Books That I’m Reading

Secrets of the FBI

The Secrets of the FBI, by Ronald Kessler: Although rather defensive over some the FBI’s mistakes, it starts with Hoover and goes over some of the good and bad points of each director peppered with many humorous anecdotal tales of FBI break-ins gone wrong, like when a cat escaped and they sent agents with night vision out to recapture it, threw it back in the house and wondered why the dog was flipping out over the cat only to find out the next day that it was the wrong cat. Or the time a bus was parked in front of a house to give agents cover for a target house they broke into, after which everyone piled in the bus and drove off, only to find two freaked out pedestrian passengers who boarded without anyone noticing and was now ringing the bus stop bell to be let off the bus filled with black-suited men bearing weapons.

Action Philosophers

The More Than Complete Action Philosophers, by Fred van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey: A hilarious graphic novel that provides good synopses on ancient, medieval and modern philosophers, including: Thales of Miletus, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Lao Tzu, Plato, Aristotle, Diogenes, Epicurus, Epictetus the Stoic, St. Augustine, Bodidharma, Rumi, Thomas Aquinas, Mchiavelli, Isaac Luria: Rabbi of the Mystic Arts, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, George Brekeley, Leibniz, Hume, “Oh no, Rousseau!” sitcom, Jefferson, Immanuel Kant: Epistemological Attorney (God hires him after being indicted as a “transcendental illusion”), Georg Hegel vs. Arthur Schopenhauer, Auguste Comte, Soren Kierkegaard, Marx, “You’re a Good Man John Stuart Mill” Charle Brown comic, Nietzsche, William James, Freud, Jung, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jean-Paul Sartre, Joseph Campbell, Ayn Rand, “The Foucault Circus,” and Derrida the Deconstructonator.

Hitch 22

Hitch-22: A Memoir, by Christopher Hitchens: Turns out the priest Hitchens’ mother committed suicide with was an X-priest and they both had become initiated into a religious following by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the “Beatles Guru.” This, combined with the the way he had to pay a priest who was grumbling about the sanctity of deterring a suicidal adulteress has made me even more confident that his, and the unabashed love he described for his mother — descriptions which bordered so much on Oedipal that I thought I was listening to D. H. Lawrence — has made me more confident in connecting this to his hatred of religion.

Another weird thing is that although a great deal of the book is dedicated to his protest against Vietnam and his first encounters with associates and books in the world Socialist movement. Yet the only reason he gives for being against Vietnam is because the U.S. was aggressively bombing an agrarian state, with no mention of WW2, the French colonies, China, the Korean War, the South Vietnamese, or anything to put the war in context. One could make the same argument he gives for Iraq. In other words, the book has more to do with what he did than why he did it. He does the same thing with Kennedy, completely blaming him solely for the Cuban Missile Crisis as if it had more to do with the United States’ desire to annex a “Banana Republic” rather than prevent a nuclear buildup on it’s front door. No blame whatsoever for the U.S.S.R. (A later chapter says that a review of his work showed that the word he used was, quite surprisingly, not “Banana Republic” but “perhaps”.)

Although he gives some reasonable explanations for being against of the Gulf War, such as the U.S.’s role in the Iraq-Iran war and Bush originally pledging not to defend Kuwait being a signal that Saddam was going to be allowed to take the oil fields but not the country,
the way he moves from goes from opposing the Gulf War with quiet reservations to hating those who support the Iraq War in the same chapter is mentally disjointed, even falling into the same tropes that he would have found to be disgusting propaganda had it been used for the Vietnam war. Had the Gulf War been expanded into a 10-year ouster of Saddam, he no doubt would have felt as vindicated (something he says is the definition of happiness) as if the Iraq War lasted as long as the Gulf War. As it so happened, his transformation from World-Citizen Socialist to American Liberal Hawk coincided with his supporting of a bad war in the guilt of not supporting a good war. Especially strange is the way he insincerely suggests that the Bush Administration and his good pal Paul Wolfowitz were criminally negligent for the massive power outage that hit Iraq and the lack of properly issued vehicale and body armor following Saddam’s fall, yet he nevertheless compares Rumsfeld’s quote about “going to war with the army we have” to his own unconvincing belief that he would have pushed for the Iraq War had Gore been president. Thomas Jones says it best:

More striking than the way in which the content of his opinions has changed, however, is the continuity in the manner in which he has held those opinions. He likes to think of himself as a rational sceptic, but he isn’t really: his views are more visceral than that, his lurches from one deeply held position to the next driven mostly by gut instinct. Fine orator and fluent writer though he is, he’s never been much of an analytical thinker, and his style of argument proceeds more by a series of emphatic, emotive and stylish assertions (he magnificently denounces Argentina’s General Videla as looking ‘like a cretin impersonating a toothbrush’), by appeals to common sense and common feeling, than by logical reasoning.

Masterfully eloquent in his delivery, every appended anecdote scorched with dry British wit, it is very much worth the cost of not being able to interpret some of his phrases to listen to it on audiobook.

Catch 22

Catch 22, by Joseph Heller: I was given this book by a friend even though I wasn’t sure if I was going to read it, but was told by him that the book was so good he had a second copy just so he could lend one out. Apparently I took too long because the last time I was over at his place before the New Year, he announced (not to me specifically) that he had bought another copy of it. Haven’t gotten far in it but the theme of the WWII-set storyline seems to be that in a world gone completely insane, only those feigning illness to get out of the war are completely sane.

Fullmetal Alchemist

Fullmetal Alchemist, by Hiromu Arakawa: A story in a paralel universe where alchemy replaces science. Two brothers, Edward and Alphonse Elric, attempt to break alchemy’s ultimate taboo and use the art to bring back their dead mother. The act pulls Edward’s leg into another dimension while Alphonse is completely swallowed up. Waking up, Edward finds a tortured, half-constructed organ mesh where his mother should be and his brother gone. Using alchemy once again, he sacrifices his arm to anchor Alphonse’s soul to a body of armor. In grand steam punk style, his friend/love interest Winry then creates a metallic arm and leg for him, the first of which he often transforms into a blade using alchemy. Alphonse’s fearsome look is contrasted by his a polite, gentle character, and his disappearing memories later make him wonder if he really existed before he was transposed into the metallic body. Edward is shorter than average and a lot of comic relief comes from how extremely touchy he is about it, along with the running gag that everyone they meet naturally thinks that Alphonse is the “Fullmetal Alchemist.”

The manga reminds me a lot of Rumiko Takahashi, and she does say that Rumiko is one of her inspirations. Two different television series were born from the manga: the first one moves in a different direction once it catches up with the manga and the second one basically rewrites a bunch of the episodes for the first season and then continues with the manga telling of the story. I had watched the movie a couple of years ago even though and enjoyed it even though it acted as an ending for the first series. The movie was set in our own universe right before Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch, with the plot involving the Nazi-connected Thule Society trying to open a portal into the other world.

As for the manga, it had a wonderfully massive ending that concluded the story. That is one thing I’ve always appreciated about the Japanese manga artist. They may have no problem carbon copying themes from every other manga/anime in existence (Negima!, for example, is a now-typical “harem” comedy about a 10-year-old magician with a talking ferret that has 31 schoolgirls “almost” kissing him, including: a ninja, a vampire, a robot, a ghost, a half-demon, a web idol, and a time traveling Martian). But for their lack of originality, the Japanese manga artist at least knows how to end a story and move on, whereas no cartoon in the U.S. can ever change anything on their last comic/episode on the chance it might get picked up again.

Hedge Knight II: Sworn Sword

Hedge Knight II: Sworn Sword, by G. R. R. Martin. Before writing the stupendous Song of Ice and Fire series, Martin wrote for The Twilight Zone and the CBS drama Beauty and the Beast. Hedge Knight is the story of a not-too-bright knight-for-hire and his younger, bald squire, the literate but still childish “Egg.” Like Game of Thrones, Martin does a great job immersing the reader into his world and the lushly colored art is spectacular. As always, even the most minor of characters is an interesting three-dimensional medieval personality and the plot has plenty of great plot twists.

The First Man in Rome

The First Man in Rome, by Colleen McCullough: This is the first in a series of extremely long novels, starting with the history of the Social War in first-century B.C. Rome and ending with Antony and Cleopatra. The first novel chronicles the lives of Gaius Marius, a powerful man without prestige, and Sulla, a nobleman without money or power before their alliance and eventual conflict, which eventually broadens out to the Social War between Rome and Italy, which in turn precipitates the Civil War between Caesar and the Republic. McCullough does a great job combining a character-driven novel with an amazingly immerse background in Roman history, complete with appended glossary. The immense novel lengths of McCullough is not the only thing she shares in common with George R. R. Martin. Like Martin, she gets the characterization right, masterfully blending modern psychological traits with ancient cultural mores.

The Great Derangement

The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire, by Matt Taibbi: Working under Rolling Stone, the only magazine that will allow Taibbi to say “FUCK YOU” to Mike Bloomberg, Matt goes undercover, pretending to be both a Fundamentalist Christian in one of John Hagee’s Megachurch cells and a 9/11 Truth follower to show how modern politics has polarized political groups into conspiratorial cults. Probably the only author I know who non-nonchalantly referred to himself as a drug addict without any explanation or elaboration. Taibbi is also surprisingly bad at his undercover roles, explaining that at one point he told his fellow Megachurch supporters that his Dad had died in some clown-related incident… and that wasn’t even something he came up with on the spur of the moment. The undercover work actually seems to yield very little in damning material about the individuals he meets, who you end up feeling sorry for more than anything, and so most of the book is him extrapolating on conversations he had with them in order to explain his own points. Surprisingly dull for such a talented writer.

Griftopia

Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America, by Matt Taibbi: A must-read for those looking into a non-partisan explanation of the financial crisis of 2008. He explains how the Tea Party was “top-down media con” initiated by CNBC’s Rick Santelli when he denounced not the huge bailout of the banks but rather the relatively small bailout for people facing foreclosure. (The name goes back to Ron Paul’s 2007 Boston Tea Party fund raising commemoration, but that’s like comparing the commercialized rape-fest of Woodstock ’99 to its original). He describes Alan Greenspan as an economist who became famous for being famous, a social ladder climber who got in with Ayn Rand to help himself get into elite circles and then abandoned her Libertarian philosophy to join the Federal Reserve as a corporatist. Taibbi explains how the banks repackaged securitized loans as Collateralized Debt Obligations (and in the process took the loan originators off the hook), then cut these bundled loans into “tranches”, convinced the rating agencies who depend on the banks for their living to give them a Triple A rating, and then insured them through credit default swaps so that neither sellers like AIG needed capitalization, nor buyers needed to own the insured assets.

Prey

Prey, by Michael Chrichton: Nanomachines that are evolving into hive behavior begins killing the scientists who created them. The protagonist, an out-of-work scientist who helped develop the nanomachines but now a stay-at-home Dad, goes to the Nevada desert lab where his wife works to help bring them under control while at the same time worrying about whether his wife is having an affair with his former friend and team leader. Decent novel. Follows a kind of horror movie format. The science seemed well researched, as opposed to say, Timeline, where Chrichton emphatically maintained was based on parallel universes and NOT time travel before ending the story with the protagonist changing the past in his own timeline.

Next

Next, by Michael Chrichton: This is the last novel that was published before Chrichton died. This story is about transgenic animals being given the powers of human intelligence and speech. Genetic companies wage legal and covert battles. One of the main characters, a biotech researcher, is forced to adopt a child-like chimp that has his genetic material and his wife creates a fictitious genetic disease on Wikipedia to explain his appearance at school. The family must deal with bullies and the genetic corporation trying to eliminate him to destroy evidence of unauthorized experiments. There are several other plot threads, some which run into the main one, and others that go nowhere and just die out, and Chrichton explains in an interview appended to the audiobook that he did this to emulate the way genes themselves evolve.

Rethinking the Gospel Sources

Rethinking the Gospel Sources: From Proto-Mark to Mark, by Delbert Royce Burkett: This book has been nothing short of revolutionary for me. I had of course, long believed that there was more than one earlier prototype for the Gospel of Mark, but Burkett’s theory made me change my mind on two things that I never would have believed possible: that the Griesbech Hypothesis was partially true and that Jesus’ resurrection appearance at the end of Mark’s gospel, which most modern Bibles now mark off as a late addition, is actually the original ending.

The Griesbach Hypothesis is a very old rival to the Two Source Hypothesis saying Matthew and Luke had used Mark. The theory instead argued that Mark’s gospel is actually a combination of Matthew and Luke. There was no shortage of evidence against the Griesbach hypothesis: Mark’s language was cruder, it’s plot less grandiose, and tons of gospel content would have had to have been exercised from Matthew and Luke for no discernible reason. I had studied the Griesbach Hypothesis for my thesis and wrote against one Griesbach author who had tried to show that Mark had been switching back and forth between Matthew and Luke as he went along. By looking at some of the examples, I showed that the “alternations” were ethereal: every instance of “Mark copying Luke” had some Matthean language in it and every instance of “Matthew copying Mark” had some Lukan language in it. But I rememeber thinking how weird it was that Matthew and Luke always seemed to take a different verse from Mark than the other.

As it turns out, that is because both the Two Source Hypothesis and the Griesbach hypothesis are true: Matthew and Luke had respectively copied from two different versions of Proto-Mark, called Proto-Mark A and Proto-Mark B, but Mark’s gospel itself was born of the incestuous union of those same two sources. The effect was that while Matthew and Luke had much longer gospels than Mark because they combined different stories, Mark had longer stories than Matthew or Luke because he combined verses from different versions of the same story. It was hard to believe at first: I typically assumed gospel variants expanded like branches on a tree: generally moving apart from one another, but this hypothesis showed that Proto-Mark had been expanded by two different authors and then later recombined back into Mark.

The second miracle, convincing me that both Proto-Mark and Mark actually had a resurrection appearance sequence at its conclusion, came from showing that Mark’s ending had material that came from both Proto-Mark A/Matthew and Proto-Mark B/Luke, meaning that either it came about from Mark’s combining process or it coincidentally went through the same exact process at a later date. I had already known that Mark’s ending referenced Luke, but that only made me assume that the ending was an attempt to harmonize the earlier gospel with Luke’s Presbyter tradition. Instead, it seems a later editor cut out Mark’s resurrection sequence, something I had only seen Biblical literalists believe. The absence of a resurrection appearance made sense for Proto-Mark because early Christians probably would have believed the resurrection would happen at the upcoming Apocalypse, not before it, or so it seemed. Burkett even showed that textual parallels within Mark’s second, shorter ending with the earliest version of Proto-Mark proved that it based on Proto-Mark’s ending, basically meaning BOTH endings involving the resurrection appearance are authentic.

Proto-Mark -> Proto-Mark A & Proto-Mark B -> Mark -> Mark with Deleted Ending -> Mark with Proto-Mark’s Ending

Proto-Mark A -> Matthew

Proto-Mark B -> Luke

But why would a Christian cut out the resurrection appearance and leave Jesus’ tomb empty at the gospel’s conclusion? I thought that the most likely explanation was that it was edited by a Gnostic since the Gnostics generally eschewed apocalypticism, perhaps as a reaction against the messianic failures of the Bar Kohba Revolt. And, as it turned out, I had already accepted the plausible explanation from Helmut Koester that Morton Smith’s Secret Mark was a third-generation gospel edited by a baptismal sect since both Matthew and Luke lacked a verse from Mark making a literary connection between baptism and martyrdom. I even built on Koester’s hypothesis: Secret Mark had a story very similar to the resurrection of Lazarus from John’s gospel following the bathing narrative and the Gnostic-themed second layer of John appeared to be Valentinian. There was a branch of Valentinians known as the Marcosians, named after their leader Mark, who also happened to teach about a second baptism of Christ for perfection apart from the baptism of Jesus for the forgiveness of sins. Who better to write a Gnostic version of the gospel centered on baptismal resurrection under the name Mark?

But it was not to be. Burkett dismissed the existence of Secret Mark for lack of evidence and an insufficient amount of material. I went back and started to review Secret Mark with a mind to contradict him, but as it turned out, a writing expert had recently determined it to be a forgery and an old Da Vinci Code-like novel had since been discovered telling of plot involving a forged “lost gospel” that had been “discovered” at the Mar Saba monastery near Bethlehem, the same monastery Morton Smith had “found” the letter supposedly written by Clement of Alexandria quoting Secret Mark. Ironically, I had originally been skeptical of Secret Mark, even writing to a Biblical scholar that the dishonesty and cynicism in the letter didn’t seem to reflect the personality of Clement (one of the few theologians I kind of liked), but got a reply that it did reflect him. The fact that “Secret Mark” made Jesus look gay and that Clement’s letter mysteriously disappeared soon after Smith “found” it also made me skeptical, but I started to question that skepticism when Bart D. Ehrman claimed to have talked to someone from the monastery who said they had seen it and knew how it disappeared (although Ehrman himself remained unsure). I finally accepted Secret Mark as real when I read Koester’s argument dismissing Smith’s assumptions that the resurrection story was historical and linked to actual homosexual magical rituals used by Jesus. Although Burkett didn’t even mention it, an examination of his work on Proto-Mark also destroyed one of the main pillars of Secret Mark: the scene of Jesus entering Jericho and then leaving the city without doing anything inside it, long assumed by Bible scholars to prove the story in Jericho from Secret Mark was edited out, which is shown by Burkett’s work to be a byproduct of Mark combining his two sources. Thus, a late layer of Mark is disproven by the same process proving no less than three earlier layers of Mark.

Panarion

The Panarion of St. Epiphanius, Bishop of Salamis, translated by Philip R. Amidon, S.J. (Jesuit): Driven by jealousy for not making Barkett’s discovery myself, I attempted to prove that Marcion’s “Gospel of the Lord” constituted an editorial layer in between Proto-Mark B and Luke, but came up with mixed results. Before I knew about Epiphanius’ quotations from Marcion’s gospel, I had gone through Luke and bracketed out what I thought was an earlier Marcionite gospel that was canonized into Luke. Although I did find a few examples from Epiphanius of what I think are verses that pre-date Luke, a lot of the content missing from Marcion actually appears in Mark and Matthew, leading to troubling conclusion that some verses really were “cut out” as Tertullian and most biblical scholars assume, and not only that but cut out for no good reason (as even Epiphanius mentions). Weirdest of all is that Epiphanius’ version has the physical resurrection of Jesus after he himself said Marcion only believed in a spiritual resurrection.

Another conclusion I came to from the comparison is that I believe Proto-Mark did in fact have a copy of the Sermon on the Mount but chose to pepper his action-oriented gospel with a few references rather than copy the whole thing down. Most scholars, including Burkett, believe the Sermon comes from Q, but the “Blessings and Curses” from it are very different from the Cynic Wisdom teachings that make up Q, plus both Matthew and Luke place the sermon in the context of a mountain, proving that the Sermon’s source was not a “sayings gospel” like Q.

    Games That I am Playing

New Super Mario Bros. Wii

New Super Mario Bros. Wii

This game is amazingly challenging for the Wii era of the casual gamer, not to mention a game that could be essentially classified as a “party game” since it can boast 4 players, but having multiple players in a Mario game is the very pinnacle of nostalgic gratification. Having a second player can prove advantageous since you can cooperate a times, such as jumping on your partner’s head to gain altitude, but it also often trips you up as players run into one another and accidentally killings are very common. Given that the challenge level is so high, one would expect Princess Toadstool/Peach should have been one of the four main characters, but opting to keep the nostalgia centered completely on Super Mario Bros. 1 (rather than 2), Player 4 is just a second clone of Toad in another color, which is pretty pathetic given the expanded array of Mario characters– even Luigi has a princess girlfriend I think. The final battle against Bowser is also engineered to bring back nostalgic memories of the original castle-battle of SMB1 where Mario had to run under the jumping Bowser and flip a switch that dropped him into a pool of acid below, though it is spiced up with a final final battle against a magically-enlarged King Koopa. The game is played with the WiiMote held sideways to emulate the controller of the 8-bit NES. However, the decision to do this is met with a massive design flaw:

Wiimote design flaw

The A button puts your character in a bubble, which is useful if you make a mistake and are about to die, but is excruciating when you accidentally hit it and are the only one alive on the screen, because it automatically takes you back to the beginning of the level with whatever power-ups you had lost. It’s also easy to accidentally hit the power button, which causes everything unsaved up to that point to be lost. Either one button or the other got pushed accidentally dozens and dozens of times and usually at the worst possible times.

    Music That I Am Listening To

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Soundtrack

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo: by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.

I had heard that Trent Reznor had gotten involved with another band called How to Destroy Angels, but I didn’t really like the grating, demonic noise that indeed seemed designed to rupture the conscious mind of some ethereal beings. As it turned out, Trent had gotten married and the project was centered on his Filipino wife, Mariqueen Maandig, who quit her band West Indian Girl and joined her husband and Atticus on creating “Angels.” As if Trent getting married wasn’t shocking enough, he also has a son. Like Devin Townsend, Trent seemed to have lost some of his inspiration with With Teeth and Year Zero when he decided to get sober, but then he teamed up with Atticus Ross to create the four-cd instrumental epic, Ghosts I-IV, my favorite Nine Inch Nails album to date. Although he had talked about making a sequel to Year Zero and Ghosts, Trent eventually decided that NIN should “go away for a little while” and went on his “Waving Goodbye Tour.” However, the two soundtracks he has done with Atticus Ross, The Social Network, and the 3-cd behemoth, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, are just sequels to Ghosts with another name on it. Beginning with a cover of “Immigrant Song” by Led Zeppelin and ending with a cover of the Bryan Ferry song, “Is Your Love Strong Enough?”, under the moniker of How to Destroy Angels, the movie is bound to bring Reznor and Ross far more commercial success than had it been released as a Nine Inch Nails album.

The True Meaning of Christmas

St. Nicholas

December 25 is not Jesus’ birthday. Christmas is based on the winter solstice. In a great many religions from the Old World, the solstice marked the day that the vegetation god died, typically by being crucified on a tree, causing all the earth’s vegetation to die with him only to be reborn on the spring equinox. Thus the death and resurrection of the god symbolized the death and resurrection of vegetation throughout the year.

None of the gospels give an exact date for the birth of Jesus. The Gospel of Luke mentions shepherds out tending sheep in the late evening, which some have taken to mean it wouldn’t be in the winter since sheep would have been locked up. Luke puts his birth at 6 A.D., a symbolic year for Jewish resistance as Luke specifically makes reference to the Roman tax census that triggered a revolt by Judas the Galilean (a Zealot figure who probably inspired Judas Iscariot, seeing how his surname is a reference to Sicarii assassins). The Gospel of Matthew tells the story of the Three Magi visiting Herod the Great on their way to meet baby Jesus, but Herod didn’t die until 4 B.C., a full 10 years before the tax census.

Around 200 A.D., St. Clement of Alexandria gave three different dates various churches used to celebrate Jesus’ birthday. None of them were December 25. Another Alexandrian theologian named Origen mocked Roman celebrations of birth anniversaries, dismissing them as “pagan” practices.

Tertullian, the first Latin father to mention the Trinity, in particular condemned decorating the home with boughs of evergreen, saying:

“Let them over whom the fires of hell are imminent, affix to their posts, laurels doomed presently to burn: to them the testimonies of darkness and the omens of their penalties are suitable. You are a light of the world, and a tree ever green. If you have renounced temples, make not your own gate a temple.”

Even the 2,600-year-old Biblical prophet Jeremiah condemned a ritual seemingly identical to Christmas, saying: “For the customs of the peoples are worthless; they cut a tree out of the forest, and a craftsman shapes it with his chisel. They adorn it with silver and gold; they fasten it with hammer and nails so it will not totter” (10:3-4).

The first Christian linking Jesus’ birth to Christmas comes from an Egyptian in the mid-300s, and by the late 360s, the Donatists, an African Christian sect that broke away from the “traitors” who allied themselves with Emperor Constantine, accepted Christmas on December 25 but not the Epiphany on January 6.

Some time during the Middle Ages, the Christmas tree became associated with the tree from the Garden of Eden, called the “Paradise Tree,” and decorated with apples, a concept hardly alien from the original pre-Hebrew myth. The first recorded Christmas tree was erected in the house of a military brotherhood in Estonia in the mid-1400s. A Bremen guild chronicle of 1570 records how a small tree decorated with apples, nuts, dates, pretzels and paper flowers was put up in the guild house for the members’ children. Most Christmas trees were found only in churches until the 1500s, but even in the mid-1800s, they were still controversial enough to bring threats against Henry Schwan of Cleveland Ohio, the first American pastor to erect a Christmas Tree in his church. The Puritans likewise condemned Christmas, with Oliver Cromwell outright banning “the heathen traditions” of Christmas carols, decorated trees and any joyful expression that desecrated “that sacred event.” Martin Luther tried replacing the bearer of gifts with Christkindl, the “Christ Child”, but the name was only transferred over to St. Nikolaos, which is why Santa Claus is also known as “Kriss Kringle.” Decorating the tree with expensive-for-the-time candles comes from the 1700s and by the 1800s Christmas trees were showing up in Germany’s schools, inns, and military hospitals.

The winter solstice was important in ancient times because there was little food and starvation was common, so the solstice was meant to be the last feast celebration before everyone had to hole themselves up for winter. Most cattle were slaughtered to save on food, so the solstice feast was one of the few times anyone could eat as much meat as they wanted. Wine and beer stored for fermentation was opened up at this time. The reason Christmas Eve holds particular importance is because the pre-Romanized day began in the evening previous, just as the Jewish Sabbath does today.

In Roman times, the solstice festival was named Saturnalia after the god of time and agriculture. According to the third-century Neo-Platonic philosopher Porphyry, Saturnalia occurred near the winter solstice because the sun enters Capricorn, the astrological house of Saturn, at that time. The holiday was celebrated with a sacrifice at at Saturn’s temple and a public banquet followed by private gift-giving.

There was a carnival atmosphere, complete with costumes and role-playing, a time when social norms could be overturned: gambling was permitted, no declaration of war could be made, and masters provided table service for their slaves. Both citizen and slave wore the cone-shaped pileius cap, representing the wearer as a freedman. The reversal of social roles aspect of the holiday was inherited from the Athenian festival of Kronia, named after Kronos (linked to the root word “chron,” as in “chronology” or “chronicle”), the Greek equivalent of Saturn, although the Greek holiday was actually celebrated in the summer.

Wikipedia says that:

The day of gift-giving was the Sigillaria on December 23. Because gifts of value would mark social status contrary to the spirit of the season, these were often the pottery or wax figurines called sigillaria made specially for the day, candles, or “gag gifts”, of which Augustus was particularly fond. In his many poems about the Saturnalia, Martial names both expensive and quite cheap gifts, including writing tablets, dice, knucklebones, moneyboxes, combs, toothpicks, a hat, a hunting knife, an axe, various lamps, balls, perfumes, pipes, a pig, a sausage, a parrot, tables, cups, spoons, items of clothing, statues, masks, books, and pets. Gifts might be as costly as a slave or exotic animal. Patrons or “bosses” might pass along a gratuity (sigillaricium) to their poorer clients or dependents to help them buy gifts. Some emperors were noted for their devoted observance of the Sigillaria.

The revelries and dropping of social status of Saturnalia were supposed to reflect the conditions of the lost mythical age, when Saturn, or Kronos, reigned over the world during a time of limitless bounty of the earth without labor in a state of social egalitarianism known as the Golden Age, the same as the Biblical Eden.

The Jewish Talmud ascribes the origins of this festival to Adam, who saw that the days were getting shorter and became afraid that the world was returning to the chaos and emptiness that existed before creation because of his sin, and so fasted for 8 days, representing the 8 days between Saturnalia and the winter solstice. When the days grew long again, he realized it was the earth’s natural cycles, and so made 8 days of celebration, representing the 8 days between the soltice and the festival called Kalend. Only later was the festival turned into something pagan, according to the text.

Christmas day also marked the first day of the year for the Anglo-Saxons, the German tribes that invaded Great Britain in the 400s and ruled the newly dubbed Angle-land (England) until the Norman conquest in 1066. Around 730 A.D., the venerable Latin monk Bede wrote:

They began the year with December 25, the day some now celebrate as Christmas; and the very night to which we attach special sanctity they designated by the heathen term Modraniht, that is, the mothers’ night — a name bestowed, I suspect, on account of the ceremonies they performed while watching this night through.

In Germany, the Yule festival was celebrated for 12 days from late December to early January on a date determined by the lunar Germanic calendar. The legendary Ynglinga Saga, written by the Old Norse Icelandic poet Snorri Sturloson in 1225, mentions a Yule feast being celebrated as early as 840. In the Saga of Hákon the Good, Snorri gives a vivid description of the German festival:

It was ancient custom that when sacrifice was to be made, all farmers were to come to the heathen temple and bring along with them the food they needed while the feast lasted. At this feast all were to take part of the drinking of ale. Also all kinds of livestock were killed in connection with it, horses also; and all the blood from them was called hlaut [sacrificial blood], and hlautbolli, the vessel holding the blood; and hlautteinar, the sacrificial twigs [aspergills]. These were fashioned like sprinklers, and with them were to be smeared all over with blood the pedestals of the idols and also the walls of the temple within and without; and likewise the men present were to be sprinkled with blood. But the meat of the animals was to be boiled and served as food at the banquet. Fires were to be lighted in the middle of the temple floor, and kettles hung over them. The sacrificial beaker was to be borne around the fire, and he who made the feast and was chieftain, was to bless the beaker as well as all the sacrificial meat.

The first toast was to be drunk to Odin “for victory and power to the king,” the second toast to Njörðr and Freyr “for good harvests and for peace,” the third toast was to be a beaker drunk to the king himself, with final toasts to the memory of departed kinsfolk.

Children would fill their boots with carrots, straw, or sugar and place them near the chimney for Odin’s flying gray horse, Sleipnir, to eat. Black ravens would listen from the chimney hole in the house to figure out which children were naughty and which were nice before the large white-bearded Odin would enter and reward the good children by replacing Sleipnir’s food with gifts or candy. Thor, whose home was in the snowy “Northland”, also rode a flying chariot pulled by two white goats, Cracker and Gnasher, and came down the chimney holes directly into the fire, which was his natural element.

St. Nikolaos’ popularity skyrocketed during Medieval times. The propensity of paintings of Nikolaos was matched only by the Virgin Mary, with almost 400 churches dedicated to him in England during the late Middle Ages. The earlier Yule-themed traits of Odin and Thor passed on to the German Sinterklaas since the Feast of St. Nikolaos was on December 6. This may be related to the fact that the 6th of each month was considered the birthday of the goddess Artemis, the same goddess many of the temples that St. Nikolaos had destroyed was dedicated to. After the Protestant Reformation, Nikolaos’ popularity dwindled in the west, except in the Netherlands. The image of Santa being a fat man comes from the Dutch-American poet Clement Moore in 1823, although Coca Cola ads helped trim his wild nature beard and dropped the smoking pipe.

Nikolaos the ConfessorClement Moore's Santa

St. Nikolaos was originally from Myra in Asia Minor, but his remains were taken to Mari in southern Italy in 1087, and by the late 1400s the city was in control of Spain, which was part of the Moorish Empire of African-Arab Muslims. This is why in the mid-1800s, Dutch folklore described the companions of Sinterklaas, “Zwarte Pieten”, or “Black Petes,” as little Moorish children. These “helper elves” were said to navigate the steam boat that took Sinterklaas from Spain to the Netherlands and took the role of the black crows in listening from the chimney holes and stuffing presents down the ones who had good children. Sinterklaas’ giant bag contained not just candy for nice children but a chimney sweep’s broom to spank naughty children, and some of the older Sinterklaas songs even say the bag was used to carry naughty children back to Spain. In Belgium, “Black Petes” still dress up in colorful moorish clothing and scatter pepper nuts, spice nuts, and special Christmas candies called “strooigoed” to those who ran into Sinterklass as he went around town.

Nikolaos and Black Pete

The relation between Sinterklaas and Black Pete also mirrors the relationship between Amoo Nowruz (“Uncle New Day”), a white-bearded “Father Time” figure who brings gifts on the eve of the Spring Equinox, and Hajji Firuz, little black-faced, red-suited harbingers of the Persian New Year. These soot-covered tambourine players are believed to come from the tradition of the “Mir-Norowzi,” a comical figure that was paraded around the city and given the power of being king for five days.

Black PeteHajji Firuz
Left: Black Pete and Sinterklaas; Right: Hajji Firuz

The red clothes and soot-covered faces and red clothes of the Hajji Firuz apparently goes back to the red-dressed fire-keepers of the Zoroastrians, who at the last Tuesday of the year, was sent by the Zoroastrian priests to spread the news about the arrival of the New Year and call on the people to renew their lives by burning their old items in the fire. The dualistic religion of Zoroastrianism seems to have contributed to the concept of armies of angels and demons doing battle with one another in Christianity since nothing in the Old Testament gives the Judaic Satan from Job that kind of power or authority. And in fact, other Alpine folktales tell of Sinterklass’ companion being the devil, who was shacked to him and made his slave, which fostered the concept of the satyr-like Krampus of Austrian lore. Sources from Germanic Europe identify Black Pete and the Sinterklaas’ demonic slave as being one and the same.

Like Batman, Nikolaos the Confessor used the inheritance from his tragically deceased parents to help the needy. Although Santa passing out candy can be traced back to Odin, the tradition is more popularly linked with the legend of St. Nikolaos sneaking golden coins into the homes of three impoverished families through the windows in order to prevent the desperate families from having to sell their daughters into prostitution for food. Other 11th-century legends tell how he was able to identify a butcher who murdered three children (or inn residents) and was trying to sell their butchered remains as ham, and then resurrected the children. Another legend says that after convincing sailors taking wheat to Emperor Constantine to donate some to the famine-hit people in the city of Mysa that they would not suffer for it, the sailors found that the wheat weighed the same after arriving at Constantinople. Another legend says that Nikolaos set sail for Jerusalem, but after having a Satanic dream, he prophecized a storm and then, a la Jesus, halted the storm and resurrected a sailor who had been blown off a mast. In Jerusalem, church doors magically opened for him, but having not stollen Jesus’ bit enough, he went into the desert to pray but was called back to Mysa so that he could walk through the church doors at just the right time to fulfill a vision given to one of the church elders that an bishop position should be given to the person to next walk through the door.

St. Nikolaos sneaking coins through the window

Although St. Nikolaos is not listed among the debaters at the famed Council of Nicaea, there is another legend that he passionately debated with the theologian Arius over whether Jesus was one and the same in God or a creation of God. Arius argued that the title “Son of God” insinuated inferiority to the Father, saying, “What argument then allows, that He who is from the Father should know His own parent by comprehension? For it is plain that for that which hath a beginning to conceive how the Unbegun is, or to grasp the idea, is not possible.”

And for that, jolly ol’ Saint Nick bitch-slapped him.

Nikolaos was kicked out from the council and Constantine threw him in prison, so says the legend, but then Jesus and the (now official) Mother of God vindicated him. In dreams, of course. The dreams brought the priests and bishops to Constantine begging to let pimp daddy Santa out of prison, which Constantine did after he saw Nikolaos produce both gospel and bishop garments from within his cell. So I guess the lesson here is it is completely all right to resort to violence to prove abstract theological points that even Constantine loathed.

Another similar legend says that Nikolaos helped stop one of Constantine’s armies from sacking the city and then saved three generals from being executed by appearing in a dream to Constantine, who rewarded the three men with golden gospels and incense burners, making St. Nick the patron saint of the falsely accused.

The afore-mentioned 13th-century Icelandic poet Snorri credits the 10th-century King Haakon I of Norway with being the first to combine the Yule festival with Christmas. Although Haakon kept his Christian religion secret at first, he eventually wielded enough power to request a bishop and priests from England to convert the country. By the 1200s or early 1300s, Yule became equated with Christmas, with The Grettis Saga saying that all Christians fasted from meat the day before Yule in preparation of the feast.

In the 1100s A.D., a marginal note written by a Syrian Biblical commentator, Dionysius bar-Salibi, said that Christmas had been moved from January 6 to December 25 so that it fell on the same date as the holy day for the pagan Sol Invictus, the Roman version of the Zoroastrian-inspired sun god Mithras that Constantine had worshiped. His birthday was also December 25. Macrobius, one of the last fifth-century Latin authors not to convert to Christianity, said that the proximity of the Saturnalia to the winter solstice led to an exposition of solar monotheism, the belief that Sol Invictus ultimately encompasses all divinities as one.

Some Biblical scholars have suggested that the date for Christmas was actually determined by calculating the date back 9 months from Passover to the day of his conception, the Annunciation, under the assumption that early Christians were following a Jewish tradition that creation (the Nativity) and redemption (the Crucifixion) occurred at the same time, but Passover and the Annunciation are also derived from the Spring Equinox, or Easter.

The Canaanite fall harvest was changed by the Israelites into Succoth, when they were to move into booths in remembrance of the Exodus, and the Canaanite New Year festivals became Rah ha-Shanah and Yom Kippur, the day of repentance. The Semitic early spring festivals which celebrated the birth of the new lamb became historicized into the Passover, when the blood of lambs was to be put on doorposts.

Even the very minor celebration of Hanukkah probably only showed up on Jewish calendars to provide some kind of a substitute for the winter festival of their neighbors. As David Frum points out, the Pharisee sect that eventually became Orthodox Judaism was actually in contention with the Maccabbees who miraculously held out against the Syrians by the power of divinely enduring lamp oil since the Maccabees not only took over the throne of Jerusalem but also the priesthood, breaking the Biblical law that only Levites could be priests. Since the whole rebellion was based around having to sacrifice against the rules of the Bible, it was understandably a controversy. (Not to mention the fact that the Maccabees allied against the Syrians with the Romans, the same guys who eventually burned down the Temple and put an end to Jewish sacrifice forever.)

The name Easter is based on the Saxon goddess Eostre, which is also related to the word “east” because the sun rises in the east, representing the resurrection of the sunlight. She is also equivalent to the Greek Aphrodite and the Roman Venus, whose lover Adonis is also crucified to a tree and was resurrected in the Spring. Fertility symbols such as the highly reproductive bunny and the egg became associated the rebirth of new life that comes in the spring.

Comic

In Norse mythology, the vegetation god Baldr (of Baldur’s Gate fame) is killed by a dart made from mistletoe and just like Jesus in the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemuis, goes to Hel(l) to be resurrected during the Norse Apocalypse, called Ragnarok. Baldr had visions of his own death, as did his mother Frigg, wife to Odin, so Frigg forced all things on the earth to vow not to hurt Baldr except for the mistletoe, so of course, mistletoe became his kryptonite. After being shot by a mistletoe dart by his blind brother Hodr, who is sometimes guided by Loki, Frigg made an arrangement with the queen of the underworld, Hel, to release Baldr if everything in the world wept for him, but a female giant named Thokk, which some sources say was Loki in disguise, refused to weep for him, and thus prevented his resurrection.

Mistletoe is actually a parasite that grows off the branches from bird droppings and thrives during the winter, making it a suitable scapegoat for the destruction of vegetation during that time. Pre-Christian Europe viewed mistletoe as a representation of divine male fertility, possibly because its berries look like semen. Somewhere along the line this turned into kissing under the mistletoe.

The weeping for Baldr also mirrors the ceremonial “weeping for Tammuz,” which many women from Jerusalem did during the 7th century B.C., much to the prophet Ezekiel’s own chagrin (8:14). The symbol of Tammuz was the Tau cross, from which we get the letter T from. In Sumerian times, he was known as Dumuzi (literally “Good Son”), the Crucified Bread and Beer God who rose on Easter and was known as both “Shepherd” and “Fisherman.”

Tau Cross
Sumerian Cylinder From Nippur linking the plowing of grain with the Tau cross.

Dumuzi’s lion-riding wife Inanna was known in the Akkadian language as Ishtar, which is probably related etymologically with Eostre. In Canaan she was known as Asherah, and the Old Testament violently condemns those who worshipped her Asherah poles which symbolized the Tree of Life on which her lover was crucified on. Not only is there a long theological history behind associating Jesus’ cross with the Tree of Life, but infact other than the four gospels and a couple of very late pseudographical epistles attributed to Paul in the late second century, the New Testament refers only to Jesus being “hung on a tree.” The “Sacred Marriage” held between Dumuzi and Inanna was the subject of much erotic Sumerian poetry, which is mirrored in the Biblical Song of Solomon. There are several myths concerning Dumuzi’s tragic death, but the longest one involves him being taken by demons while sitting beneath a tree and then hung on a stake in the netherworld. A Mesopotamian cylinder seal dated between 2320 and 2150 B.C. shows a multi-horned Inanna welcoming Dumuzi back from the dead from the bottom of a tree. Sumerian statues of Inanna also look very much like the ancient “Venus figurines” like the “Venus of Willendorf,” earth mother figurines discovered throughout all of the Old World and dated as far back as 27,000 years ago.

Dumuzi Returns From the Dead

The Babylonians also celebrated the New Year Zagmuk festival of sowing barley in March/April, complete with the Christmas traditions of exchanging gifts, carnival processions, twelve-day feasts, and the staged re-enactment of the Enuma Elish creation myth. Each year as winter arrived, it was believed that the ancient seawater and freshwater monsters of chaos who gave birth to all the gods tried to slay their creations, and so in turn, the freshwater Apsu was tamed by the Promethean god Ea (or Enki) while it was the head god of the Babylonian pantheon, Ba’al Marduk, who battled and slew his primordeal wife Tiamat, before fashioning her corpse into the known world. Tiamat, who in Sumerian myths was Nammu, the great mother of both the universe and humankind, is probably another incarnation of the primordeal “Venus” earth mother. Thus, the Babylonian creation myth apparently represents the replacement of the far more ancient matrimonial religion with that of the patriarchal storm god cult.

The king of Babylon acted out the part of Marduk in the ceremonial New Years play. On the 10th day of the ceremony, he would enact the Sacred Marriage rite with his spouse or a celebate high priestess. In some versions of the story, Marduk is killed by Tiamat and then saved by his son Nabu, the god of writing, so in the enactment of the ritual, the king’s life was to be forfeited as well. However, a prisoner was usually used as a scapegoat for the king, and just to make it fair, a different prisoner was set free under some twisted sense of “balance.” Philo tells of a similar story of a madman named “Carabbas” dressed up and hailed as a mock king, and it is this story combined with the ancient myth of the sacrificed king that inspired the story of Pontius Pilate releasing Barabbas because of a non-existent Jewish custom of releasing a prisoner that the Romans would certainly never had honored even if it did exist. The tradition of the “mock king” holds parallels with some of the other cultural Christmas traditions as it follows the same themes as the dropping rank in Saturnalia and the five-day rule of the Mir-Norowzi. Even in late medieval England, St. Nicholas’ Day parishes held Yuletide “boy bishop” celebrations in which young men performed the functions of priests and bishops and were allowed to boss around their elders.

The myth of Hodr blindly slaying Baldr is mirrored in the apocryphal Book of Jasher in which the antediluvian king Lamech blindly shoots Cain with an arrow by the malevolent direction of his son Tubal-Cain, angering Lamech enough so that he then turned and killed his son in frustration as well. The story of Cain and Abel itself is based on an earlier Sumerian myth about two brothers, Summer and Winter, contending which of their sacrifices was more appealing to their father Enlil, and like the story of Cain (“Metal Smith”) and Abel (a possible pun on “Herdsman”), one is a farmer and one a shepherd, highlighting the ancient conflict between city farmers and nomadic shepherds. Just as Cain represented the city farmer and Abel the shepherd, Tubal-Cain is said in Genesis to have forged the first tools in bronze and iron while his brother Jubal was the father of the harp and flute for the “jubilee.” Just as Romulus slew Remus, Cain killed his brother Abel and was then banished to the land of Nod (“wandering”) and built the first city Enoch, which in Mesopotamia was Eridu. Later Kassite myth said that the first priest of Eridu, Adapa, was taken up to heaven where he met Dumuzi and Gizzida (“Good Tree,” Dumuzi’s double from the city of Lagash) playing St. Peter at the Pearly Gates, after which Adapa, on the advice of the wise God Enki playing the role of the snake in the Garden of Eden, denied the sky god Anu’s offer of the bread and water of eternal life, mirroring the Biblical interpretation of the Fall of Man and the story of the Biblical Enoch being taken up into heaven.

The second Sumerian capital city to take hold in ancient Sumer was Bad-Tibira (“The Fortress of Metal Smiths”), a natural identification for Tubal-Cain (“Bringer of Metal Smithery”), and the third king to rule the city was none other than Dumuzi the Shepherd. Another Dumuzi, called “the Fisherman,” ruled Uruk right before the famous king Gilgamesh. Since this Dumuzi captured the king to a rival dynasty in Kish that Gilgamesh was also in conflict with, it may be reasonable to link the fisherman Dumuzi with the tragic figure of Enkidu, who in Sumerian myth is blindly sent to the underworld by Gilgamesh only to be trapped there for not heeding Gilgamesh’s warnings. The Epic of Gilgamesh later absolves Gilgamesh of any guilt by placing the blame on Ishtar, just as Inanna is said to have been regretfully responsible for Dumuzi’s death in other versions of the Dumuzi myth. In yet another version, Dumuzi’s sister, Geshtinanna takes vengence on the storm goddess who killed Dumuzi, just as Ba’al Hadad’s sister/lover Anat takes revenge on the underworld god Mot for slaying her brother in a later Canaanite myth. In the Coptic Gospel of Judas, Egyptian Gnostics also rewrote the Passion story so that Judas betrayal of Jesus was a necessary part of some deeper cosmic mystery.

At the heart of this world myth lies the complimentary forces of good and evil, king and slave, and sacrifice and betrayal. The Persian historian and mythologist Mehrdad Bahar argued that the figure of the Haji Firuz is derived from ceremonies and legends connected to the Epic of Prince Siavash, which in turn derive from the ancient myths of Dumuzi, with the blackened face of the Hajji Firuz reaching back into the ancient symbolism of the vegetation god returning from the world of the dead, while his red clothing symbolized Siavash’s blood and the return of the sacrificed deity. His joviality, as with the Biblical Jubal, is the jubilation of Spring’s rebirth. The mothers of Baldr and Achilles, “the woman clothed in sun” in Revelation, and the Athena-like goddess of wisdom spoken of in the Toledot Yeshu all represent the same overarching theme of a protective mother or sister goddess watching over her Savior son/lover, who always dies tragically but is then reborn, whether it be Dumuzi, Tammuz, Adonis, Attis, Osiris, Dionysus, Baldr, or Jesus.

Family Guy Writer Suffers Nerve Damage From LAPD During Occupy Protest

unified message

One of the writers of the Family Guy told of the abuse he and other protestors took from the LAPD:

It was horrible to watch, and apparently designed to terrorize the rest of us. At least I was sufficiently terrorized. I unlinked my arms voluntarily and informed the LAPD officers that I would go peacefully and cooperatively. I stood as instructed, and then I had my arms wrenched behind my back, and an officer hyperextended my wrists into my inner arms. It was super violent, it hurt really really bad, and he was doing it on purpose. When I involuntarily recoiled from the pain, the LAPD officer threw me face-first to the pavement. He had my hands behind my back, so I landed right on my face. The officer dropped with his knee on my back and ground my face into the pavement. It really, really hurt and my face started bleeding and I was very scared. I begged for mercy and I promised that I was honestly not resisting and would not resist.

My hands were then zipcuffed very tightly behind my back, where they turned blue. I am now suffering nerve damage in my right thumb and palm.

NewScientist reports that an analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy. There is continuing evidence that economic inequality harms socieites. Both sides are taking in major donations from Wall Street, and Politifact points out that “a large majority” of candidates with the most money wins and the U.S. is the 6th most unequal country on the planet.

Yet support for redistribution has actually plummeted during the recession. Scientific American attributes this to a fundamental psychological loathing for being near or in last place, called “last place aversion,” a fear that can lead people near the bottom of the income distribution to oppose redistribution because it might cause those they identify as being lower than them to catch up or even pass them. Naomi Klein attributed it to the “the shock doctrine”: using the public’s disorientation following massive collective shocks – wars, terrorist attacks, or natural disasters — to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy. I think there is something to that in Irving Kristol’s suggestion that Neo-Cons force Democrats to “tidy up” after them. The Republicans destroy the deficit with tax cuts and destroy the economy with deregulation then they get to sit back and alter between screaming at Obama to fix the economy and fix the deficit just as Bill Wilson was masturbating to the thought of forcing Obama to choose between paying social security or the armed forces. All the while Fox News-addled baby boomers start looking in desperation to terminate all the government departments that neither Perry nor the Republican base know enough to list on one hand to save money since “we’re broke.” Even Reuters is getting in on the act of blaming Occupy Wall Street on George Soros.

The economy and the deficit spending has done a lot better since Obama took over. Ezra Klein points out that a lot of the deficit comes from assumptions that we won’t let tax cuts expire. Paul Krugman plots out how nonresidential investment is a pure demand story.

Stock trader Alessio Rastani told how stock traders were looking forward to the possibility of a second big recession: “For most traders, it’s not about – we don’t really care that much how they’re going to fix the economy, how they’re going to fix the whole situation,” he said. “Our job is to make money from it.” And even when the inflation and long-term interest rates that people like Alan Greenspan predict don’t show up, they lament that, “This is regrettable, because it is fostering a sense of complacency that can have dire consequences.”

David Frum wrote a really interesting article about how the unbelievably horrible roster of Republicans is based on future shock:

This year we had a GOP figure candidate rise to the top of some polls by claiming that Obama was born in Kenya. He was replaced briefly by someone who has accused the President of trying to set up mandatory, Communist-style re-education camps for youth. She’s been replaced by a guy who calls Social Security a giant fraud.

Something has changed. Facts are elitist. Credibility is evolving into a liability and crazy has become a tactic.

Maybe we are in the process of redefining sanity. We have an abundance of reliable information to help us separate what is from what isn’t. But we are also being overwhelmed by shiny distractions. And it’s not just our omnipresent entertainment that is weakening our hold on what’s real. This wealth of accurate information is available inside an atmosphere in which reality is becoming perilously complex. Even the most common tools and devices that are woven into the fabric of our daily lives are now wonders beyond simple credibility.

With all the attacks on Republicans lately, some people have wondered why Frum still calls himself one. He gives a list of reasons, none of which are very compelling.

Paul Krugman suggests the reason Cain “is not an accident” is because you have to either be totally cynical or totally clueless to meet the basic G.O.P. requirements for running for president. Mitt Romney is a total cynic but a bad actor, so it becomes a perpertual runoff between him and those who are clueless enough to actually believe the stupid shit they’re saying.

A relative of mine recently sent me an article written about Jim Rogers, an American investor who shills for the free market theory of the Austrian School of economics. It read:

>President Barack Obama has tried to spend the economy back into recovery, which never helps, Rogers told Newsmax.TV in an exclusive interview.

Oh yeah, NewsMax. The leader in Obama birth certificate conspiracy news.

>”We cannot quadruple our debt every four or five years. We cannot print staggering amounts of money every four or five years. So there’s going to come time when we’ve shot all of our bullets, and it’s going to be a big mess.”

Obama has not quadripled the debt. Reagan tripled the debt then Bush tripled it again. Why is it Republicans are allowed to overspend on tax cuts when there’s no reason to believe super-rich corporations need extra money to invest, but Democrats aren’t allowed to spend money on people who need it when the economy is depressed?

>Japan refused to let troubled financial institutions go under in the early 1990s and as a result, spent two decades mired in sluggish recovery.

Their Lost Decade comes from policies that were too-little-too-late, not from spending too much. When our stimulus came around, Krugman argued it was too little. The response was we can always get another stimulus if we need it, but Krugman responded that no, if the stimulus didn’t completely recover the economy, then that would be used as proof that the stimulus failed. Sure enough, that’s what happened. The bipartisan fact-checker Politifact has shown that the stimulus did work for the money that was put into it. The non-partisan CBO also says we need to spend more money. The economic basis goes back to Keynes, who correctly predicted that if the Germans were forced into austerity for reparations by France during the Depression that it would open their politics up to radicalism. Keynes was also right that by spending tons of money on WW2, it stimulated the economy enough to get us out of the Depression.

>Scandinavia took the opposite approach when it ran into an economic downturn and today is healthy, Rogers points out.

You know an argument is full of crap when they tell you to look to Sweden, Norway, and Denmark are models of right-wing economics!!! Scandanavia is one of the few places on the planet that doesn’t have a huge gap between the rich and the poor because of their extremely high tax rates. So yeah, they didn’t need to pay for a stimulus because 1) they did the right thing from the beginning and 2) the safety net was already there!!! I’ve supported Sweden’s bailout model since I first heard about it 3 years ago. The important thing to know is they didn’t let the banks get away with it. The government took over the banks and they took their pound of flesh from the stockholders. The banks actually had to write down their losses and issue warrants to the government. The people pushing this “no-stimulus” stuff like Newsmax are the same ones who say the banks were forced to lend money to minorities when the fact is they were really trying to hide how much of these loans went to minorities from the government.

>On top of hundreds of billions of dollars in stimulus measures the administration has rolled out, the Federal Reserve has pumped $2.3 trillion into the economy via quantitative easing, which are asset purchase from banks that critics describe as printed money with little backing that in the end threatens to push up inflation rates.

I agree that we shouldn’t use QE. It does expand the economy, but it also increases the wealth gap, which has been a major part of the problem since 1978. The problem isn’t that banks don’t have money to loan, it’s that they see no way to profit since they are the only ones who have any money now.

Media Matters also has a short story about Larry Summers. He once brought up a story about talking to a girl who was protesting the World Bank’s annual meeting, saying : “And so I asked the girl: ‘What is this new system that you want? Tell me about it!’ And the girl had nothing. Nothing! She had no fucking clue what this magical new system was supposed to be. No one is saying that there aren’t problems with the world economy the way it is today. But these kids out there — they don’t know what they want!”

Zack Exley, a political and technology consultant, the Chief Community Officer at the Wikimedia and Co-Founder of the progressive New Organizing Institute, replied: “Mr. Secretary. You’ve got 50 economics PhDs in this room who pretty much run the world economy. And you’re asking that girl for a better system? Aren’t the solutions your job? You admit billions are living in hell, but it’s up to that girl to fix it?”

Jon Stewart did a great piece on how the pilgrims were better informed about the pagan history behind Christmas than Fox News anchors.

But let me end on Joe Arpaio, the self-proclaimed “toughest Sheriff in America”, who in the past made headlines for his hard-line stance toward immigration. He’s recently admitted that his office’s botched investigations of over 400 sex-crimes cases. One might think that it came from spending too much time helping Steven Seagal kill a puppy and hundreds of roosters by driving a tank into a home for…. what was it again? Oh yeah: animal cruelty.

That’s the actual headline:

Actor Steven Seagal Sued for Driving Tank into Arizona Home, Killing Puppy

The story reads:

Seagal told a local radio station that animal cruelty was one of his pet peeves, and since the bust was an animal cruelty bust – which apparently requires the use of several armored cars, a tank, and dozens of sheriff’s deputies in full riot gear – Seagal decided to go along for the ride…and kill hundreds of roosters and a puppy in the process.

Seagal is being sued for $100,000 by the illegal immigrants. Merry Christmas, everyone.

Keynes vs. Hayek

“These days, you constantly see articles that make it seem as if there was a great debate in the 1930s between Keynes and Hayek, and that this debate has continued through the generations. As Warsh says, nothing like this happened. Hayek essentially made a fool of himself early in the Great Depression, and his ideas vanished from the professional discussion.

So why is his name invoked so much now? Because The Road to Serfdom struck a political chord with the American right, which adopted Hayek as a sort of mascot — and retroactively inflated his role as an economic thinker. Warsh is even crueler about this than I would have been; he compares Hayek (or rather the “Hayek” invented by his admirers) to Rosie Ruiz, who claimed to have won the marathon, but actually took the subway to the finish line.” –Paul Krugman

Milton Friedman would probably be a better choice for the right-wing equivalent of Keynes, but he more-or-less added on to Keynes rather than completely opposed him (“In one sense, we are all Keynesians now; in another, nobody is any longer a Keynesian”). But now that the far right is embracing economic policies that are over 40 years old, they have to go further back and find someone who completely opposed him.

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