Monthly Archives: December 2012

Bigfoot News New Years Edition 2012 Part 2

Update on Rick Dyer Bigfoot shooting. Of all the crazy stories floating around Bigfootery lately, this one is garnering the least attention, and that is too bad, because it makes the most sense, and it’s the question that I am most confident about. Instead of saying I don’t have the faintest idea, as I do repeatedly in today’s prior post, on the contrary, I am quite confident that Rick Dyer did indeed shoot and kill a Bigfoot near San Antonio, Texas on September 6, 2012.

The reason no one believes this story is solely due to the reprehensible behavior and mentality of Rick Dyer himself, no doubt the most hated man in Bigfootery and for very good reason. People hate him so much that they refuse to believe this story! Not only that, they hate him so much that many are refusing to run or even read any stories that even mention his name. Ouch! That’s some real hatred.

Fellow investigators and bloggers have been asking me a lot of questions lately to try to determine if this is a hoax or not. Most of them are certain that it’s a hoax. In general their reasons for believing this include their hatred for Dyer and his many hoaxes of the past. But this is not logical thinking.

  1. Dyer hoaxed numerous times in the past, therefore he is hoaxing now.
  2. I hate Dyer, so Dyer is hoaxing.
  3. Dyer is my personal enemy, therefore he is hoaxing.

Very tempting for the brain to believe any of these things, but these are all logical fallacies that would be demolished quickly in Logic 101.

One of the questions tossed my way is how do I know that my source at Minnow is really a source at Minnow Films of the UK. Instead, perhaps it is someone in with Dyer who is part of the hoax.

The answer is that I am quite certain that this person is with Minnow, though they were given some incorrect information (apparently deliberately) about the Dyer shooting, probably to confuse them so they don’t know the whole story. My source was quite chagrined when they learned that they had been somewhat misled.

The incorrect information centered on the height and weight of the Bigfoot. The correct height and weight was given in a recent post by Crypto Crew, from an unknown source. This Crypto Crew post updates and expands the entire story beyond what I wrote, and Dyer himself has apparently confirmed that this account is 100% correct.

There are other things that lead me to think that this is not a hoax. First of all, the Camper Video is a video of a real, live Bigfoot! I am 100% certain of this, and Facebook Find Bigfoot confirmed that. So many people are insisting that that is a fake video only due to their hatred of Dyer. If anyone else shot that video, they would be praising it to the skies.

The way this story has come out looks very unhoax-like. It has trickled out in tiny bits and pieces here and there via mysterious unnamed sources ever since the day after the shooting. A number of Bigfooters heard these stories but didn’t know what to think of them. When asked, Dyer resisted these tiny leaks all along the way.

That’s not how a hoaxer works. If Dyer was hoaxing, he would have shouted to all of us right away that he had shot a Bigfoot. He would not have fought tooth and nail every leak along the way, and the story would not have slowly dribbled out like this. Sure, Dyer appears to be confirming it now, three months later and very reluctantly. It would not have played out like that if it were a hoax.

Let’s see: I will hoax a Bigfoot shooting in September, then as tiny leaks pour out for months, I will fight and deny them all the way until December, when I will orchestrate a huge leak via a major and well-regarded film company, and then I will hem and haw and finally fess up. Hoaxes don’t work that way, no sir.

Further, Dyer apparently told a close associate of the shooting early on but absolutely swore this person to secrecy, virtually making them scribble it in blood. If you are going to hoax, why swear associates to the secrecy of the hoax? Idiotic.

The only way this could possibly be a hoax is if Dyer is about 20 times smarter than the dumb redneck he is. Sure, maybe Dyer is hoaxing via some sort of 11th Dimension Chess, thereby making the greatest and most elaborate hoax of all time, to be studied by intelligence agencies across the seas for decades. Think so? Neither do I.

Rick Dyer, sociopath. In the last Bigfoot update, I discussed the narcissism that drives a lot of Dyer’s antics. It is only with a deep understanding of narcissism that a lot of this man’s behavior can be properly understood. Narcissists are as common as dandelions in Bigfootery, which attracts, feeds and probably grows its very own narcissists. But even there, Dyer stands out.

There is another aspect of his behavior, an antisocial aspect. Antisocial traits of various types are also very common in Bigfootery, and they are often hard to parse out from the narcissism. The two often run together, and narcissists can act antisocial at times.

Most of the antisocials in Bigfootery are the more controlled types. Sociopathy is either “controlled” or “uncontrolled.” The more controlled types fill the ranks of law, medicine, business, the military, law enforcement and of course government! It is simply not the case that all sociopaths are criminals. Most of them are never locked up for a single day of their lives. Why not? They are afraid of going to prison.

Fortunately for them, modern society provides many perfectly legal ways to do what sociopaths do best, being a criminal! Yes, these are the “legal criminals.” Who are these “legal criminals?” See above. Attorneys, physicians, businessmen, soldiers, cops and prison guards and of course how can we forget those who practice the art of Politricks?

The less controlled types are the “illegal criminals.” When they are highly uncontrolled, you get Ted Bundy. Highly controlled, you get JFK. Defenses come in handy here, especially sublimation.

Sublimation is nothing new. Churchill could have been Hitler.

Anyway, let us look at Dyer’s history. We know little about his early life.

In his 20’s, he joined the military. He served only 2 years before he took a “general discharge.” This is not a dishonorable discharge, but it’s not an honorable one either. It’s not exactly an optimal way to leave the service. My guess is his antisocial behavior got him thrown out of the military somehow, probably because he could not follow rules. It is very common for antisocials to get tossed from military service.

After that, he went into Corrections, an industry which, unfortunately for those of us out of uniform, is swarming with antisocials. Dyer only worked as a prison guard for 2 years before leaving for unknown reasons. Being a prison guard is a great job, and it makes no sense to leave a great job like that. My guess is he got in trouble again as a guard, probably once again for breaking rules (antisocials can’t seem to follow rules very well).

After that, he goes into used car sales, an occupation which is literally swarming with antisocials. In fact, one wonders how many used car salesmen are not antisocial!

Rick Dyer has a criminal past. By his own admission, he has been arrested all over the world. Well, that’s quite an achievement, guy! Dyer states this with some pride. Typically, he weasels his way out of convictions. Getting out of convictions and escaping from confinement is another thing that antisocials are good at. In fact, the best antisocials have this down an art. How they do it, I have no idea.

In the US, he was arrested a couple of years ago for ripping off car buyers on Ebay auctions. He stole $19,000 from a couple of men, one a Canadian. Dyer took thousands of dollars and promised the men Corvettes. The men received nothing at all, and Dyer simply stole their money, laughing all the way to the bank no doubt. Dyer plea bargained out of this one somehow by refunding the guys’ stolen money.

He had a big story about how it was an ex-wife who stole all the money and not him, and he was out of the country anyway. But antisocials always have an excuse for all their crimes. They’re never guilty of anything, and they rarely confess to any crime. Even when they do confess, they typically recant later on. They usually have a number of fall guys set up just in case they might need them, or if not, they just grab the nearest one off the street and designate them sucker.

Earlier this year, Dyer was arrested for beating up his pregnant wife. He’s got a big story about how she provoked him somehow, but that’s to be expected. The charge was bargained down to something minor, and he never got sentenced to jail. He’s now back with the woman, and she just gave birth to a child.

Dyer travels the world on a compulsive basis, apparently setting up residence in varying foreign countries for a short period of time, doing this, that or whatever (probably something shady, sleazy, quasi-legal or out and out illegal) and then taking off. Dyer also wanders around the US quite a bit. This sort of roaming and wandering is also typical of an antisocial. Many normal folks like to wander about too, but antisocials take it to an art.

Dyer is a less controlled sociopath, which is the reason for the repeated run-in’s with the law. However, I don’t think he is particularly dangerous, and I have advised folks who want to deal with him to not be afraid of him. If you as a fellow Bigfooter get involved with the guy, I don’t think he’s going to murder you, steal your money or rape your wife.

Given that Dyer is a sociopath, he is precisely the sort of guy who would and could very well shoot and kill a Bigfoot in cold blood as he is claimed to have done. You have to be pretty coldblooded to do that, and antisocials are legendary for their icy veins. A daredevil expedition like that is the perfect legal, quasi-legal or not exactly legal or illegal avenue for his antisocial tendencies.

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Filed under Americas, Animals, Antisocial, Apes, Bigfoot, Mammals, Mental Illness, Narcissism, North America, Personality, Personality Disorders, Psychology, Psychopathology, Regional, Sociopathy, Texas, USA, West, Wild

Letter from India

I read your article India Is a Shithole, and I must say that you have been extremely lenient in criticizing my country. My name is V., I am an Indian (hate to be one but am) myself and read the comments of my fellow Indians, but I will be bold enough to say this, even if they kill me, for it is true – INDIA IS A SHITHOLE! I wanted to post a comment highlighting the veracity of what you had said but was unable to find the tab to do so. Hence I thought its best if you could put my remarks on your blog for me.

Please allow me to give you an in depth account of the same. On Dec 16, 2012 a girl was out with her guy friend at around 2130 hrs.

They boarded a bus, which as it is in this country are shitty and carry around the filth migrating from the Indian villages to its cities (or should I say shitties). In that bus were 5 guys who started passing lewd comments at this girl. When her guy friend protested and slapped the guy who did so, he was beaten up with iron rods and the girl was brutally raped, beaten, the iron rod inserted into her. Finally when these five ‘Indians’ had their fun, they threw the guy and the girl out of the bus after stripping off her clothes.

The usual events which follow such cases in India took place. The media hyped it; people protested right outside the Parliament. Everybody has been screaming for a very long time about the way rapes are spreading like an epidemic in this country. People have been demanding that the rapists be brutally executed. But let me tell you what will happen: sooner or later, the media will forget about this issue, the people will go silent and forget about it, no amendments will be passed, and in all probability, the rapists will be allowed to go scot free.

The mentality of Indians is what’s the most fucked up, Robert. People will blame the girl and say that its her fault that she left her house late at night and then say that its the kind of clothes that women wear that provoked the rapists. I feel like smashing the faces of such assholes; every day I just feel anger at my peoples retarded mentality! While our politicians do nothing, the people who are genuinely protesting outside the Parliament are being beaten up by the cops. The cops were not even provoked by the protestors!

Moreover a woman is raped every 20 minutes in India. This Robert is just the tip of the iceberg. The kind of social stigma that women in this country after being raped ensures that most of the cases are not reported. Incredible India?? My ass! I would like to make it very clear to the Indian men: “You fucking retards! Even if a woman is standing naked on the streets, it does not give you the right to touch her, grope her or pass lewd comments at her! Grow up or we’ll remain a 3rd world shithole!”

Another thing I’d like to go into detail is the Indian leadership. Our prime minister, the so called Dr. Manmohan Singh, is a loser! A fucking coward! All he has given this country since his government came to power is fucking scams! Here is a list of a few:

– The 2G Scam
– The 3G Scam
– The Adarsh Scam
– The Commonwealth Games Scam
– The Coal Gate Scam

The way a leader reacts after a crisis has happened is extremely important. This piece of shit didn’t even make a statement to the Indian people or address us as to why such a state of affairs exists or that his government would hunt down those responsible.

You’d said in your article:

The Indian state exists only to suck up to the rich or in its human form to move up clas-swise and become part of the elite class. The state cares nothing about workers, consumers, the environment…Hell, about anything relating to the people.

You couldn’t be more right. The soul of the Indian people has been sucked dry by the leadership of leeches that lead us. I personally would like to gouge out the eyes of each of these politicians, break their necks and deliver unspeakable brutalities on them, however corruption is so intricately woven into the system that it’ll neuter me even before I can think of striking it.

Have you seen the personality of our leaders? They must be like 7000 years old and with pot bellies. Whenever I switch on a news channel to watch how our politicians debate, I feel fucking embarrassed. They act like a bunch of rowdy fools with no regard for anyone’s opinions but their own, and the debate turns into a competition wherein each one is trying to drown out the others voice. Just switch on NDTV and you’ll know what I’m talking about. The lack of civility is evident. In contrast when I watch the BBC, it a pleasure to watch Hard Talk.

Have you seen the condition of Indian roads (or rather the lack of them)? I am an avid biker, but if I even think of going for a long cruise on our roads, it’ll be like me dancing with the devil. There are no markers for speed breakers, and they pop out from the middle of nowhere. There are so many potholes, that if I think of speeding up or going over 50 kms/hour I will end with up fractured bones and my flesh ripped off.

To aggravate our misery, our driving sensibility kicks in i.e. no respect for pedestrians, overtake from the left or right as you please, never give an indication while switching lanes, and even if I do, I’m afraid the moron behind me will speed up as though someone grabbed his balls, and he’ll run me over.

I would now love to tell you about our ‘education system’ and about our ‘competitive exams’. Firstly please let me clarify that all the education system has not really succeeded in education anyone in this land of crap. Education means that people know that for civilization to exist, we must imbibe the principles, values and ethos necessary to ensure that the society not only remains civilized but also grows and flourishes. All the ‘education’ in India has managed to do is ensure that people are literate. If you ask an India what being polite, respectful or being politically correct means, he won’t know what the hell you’re talking about. The Indians who exemplify this as I said earlier are our politicians.

Why is the Indian system of education so dysfunctional? The short answer is that it suffers from government interference, which hobbles the system – primarily by constraining the supply of quality education. This it does by not allowing free entry and investment in education. By constraining the supply in face of increasingly high demand, the prices go up, the quality goes down and this opens up avenues for corruption. The high price allows the government to directly extract profits from the system – through rationing out the limited supply to favored groups in exchange for their political support.

The competitive exams in India are also geared towards this strategy. These exams do not test the suitability of the candidate to study a subject, rather they are designed to weed out 98% of the applicants. As a result what you are left with are the most diligent of the lot. Whether or not you teach them anything, they will be successful in the narrow domains of their specialization.

Good education should open ones mind to think logically and creatively, and make it able to process different kinds of knowledge. But by stitching students into tight subjects early on, buttoning these with monologue teachings and objective type exams, India does the opposite. This is often justified by using an old fixation, namely education must equal jobs.

Another thing that pisses me off is the way that we Indians take credit for the success of Indians who migrate to the states or to any other developed nation. If we can’t retain our own people and give them the resources to replicate their brilliance back home, then who are we trying to fool by saying that Indian possess genius?? People will do their masters from here, go abroad and do their PhD’s and if they try and come back here, they are told to go back as they are overqualified. I’ll give you an example; for a personality like Sunita Williams people in India celebrate her success. Why? Because her name ‘sounds’ Indian…Sunita. Not only are we uncivilized and uncouth, we are also hypocrites.

Trust me Robert, I could go on and on and give you the intricacies of how fucked up India is. When I raise my voice in my own country, people don’t give a shit. Hence I must go through you. The only thing that gets my people to act is foreigners telling us how fucked up we are (This is true! I shit you not!).

You compared India to Ethiopia. Dude, I lived in Botswana for 3 years from 1995 to 1998. That country gained independence in 1966; we Indians in 1947. To date India does not have potable running water in its taps or 0 power cuts in its households; whereas when I was in Botswana, I could drink water right out of any tap, regardless, and not fear death from an infection. The same cannot be said about my country.

Risible bloody shithole!!

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Filed under Africa, Asia, Corruption, Crime, Culture, East Indians, Education, Government, Immigration, India, Politics, Race/Ethnicity, Regional, South Africa, South Asia, South Asians

Bigfoot News New Years Edition 2012 Part 1

Bigfootery is rocked by exciting, confusing and crazy stories, one after the other! More below.

First of all, the famous Bigfoot steak from the Sierra Kills of October 8, 2010, when 2 Bigfoots were reportedly killed near Mt. Haskell, California, has tested positive for Black Bear and human, the human being Justin Smeja, the shooter, himself. The conclusion apparently is that this is not a piece of Bigfoot as Dr. Melba Ketchum reported as part of her Bigfoot DNA study. Instead, it’s a piece of bear contaminated by the DNA of the man who found it.

There are all sorts of accusations flying, mostly centering on hoaxing. Many are accusing Ketchum of perpetrating a gigantic hoax on the community by taking a piece of bear and calling it a piece of Bigfoot.

Others are accusing Smeja of perpetrating a hoax. He never shot two Bigfoots, it is claimed. Instead, he shot two bears and claimed he shot two Bigfoots as part of a huge hoax.

I know Justin, and in addition, everything I have learned about him points in the direction of this being a true story. He’s simply not a hoaxer. Hoaxing is not in him. He’s really too good for this slime-pit called Bigfootery to be honest.

There are other theories being tossed about – that Justin sent in piece of bear instead of a piece of Bigfoot to keep from being prosecuted. He sent the actual piece of Bigfoot in to the study. That doesn’t seem to make much sense either.

One thing that is very confusing is that Ketchum never asked Justin for his own DNA in order to rule it out. If this is true, it is a damning statement against Ketchum.

There are also other accusations against Ketchum stemming from Smeja and Bart Cutino which I am not allowed to report on at this time, though I have known about this for months. Justin is supposed to release a statement about this in a day or two, but it may be delayed. Suffice to say that if true, it shows Ketchum in a shady light, in fact, in a more shady light than she is often portrayed – it makes her look absolutely terrible.

This story did not surprise me when I heard it as I have my own theory about why she made this sleazy and odd request, and it lines up with what we know about her ruthless and morally developmentally delayed personality.

Is Ketchum perpetrating a hoax? I asked the late Richard Stubstad this question. Stubstad was a statistician and an interesting fellow in that light. You could ask him just about any question that was not outrageously offensive, and he would just give you some kind of a statistical-type answer. These would be the sort of questions that would elicit moral outrage in most folks due to the implications of the question.

For instance, I asked him once if it was possible that Dennis Pfohl and Dr. Leila Hadj-Chikh were perpetrating a gigantic hoax on Adrian Erickson by claiming that they were interacting with Bigfoots regularly. His voice grew grave, and he said carefully, “I do not believe that this is possible. That’s not a possibility.” You see, a statistical answer. You could ask him all sorts of questions like that, and he would give you funny statistical answers like that.

Once I asked him if it was possible that Ketchum was perpetrating a gigantic hoax on all of us. Once again I got that dead serious tone, and he said, “I do not believe that that is possible. That’s not even a possibility.” Stubstad disliked her as much as anyone, and he would be the first to call her out as a hoaxer if that’s what he thought. But he didn’t think she was.

I do not believe that this woman is pulling off a gigantic hoax. Her career in science and possibly medicine could well be shot for good if she was caught doing such a thing. Further, it’s illegal to hoax for money. It’s called Fraud. Not only could she be sued civilly by everyone in sight for stealing their money, but it’s also a criminal offense. An enterprising DA could well send her to a female prison for a bit where she could study a lot of animalistic hominins up close and personal for a while.

Hence, we have a dilemma.

Ketchum says Justin has a piece of Bigfoot. Others say it’s a piece of bear.

Conclusion?

There is none. None of it makes the tiniest bit of sense to me, and all of the possible theories make no sense either. Humans don’t like to do this because it makes them feel lost like children, but many times in life you simply have to throw up your hands and admit that none of this or that makes any kind of sense at all, and you don’t have the foggiest idea what in the Hell is going on.

Which is where we will leave this depressing matter for now.

Daisy is in the box! A group associated with MABRC (Mid America Bigfoot Research Organization), a split off from the MABRC split-off Orig-6 called Team Quantra, is claiming that they have live captured a Bigfoot somewhere in the continental US. The Bigfoot was captured in some sort of a clam trap, sedated and then sent 12 miles away to a facility to be studied. A scientist was called in to study the creature, and that is the last that we have heard.

They will either be releasing it in 3 days (a very bad idea), or they will send it on somewhere to be studied, in which case they will release a statement in 30-90 days (30-90 day delay being another very bad idea). If they release it, all they will have presumably is video and photo evidence, which of course will be shredded to bits by skeptics. Hopefully they would have obtained some biological samples from the creature which could then be studied and DNA tested. But the creature would be loose, and we would once again run into the “no body” dilemma.

Various and sundry Bigfooter-critters have weighed in with their individually tailed ludicrous responses.

Tim Fasano, who is about as big of a kook as the guys at MABRC, etc. are, issued a statement saying that he called “Central Command,” and they told him that they had ordered the Bigfoot released “as per the Geneva Conventions.”

How does Fasano known anyone on the US military’s Central Command in the first place, and if he doesn’t know anyone, why would CentCom even speak to a lowly civilian? It  was a general himself who supposedly spoke to Fasano. Why would a general talk to this guy? No reason to. At the end of the day, the story is seems silly, and as with so much other nonsense lately, probably unverifiable.

Matt Moneymaker, another kook, also weighed in, claiming that this was all a hoax perpetrated by the same clown who hoaxed Autumn Williams in her Enoch Bigfoot hoax book. This is surely not true. The communications are coming directly from Ed Smith and Darkwing Lee themselves, and these guys, though clowns, would never allow themselves to be hoaxed by a lowly fellow like the Enoch hoaxer.

Either this really happened, or Ed Smith is knowingly perpetrating a hoax. Bottom line.

Ed Smith, Darkwing Lee and MABRC etc are some of the biggest kooks, idiots and fools in all of Bigfootery, and believe me, the competition is intense! They fight with everyone, including all other Bigfoot organizations. The fights get brutal; these rednecks play hardball. Threats have been reported both ways, possibly including death threats.

A pipe bomb reportedly went off at a MABRC conference a couple of years ago, but no one was hurt. There are accusations that MABRC themselves set it off. They steal other people’s research areas, often aggressively and even violently. They like guns and other weaponry. Their organization is filled with ex-military. So these are the kinds of folks we are dealing with here; you don’t mess around with them.

In addition, there has been one false alarm after another coming out of Smith/MABRC for a long time now. Most have fallen short of overt hoaxing, but you get the idea. The false alarms have been along the lines of “capture coming soon,” nonsense like that. For instance, Ed Smith claimed to have biological Bigfoot samples which were sent out for DNA testing. He then reported back the test results which would not make sense in any reasonable universe, though I am not a geneticist (it sounded like he made the results up himself). I am not sure if that counts for a hoax?

A recent false alarm was the Lee/Smith fiasco where they “refused to confirm or deny” whether or not they had a body. They played this out for a bit, milking all the publicity, until the coda, a 1 hour radio show that ended with them both stating that they had no body after all. They jerked off the whole Bigfoot community for weeks on end. Thanks a lot guys. I haven’t been masturbated quite so nicely in some time.

The problem with these guys is that while they are kooks, they are also dead serious. They have a very serious plan for capturing a Bigfoot, and they may well have working traps. They have an excellent plan for dealing with the Bigfoot afterwards. They have some brawn (ex-military), engineers, a whole lot of fancy and expensive equipment and some big money backers like attorneys, physicians and businessmen.

Obviously, you would have to be completely insane to try to live capture a Bigfoot. One of the side effects of kookery is that most kooks are quite crazy. Being crazy isn’t really all that great, but sometimes it comes in handy. If you want to live capture a Bigfoot, only the insane need apply. And a side effect of all the kookery and nuttiness of these guys is that they are precisely insane enough to try to and maybe even succeed at something as loony as live capturing a Bigfoot.

They may well know where these things hang, and they may have a working trap. They may be capable of tranking the thing if it gets unruly. They may even be able to move the box somewhere close by. They may be capable of having facilities to study the thing. But after that, all bets are off because I don’t see how a non-state group keeps such a creature in a facility tranked up enough to get studied. This part is where I feel their expertise would fall short.

A wild story was published on Bigfoot Evidence from someone who claimed to be in on the capture, and he said that the whole thing fell through when they got the Bigfoot in the facility. According to the story, the Bigfoot got out, tore up some of the guys studying it and then escaped. No one knows if the story is true, and hoaxers write in to BFE all the time with elaborate fictions like this, but this is just about how a story like this would logically end. In catastrophe, blood, broken bones, mangled bodies, property destruction and possibly even death of either the Bigfoot or some of those studying it.

We haven’t heard anything out of these guys for a day or so now, so who knows from here on out?

Is it all a hoax? As morally challenged as these guys are, MABRC/Smith have never yet actually and formally hoaxed the community. They have nearly hoaxed us many times, but almost only counts in Equine footwear and Little Boys. If they are hoaxing us, this would be a lowly first for them.

So, does the Team Quantra have a live captured Bigfoot?

Guess what? No one knows!

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Filed under Americas, Animals, Antisocial, Apes, Bigfoot, California, Mammals, Mental Illness, Narcissism, North America, Personality, Personality Disorders, Psychology, Psychopathology, Regional, Science, Sociopathy, USA, West, Wild

An Interesting Israel 9-11 Connection

Repost from the old site.

This piece from the Muckraker Report contains an interview with a former Israeli military officer, now living in the US, who overheard men speaking in Hebrew about planes hitting the World Trade Center Towers 11 months before 9-11. He went to the FBI with the information but they would not provide him protection which he asked for due to fear of being assassinated by the Mossad.

In October 2000, the officer was collecting ivy cuttings at a Jewish cemetery in Newark, New Jersey. He overheard men speaking in Hebrew below a retaining wall beneath him. Another more important man pulled up and approached the two men. He said, “The Americans will learn what it is to live with terrorists after the planes hit the twins in September”.

When one of the men voiced concerns about which party would get elected in 2000 and how this may effect the plans, the important man said, “Don’t worry, we have people in high places and no matter who gets elected, they will take care of everything”. Also, at one point, one of the three men said, “The Arabs are so stupid. They don’t even imagine that we are using them.”

The former officer made a few attempts to warn the FBI, but he kept getting rebuffed. Finally, two agents, Agents Stengel and Gritz, met with the man and tried to get some information out of him. He refused to say more than that there was a terrorist attack planned for New York City using planes unless he was granted protection by the US government.

However, the agents’ higher-ups’ refused to grant the man protection for some strange reason. Now, the FBI is stonewalling all efforts to investigate this man’s case, in yet another apparent cover-up of an Israeli 9-11 connection.

About these cover-ups: I think there are quite of few folks in the US government who are outraged at the way that we have insanely allowed Israel to worm its way into our government. But there are pro-Israelis, Jewish and Gentile, and out and out Israeli agents at many US government offices now, and they are working to cover up any inquiry into Israeli involvement.

So, there is some back and forth tension going on within US law enforcement. With regard to one man’s statement – “The Arabs are so stupid. They don’t even imagine that we are using them” – this seems to suggest that the Al Qaeda attackers were either Mossad agents or being coerced into the attack unbeknownst to their Mossad handlers. This theory is quite popular in 9-11 conspiracy circles.

Nevertheless, we have a tremendous amount of evidence that Osama bin Laden and his associates in Al Qaeda planned and carried out this attack. and that the hijackers were Al Qaeda operatives, not Mossad agents, and that they were not being directed by Mossad handlers. I assume this man’s comment is just stereotypical Jewish arrogance in taking credit for something that is not the Jews’ doing.

This story is very interesting and needs to be looked into some more. Still, this story is not as shocking as it seems. Other foreign intelligence services also heard rumors of the attack long before it took place – in particular, Saudi, Pakistani and Russian intelligence.

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Filed under Conspiracy Theories, Government, Israel, Jews, Law enforcement, Middle East, Race/Ethnicity, Regional, Reposts From The Old Site, Sociology, Terrorism

“The Cry of the Wall”

Repost from the old site.

I received this nice poem in my email the other day from a source who shall remain anonymous in response to my post, Racial Holy Wars, Real and Phantom. Although I suppose the poem below could be construed by some as anti-Semitic, I do not really think it reaches that level.

On the surface, it is best read as an account of the religious Zionist enterprise to colonize Palestine in order to reconstitute Israel as a Jewish homeland. I will make an exception for the line where the Jews are promised, “The Earth, its wealth and all to be”, which is a bit problematical. Of course this line plays into the classic anti-Semitic trope of the Jews as desiring to control the world.

On the other hand, if one studies the Jewish religion carefully, a quite proper reading shows that according to the Jewish religion, the Jews are indeed supposed to rule the world at some point in the future. I believe the Messiah comes, the Jews get Israel back, and then they take over the world. The Gentiles are to serve as little more than slaves to the Jews.

A sort-of exception is made for “righteous Gentiles”, who agree to live according to Jewish Law. These laws being the Noahide Laws, or Jewish Law for the Gentiles. Penalty for violation of Noahide Laws is death. A student of Comparative Religions will note similarities with the Dhimmitude Laws for the People of the Book (Jews, Christians, and Sabeans) under Classic Islamic Law.

And a proper reading of Islam leads to the conclusion that Islam also desires to conquer the world, and either convert of enslave (force into dhimmitude) the non-Muslims. The radical Christian Reconstructionist movement (popular with US fundamentalist Christians) also apparently has desires to rule the world, and also envisions laws that non-Christians must live under and obey under penalty of death.

Can you see the similarities running through here? The desire for domination, even total (world) domination, a set of conservative religious laws, and a desire to subjugate and humiliate those of other religions who refuse conversion under a set of religious laws, violation of which is punishable by death.

So, what appears at first to be a sign of the unique evil of the Jews (the anti-Semitic line) becomes, on analysis, an unfortunate universal human tendency. And although the Jewish religion seems to envision world domination for the Jews, how many Jews, like your neighbor or the shopkeeper, are aware of that, and pine for such domination themselves? I would say few.

Now, in my opinion, there are Jews with the power and money to dream of world domination, and some of them dream of just that, to quote Israel Shamir. The neoconservatives, the Jews in the Russian Mafia, the Rothschilds, the media moguls, and a some Israelis like David Ben Gurion, do seem to be out to become the “Jews that control the world”, as an article in a recent issue of Tikkun Magazine noted.

But are they anywhere close to achieving this goal? I say a resounding no. There are many players in the world domination game, not just the Jews. The reactionaries in the Bush Administration clearly lust for world domination. Just read the missives from the Project for the New American Century.

In the World Control Sweepstakes, the Jews are a mosquito on my arm, while US imperialism is a wolf at my front door. For mosquitoes, there are always swats and repellents. For wolves, I will need a shotgun. Double-barreled. Enjoy:

Cry of the Wall

The day is nigh the Rabbi cried
From Moses to the Judah Tribe
A promise of the Holy Lands
And Lord o’er the Gentile Bands

But wasn’t Moses for us all
Plied the Gentiles from the wall
Not so replied the Rabbi lot
We’re the chosen Men in Frocks
To lead and guide the Judah flock

And they will follow thick and thin
To attain what Moses promised them
And what is that the Gentiles cried
What should they get that we’re denied

The earth, its wealth and all to be
Cried the Rabbi’s don’t you see
We’re the chosen, you are not
So get your butts off this block

But this is ours the Gentiles yell
We’re long time here as time will tell
You have no right to boot us out
So we’ll stand against your rout

Ahh!… the Rabbi’s cried, we’re right!
Just listen to the anti-Semite
Who persecutes our Godly flock
And denies our right to this Holy block

If won’t you bend to our Gods will
We use the power of our Till
To take what’s yours without ado
So hump your swag and bid adieu

The cry came back, we’ll never leave
Will join our men and fight your thieves
Once more the Rabbi’s joined in grist
Yelled!… now we have the Terrorists.

This tale goes on, will never end
Until the Judgment Day does rend
The souls of man from evils past
To blend with Natures soul…at last!…

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Steganography

Repost from the old site.

What do the following have in common:

The Egyptian Sphinx
The little snake in Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince
One of Batman’s nemeses
Teresias in the play Oedipus Rex
Osama Bin Laden
Shakespeare’s Hamlet
Greek oracles
Jesus Christ in The Gospel of Mark
God Himself

Hint: The url’s contain hints to the answer, so clicking on them or even hovering the mouse over them is sort of cheating.

I will answer in the comments if any of you layabouts bothers to guess.

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Fanaticism and its Discontents

Repost from the old site.

Why are Republicans so dishonest? Probably because as extreme rightwingers, they tend to be fanatics, and most fanatics are outrageously dishonest.

That extends from Linux (or insert another product) fanatics to political fanatics to extreme nationalist fanatics to ethnic and tribal fanatics of all stripes to religious fanatics. They may also just be crafty psychopathic bottom-liners, who play the zero-sum game for keeps. The more I study the fanatic, the more convinced I am that this is a sick way of thinking.

And what it looks like at core is human egotism. Because the fanatic’s relationship to the thing he is fanatical about is identical to the egotist’s relationship to the individual. After all, the ego is the biggest liar that any of us know. The ego lies to most all of us every minute of every day, and this is adaptive to some extent.

When it gets out of control, the lying of the egotist or his extensions assumes gargantuan proportions. This is seen in the addict, the sociopath, the narcissist, the histrionic, the borderline, indeed, in every single personality disorder – in a word, the extreme selfish human.

Other characteristics of the egotist are reacting with rage to all criticism, and and treating all criticism as libel, assault, character assassination, defamation, or especially, hatred.

To the egotist, all criticism is always absolutely uncalled for and baffling. Of course, the egotist reacts towards this outrageous assault with a wild counterattack that often has overtones of threats, verbal, physical, monetary or social (the egotist will threaten to end the relationship with the critic).

At the same time, the egotist engages in nonstop criticism of others, often of a very harsh nature. In fact, many egotists are in a constant state of attack against supposed inferiors and enemies, which makes them seem mean, aggressive or hostile. In conflicts, the egotist portrays himself as the knight in shining armor radiating perfection, pure goodness and righteousness in all directions.

The person conflicting with the egotist is portrayed as purely bad or crazy, the essence of negativity and evil boiled into human shape. The egotist is 100% right and good and his opponent is 100% wrong and evil. Any suggestion to the egotist that there may be a 1% grey area in the conflict is met with fury, threats, and accusations of “working for the enemy”.

It’s tough being friends with an egotist, since you’re either 100% supportive of the egotist, or if not, you are blackened by the egotist into a 100% enemy. As this situation gets more out of hand, the egotist’s behavior gets more virulent in its pathology, and we often see frank paranoia, audacious attempts at attention-getting and appalling manipulation of others.

This little psychological aside has a purpose. I want you to think about what I just said and plug it into the notion of fanaticism. The stunning conclusion is that the fanatic is “egotistical” about the object of his fanaticism.

Therefore, the relationship of the fanatic towards rival or conflicting products, ideologies, political parties, tribes, races, religions or nations, is precisely the same diseased, pathological behavior that the egotist displays towards his critics and rivals! Now we need to know why this is.

Does the fanatic see his fanaticized objects and notions as extensions of himself, of his own ego? Surely the tribal, racial, religious or ethnic fanatic must. If you attack my “tribe”, then you attack me, and I will react accordingly as if you threatened to kill me. But does the Republican fanatic or the Linux fanatic see the party or the operating system as an extension of the self? How could they?

Food for thought…

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Filed under Politics, Psychology, Reposts From The Old Site, Republicans, US Politics

More Comments on Zionist Censorship of Liberal Forums

Repost from the old site.

We got some interesting comments on the Zionist censorship of liberal Net sites posts. Here is one of them, from the source for the original post. I think it sums things up pretty well:

The whole exercise in various liberal/progressive forums is a kind of intellectual blackmail. The board admin and mods are manipulated into a position of self-conscious egg-treading, trying to avoid the appearance of tolerating bigotry and racism, which of course just carpet-bombs all balanced, serious discussion.

[RL: Exactly! There is no way to discuss Israel, Jews or a million other things in any rational manner while trying to be PC-correct. PC nukes most serious discussion by discarding much talk into the “racist” bin.]

It presumes that the board participants aren’t smart enough to recognize the difference between legitimate criticism that’s often backed up by open sources and figures, and simple, raw emotional generalizations based on rumors, hate and fear.

[RL: Sure, the line between racism and criticism is thin and tricky one, but since when is any criticism of any ethnic group, nation or religion racism?! What kind of BS is that?! It’s Jewish BS, that’s what it is.

So how to we tell criticism from racism? Well, it’s kind of like the Supreme Court justice said about obscenity, you know it when you see it. In general, criticizing a group fairly for changeable things is not racism. Nor is dislike for certain members of a group that behave in a certain way, if that way is objectionable.

Even the Jews have two minds about this.

One the one hand, you have what I call the Jewish tribalists, who are basically reactionary. There will be no criticism of the tribe, other than criticism of reformers or “traitors”. Even on Israeli sites, these types lash out at any and progressive, critical Jews as Jewish anti-Semites.

But there is another Jewish tradition, one which, though it is tinged with chauvinism, should be promoted. It tends to be a progressive tradition and it says that “One thing that is great about the Jewish people is that unlike other peoples (the chauvinism) we have always been able to criticize ourselves.” Hooray for this tradition!

The reactionary tradition is heavily tied into Zionism, and the hardest Zionists are always the most radical, racist, tribal and militant Jews of all. In fact, we can think of Zionism as a marker for Jewish tribalism. The more Zionist the Jew, the more tribal they are.]

The tactic is effective in suppressing criticism of Israel, but fortunately “facts are stubborn things.”

That quote is often credited to Lenin, but it’s also attributable to Thomas Jefferson, another revolutionary that Lenin might have studied. As for many rightwing sites like Little Green Footballs and Freerepublic, the pro-Israel sentiment is raw, searingly intense and without any boundaries or limits of decency.

Literally anything the Israelis do is justified, including the slaughter of civilians (who are all terrorists) and any critic of Israel, no matter how tepid or circumspect, is a Commie/terrorist-lover worthy of having their “head sawed-off with a dull knife”. (And that’s just an example of the more restrained comments.)

Go figure.

[RL: Yes, this is a case of Israelphilia or Judeophilia, and that’s almost as stupid as anti-Semitism. It’s really disturbing the way that Israel is lining up more and more with the rightwing.

Face it, Leftwing Zionism was always a contradiction in terms. And in this way, we see, as Israel Shahak points out, the Jews are getting back into their old habits as supporters of the aristocratic ruling classes.

In fact, the Ashkenazi were always conservatives, supporters of the rightwing aristocracy in Europe, and only turned to the Left around 1800 due to conservatism becoming associated with anti-Semitism as the Jews left the ghettos.

The spark for this exodus was Napoleon, who, in liberating the French Jews, set the stage for the liberation of all Ashkenazim. To this day, all Ashkenazim owe their liberation to Napoleon and should be grateful to him.]

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An Excerpt From the “Memoirs of Hadrian” by Marguerite Yourcenar

Repost from the old site.

For this post I am going to post a bit from a delightful book I just came across called The Memoirs of Hadrian, by Marguerite Yourcenar, a French novelist. It was translated from French to English in the 1950’s and 60’s by her lesbian live-in partner, Grace Frick. The English translation was published in 1963. Frick’s translation was widely praised.

This is a psychological and historical novel, not an actual memoir, and perhaps that is why it sounds so contemporary. This choice novel, a best seller in France 50 years ago, is just as contemporary as if it had been written yesterday. A film adaptation by John Boorman is due to start shooting in Italy in Spring 2006.

No matter how long ago they lived, the Romans were so much more like us than we ever want to believe. The fictional voice of Hadrian, the third of the five so-called “good Roman emperors”, so eloquent, learned and wise, could be that of a high-ranking military or political official in 2006.

I will intersperse this bit of treasure with my comments, which will be in bold. My comments will often try to relate this ancient events to contemporary events, to show how history lives within all of us, as we are all products of the past and molders of the future, and how thereby the past, present and future tend to merge via human agency, culture, genetics and tradition.

We are where we are and we do what we do in part because of history, whether we like it or not. And what we are and do now creates the future, whether we like that or not.

Hence, as Kurt Vonnegut notes in one of his books, referring to a obscure science fiction short story (I think, The Music of the Spheres by Stuart J. Byrne, but I may be wrong), the past, present and future are all simultaneously occurring right at this very moment.

But I digress…

This section refers to the Simon Bar Kokhba Rebellion (otherwise known as either the Second or Third Roman-Jewish War) amongst the Jews which took place in the Roman colonial province of Judaea (now Israel or Palestine) from 132-135 AD. There is also a passing reference to Jewish heroine Esther and the Jewish holiday of Purim, the celebration of which just passed us by.

Since this blog frequently discusses Israel, Jews, Palestine and the conflict in that region, and a recent post discussed Purim, I figure this excerpt has contemporary relevance, if only to replay the skipping record called “History repeats itself”.

Perhaps the word Judaean is more appropriate than the word Jewish in this context, since the Jewish religion at that time was quite different, in my opinion, despite what Zionist propaganda tells us, from modern rabbinical Judaism. Hence, I will use Judaean instead of Jew when describing this war. This is also a dig at Jewish primordialist volkisch Zionism, which I oppose).

Judaea was still majority-Judaean at this time, even after the failed First Judaean Revolt and the destruction of Herod’s Temple in Jerusalem around 65 years prior that left around 950,000 Judaeans dead and many others sold into slavery.

Though this blog supports most anti-colonial rebellions as a general rule, it is interesting to see the Bar Kokhba Revolt through the eyes of a secular Roman. Hadrian felt the Judaeans were fanatics, and clearly they were.

Many Romans also felt that the Christians of that time were also fanatics, and in fact many of them were also. In the Romans’ eyes, all the Romans asked was for the Christians to swear allegiance to Rome and pay their Roman taxes, and the Christians refused to do either, especially the swearing allegiance part. Instead, they preferred to kill themselves.

The Romans thought these suicides were the acts of an insane religious fanatical death cult, in the same way that many of us nowadays feel that Muslim suicide bombers are part of a crazy fanatical religious death cult.

Many Romans were secular, believe it or not, especially the educated ones. They had their Roman gods, of course, but many Romans, especially the ruling classes, didn’t really believe in their own gods very much.

In 130, Hadrian visited the devastated city of Jerusalem, which had still not been rebuilt after the Romans laid it to ruins some 70 years prior. Hadrian felt sorry for the Judaeans and promised to rebuild the city.

But the Judaeans became angry when word got out that Hadrian was going to rebuild the city as a pagan metropolis instead of a Judaean holy city and that he was going to rebuild the Judaeans’ Second Temple as a pagan temple to the Roman god Jupiter. The new city was to be named Aelina Capitolina. The Judaeans regarded the excavation of the Temple to rebuild it as a pagan monument as a religious transgression.

In 131, Hadrian added insult to injury by banning circumcision, which the Judaeans practiced as an essential part of their religion. Hadrian viewed circumcision as primitive, barbaric, body mutilation.

The Jewish wise man Akiva convinced the Judaean religious leadership of the Sanhedrin to rebel against the Romans. A military hero named Simon Bar Kokhba was chosen to be the leader. The name means sun of a star in Aramaic. It is interesting that the Judaeans at that time were speaking Aramaic, not the Hebrew of primordialist Zionist fantasy.

Simon Bar Kokhba was also designated the Judaean Messiah. This designation deeply offended many Christians (who were still mostly converted Jews at this time) since they felt that Christ was the real Messiah. Consequently the Christians would not support the rebellion.

In 132, the rebellion began, and the Judaeans had learned from the two previous rebellions and fought well. The Romans were routed, and for 2 1/2 years a Judaean state called The Era of the Redemption of Israel was formed. Bar Kokhba designated himself Nasi Israel, or ruler of Israel.

The crazy, endless procession of animal sacrifice at the Judaean Temple was restarted, which, in my opinion, is an example of one of the most primitive forms of ethnoreligious barbarism known to mankind (Sorry, Jewish readers!).

From morning to evening, the line of Judaeans with animals to sacrifice would snake away from the Temple and the blood of the slaughtered beasts ran red like a river away from the building!

The Romans gathered up a huge army and fought for three years. In 135, Bar Kokhba was driven to a redoubt at Betar. The fortress of Betar was then overwhelmed and the Judaeans were defeated. 580,000 Judaeans lay dead.

Much later, the name Betar was adopted in the 1920’s by a Jewish proto-fascist organization in the Jabotinskyist tradition. In my opinion, the recrudescence of the Betar decades later became the Kach or Kahane Movement, although the original Betar Movement apparently still exists at a much reduced level, since I visited their website not long ago.

However, just to demonstrate the proto-fascist roots of the Israeli Likud party, let us note that current and former Israeli Likud leaders such as former Prime Ministers Yitzak Shamir and Menachem Begin, current Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, and former Defense Minister Moshe Arens are all former members of Betar.

The fact that the US media fawned and fawns over such crypto-fascist characters is profoundly disturbing and makes one question the extent to which our media believes in democracy, if such folks are regarded as role models.

Hadrian tried to wipe out the Judaean religion, which he felt was the source of repeated rebellions. He banned the Judaean calendar and Torah Law and had many Judaean scholars executed. He built Roman statues on the ruins of the Temple and burned the Judaeans’ sacred scroll.

Jewish scholarship moved to Babylonia (Iraq) where the Babylonian Talmud was written hundred of years later, from 400-700, laying the foundation for modern rabbinical Judaism. Judaism started to reject radicalism and messianism and became more cautious and conservative. This can be seen in the Talmud’s reference to Bar Kokhba as Ben-Kusiba, which means false prophet.

As the final insult, he renamed Judaea to Syria Palaestina, after the Judaeans’ ancient, now-extinct enemies, the Philistines. This is one silly reason that Jewish Zionists find the geographical term Palestine so infuriating and illegitimate. Do Zionists really get livid about events 1,870 years ago? Zionists do.

It is interesting that hysterical, racist Jewish Zionist promoters of settler-colonialism in Palestine may be entirely wrong about the name Palestine coming from the Roman renaming of Jerusalem as Syria Palaestina, even if ultimately the dispute is just more Zionist verbal subterfuge and sophistry.

For instance, in the 1100’s BC, Egyptians refer to the inhabitants of Palestine as “Peleset” or “sea-people” because around this time, there was a lot of settlement going on in Palestine via Mediterranean seafaring trade merchants. The Akkadian language from the same period refers to the Southern Syrian region as Palashtu.

In fact, most Egyptian and Akkadian references to the region, even during the Judaean period, refer to it as Peleset (Egyptian also refers to it as Deyen, probably a reference to Danaos of myth) or Palashtu, and less commonly as Israel.

Judaeans only started showing up in Palestine en masse around 900 BC. But according to crazy Zionist ethnonationalist volkisch liars, only the Jews have always been there! Go figure!

Following Hadrian’s order, Jerusalem was renamed Aelia Capitolina, turned into a Roman pagan city, and Judaeans were forbidden from entering the city. Most modern Jews regard the uprising as a horrible tragedy, and certainly many Judaeans lost their lives.

But at the time, Bar Kokhba was widely regarded as a religious fanatic akin to the way many of us see Osama bin Laden or Pat Robertson, even by many of his own people. As you can see in the text, most Jews outside of Judaea were not much interested in the rebellion, which they tended to view as fanatical and not in their interests.

This text shows another side to the Bar Kokhba rebellion, cleansed of its Zionist primordialist whitewashing, exemplified by Jabotinsky’s proto-fascist Betar above and David Ben-Gurion (the father of Israel) taking his name from one of Bar Kokhba’s generals.

This text comes to me via a friend who got it from a mailing list he is on. He reports that a “cultured Arab” typed the text below out from the novel and sent it to the list. We thank this Arab, whoever he may be, for this bit of manna from heaven.

Now – On to the Romans and the Israelites!

Memoirs of Hadrian

By Marguerite Yourcenar

Translated from the French, New York,1954-1963

Excerpts from pages 233-249 for the years 132-135 AD:

…Jewish affairs were going from bad to worse. The work of construction was continuing in Jerusalem, in spite of the violent opposition of Zealot groups.

[RL: The construction referred to is Hadrian’s rebuilding Jerusalem as Aelina Capitolina, a Roman pagan city with a Roman pagan temple built in place of the destroyed Judaean temple. The violent opposition described is that of Judaeans who regarded the construction as a sin.]

A certain number of errors has been committed, not irreparable in themselves but immediately seized upon by fomenters of trouble for their own advantage.

The Tenth Legion Fretensis has a wild boar for its emblem; when its standard was placed at the city gates, as is the custom, the populace, unused to painted or sculptured images (deprived as they have been for centuries by superstition highly unfavorable to the progress of the arts),

[RL: Note that Hadrian regarded the Judaeans as uncivilized, backwards, fanatical barbarians, a view shared by many Romans.]

…mistook that symbol for a swine, the meat of which is forbidden them, and read into that insignificant affair an affront to the customs of Israel.

The festivals of the Jewish New Year, celebrated with a din of trumpets and ram’s horns, give rise every year to brawling and bloodshed; our authorities accordingly forbade the public reading of a certain legendary account devoted to the exploits of a Jewish heroine (Easther) who was said to have become, under an assumed name, the concubine of a king…

…of Persia (Iran), and to have instigated a savage massacre of the enemies of her despised and persecuted race. The rabbis managed to read at night what the governor Tineus Rufus forbade them to read by day; that barbarous story, wherein Persians and Jews rivaled each other in atrocities, roused the nationalistic fervor of the Zealots to frenzy (a feast of Purim).

[RL: Note the Roman view of Purim as a barbaric spectacle of bloodthirsty revenge, a view that, unfortunately, I share. Are the Jews to celebrate this blood-soaked festival, which promotes the notion that Jews and non-Jews are locked in eternal conflict until the end of time, forever? If so, what are the chances of reconciliation between Jews and non-Jews? Zero?]

Finally, this same Tineus Rufus, a man of good judgment in other respects and not uninterested in Israel’s traditions and fables, decided to extend to the Jewish practice of circumcision the same severe penalties of the law which I had recently promulgated against castration (and which was aimed especially at cruelties perpetrated upon young slaves for the sake of exorbitant gain or debauch).

[RL: Note that the Romans put circumcision on a par with castration! I certainly do not agree, being circumcised myself. I regard anti-circumcision activists as ill-advised kooks, and the whole movement has a wide streak of anti-Semitism running through it.

If you are interested in the subject, just search Google and discover all sorts of web pages devoted to the “horrors of circumcision”.]

He hoped thus to obliterate one of the marks whereby Israel claims to distinguish itself from the rest of human kind.

I took the less notice of the danger of that measure, when I received word of it, in that many wealthy and enlightened Jews whom one meets in Alexandria (Egypt) and in Rome have ceased to submit their children to a practice which makes them ridiculous in the public baths and gymnasiums and they even arrange to conceal the evidence on themselves.

I was unaware of the extent to which these banker collectors of myrrhine vases differed from the true Israel. As I said, nothing in all that was beyond repair, but the hatred, the mutual contempt, and the rancor were so.

In principle, Judaism has its place among the religions of the empire; in practice, Israel has refused for centuries to be one people among many others, with one god among the gods.

The most primitive Dacians (Bulgarians) know that their Zalmoxis is called Jupiter in Rome; the Phoenician Baal of Mount Casius has been readily identified with the Father who holds Victory in his hands, and whom Wisdom is born; the Egyptians, though so proud of their myths some thousands of years old, are willing to see in Osiris a Bacchus with funeral attributes; harsh Mithra admits himself brother of Apollo.

No people but Israel has the arrogance to confine truth wholly within the narrow limits of a single conception of divine, thereby insulting the manifold nature of Deity, who contains all; no other god has inspired his worshipers with disdain and hatred for those who pray at different altars.

[RL: Here Hadrian hints at an age-old clue to the riddle of anti-Semitism – the chauvinism of the Jews. How did the Jews persevere as a minority for 2000 years amidst frequent oppression? It’s the racism, stupid!

How about by preaching racist hatred against all non-Jews, banning most contact with Gentiles other than for business, and even building ghettos for themselves to keep their people from mingling with Gentiles?

How about by saying prayers throughout the day, every day, cursing the Gentiles in every way and wishing for their destruction, and instituting vicious penalties for Jewish women who had sex with Gentile men (like having their noses chopped off)?

Note that as late as 1800, any observant European Jew would refuse to eat or even have tea with any Gentile as a matter of custom. While this sort of behavior is a smart ethnocentric way of ensuring continuity of your race as a minority, it didn’t exactly help the Jews to win friends and influence people, and to the extent it yet exists, it still doesn’t.

Jewish separation and chauvinism is and was one of the major contributors to anti-Semitism, despite dishonest denials by Jewish scholars who specialize in and propagandize the mystification of anti-Semitism.]

I was only the more anxious to make Jerusalem a city like others, where several races and several beliefs could live in peace; but I was wrong to forget that in any combat between fanaticism and common sense the latter has rarely the upper hand.

[RL: Note here that Hadrian comes across as some sort of a Second Century universalist and multiculturalist!]

The clergy of the ancient city were scandalized by the opening of schools where Greek literature was taught; the rabbi Joshua, a pleasant, learned man with whom I had frequently conversed in Athens…

…but who was trying to excuse himself to his people for his foreign culture and his relations with us, now ordered his disciples not to take up such profane studies unless they could find an hour which was neither day or night…

[RL: Note again the ferocious condemnation by the Judaeans of those Judaeans who had extensive contact with Gentiles and the refusal of the Judaeans to assimilate to larger society in the tiniest way by studying Greek, which they regarded as a sin.]

…since Jewish law must be studied night and day. Ismael, an important member of the Sanhedrin, who supposedly adhered to the side of Rome, let his nephew Ben-Dama die rather than accept the services the Greek surgeon sent to him by Tineus Rufus.

[RL: Wow! Talk about fanaticism! No wonder the Romans were appalled by the Judaeans. The guy let his Judaean son die rather than have a “contaminated” and “unclean” Gentile doctor profane him by operating on his body!]

While here in Tibur means were still being sought to conciliate differences without appearing to yield to demands of fanatics, affairs in the East took a turn for the worse; a Zealot revolt triumphed in Jerusalem. An adventurer born of the very dregs of the people, a fellow named Simon who entitled himself Bar-Kokhba, Son of the Star, played the part of firebrand or incendiary mirror in that revolt.

I could judge this Simon only by hearsay; I have seen him but once face-to-face, the day a centurion brought me his severed head. Yet I am disposed to grant him that degree of genius which must always be present in one who rises so fast and so high in human affairs; such ascendancy is not gained without at least some crude skill.

The Jews of the moderate party were the first to accuse this supposed Son of the Star of deceit and imposture; I believe rather that this untrained mind was of the type which was taken in by its own lies, and that guile in his case went hand with fanaticism.

He paraded as the hero whom the Jewish people had awaited for centuries in order to gratify their ambitions and their hate; this demagogue proclaimed himself Messiah and King of Israel.

The aged Akiba, in a foolish state of exaltation, led the adventurer through the streets of Jerusalem, holding his horse by the bridle; the high priest Eleazar rededicated the temple, said to be defiled from the time that uncircumcised visitors had crossed its threshold.

[RL: Note again the Judaean association of Gentiles with uncleanness, contamination and profaneness. Gypsies also have this view of non-Gypsies, and similarly, they have also played the role of European minority from the East locked into endless conflict with non-Gypsies, as the European Jews from the East were locked into endless conflict with Gentiles].

Stacks of arms hidden underground for nearly twenty years were distributed to the rebels by agents of the Son of the Star; they also had recourse to weapons formerly rejected for our ordnance as defective (and purposely constructed thus by Jewish workers in our arsenals over a period of years).

Zealot groups attacked isolated Roman garrisons and massacred our soldiers with refinements of cruelty that recalled the worst memories of the Jewish revolt under Trajan; Jerusalem finally fell wholly into the hands of the insurgents, and the new quarters of Aelia Capitolina were set burning like a torch.

The first detachments of the Twenty-Second Legion Deiotariana, sent from Egypt with utmost speed under the command of the legate of Syria, Publius Marcellus, were routed by bands ten times their number. The revolt had become war, and war to the bitter end.

Two legions, the Twelfth Fulminata and the Sixth Ferrata, came immediately to reinforce the troops already stationed in Judea; some months later, Julius Severus took charge of the military operations. He had formerly pacified the mountainous regions of Northern Britain…

[RL: This is a reference to the last holdouts of the Celtic Empire, (in this case, Scotland) which once stretched across Europe from one end to the other, already at this time largely destroyed and scattered by Roman conquest.

The most recalcitrant of the Celts were in the far western edges of Europe, in the least habitable and most difficult-to-pacify areas, where to this day, the last holdouts of the Celtic languages Scots Gaelic, Irish Gaelic, Breton, and Welsh fight for survival and the Cornish and Manx languages rise from the dead.]

…and brought with him some small contingents of British auxiliaries accustomed to fighting on difficult terrain.

Our heavily equipped troops and our officers trained to the square or the phalanx formation of pitched battles were hard put to it to adapt themselves to that war of skirmishes and surprise attacks which, even in open country, retained the techniques of street fighting.

Simon, a great man in his way, had divided his followers into hundreds of squadrons posted on mountain ridges or placed in ambush in caverns and abandoned quarries, or even hidden in houses of the teeming suburbs of the cities. Severus was quick to grasp that such an elusive enemy could be exterminated, but not conquered; he resigned himself to a war of attrition.

The peasants, fired by Simon’s enthusiasm, or terrorized by him, made common cause with the Zealots from the start; each rock became a bastion, each vineyard a trench; each tiny farm had to be starved out, or taken by assault. Jerusalem was not recaptured until the third year, when last efforts to negotiate proved futile; what little of the Jewish city had been spared by the destruction under Titus was now wiped out.

Severus closed his eyes for a long time, voluntarily, to the flagrant complicity of the other large cities (which) now become the last fortresses of the enemy; they were later attacked and reconquered in their turn, street by street and ruin by ruin. In those times of trial my place was with the army, and in Judea….

In the spring of the third year of campaign the army laid siege to the citadel of Bethar, an eagle’s nest where Simon and his partisans held out for nearly a year against the slow tortures of hunger, thirst, and despair, and where the Son of the Star saw his followers perish one by one but still would not surrender.

Our army suffered almost as much as the rebels, for the latter, on retiring, had burned the forests, laid waste the fields, slaughtered the cattle, and polluted the wells by throwing our dead therein; these methods from savage times were hideous in a land naturally arid and already consumed to the bone by centuries of folly and fury.

The summer was hot and unhealthy; fever and dysentery decimated our troops, but an admirable discipline continued to rule in those legions, forced to inaction and yet obliged to be constantly on the alert; though sick and harassed, they were sustained by a kind of silent rage in which I, too, began to share….

In my dispatches to the Senate I suppressed the formula that is regulation for the opening of official communications: THE EMPEROR AND THE ARMY ARE WELL. The emperor and the army were, on the contrary, dangerously weary.

[RL: The leaders of Roman military campaigns, by tradition, began their missives and return speeches to the Roman Senate with the phrase, “The army and I are well.” In this case, Hadrian left out this characteristic phrase. The fact that he did not say it is attested widely by historians, making it one of the most famous aspects of the Bar Kokhba Revolt.]

At night, after the last conversation with Severus, the last audience with fugitives from the enemy side, the last courier from Rome, the last message from Publius Marcellius or from Rufus, whose receptive tasks were to wipe up outside Jerusalem and to reorganize Gaza, Euphorion would measure my bath water sparingly into a tub of tarred canvas; I would lie down on my bed and try to think.

There is no denying it; that war in Judaea was one of my defeats. The crimes of Simon and the madness of Akiba were not of my making; but I reproached myself for having been blind in Jerusalem, heedless in Alexandria, impatient in Rome.

[RL: Hadrian traveled widely.]

I had not known how to find words that would have prevented, or at least retarded, this outburst of fury in a nation; I had not known in time how to be either supple enough or sufficiently firm.

Surely we had no reason to be unduly disturbed, and still less need to despair, the blunder and the reversal had occurred only in our relations with Israel; everywhere else at this critical hour we were reaping the reward of sixteen years of generosity in the Orient.

Simon had supposed that he could count on a revolt in the Arab world similar to the uprising that had darkened the last years of Trajan’s reign; even more, he had ventured to bank on Parthian (Persian) aid.

He was mistaken, and that error in calculation was causing him slow death in the besieged citadel of Bethar: the Arab tribes were drawing apart from the Jewish communities; the Parthians remained faithful to the treaties.

The synagogues of the great Syrian cities proved undecided or lukewarm, the most ardent among them contenting themselves with sending money in secret to the Zealots; the Jewish population in Alexandria, though naturally so turbulent, remained calm; the abscess in Jewish affairs remained local, confined within the arid region which extends from Jordan to the sea; this ailing finger could safely be cauterized, or amputated.

And nevertheless, in a sense, the evil days which had immediately preceded my reign seemed to begin over again….The evening courier had just informed me that we had reestablished ourselves on the heap of tumbled stones which I called Aelia Capitolina and which the Jews still called Jerusalem; we had burned the Ascalon, and had been forced to mass executions of rebels in Gaza.

[RL: The Ascalon was the Judaeans’ sacred scroll.]

If sixteen years of rule by a prince so pacifically inclined were to culminate in the Palestine campaign, then the chances for peace in the world looked dim ahead. I raised myself on my elbow, uneasy on the narrow camp bed.

To be sure, there were some Jews who had escaped the Zealot contagion: even in Jerusalem the Pharisees spat on the ground before Akiba, treating that fanatic like an old fool who threw to the wind the solid advantages of the Roman peace, and shouting to him that grass would grow from his mouth before Israel’s victory would be seen on this earth.

But I preferred even false prophets to those lovers of order at all cost who, though despising us, counted on us to protect them from Simon’s demands upon their gold (placed for safety with Syrian bankers), and upon their farms in Galilee.

I thought of the deserters from his camp who, a few hours back, had been sitting in my tent, humble, conciliatory, servile, but always managing to turn their back to the image of my Genius.

Our best agent, Elias Ben-Abayad, who played the role of informer and spy for Rome, was justly despised by both camps; he was nevertheless the most intelligent man in the group, a liberal mind but a man sick at heart, torn between love for his people and his liking for us and for our culture; he too, however, thought essentially only of Israel.

Joshua Ben-Kisma, who preached appeasement, was but more timid, or more hypocritical (than) Akiba. Even in the rabbi Joshua, who had long been my counselor in Jewish affairs, I had felt irreconcilable differences under that compliance and desire to please, a point where two opposite kinds of thinking meet only to engage in combat.

[RL: We see here the ancient complaint against the Jews of “dual loyalty”, which obviously is and was often based on verifiable fact (much more so in the past than today).

The Jews have been ferociously ethnocentric for centuries, to the point of seeing non-Jews as agents of contagion and contamination, and even banning Jews from the tiniest non-business relations with Gentiles.

That this mindset would make most Jews (at least until around 1800 or so, and in some places and/or during certain times afterwards) more loyal to the tribe than to whatever despised state they were minority residents in at the time seems as clear as air.]

Our territories extended over hundreds of leagues and thousands of stadia beyond that dry, hilly horizon, but the rock of Bethar was our frontier; we could level to dust the massive walls of that citadel where Simon in his frenzy was consummating his suicide, but we could not prevent that race from answering us…

I raised my head and moved slightly in order to limber myself. From the top of Simon’s citadel, vague gleams reddened the sky, unexplained manifestations of the nocturnal life of the enemy. The wind was blowing from Egypt; a whirl of dust passed like a specter; the flattened rims of the hills reminded me of the Arabic range of moonlight.

I went slowly back, drawing a fold of my cloak over my mouth, provoked with myself for having devoted to hollow meditations upon the future a night which I could have employed to prepare the work of the next day, or to sleep.

The collapse of Rome, if it were to come about, will concern my successors; in that eight hundred and forty-seventh year of the Roman era my task consisted of stifling the revolt in Judea and bringing back from the Orient, without too great loss, an ailing army. In crossing the (camp’s) esplanade I slipped at times on the blood of some rebels executed the evening before.

I lay down on my bed without undressing, to be awakened two hours later by the trumpets at dawn.

End of the excerpt.

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Zen Judaism

Repost from the old site.



The first photo above was first published on this blog as part of Stojgniev O’Donnell’s latest piece, My Middle East Solution. Some research on the Internet indicates that the photo of Bush supposedly going to a Talmud Study Class with his Orthodox Jewish former Press Secretary Ari Fleischer is apparently a fake.

However, I showed the picture to a graphic artist who works for my company, and he could find no evidence that the photo was a fake. If it was a fake, he said, it was one of the best fakes he had ever seen.

There now seems to be a solution to the puzzle. This blog has received, exclusively, through our connections with Israeli Mossad Intelligence Agency, the original, un-retouched photo of George Bush going to the Talmud Study Meeting with Ari Fleischer. This new photo, straight from the Mossad archives, proves that the original was a fake, since Bush’s long beard and sideburns were removed with a photo-editing program.

I hope this settles the controversy once and for all.

Now, onto Zen Judaism, from The Straight Goods, which bills itself as Canada’s leading online newspaper.

If there is no self, whose arthritis is this?
Be here now.
Be someplace else later.
Is that so complicated?

Drink tea and nourish life.
With the first sip…joy.
With the second…satisfaction.
With the third, peace.
With the fourth, a danish.

Wherever you go, there you are.
Your luggage is another story.

Accept misfortune as a blessing.
Do not wish for perfect health or a life without problems.
What would you talk about?

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single “Oy.”

There is no escaping karma.
In a previous life, you never called, you never wrote, you never visited.
And whose fault was that?

Zen is not easy.It takes effort to attain nothingness.
And then what do you have?
Bupkes.

The Tao does not speak.
The Tao does not blame.
The Tao does not take sides.
The Tao has no expectations.
The Tao demands nothing of others.
The Tao is not Jewish.

Breathe in.
Breathe out.
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
Forget this, and attaining Enlightenment will be the least of your problems.

Let your mind be as a floating cloud.
Let your stillness be as the wooded glen.
And sit up straight.
You’ll never meet the Buddha with such rounded shoulders.

Be patient and achieve all things.
Be impatient and achieve all things faster.

To Find the Buddha, look within.
Deep inside you are ten thousand flowers.
Each flower blossoms ten thousand times.
Each blossom has ten thousand petals.
You might want to see a specialist.

To practice Zen and the art of Jewish motorcycle maintenance, do the following:
Get rid of the motorcycle.
What were you thinking?

Be aware of your body.
Be aware of your perceptions.
Keep in mind that not every physical sensation is a symptom of a terminal illness.

The Torah says, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”
The Buddha says there is no “self.”
So, maybe you are off the hook.

The Buddha taught that one should practice loving kindness to all sentient beings.
Still, would it kill you to find a nice sentient being who happens to be Jewish?

Though only your skin, sinews, and bones remain…
Though your blood and flesh dry up and wither away…
Yet shall you meditate and not stir until you have attained full Enlightenment

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