, day, or week. Income was money received via gain, profit, or interest. Salaries were paid monthly for professional or non-manual work. Now they are all considered as equivalents by the IRS.  It was universally thought that labor or low salaries (such as those endured by women paid a "pittance" in the Chinese factories Mitt so admires) should not be taxed. And it wasn't then. But it is now. 
It was universally thought that money received by leisure class coupon clippers for bond interest and stock dividends was the fairest game for taxation. But no so much now.

This page at taxfoundation.org  has an interesting chart on tax rates through the years since the Income Tax began in 1913 after the 16th Amendment was purportedly passed in 1910, making income tax, which had been  first imposed in 1862 during the Civil War, legal. When first tried it was  soon abandoned in 1872 and then declared unconstitutional in 1894. The IRS was founded in 1862, with the income tax, but unfortunately it was not abandoned with the tax. Later on in 1913, on December 23, the Federal Reserve system was created. All in all it was a very bad year for most of the people and a wonderful year for the financiers and the war profiteers. 

So it is indisputable that the income tax was meant to only apply to the rich and it would never have passed if half the people had to pay it. It is frightfully honest of Romney to decry all the "freeloaders" who don't pay income tax as if Mitt would trade places with those lucky freeloaders who don't have to pay the income tax. This is pure projection, of course. Most of the population was supposed to be free of income tax. 

The rich have labored endlessly and successfully to get as much as possible of the income tax onto the backs of the working people and the middle class and away from the holders of true wealth. They have used pliable politicians, who are nothing but their public whores, to ensure that the income tax rates were not indexed to inflation and to create more and more esoteric deductions for the wealthy who are the only ones able to afford the accountants and bag men necessary to keep track of tax loopholes, understand enough to take advantage of them, and lobby for more. In fact, the rich are the "freeloaders" who do everything they can to avoid paying a fair price to flourish in the United States. This safe haven without peer in the world spends inordinately to protect the rich and all their possessions, property and corporate masks. If this were a poorer land we would not have to spend so many trillions fighting spurious wars, gathering intelligence on our own populace not to mention the world, and buying expensive superfluous weapons from the military industrial complex (owned by those same wealthy elites) to "defend" the country and invade countries that look at us cross-eyed while sitting on mineral wealth. The money the government spends propping up the interests of the wealthy is enormous compared to the pittance spent on welfare programs for the poor.

Beardsley Ruml

A lot of people in the lower tax brackets effectively avoided income tax before some genius (his name was  Beardsley Ruml and he was chairman of the New York Federal Reserve Bank’s board of directors) invented tax withholding on income during WWII. It was thought that 5,000,000 million people a year were avoiding taxes at that time as inflation and income tax increases for the war gently prodded the tax charts into swallowing up more and more middle income wage earners who had never paid the income tax before. The IRS had mostly gone after out of favor fat cats and criminals like Al Capone in search of tax evasion.   Federal withholding was a godsend for the IRS. It put a torrent of  money in government coffers before the workers ever saw it and the poor and middle class had to jump through hoops to get it back, much of it over a year after it was earned. At the same time,  the wealthy, who collected dividends and interest while sitting on their asses got the quarterly "pay as you go" treatment. Withholding also enabled the IRS to avoid the unpleasant publicity of bringing criminal tax evasion charges against average working and middle class Americans.

The point is, you had to be really really rich to pay income tax at the beginning. Inflation and corrupt politicians over the years gradually shifted the burden on to the middle class. The middle class noticed it at the beginning no more than a lobster tossed into a cold pot of seawater notices the moment the gas valve is opened and the flame is lit. 

Al Gore is in Favor of Abolishing the Electoral College. 
Or, Why the Electoral College Is a Wicked Institution and Always Has Been....

I agree with Al Gore.

The Electoral College gives an inordinate amount of voting power to the states with small populations. Electoral College votes are determined by congressional seats plus two. That plus two magnifies the clout of little states with only one congressman by three hundred percent (that's triple), and states with only two congressmen by 100% (that's double). 

Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming have only one congressman but three electoral votes each . California has 53 congressmen and 55 electoral votes . A vote in those states has three times the power, augmented 300%, of a vote in California.

Therefore small, rural states are very much overrepresented in the Electoral College and in the Congress.. 
People, like myself in Maine, who live in states with two congressmen, have Presidential votes that are almost double the weight of a resident of New York or California.  There are 685,000 residents per electoral vote in California. There are 626,000 residents per electoral vote in New York State. There are 325,000 residents per electoral vote in Maine.There are 228,000 residents in North Dakota per electoral vote.  

Relative power of the individual voter for the electoral college by selected states. A John Bonanno cartoon.

I have heard various arguments about why this was done. 
Usually we hear a heartfelt, tearful, defense based on the need to hear the voice of the farmer. 
The family farmer is almost as extinct as the dinosaur. But we do have a vigorous substitute in the corporate farmer, a "person" who needs no additional representation in Congress. 

This peculiar system was created to placate the South when the Republic was established. 
The South feared its "peculiar institution" of slavery would find itself in danger in a true democracy. 
They wanted to ensure that their states, with smaller populations than the free North, would be able to bottle up any attempts in Congress to free their chattels. 

Amazingly, our founders enabled slavery-loving  Southern voters, giving them additional weight in Congress and in Presidential elections beyond the "plus two" formula via the Three-Fifths Compromise inserted in Article One of our "Holy" Constitution, by allowing the South to count their disenfranchised slaves for congressional and electoral college representation purposes at 3/5 a human. This devilish solution to ensuring southern participation in the Republic also reduced slave state taxes by the same formula.   Was anyone deluded enough to believe those additional Southern congressmen diligently and forcefully protected the interests of all those Negroes in servitude?

 I doubt many reflected on the fact that the "winner take all" Electoral College and the 3/5 count of slaves  magnified the vote power of the southern white man by perhaps four times the weight of a northern abolitionist. 

That is enabling Evil.   

A younger, slimmer, and more muscular Adrian Gonzalez with the Padres

Red Sox Trade? 
(Well, Technically It Will Be A Waiver Deal)

If the proposed Red Sox deal goes through with the Dodgers the following salaries could no longer be on the payroll next year: 

Carl Crawford in happier days.

Adrian Gonzalez $21.857 million 
Carl Crawford $20.857 million
Josh Beckett $17 million
Daisuke Matsuzaka (2013 Free Agent)  $10.333 million this year as an  ineffective, injury prone, tortuous-to-watch player
David Ortiz (2013 Free Agent) making $14.575 million as an aging, injury prone, DH

Josh fires a pitch after a long deliberation. Are you asleep yet?

This adds up to a potential total savings of $84.622 million that could be spent on younger, more productive, less complacent not-so-comfortable-in-losing players. 
I think next year's team will have a better record than this year's. 

I'm a little surprised the Yankees didn't play a little "chicken" with the Red Sox and claim Adrian Gonzalez. 

Sure he is expensive but he wouldn't be a bad consolation prize if the Sox actually let the Yankees have him, which they probably wouldn't.  The Yankees may regret passing on the opportunity to put the kibosh on this potential deal which will be a Godsend for the Red Sox. I believe if the Yankees had known this transaction was possible, they would have blocked it. 

Adrian Gonzalez just didn't look like he was enjoying himself in the least amount during his time with the Red Sox. I can understand that the Boston press is annoying and self righteous but that kind of money makes it easy to ignore that stuff. His stats have been OK and he leads the league in RISP average, but the power numbers have suspiciously declined and there is a perception that he doesn't hit in the clutch, mainly because the team tanked last September and has not been in the race this year. 

Crawford was terrible last year and has been injured off and on (currently on, recovering from Tommy John surgery, he may be back in time for spring training) since he arrived. 

Beckett has been mediocre for years. His fine stats last season were negated by the beer and chicken induced September swoon. He pitches soooo slowly, it seems like I'm stoned when I watch him. 

On those rare occasions in recent years when Daisuke Matsuzaka was able to pitch you would find me contemplating seppuku. Daisuke seems to operate on the theory to never throw a strike when the batter might swing at a bad pitch. On the rare occasion when he went ahead on a batter no balls two strikes, you could usually win a bar bet that the count would go full.

The chances that David Ortiz will avoid injury or decline in the next two or three years are too high to pay him anywhere near his current salary on a long term contract (more than one year at his age)  to be a DH. My guess is his pride will not allow him to  play year by year and I expect he will move on.  

Utility infielder Nick Punto will also be going to the Dodgers. He made $1,500,000 this year and was not expected back since he had a cheap buyout for next year. He is a fine fielder but his bat has abandoned him in his old (in baseball terms) age. He will be useful to the Dodgers because of injuries.  

Red Sox contract information found HERE. 

Mercy Hospital is FOR SALE
Who wants to buy?

Mercy Hospital in Portland, Maine, is having financial problems. 

Mercy Hospital is not owned locally, despite their "home town" approach to advertising.
Catholic Hospital East, a Pennsylvania-based network of 35 hospitals owns the Portland institution and they are evidently not happy with its performance. Mercy Hospital is being eyed for purchase by Steward Health Care, formerly Caritas Christi, which was bought from the Boston Catholic Archdiocese when they went on a liquidation binge due to being cash short a few years ago repeatedly paying lawyers and damages for all their rapist pedophile priests.

If Steward is successful in purchasing Mercy Hospital it will convert from being a non-profit institution to an investor owned one.

"Hercules descended into Hades, accompanied by Mercury and Minerva. He obtained permission from Pluto to carry Cerberus to the upper air provided he could do it without the use of weapons; and in spite of the monster's struggling, he seized him, held him fast, and carried him to Eurystheus, and afterward brought him back again." —Bulfinch, 1897

Steward is owned by Cerberus Capital Management, a private equity firm. 

From the Cerberus website:

"Cerberus’s investment professionals are leading experts in four distinct investment strategies, allowing the Firm to move quickly to take advantage of diverse opportunities across multiple markets.
Cerberus Capital Management, L.P. is focused on the following four investment strategies:
Distressed Securities and Assets
Control and Non-Control Private Equity Investments
Commercial Lending
Real Estate
The Firm has a deep commitment to risk mitigation and asset diversification within each investment strategy. Cerberus’s dedicated teams of investment professionals, many of whom have been with the Firm for more than a decade, are highly regarded in their areas of expertise. The combination of their analytical approach coupled with the Firm's operational team's in-depth operational knowledge provides the foundation for each of the four investment strategies."

Cerberus is the three headed dog in Greek Mythology who guards the gates of Hades (that's Hell in Greek).

Cerberus, called by some a "vulture capitalist" company, was founded in 1992 by Steve Feinberg, who still runs it and claims he regrets the choice of name but believes that the brand equity he has built up is too valuable to warrant a change.
Yet Cerberus indeed is a storefront for an Underworld (or a Hell, if you please) of exclusive investment. The company is well connected in Republican Washington.

George W. Bush's former treasury secretary John W. Snow, is a senior executive.
Dan Quayle is chairman of the company's investment division.
Donal Rumsfeld was (is?) a client.

The specialize in snapping up troubled companies at bargain prices. They bought Chrysler from Daimler at the wrong time and would have lost their entire investment had the govenment not bailed out the auto companies. They have since sold out Chrysler to Fiat for twenty cents on the dollar. [Other, more friendly reports claim that Cerberus garnered back 90% of their investment in Chrysler.] They own lots of stuff, including the operating company of Marriott, Hyatt, Hilton and other hotel brands. Covis Pharma, a Swiss drug company, is owned by one of their affiliates. They own the film production company Spyglass Entertainment, which has a deal with Disney.
 One can get a good overview of establishment film making by perusing a list of titles they have unleashed on the world HERE. 

Spyglass' Last Fifteen Releases:
Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013) ... Production Company
The Vow (2012) ... Production Company (presents)
Footloose (2011) ... Production Company (presents)
The Dilemma (2011) ... Production Company (in association with)
No Strings Attached (2011/I) ... Production Company (presents)
The Tourist (2010) ... Production Company (in association with)
Dinner for Schmucks (2010) ... Production Company (presents)
Get Him to the Greek (2010) ... Production Company (in association with)
Leap Year (2010) ... Production Company (presents)
Invictus (2009) ... Production Company (in association with)
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009) ... Production Company (presents)
Star Trek (2009) ... Production Company (presents)
Four Christmases (2008) ... Production Company (in association with)
Flash of Genius (2008) ... Production Company (presents)
Ghost Town (2008/I) ... Production Company (presents)

Cerberus, a few years ago, went on a buying binge of firearms companies.
They own Windham, Maine's Bushmaster Firearms, as well as Remington, Cobb Manufacturing (through Bushmaster), DPMS Panther Arms, Marlin Firearms (through Remington) and others. They consolidated their firearm companies under an umbrella called The Freedom Group.
Last year right wing fearophiles' emails and social networks spread a false rumor claiming the Freedom Group was owned by George Soros who purportedly (and therefore hilariously) bought these companies to put them out of business.  

Scary Bête noire of the right,
 George Soros

Funny Funny. I wouldn't be surprised if a bored Cerberus employee made that one up and sent it out on a right wing mouth frother mailing list to drum up business among the inevitably and too easily panicked 2nd Amendment cultists.

J.P. Morgan Worldwide Securities Services administers their money.

Cerberus operates a large private (which means you can't get involved or find out much about it) hedge fund.

One of Cerberus' entities, International American Products (IAP) Worldwide Services had a contract to operate the facilities at Walter Reed Hospital and medical facilities in Iraq during the Bush II administration. It was thought that IAP getting these contracts would be  an improvement and a fresh start over the embarrassing Halliburton KBR performance in privatizing war, but it turned out that IAP was a sort of Halliburton in hiding.
They had to repay millions in overcharges to the DOD.
The tawdry details can be found here. 

IAP's CEO, Al Neffgen, is a former Halliburton KBR executive. Cerberus, through IAP, may have partnered with Halliburton KBR in fleecing the government of millions in defense contracts in Iraq during the Bush privatization scandals. IAP also had to answer questions about missing money received in contracts for Katrina relief.

 Former IAP president (and former Halliburton KBR vice president) Dave (His Real Name) Swindle had to answer some tricky questions in relation to the treatment of Iraq vets due to the degraded conditions at Walter Reed Hospital after privatization and assumption of operation by IAP. 

From Wikipedia, some entities owned by Cerberus:

A Albertsons LLC American Coach Lines Aozora Bank YP Holdings B BAWAG BAWAG P.S.K. Blue Bird Corporation BlueLinx Bushmaster Firearms International

C Caritas Christi Health Care D DPMS Panther Arms DynCorp F Freedom Group G GeoEye H H & R Firearms M Marlin Firearms N NewPage North American Bus Industries

O Optima Bus Corporation P Para-Ordnance R Remington Arms S SNET Information Services Spyglass Entertainment Steward Health Care System T Tower International

Leggy actress Julie Newmar's TV series "My Living Doll" debuted in 1964, just as the "War On Poverty" was getting underway. 

WARS WARS WARS!!!!!

Public Radio is telling us we are losing the "War On Poverty."
Since Lyndon Johnson started this "War" there have been scores of headlines written by editors  bemoaning the same thing.

You can't win or lose a "War" against a concept, as so many have stated. 

Poverty can only be lessened when we change our mode of thinking. 

Wars on Poverty, Drugs, Terrorism indicate a poverty of ideas. 

The Kennedy adviser who put the bee in the bonnet of Lyndon Johnson to make a "War On Poverty" two weeks after ascending to POTUS set up an untenable proposition. As in much of American medicine, the policies masked symptoms and were anything but a cure.    

As soon as  the "War On Poverty" was declared, the political opposition began making War on the Poor. 

Then Nixon made a "War On Drugs," giving us the Law Enforcement/Prison Complex that grows on and on. 

As soon as the "War On Drugs" was in effect, the government at all levels used enforcement to make War on Drug Users, in effect, another War on the Poor.

Then W made "The War On Terrorism" to replace the "Cold War." This gave the Pentagon something to do and people to kill and contracts to put out for bid.  George W. Bush should have called his memoir "The Care and Feeding of the Military/Industrial Complex." 

This "War On Terrorism" was immediately transformed into a War On The Rights Of The People, which was fought in faraway lands, essentially by the Poor. 

All these Wars are doomed to FAIL, yea, they are designed to FAIL.
When a war is won the money stops.
We cannot win wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq....
You name the place unless it is a small tiny helpless island like Grenada.
These wars are not winnable. 
We don't want to win these "Wars" because winning would require an actual rational solution to these problems.
These Wars are created to fatten the wallets of the connected.

A socialized national health care program would have done more to alleviate poverty than a thousand bureaucracies. 
Fully subsidized higher education for qualified students would have done even more. 

I almost forgot about Nixon's "War On Cancer." [Nixon loved Wars.] 

Real cancer survival rates have changed little since that War began.
The medical establishment will tell you survival rates are higher, but if you look at what is really going on you will discover that the only significant progress has been earlier detection. So it appears as if "survival" is going up when actual survival times have stayed about the same since survival time is based on when the cancer was detected. 
This second metaphorical Nixonian War was no different than the others since it was designed to further enrich an elite and powerful Medical/Corporate Establishment. 

So They declared War on ME.

Notes:

As I watch synchronized swimming I wonder why no one has invented a hidden nostril plug instead of those very unattractive nose clamps that look like they came out of an S&M boutique.

Thoughts While Listening to The Collins Brothers



I was led to a radio interview with the Collins Brothers, Gnostic Luciferianism - What is it ? "Religion of Apotheosis" Paul and Phillip Collins via a Youtube link on Facebook today.

As I listened I made the following notes.

The Catholic sesquipedalian Collins Brothers, authors of  The Ascendancy of the Scientific Dictatorship: An Examination of Epistemic Autocracy, From the 19th to the 21st Century,
seem not to notice the Luciferianism in the Vatican.

At 21 minutes in we get the inevitable phrase "immanentizing the eschaton." This is the Collins' Catholic (via Voegelin and  American conservatism) putdown of any who presumes to try to make this world a Heaven (merely trying to improve one's self through gnosis or to ameliorate man's lot on this world is enough to qualify) rather than accepting one's place and suffering in Faith until one dies and is judged by God. I do not believe the Collins Brothers can get through an interview without using this term. 

Of course, Gnosticism was a prime heresy suppressed by the early Church for "Immanentizing The Eschaton," which, to the Church, is a form of the Sin of Pride. Salvation can only come through Faith and the Church. Good things come from God but without the intercession of Jesus Christ via the Holy Roman Catholic Church, Man is Lost. 

Self-knowledge and knowledge of the world are anathema to the Church since both lead man and society away from the bindings of the true Faith.

The Collins Brothers present many good insights, however, the blinders they wear courtesy of the Catholic Church, force them to scrupulously examine Trees and to ignore the Warden of the Forest.  

Some Collins Brothers Links:

http://www.thebyteshow.com/CollinsBrothers.html
http://www.conspiracyarchive.com/Articles/Egypt_and_Beyond.htm

Eric Voegelin, Nazi refugee. Is it any wonder he despaired that government could do good?

"Don’t let them immanentize the eschaton," Eric Voegelin wrote in the National Review back in the fifties. "Them" referred to anyone (liberals) who believed government could be used as a tool to improve the lot of the people.  At the same time National Review conservatives were embracing big government as long as it was big in ways they wanted: Promoting big military, big intelligence (especially big intelligence since the Buckley Brothers were heavily involved in this avocation), big corporations, suppression of people's movements around the world, and obedience through faith and dogma. Conservatives who thought otherwise were ostracized. 
This pattern was copied, consciously or unconsciously, from the Catholic Church. In fact, many of the neo-cons are Catholic. Take a look at the current roster of the Supreme Court. There are six Catholics (four of whom are ultra conservative, one not quite so ultra and another a purported liberal). 
If government cannot be used to improve man's existence (a marker of their Faith), the only other things it can do is to protect a wicked establishment and oppose change. The United States government and the Catholic Church have lurched (in the case of the Church one might say it re-lurched) over to this kind of faux conservatism since Voegelin wrote these words. Voegelin would be appalled.



Eric Voegelin Quotes and Notes:

Let us peruse a few words of Eric Voegelin and discover what flavor conservative he is. 

 “A further reason for my hatred of . . . ideologies is quite a primitive one. I have an aversion to killing people for the fun of it. What the fun is, I did not quite understand at the time, but in the intervening years the ample exploration of revolutionary consciousness has cast some light on this matter. The fun consists in gaining a pseudo-identity through asserting one's power, optimally by killing somebody—a pseudo-identity that serves as a substitute for the human self that has been lost. . . . A good example of the type of self that has to kill other people in order to regain in an Ersatzform what it has lost is the famous Saint-Juste, who says that Brutus either has to kill other people or kill himself.
. . . . I have no sympathy whatsoever with such characters and have never hesitated to characterize them as "murderous swine."


[I wonder if the conservatives who consider him a hero understand that their own belief set might be counted among the "ideologies" hated by Voegelin, especially after their conservatism morphed into a murderous and intolerant neo-conservatism.-JB]


"In order to degrade the politics of Plato, Aristotle, or Saint Thomas to the rank of "values" among others, a conscientious scholar would first have to show that their claim to be science was unfounded. And that attempt is self-defeating. By the time the would-be critic has penetrated the meaning of metaphysics with sufficient thoroughness to make his criticism weighty, he will have become a metaphysician himself. The attack on metaphysics can be undertaken with a good conscience only from the safe distance of imperfect knowledge." 

"Excuse my rough words—I don't mean to be disrespectful to the psychological analyses of Sartre (late in L' Être et le Néant, for example)—but he is a vulgarian and an epigone. He's not interesting.  He's not to be compared with Camus;   he was a thinker!  Sartre is not on that level."

[Sartre was a comedian.-JB]

"[Milton writes in Of True Religion , 1673:]  Catholic worship cannot be tolerated  "without grievous and unsufferable scandal giv'n to all consciencious Beholders."   And he leaves it to the civil magistrate to consider whether Catholics in England can be tolerated at all, even without public worship.   If Catholics should complain that their conscience is violated if the celebration of the mass is not permitted to them, he replies that  "we have not warrant to regard Conscience which is not founded on Scripture." . . . . Radical scripturalism has become, in the field of social technique, the instrument through which the conscience of man can be kept within the limits of national jurisdiction.
Milton goes even further in his scripturalism:  he expects everybody to do his duty and to use the opportunity offered by the English Bible translation for becoming thoroughly acquainted with Scripture.  "Neither let the Countryman, the Tradesman, the Lawyer, the Physician, the Statesman, excuse himself by his much business from the studious reading thereof. . . ."
Using a modern category, we might say that Milton was a totalitarian National Scripturalist. . . ." 

[I wonder what my Christian conservative friends think of that.-JB]
 

Voegelin Link:

http://www.voegelinview.com/

Many more quotes here:

http://www.voegelinview.com/ev/voegelin_pungent_observations.html

Beware of Men Bearing Poppets!

When I was a kid the puppets were quite popular on television. Burr Tillstrom's Kukla, Fran and Ollie may have been the first. I loved the "Howdy Doody Show."  

The Jack Paar show and Walter Cronkite's 1954 CBS "The Morning Show" had Bil Baird's company of singing and dancing puppets including Charlemane the Lion  interviewing people and talking with the hosts. (This stuck in Cronkite's craw and he quickly escaped the show to become CBS' legendary evening news anchor.) 

Shari Lewis

As Shari Lewis' show became popular I was losing interest in puppets but I found Shari very sexy. Shari Lewis was more than a puppeteer; she wrote the Star Trek episode "The Lights of Zetar." 

You don't see many puppets on TV these days. Mostly the art lives on in live shows. I remember taking my daughter to a few back in the early eighties and I felt rather creeped out by the puppet experience. I seem to recall my daughter was too. In fact, when I took her to Disneyworld when she was 6 or 7 she told me she felt very uncomfortable there. 

Disney's It's a Small World

Full Moon's Puppet Master movies show us that in popular culture puppets have become more scary than anything else. 

From Full Moon's Puppet Master II

Now we see another example of someone whose public religiosity cloaks a private life of debauched evil. Ronald William Brown, 57, of Largo, Florida is a public Christian and a  puppeteer who entertained the little ones during what must be the extremely boring services at Gulf Coast Church. He planned with an internet buddy comrade in crime, Michael Arnett,  to abduct and eat after roasting  a two year old girl.  
Puppets are often used as tools by black magicians, consciously or not.  If the FBI just checked out all the Christian puppeteers in the country they might stop a few crimes. It is interesting that it was Homeland Security that got this guy. At this link you can watch Ronnie in action. 

Update: Puppeteer Ronald Brown was convicted July 30, 2013

Order Out Of Chaos
Mundi exigere ordinem. 

“Children of the World Dream of Peace” diptych part 1 by Leo Tanguma, One of Those Cryptic Murals  at the Denver Airport

Now some of these cryptic murals at the mysterious Denver Airport are beginning to make sense.
This one is especially morbid and would be very much at home on the cover of some Death Metal band's record. The sheets of paper at the lower portion of the painting on the right contain these words:

I once was a little child who longed for other worlds
but I am no more a child for I have known fear
I have learned to hate how tragic, then, is youth
which lives with enemies, with gallows ropes.
Yet, I still believe I only sleep today. that I’ll wake up,
a child again, and start to laugh and play.
Hama Herchenberg, 14 years old..died December 18, 1943
Auschwitz Concentration camp”.

Painting and quotation Found at Mountain Weekly News, April 12, 2011  

The Happy Ending?

"Children of the World Dream of Peace" dipytch part 2 by Leo Tanguma

Interesting Addendum:
HNC, FICO, and Confabulation

Robert Holmes Jr., senior lead scientist at Fair Isaac, FICO

In an initial post about the Aurora, Colorado massacre, I noted that Robert Holmes Jr., the father of the killer, previously worked at what I called a "spooky place," HNC Software, formerly Hecht-Nielsen Neurocomputer Corporation. I termed the company "spooky" because of their long term contract with DARPA.  The company itself described the situation as follows in their own descriptive materials in 1999. "HNC is working on a long-term research project launched in 1998 that is jointly funded by HNC and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), part of the U.S. Defense Department, to investigate ‘cortronic neural networks,’ a concept originally proposed by Robert Hecht-Nielsen, HNC’s co-founder and chief scientist."   What could be more spooky than that? I'm not saying evil, just spooky.

Robert Hecht-Nielsen with Zeus

While searching for information on Robert Hecht-Nielsen, co-founder of HNC Software and adjunct professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, San Diego,  I discovered that Robert Holmes still works for the ghost of HNC Software because HNC merged with his current employer, Fair Isaac Corporation, a credit score company now known as FICO for a tad over $800 billion in stock swaps in 2002, and Mr. Hecht-Nielsen had become FICO's vice-President of Research and Development. It's a complicated stock swap and I have read the transaction as a purchase by HNC of Fair Isaac and the other way around. We do know that it was a merger. Both Hecht-Nielsen and Holmes are still associated with FICO when all is said and done.

Here is the FICO website. 

This is his bio from the University of California at San Diego:

"Robert Hecht-Nielsen has been on the UCSD faculty since 1986. His popular ECE-270A/B/C year-long graduate course, Neurocomputing, provides an introduction to the neuroscience, and technological applications, of confabulation theory. Hecht-Nielsen is Director of the Confabulation Neuroscience Laboratory of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (CalIT2), a Member of the UCSD Institute for Neural Computation; and an Adjunct Professor in the UCSD Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He serves on the Board of Governors of the International Neural Network Society (2007-2009). An IEEE Fellow, Hecht-Nielsen has been awarded the IEEE Neural Networks Pioneer Medal and the UCSD ECE Department’s Graduate Teaching Award. He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Arizona State University in 1974."

Mr. Hecht-Nielsen specializes in the field of cognition, neurocomputing. He asks the question: how does thought work? Philosophers call this field of study epistemology. A thorough understanding of knowing how we know what we know would ultimately lead to true artificial intelligence. It is difficult to avoid strange loops when delving into neurocomputing  as much as it is difficult to ignore the lack of coherence in human thought by philosophers interested in epistemology.  Professor Hecht-Nielsen is Director of the Confabulation Neuroscience Laboratory in the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology which gave us this 2008 press release, which I cognate may have come from Hecht-Nielsen himself. 
Here are some excerpts.

"Hecht-Nielsen believes the Outstanding Engineer award honors his presentation and publication last year of "Confabulation Theory" (Springer-Verlag 2007)-the culmination of a lifetime of work on the mechanism by which thinking is carried out in humans and animals. "For forty years my goal has been to understand the fundamental mechanism of thought," said the author. "This search led to a unified 'confabulation theory' of cognition that explains the mechanism of thought."
How thinking works has puzzled scientists for millennia -- from Aristotle's studies on human thought (published in 350 B.C.), to recent computational neuroscience research. Hecht-Nielsen's Confabulation Theory now presents the scientific and engineering communities with what he calls the "first comprehensive and complete theory of cognition," a theory that he believes can shed extensive light on the design of the brain. "Seeing the detailed process of thinking in action," said Hecht-Nielsen, "it is clear that thinking is starkly alien in comparison with past concepts in neuroscience, computer science, and so on."

Confabulation Theory seems to involve the fact that the human brain makes inferences from given information. Sherlock Holmes could be described as a master confabulator. And I must admit I infer things all the time. One might say this is intelligence. Perhaps it is intuition.
Artificial intelligence has traditionally had a big problem with putting together disparate pieces of information in novel ways. At this time computers are not structured to infer information like humans or animals. If confabulation technology could be combined with  gigantic computational power, it would be of  inestimable value to corporate and government interests. As our hero says, "What is most striking about this confabulation architecture is its extremely large quantity of knowledge and the effectiveness with which it exploits this knowledge to craft astonishingly intelligent outputs, all without any traditional 'software', 'rules', or 'algorithms'. This is how neurons think. This is how human and animal 'intelligence' arises. Establishing a complete understanding of this will require a huge new phalanx of research."

 Robert believes his work is leading humanity in a very Utopian direction. 

"Hecht-Nielsen envisions that by 2 100, human toil will have permanently ended; he argues that hundreds of billions of confabulation theory-based intelligent machines would do all work that humans choose not to do. "By 3 000, humans and their intelligent machines will have spread throughout the Milky Way galaxy," he said, forecasting that "by the year 20000, humans and their intelligent machines will be intervening to eliminate unnecessary lifeform suffering, strife and tragedy throughout the millions of billions of galaxies of the entire universe.""

I am a bit less optimistic about these things. I remember predictions similarly made in the 1950's about the way we would live at the arrival of the Twenty-First Century. I do believe Hecht-Nielsen is an extraordinary salesman.
And I am certain that Bob's excitement for the future is helping him land these long term contracts from the government.  
To tell the truth, I am skeptical of FICO's software simply by reflecting on recent history. 
Have you ever heard of the FICO score? You have one.  It is one of the prime tools used by banks to judge whether a customer is worthy of a mortgage. During the heyday of easy money in the oughts, before our economic bubble busted, banks were using FICO scores to give any Tom, Dick or Harriett a mortgage for which they could not make the payments. We are still feeling the effects today. 
Perhaps the banks ignored FICO scores in their rush to bundle and resell bad loans. 
But one must suspect  that FICO was riding the wave just like everyone else in those days.
Somehow I confabulate that this credit score company was handing out scores that reflected the optimism for the future of Mr. Hecht-Nielsen himself.  

More to come in future posts.