It is said that for a celebrity, there is no such thing as bad press.

If this assertion is true, then Vatican City and its most famous resident are getting great press following recent efforts to heal aschism in the Catholic Church by lifting the excommunication of British Bishop Richard Williamson.

Williamson has achieved notoriety for himself by denying the scale of Adolf Hitler's slaughter of Jews during the second World War. Given the current spirit of the times, this is an unpopular view, and the Pope and his staff seem anxious to avoid any transfer of notoriety onto the Catholic Church. Since Williamson has been enigmatic in his retractions to date, the Vatican is clearly feeling the heat.

I see a problem with all this.

Bishop Williamson is in hot water because he is denying well established facts that can be independently verified any day of the week. But as a man of faith and a guide of God's children, that is the job that he is paid to do.

The bare fact is that for quite some time now, no one has heard anything from God, any God. Many are those who claim to represent the Gods. But Gods seem to speak only through self-identified representatives and for some strange reason are reticent to contact the rest of us directly.

There have been no emails. No giant faces in the clouds. No burning bush. No DNA or fingerprints. All we have are ancient promises of great kindness if we submit to God's will, and oft repeated threats of terrible, penultimate, never-ending violence if we do not. That and books with a spotty chain of custody. Continually reinterpreted texts written by and held convincingly aloft by men, some with police records.

There has been nothing you can actually use to split an atom, or a hair.

One might justifiably hold the view that these past two thousand years of thundering silence have been very convenient for men of God.

Because from the Pope on down, all officials of the Catholic Church and its derivatives, derive their authority status and wealth from the assertion that God exists, that Jesus Christ was his son, that God is a man, and judging from popular depictions, that he is an oldish Caucasian man who abhors homosexuality, gambling and the wanton consumption of certain kinds of meat.

Any man who rises to be a Bishop in the Catholic Church derives his authority from assertions that are difficult to verify independently. In fact, it's quite safe to say that no one present today on God's green earth is able to provide irrefutable evidence of the existence of God, any God.

In the absence of verifiable proof of this phenomenon, what does clearly exist is faith.

To be fair, those who deny the existence of God have a problem. The actions of God are generally assumed to be the reason for the existence of the Universe. And when the Pope offers the view that God created the Universe according to "his" own design, he does so secure in the knowledge that so far not a man jack has been able to offer a convincing refutation.

And so the Pope and his employees really have us all by the balls.

And now the Pope is putting this Bishop Wiliamson's balls in a vice over his evinced faith that Hitler murdered no more than a few old Jews and homos nobody was going to miss anyway.

Well what does the Pope want from us? Or put another way, what does God want from us?

Are we to be sent a never ending stream of confusing messages forever onto eternity? Shall the messengers forever taint the spirit and actual words of God with the Devil's spite and Holocaust denials?

Why does the Pope want Bishop Williamson to be a man of faith on Friday, Sunday and during Lent, but at no other time?

Next up, we examine this business of God's chosen people (Jews), the exact number of them who shall be saved (exactly 144,000) and the surprising facts, according to the Bible, of the last moments of the existence of this world.

A vermin-infested Illinois State Capitol that was shut down by health authorities earlier this week was to reopen by 8.00 a.m Monday morning.

Workers at the State Capitol in Springfield Illinois have spent the past few days cleaning after State Health inspectors - acting on a customer's tip - closed the the Senate upon finding an infestation of rodents, including droppings in Bill preparation areas.

But the State isn't taking anything for granted, said Senator Matt Murphy, a Republican from suburban Chicago.

Workers have taken immediate measures to prevent the rodents discovered in the building from ever returning again.

Federal prosecutors are also drawing up charges following their own oversight of the matter.

The Senate passed its first post-inspection test today, when US President Barak Obama pledged full co-operation with health officials, saying in a statement "Today ends a painful episode for Illinois. For months, the state has been crippled by a crisis of rodent infestation. Now that cloud has lifted."

 Former State Governor Rod Blagojevich said today that the Senate worked hard to overcome the infestation. Yesterday he went to the Senate and delivered a 47 minute speech commending that work.

More than 30 legislators rose one by one on the Senate floor to denounce the infestation, saying it was "cynical," "crass," and "hypocritical."

Obama, fresh from his presidential election victory, issued a report concluding that no one in his inner circle had done anything to cause the infestation.

In Madoff Scandal, Jews Feel an Acute Betrayal - NYTimes.com

There are people who make a media based living by claiming that Jews control the media and the world banking system. These people (who shall remain nameless here) and their ideas have so much traction in the public mind that I can read all about their work in the New York Times, along with all the rest of the news that's fit to print.

This alleged vast Jewish conspiracy has so much traction in public discourse that a major US national daily can find Jewish commentators of every stripe who feel compelled to quote scripture and bear witness to a sort of collective shame to be Jewish.

Why all this recent fuss in the media? Because a Jewish banker turned out to be a fraud.

Jews who assume a mantle of guilt and shame because of Bernard Madoff's fiduciary sins, are laying claim to a sad history on several fronts. Mainly, they are suggesting that as Jews, they bear part of the shame of Madoff's actions, because he is Jewish.

Anti-Semites who confer the mantle of guilt and shame upon all Jews because of Bernard Madoff's fiduciary sins, are also laying claim to a sad history. In the present and recent past, this principle of collective guilt has been extended to the principle of collective punishment.

But, we live in a period of history that has outlawed collective punishment, through the dictums of the Geneva Conventions.

Therefore the casual observer may legitimately wonder about a situation that pits Jews and anti-Semites not against each other, but allies them in a holy confederacy against common sense and naked self-interest.

It's hard to find evidence that people who check the box labelled White on their census forms feel any form of collective guilt if one of their fellows say, fakes evidence of an offensive military first strike capability by say, Saddam Hussein, and then uses this faked evidence to engineer the wholesale theft of the resources of say, Iraq.

But it's easy to find evidence that people who check the box labelled Black on their census forms feel a momentary tinge of panic when the newsflash about the latest violent escaped felon carries the addendum, the suspect is black, male, considered armed and dangerous.

And the New York Times has ably demonstrated that it's easy to find Jews who feel that sting when one of their fellows from the international banking system robs the place blind.

We'll leave these companion assertions to further debate later, but for now we can say that it seems that the public is afraid to be tarred with the same brush as someone who commits a shameful act.

Given the history of collective punishment, there's a good reason for this.

In the near future, this situation may begin to unravel like a DNA strand on a criminalist's work desk.

In the increasingly brown world, how will we measure group membership when the group's members are hard to identify? The current President Elect of the United States of America is generally seen as Black. But only one of his parents is directly descended from Africans.

If Barak Hussein Obama is photographed smoking crack cocaine behind the White House toolshed, who if anyone, should feel the most shame?

If Barak Hussein Obama is ever accused and found guilty of confining and raping one Jewish White and one Muslim Black woman in the aft washrooms of Air Force One, who will bear the brunt of any collective punishment?

Tags: BarakObama, Bernard Madoff, fraud, crack coaine, conspiracy

Yale Teaches the Real World in Class - NYTimes.com

According to the NY Times, Yale University is trying to give its business school students a real world hedge fund education.

The plan involves having the students pitch a fund of their own design to earstwhile Simon Cowells of the financial industry. Yale is probably a fine school, and they have far more experience with pedagogy than do I.  

But here are a couple of obvious and inconvenient truths. Simon Cowell operates within a carefully scripted simulacrum, not the real world. And nearly all of the graduates of the American Idol simulacrum have so far failed to convert their excellence in Cowell's simulator into significant sales.

Although simulators might work well for student pilots, don't pay go to flying with a pilot in command whose only experience has been in a simulator.

But all is not lost for the Yale set. There is yet a stalwart of the financial market who has lessons they need to hear.

This pillar of fiscal knowhow founded the sixth largest investment management business on Wall Street (for 2008). He created an organization and technology that led to the founding of the NASDAQ itself, and he subsequently served as the chairman of the board of directors for that organization.

By the 1980s this individual's organization accounted for up to 5% of the total trades made on the NYSE. With credentials like that, Bernard Madoff is an instructor's dream.

He's also an investors nightmare, because he has allegedly admitted to operating a vast conspiracy of fraud that exposed his investors to the tune of fifty billion USD in fake value.

On the basis of this, he has been arrested and charged with serious crimes. His case has not yet come to trial, but his company webpage is already changed, and a Federal Judge in a United States District Court has appointed a Trustee for the liquadiation of Bernard L Madoff Investments Securities LLC, pursuant to the Securities Investor Protection Act.

If you're enrolled in good standing at the Yale School of Management, there's probably nothing I can teach you about the financial markets.

For those who can learn something from this missive though, here's what you need to know.

There is a useful paradox inherent in the operation of the financial markets. It is illegal to conduct insider trading, but the best way to make money is to conduct insider trading. And if you run your numbers in due diligence, and you suspect someone of insider trading, then your best bet for making money (for a while) is to follow the insider's lead.

You cannot get much more on the inside than Bernard Madoff. And he was a crooked as a three dollar bill. And until he threw in his cards and caused the SEC to fold up his tent, he made oodles of money for himself, and many others who liked the cut of his jib.

If Yale fails to ferret out the lessons in all this, then its students are being defrauded.

And as some bright spark once said, don't let the University get in the way of your education.

Tags: BernardMadoff, fraud, NASDAQ