The First Post (One Man)

With supporting evidence, Harry Markopolos told the American government, five times, that he’d found a Ponzi scheme. That one man, Bernie Madoff, was still allowed to destroy thousands of lives (until his plot against the world collapsed under it’s own weight) should come as no surprise.

One man, John Carryrou, got a tip something was amiss, after thousands of reporters had already walked with Elizabeth Holmes through the halls of Theranos. She, too, was “on the path” to being allowed to destroy thousands of lives - before the weight of the Wall Street Journal fell on her.

Aaron Rodgers is one man, but thousands of others are now suspiciously quiet behind him - after destroying thousands of other lives - all around the world. People like Prince Charles, the future King of England, and a lifetime activist for (and now a patron of) homeopathy. Or France’s Boiron Corporation, which is actually the leader in "making" the stuff (since homeopathy is water, what do you imagine they “do” all day?) along with Oprah Winfrey and Dr. Oz, Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey, Robert De Niro and Robert Kennedy, Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow - the list goes on. Will a “weight” fall on them - or will one man have to carry it alone?

 

This phenomena, known as homeopathy, has been around for 200 years. So, history says, we knew the answer to that question, before it was even asked.

 

I Could Be Mistaken About How This Country Operates But I Really Don't Think So (I've Lived Here A Long Time)

It says a lot, that I had to brutalize a Paul Krugman quote to agree with it, but it had to happen:

“The widening “wonk gap” — the G.O.P.’s near-complete lack of expertise on anything substantive,...the dumbing down extends across the spectrum, from budget issues to national security to poll analysis. Remember, Mitt Romney and much of his party went into Election Day expecting victory…. 

But that was then. Modern conservatism has become a sort of cult, very much given to conspiracy theorizing when confronted with inconvenient facts,...Mitt Romney would have won if only he had been a real conservative. 

It’s all kind of funny, in a way. Unfortunately, however, this runaway cult controls the House, which gives it immense destructive power,...and it’s disturbing to realize that this power rests in the hands of men who, thanks to the wonk gap, quite literally have no idea what they’re doing.”

The immediate talk of our, or Obama's, international prestige - when faced with kids being gassed as canaries in the coal mine to gauge our tolerance of crimes against humanity - is a fine example of missing the substance by a mile. The problem is not that our people aren't smart, it's that they think they're clever - and inevitably put their smarts to arguing the wrong issues. Ask Bernie Madoff. Even better, ask my online friend, Harry Markopolos.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

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Now that's an angry patriot. And a guy who should be put in charge of something. You know why? Because he actually catches the bad guys red-handed, not hoping something falls in his lap he could capitalize on, like the Right and these imaginary "scandals" that have still come to nothing what-so-ever while they crow - over obvious bad guys, large and small, operating openly.

Or do I just imagine there are "psychics" working throughout this country?

Sure, and almost-president Mitt Romney's homeopathy franchise has always been totally on the up-and-up,...

 

I've Had Enough Education To Say It's Coming Together

I hear America's got more hotshot fucking lawyers than anywhere else in the world, and yet nobody could stop some bullshit built on this:

"When I told you that I’d taken the title from Don Rogers, you immediately said, ‘Let’s Sell These People a Piece of Blue Sky’ — Hubbard’s comment to Rogers about fleecing newcomers,..in 1950."

You want me to believe Bernie Madoff was a fluke when that's 63 years an obvious con has openly operated? Hell, even out of work lawyers should have a little time they could devote to that. 

Doctors find time for things.

It's becoming hard not to entertain that I may not live in the country I thought I did.

Or even the world.

I thought people were rational.

But at 52, I'm being talked out of it, and in a most humiliating fashion,...

 

The Corrections

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

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Isn't that weird? While assorted conspiracy theorists have been trying to carve a bogus scandal out of the Middle East, a real one actually pops up at home, and (staying so wonderfully true to form various watchdogs ought to get a broach featuring a picture of Bernie Madoff) it once again emerges without a single whistleblower - inside government or out - seeing it coming. 

Incredible - incredibly stupid - but still,...just incredible. 

I ask you - as we're now treated to the continuing spectacle of America's leaders, happily throwing shit they found on the ground, as others avoid being buried under it - is this any way to run a nation? 

 Special note to PW - send me an email: themachoresponse@gmail.com

 

Jews And Money: It Just Seemed To Be A Little Too Cute

I have a hard time not considering government "in on it," otherwise they're merely clueless, toothless dogs, I tell ya, clueless, toothless dogs:

There is a political scandal here. Grand jury investigators were baffled: How did Gosnell's ["House of Horrors" abortion] clinic, an infamous place in the tri-state area, go un-inspected for so long? Basically, the regulators blew it.

The same answer we got for Bernie Madoff, running a classic ponzi scheme, and the mortgage crisis, and Enron, and on and on, right up to cultism and all the rest. It's criminal. We need to fire everybody and start clean with these "regulators" because, I figure, there's either so much fraud out there, the current crew can't keep up, or they don't consider fraud important, or they're stupid. Being generous, I lean toward the latter. 

 And, at the risk of making this blog a one-trick pony (Ha!) they're not alone,...

 

What We Learned From The Ultimate Con Man

There's an interview with Diana Henriques, who interviewed Bernie Madoff, that has so many important lessons for us I have to quote it multiple times. First up - the price of fraud:

When I first met him in prison, my first impression was how polished he had become since I had known him 15 years earlier, even in his prison uniform. Every crease is crisp, every button is buttoned. His belt is shiny, his shoes gleam. Very much the dandy, even in prison. And very much in control of our conversation. He had a very engaging, low-key style. Never took his eyes off of me. [He] leaned forward and was very interested in everything I had to say. A few little jokes, a little bit of flattery. But very much on-message.

When I saw him the second time, after his son’s suicide, I was stunned at the change in him. From across the room, I would not have recognized him as the same man. So much thinner. In fact, the uniform involves one of the those web belts and he had the belt pulled so tight that the end of it was folded under to keep it from flopping. One of his buttons on his shirt was undone and he didn’t notice it until about halfway through. He buttoned it up. This had been an immaculately groomed, crisp, confident man back in August. In February, he seemed to holding on to his control with both hands. Fiercely. No jokes. No humor. Barely a smile. And this was two months after his son’s suicide. He was clearly devastated by that.

Next up - what marriage really means:

Madoff’s sons were deeply upset that Ruth did not walk out on him. I worked very hard to try to understand, through as many confidential sources as I could, why she didn’t go. And I asked Madoff himself why she stayed. That’s the one point in the first interview where he broke down and cried. And I do think it was genuine. He didn’t even have a Kleenex with him. His lawyer had to find some little paper napkins in the snack bar area. But he said all her friends told her she should leave, which I knew to be true. He told her she should leave, that she didn’t have to stay. As the firestorm of criticism and vitriol was growing, he could see that it was hurting her to stay with him. But she would not walk out on him. And, as I understand it, how she has explained it, is that she had a love affair with this man for 50 years and she just felt she couldn’t abandon him at this time of his near destruction.

You know Larry and I have been married for 42 years and I can sort of understand it. I don’t think younger couples can. She met and fell in love with Bernie when she was 13 years old. He was a lifeguard, she wasn’t even in high school yet. Pretty girl. And he was handsome, sun-bleached hair. She fell in love the first time she met him and married him at 18. You have to keep that in mind when you weigh the decisions she made after his arrest. It was a lifelong love affair. Everybody who knew them agreed that they were still like sweethearts. One person said that the only person who thought more of Bernie than Ruth was Bernie. She really worshipped him.

Let's follow that up with the reason integrity is so important, and why - in a world filled with so many lacking in it - there's so much fraud:

I can guarantee you that there is another Ponzi scheme out there that we haven’t heard about yet. Ponzi schemes are, to me, one of the most fascinating crimes on Wall Street, one of the most fascinating financial crimes that there is.

The air they breathe is trust. A Ponzi scheme cannot grow in an environment that’s devoid of trust. Nothing else can either, so in order to eliminate Ponzi schemes, you’d have to create a world completely devoid of trust. And when you’ve got a world like that, number one, none of us wants to live in it. And, number two: You can’t run a modern economy without a minimal level of trust. But that level of trust is exactly the level of trust a Ponzi schemer needs to get away with it. Now, Ponzi schemes are a peculiar crime in that you don’t feel any pain until the very end.

I think the Madoff story introduces a new species of Ponzi scheme. Traditionally, we’ve thought of Ponzi schemes as the classic, too-good-to-be-true fraud. Fifty percent returns a month. Double your money in 10 days. The classic Ponzi scheme, all the way back to the first one in the 1920s, appealed to our greed. The get-rich-quick itch. The Madoff scheme did not appeal to people’s greed; it appealed to their fear. Through most of the Madoff scam, you could’ve made more money somewhere else. There were years when the Magellan Fund at Fidelity was producing much better results that Madoff’s investors were getting. It wasn’t that they were greedy: He was so consistent. He was so safe. They felt safe with Bernie in an increasingly volatile, scary, complicated market. If a Ponzi scheme appeals to your greed, a Madoff scheme appeals to your fears. I can’t tell you how many people told me, “He made me feel safe.”


Those are the kinds of frauds I worry we’re going to see more of.

Got that, people? Protect yourself. Protect your loved ones. Forget trying to seem nice:

Tell the truth.

And finally, here's a quote that captures how I see others looking at the world, not considering the real consequences of their actions, as they look out for their own desires in affairs, or money-making schemes, or any number of other endeavors:

[Bernie Madoff doesn't think about his clients] who committed suicide and their families. Not the ones who’ve had to uproot their entire lives and sell their beloved homes. The human cost of the crime is part of the equation that he just doesn’t see. He’s utterly in denial about that.

Self-deception is an extremely dangerous practice. Lying to ourselves is how we get in the most trouble. If there is a lesson, it is the oldest human lesson. To thine own self be true.

If people take nothing else away from the book, I hope they take that. Lying to yourself is a luxury that you just can’t afford.

I think about all of that - every day - which makes me weird to others, but also makes them very weird to me. People innocently defend evil nowadays, and it's costs are something they never consider until too late. And usually to someone else's detriment.

Don't be the one.

Our Life's Got No Gray Area: Evil's Black & White (Dems, Hippies & NewAgers Are Liars)

While ranting at someone over at the Althouse, something occurred to me that would be better expressed here and - since I haven't got the urge to rant out of my system yet - here it goes with no fucking links or anything:

You guys allow evil to flourish because you have no interest in thinking about how to achieve anything good in this world - you're scared to death of even trying to get it.

You now have Mccarthyism labeled as bad because he went about trying to eliminate communism the wrong way. But there's nothing bad about trying to eliminate communism. You could try to get it right, but you don't because you focus on the wrong thing - the way Joe went about it.

You now have witch hunts labeled as bad because Salem went about trying to eliminate witches the wrong way. But there's nothing bad about trying to eliminate witches. You could try to get it right, but you don't because you focus on the wrong thing - the way Salem went about it.

And it's the same for every obvious evil that exists today. You always focus on the wrong-headed approach, allowing the evil free reign, and then look at anyone who suffers under it, or wants to eliminate it, as "hyperbolic and weird". You're not "sophisticated" for trying to find the grey area in evil. You're just a part of whatever evil you're shilling for.

Martin Luther King said injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere and that is the result of the attitude I see around me. Fraud is rampant in this society because those around me have a billion excuses for why we shouldn't tackle it. Look at the Bernie Madoff scandal for a prime example of an open fraud continuing for almost a man's entire life - until he himself confessed - because, even with people screaming there's something wrong there, no one was willing to go after him.

The pedophile Sai Baba just died. That's a single man who made millions, and held off the entire world, because they just refused to acknowledge he wasn't a "living god". There is no one on this planet who can justify it.

Who can adequately explain why, decades ago, the powers that be didn't say, "That isn't so"? Instead, they let that pervert abuse children and kept the creep living in the lap of luxury. You did the same thing with the Maharishi.

I always rant on homeopathy because it's such an obvious scam - it's only water - but do you see anyone picketing Whole Foods for perpetrating a fraud on the public? No - people are actually PROUD to shop there! It's a fucking badge of honor to be part of it! Because to say "You're wrong and you're doing wrong" is just not politically correct! Fuck, the term "politically correct" is Orwellian in itself! But let somebody say so and they're the crazy person! It's all evil, I tell you!

In my life, I have seen almost every form of barbarity known to man, and almost all of it happened before my eyes in the United States. It happened because there's always some asshole with an excuse for why nobody can do anything to stop it - when stopping it is the only answer for how to stop it.

I have put my life on the line for others, countless times, and it never ceases to amaze me that I'm alone in doing so. You know it's true - how often to we hear about a crime happening before a crowd and no one stops to help? Isn't there a YouTube video out there now of two black girls attacking a white girl and all some guy did was videotape it? Some older lady got involved by saying, "stop" but nothing more - she certainly wasn't going to throw herself into the breach, was she? Would you? A father just died at a McDonald's for doing so but, I'll bet, that was because he was the only person to get involved - and he was alone because the rest did nothing! You're cowards. And you're cowards because you don't have the conviction that stopping evil is what you're supposed to do!

And you certainly won't entertain your role in evil, will you? Not you, as you protest someone else! It's always someone else! It's George Bush, or Dick Cheney, or someone other than yourself! Where's the oil you said we were getting from Iraq? You were WRONG, asshole! Barack Obama is president - about as big a wrong as this nation has ever seen in it's history - because YOU were wrong about everything else! Oh, you had to have him because you were so WRONG, but will you ever admit it? Hell no! Not even the people complaining about him now will admit they were wrong to have ever voted him into office - that's on somebody else!

Even after the horror of 9/11, you laughed when George Bush said there are evildoers out there - you laughed! What was so fucking funny? Whatsa matter? 3,000 Americans dead in one morning wasn't enough proof for you? Again: you chose to focus on what you thought was stupidity than what was important - the people trying to kill us. YOU did that!

You're still focused on it. Almost every attempt to reign in the enemy is greeted by hoots and cat calls rather than suggestions for how to get the job done. How fucking helpful. How fucking immature. How very YOU!

This nation should be looking the possible fate of failure, for the very first time, squarely in the eye - and acting against it - but it's people are too concerned with trying to appear to be nice than good. It should be shutting up the hypocrites and throwing them overboard. It should be shutting up the liars and jailing them. Anyone involved in fraud should have to fight for their very lives because that's what they've forced all of us to do now.

You are not stardust and you are not golden - you're a bunch of tin, covered in gold flake, and God damn it, on behalf of all the Americans who never bought into your bullshit, I want my money back!

Exposing It All (For Your Pleasure Alone) Part II

This is more of the same, to warp your brains, or at least relieve the pressure:



Tim Flannery Channels Psychic Ants.

From behind bars, Madoff spins his story.


Trump is Final Proof that the Political Class Has Failed

Killing Bono: On The Wrong Side Of History

The truth about politicians - it just might surprise you

Better Late Than Never (That's Only My Opinion)

I've been out of the house for most of the day, walking around and getting some air, so I apologize for not getting to this sooner, but some things can't be helped:

The £1m annual Templeton prize has been handed out to Sir Martin Rees, the astronomer royal and former president of the Royal Society, in another effort by the Templeton Foundation to confuse the science/religion debate:

Lord Rees, a churchgoer who neither believes in God nor subscribes to any religious dogma, said he attends chapel on a regular basis as Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, as part of a "traditional ritual". He also cites the choir – rated fifth in the world by Gramophone magazine – as a reason for his attendance.

"Doing science made me realise that even the simplest things are hard to understand and that makes me suspicious of people who believe they've got anything more than an incomplete and metaphorical understanding of any deep aspect of reality," he told the Guardian. "I participate in occasional religious services which are the customs of the society I grew up in. I'm not allergic to religion."

Good enough for me - an atheist "God Father" to several boys - but some are up in arms he'd take the money at all. My only criticism is he looks like a smug bastard in the photo.

Click the tag, below, for more on the Templeton Prize.

This piece made the Euro sound like Barack Obama to me:

The European debt crisis -- which saw its latest iteration inaugurated on Wednesday, April 6, when Portugal indicated it would request an EU bailout -- has exposed every single lie, every fudge, and every political, legal, and economic loophole that went into making the continent's common currency. One reason Europeans have yet to set the euro right is that they still haven't reckoned with the extent of bad faith that went into its creation.

To sell the euro to a diverse populace back in the 1990s, its advocates made a series of mostly inconstant promises. The Germans were promised that monetary union would not give rise to fiscal transfers, and would create a currency at least as stable as the Deutschmark. The French understood the euro as a vehicle for improved domestic competitiveness and global reach. For the Italians and the Spanish, it offered an opportunity for monetary stability and permanently low interest rates. And in countries with highly deregulated banking systems, such as Spain and Ireland, it brought the prospect of sudden wealth.

The various promises culminated in a lowest-common-denominator governance regime. Monetary discipline would be enforced by an independent central bank tasked with ensuring price stability. Fiscal discipline was supposed to be covered by the stability and growth pact, which set the famous 3 percent rule -- the ceiling of permitted annual deficits in relation to gross domestic product. And that was it.

Given this wishful thinking, the eurozone was always vulnerable to a financial crisis.

When are we going to catch on to wishful thinking, magical thinking, and delusional thinking? There's a story about the guy who predicted the Japanese tsunami and how, of course, nobody listened to him - just as nobody listened to the guy who said Bernie Madoff was a fraud, and the guy who predicted the world-wide economic crisis, and on and on and on. What is up with that?

My fervent desire is that, as we keep moving closer to reality in this new conservative period, we start listening to people who actually know things and away from those who step forward promising "Hope & Change".

Our old pal, James Arthur Ray (and Oprah's, and Larry King's, and that group of freaks, above, from The Secret) has had his NewAge murder trial take a very un-Law of Attraction-like turn for the worse - the judge is allowing testimony about his past sweatlodges to be entered into evidence - and that's opening the floodgates:

That final round, Mercer said, was uncharacteristically quiet. When it was over, Ray was the first one out.

"He crawled out the entrance, took a few deep breaths, said something and then he walked by the guy who thought he was dying," she said. "Then he went and sat down in a chair in the shade."

It took several minutes for everyone else to get out of the lodge, and Mercer said she dragged out at least four people who had passed out as well as others whose legs weren't working right. Then she made a gruesome discovery.

"I looked inside," she said. "Something made me look inside. I saw three people in the back of the sweat lodge just laying there. I was kneeling down and I looked for someone to help me. Everyone I saw was helping someone else."

She saw Ray and told him she needed to open up the back of the lodge to get those people out. She said Ray told her not to unless it was absolutely necessary.

Deciding it was, Mercer said she went to the back and began to untangle the interwoven blankets and tarps that covered the structure, screaming for help all the while. The only help nearby was her daughter, Sarah, 18 at the time.

"We lifted up the back of the tarp," she said. "We saw these people laying there. Their lips were blue and their faces were white and my daughter said, 'Mom, they're holding hands.'"

The two were Kirby Brown and Shore, who never exhibited vital signs from that point on in spite of efforts to perform CPR. A third person, Liz Neuman, died nine days after also being pulled from the lodge.

After others arrived to help, Mercer went to her nearby house and called 911.

Mercer's earlier testimony was much like her husband Ted's, who preceded her on the witness stand. She compared Ray's sweat lodges in 2007 and 2008 to others she'd witnessed, noting that no one ever got sick unless Ray was the leader.

Oopsie! Looks like the "Spiritual Warrior" is fighting for his (own) life now.

Let me put some food in my stomach and I'll be right back,...