Did Mitt Romney launder money for "Latin American" investors?

Missing the forest for the trees (or counting cavities in the gift horse's mouth.) How many have actually seen the "When Mitt Romney Came to Town" video? http://www.webcasts.com/kingofbain/

Newt, the messenger may be extremely flawed to the extreme, but the message is "spot on." It is brilliant and to the point. Romney was a corporate raider of the worst ilk. Did you know that Bain Capital was financed by unidentified Latin American investors? I didn't. Did you know Romney's wealth is mostly parked off-shore in foreign accounts? I didn't. Those facts are off-handedly cited in the video which concentrates on the horrors inflicted by Romney and Bain Capital that impoverished men, women and children who were paying their dues to the American dream. No wonder Mitt won't release his income tax returns.

Did you appreciate that Romney and his friends drained 180 million from a company and drove it into bankruptcy when maybe looting it for only 90 million might have allowed it to survive? Maybe I should have known it, but didn't.

And how many of the personal stories of middle class workers impoverished by Bain Capital did you know? A couple maybe. But to paraphrase Stalin (ugh) about his atrocities: the loss of one job is a tragedy; the loss of a million is a statistic. The video tells the story of several US workers who had paid their dues but were nonetheless impoverished by Bain capital predatory practices.

Incidentally, one of the companies plundered by Bain is in Indiana where a right to work law is now being considered.

Bottom line: don’t get angry at Newt or weep for Mitt. Watch the video! This may be the video that saves America (if not the Republican Party) from Romney. Perhaps it should also be required watching for the Evangelical leaders meeting in Texas this weekend.

Perhaps Mormons are Christians, but Mitt Romney certainly doesn’t act like one. The Gospel of St. Matthew relates the parable of the Last Judgment where the only measure of our love of God is how we treat the least among us. Fear that judgment Mitt. Fear now.

THE SHROUD OF TURIN, THE RESURRECTION AND JOE KENNEDY

THE SHROUD OF TURIN, THE RESURRECTION AND JOE KENNEDY

By John C. Klotz

"In 1929 I sold short,
In England I'm presented at court,
But you've got me down hearted,
'Cause I can't get started with you"
"I can’t Get started"
Duke/Gershwin 1936

This piece is written with a sense of irony; tongue in cheek but with a deadly serious intent. For the last 60 years or so controversy has swirled about the Shroud of Turin, the reputed burial shroud of Jesus Christ,

In 1988, carbon dating tests on a corner of it reportedly established that it was a medieval fake. However, in peer reviewed science journal articles since that time, the validity of that conclusion has been pretty much demolished. Among other things, the tiny corner of the Shroud which was taken for tests was atypical of the Shroud fabric and contained threads, some of them cotton, added by a repair using medieval invisible weaving techniques.

But before getting to the evidence of the Shroud’s authenticity, let me explain what relevance Ira Gershwin and Joe Kennedy have to this discussion. The issue is circumstantial evidence. On the basis of two circumstances in the first two lines of the verse quoted above, it is established beyond doubt that Ira Gershwin was twitting Joseph Kennedy, the father of President John F. Kennedy in the song.

Joe Kennedy was famous for having sold short before the stock market 1929 crash, it was one of the sources of his great wealth. Selling short means that in the month prior to the crash he agreed to sell a large number of shares at prices at the then going rate at a future date. It was a bet that the market would go down. I imagine there were other short sellers although the only notorious one was Joe Kennedy. On that fact alone, you might conclude that the verse was about Joe Kennedy,

But there is second fact in the verse. “In England I’m presented at court.” They may have been other less celebrated short sellers in the fall of 1929, but I will make a safe bet that none of them were ever presented at court in England. Kennedy was. After a stint as chairman of the fledging Securities Exchange Commission, President Roosevelt appointed Kennedy as Ambassador to the Court of St. James, the English court.

Only two facts, but if it was a “money or your life bet,” you’d be pretty safe betting that Joe Kennedy was the subject of Gershwin’s verse.

Now let’s turn to the Shroud of Turin. What circumstances lead me to believe that the case is closed and the Shroud is the burial cloth of Jesus of Nazareth and quite probably proof of his resurrection. In this case, there are not two circumstances to draw a straight line, but hundreds.

A note on sources. Without footnoting every detail, I am using two primary sources which in turn are an abundant source of additional sources. One is http://shroud.com whose editor and founder is Barrie Schwortz. Barrie is a Jewish photographic expert who signed on as a photographer for a group examining the Shroud in 1978. Starting from an attitude of complete skepticism about the Shroud, and expecting to make quick work of debunking its authenticity, like many experts before and since, Barrie was astounded by what he saw and photographed, and over a period of eighteen years, moved from skeptic to a believer in the challenged antiquity of the cloth.

Another source is Dan Porter’s Shroud Story. http://www.shroudstory.com/book/BookChapterPage1.htm It is a work in progress But it covers the whole breadth of Shroud issues with hyperlinks in for each issue.

The best proof of the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin is the Shroud itself. There are not dozens of physical facts about the shroud that demonstrate its authenticity, but hundreds. In sum, the Shroud is the burial cloth of a man who was crucified after receiving a merciless beating. There are many wounds that were inflicted by the beating, and they are consistent with the whips used by the Romans at the time of Christ. In addition there are other wounds consistent with a “crown” of thorns being pressed into his head. There is a wound in the side of chest consistent with the account of his side being pierced by a lance at the scene of the crucifixion. There are wounds consistent with nails having been driven through his wrists. This is only a very abbreviated partial list of coincidences between the image on the Shroud and the Gospel accounts of the crucifixion.

I am particularly intrigued by the fact that the nail holes were in the wrist. The skeptics claim that the Shroud is a medieval fake. However, until modern times’ all the known paintings of the crucifixion showed Christ hanging on the Cross with nails driven through the palms of his hands.

I attended Christian Brothers Academy in Syracuse New York from 1950 to 1954. There were four years of religion classes. I can’t remember in which year it occurred, but I do remember one of my teachers noting that all the paintings of the crucifixion were erroneous because they showed nails driven through the palm of the hand and that was an impossibility because the palm lacked the substance to support the weight of the crucified body. It may have been a surprise to some that the nails were driven into the crucified man’s wrists, but to me it was an old story. And because the artistic tradition is so at odds with wrist nails, it is a compelling circumstance indicating that the image on the Shroud long pre-dated medieval times. Pollen and limestone dust indicate a Jerusalem origin for the Shroud. Then too, there are blood stains and other indicia of secretions that are compatible with what would be expected of a shroud that covered the body of a recently tortured and executed man.

But the stains are not the image on the Shroud which remains inexplicable. A History Channel special: “The Real Face of Jesus” explored among other things the question of what produced the image while using the image to create a face of Jesus, the crucified man. It’s speculation as to what created the image is off-the-chart, concluding that it was essentially created by some scanning process.

The image, the stains, and other physical evidence contained in and on the Shroud when compared to Gospel accounts circumstantially prove that the Shroud of Turin was in fact the burial shroud of Jesus of Nazareth. It is a reasonable supposition that solving the problem of the creation of the image will lead to another conclusion: that it is proof of the Resurrection.

For nearly two thousand years the Shroud has been among us, in one place or another. The proofs of its authenticity through science could not have been made until advances in science in the last two or three decades.

I do not believe in the supernatural. I do believe in an eternal self-consciousness of all existence that is by my definition both natural and God. What we call supernatural is simply what we, with our limited knowledge, can not explain.

For those two millennia the Shroud has been among us, waiting perhaps for our human knowledge and science to unlock its truths. I believe that science has now allowed us to prove its authenticity. If I can demonstrate from two lines in verse by Ira Gershwin that he was referencing Joe Kennedy, given the scores if not hundreds of coincidence between the Shroud and the Gospels, there ought to be no real doubt about the authenticity of the Shroud. Only one other artifact comes close to matching the uniqueness of the Shroud and that is the face cloth which covered Christ’s face which is now in Oviedo, Spain. Its blood stains match those of the Shroud and the two cloths are both mentioned in the Gospel.

Science has emerged in our times as both Christ and Anti-Christ. It has unleashed unprecedented destructive power and while one branch seeks to preserve the environment, other, better financed branches, cooperate in promoting the industries that destroy it. If we are to avoid – or win – the environmental Armageddon that now engulfs us, science will have to lead the way.

But in the authentication of the Shroud, and in the efforts to decipher the process by which the image was created, science is doing something more. It is bringing new meaning and new vitality to the Christian message.

At Mass, Catholics sometimes chant:

Christ has died,
Christ is risen,
Christ will come again.

Perhaps when the mystery of the Shroud image is decoded, we shall chant:

“Christ has come again.”


Copyright John C. Klotz, NY, NY 2011



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Health care and the Mark of Cain

A blogger who criticized Obama quoting Cain about being my brother's keeper,. because Cain was being sarcastic, misses the fundamental point, for a debating point.The story of Cain slaying Abel is in the very first book of the Bile, Genesis, which even St. Augustine read as allegory.

The fact is, that other than eating the forbidden fruit, the story of Cain and Abel is the story of the first crime: murder.

Cain's question may have been defiant: "Am I my brother's keeper?" but it was the first step in scripture towards what many regard as the universal law of morality: To treat other as we would be treated as ourselves, which is in turn corollary of a deeper command: to love our neighbor as ourselves.

In the New Testament, Mathews telling of the "parable" of the Last Judgment is a lecture on what loving your neighbor really means. We demonstrate our love by what we do to the neediest of our fellow human beings. Among other things: "I was sick and you visited me."

The inanity of some fundamentalists who insist that world is only 6,000 years old, and the excesses of religious authoritarians have turned many off to the message of the scriptures, but I can not understand how the self-styled Christians on the Right can so blithely ignore the commandment of love upon which "all the law and prophets" depend. Or as Rabbi Hillel said a generation earlier than Christ: All the rest is commentary.

To those who so mindlessly echo the right wing attack themes, and so easily turn their backs on the stricken among us, and who so openly flaunt their Christianity: be afraid not of Obama, but of the judgment of your God. Be very afraid.

Winter Rules and Lies

In golf, amateur hackers (such as myself) will often play by winter rules: that means if your ball is lying in a really bad spot you can correct its location to make for an easier shot. The theory is that it’s winter and the course is in bad shape. Of course, sometimes you play winter rules in mid-July.

Two events in the news bring this to mind. One is the intention of the golf grand Pooh-Bahs to punish Tiger Woods because he objected to a functionary hurrying play in his latest tournament so that his opponent who had a one stroke lead rushed into a triple bogie (3 over par) on the sixteenth hole allowing Woods to catch-up and take the lead.

That Tiger objected to his opponent being rushed was a generous display of sportsmanship that is all too rare these days. Forget all his great wins and remarkable record, in my book it is his finest moment because this fierce competitor revealed his respect for his fellow competitors and a refusal to gloat over what he regarded as a tarnished victory.

Would that the participants in the current debate on health care showed some of the same class. Unfortunately we are witnessing a hard truth that we have yet to cope with: that there is a determined right wing in this countrty that is always playing winter rules and lacks a sense of sportsmanship that is a hallmark as politics at its best.

Compare if you will the Clinton, G.W. Bush Administrations and the first seven months of the Obama Administration. The Clinton Administration was hobbled from its outset by a series of investigations and outlandish charges, including that Bill and Hillary murdered one of their closest friend, Vince Foster. The culmination was the Lewinsky affair which paralyzed the Clinton administration for its last two years.

Yet, the country enjoyed great prosperity during his term, and he had some amazing successes, including bringing a semblance of peace to the Balkans which for centuries had been synonymous with ethnic hatred and political instability – the precipitant cause of World War One being an assassination in Serbia.

The press feasted on his travails.

Then came eight years of the utterly incompetent George Bush Administration which ignored pointed warnings about Bin Laden plotting to attack America, let him slip though our fingers in Afghanistan and lied us into war in Iraq.

In the meantime “regulatory reform” laid the ground work for the gravest financial crisis since the time of the Great Depression.

The media essentially gave GWB a free pass. Mendacity and manipulation in the White House was scarcely noted. The Democrats, cowed by the media, more or less played possum until the 2006 election. John Kerry, when faced with outrageous accusations about his combat record in Vietnam, turned turtle.

And now after seven months of the Obama Administration, we have seen the most vicious attacks since the Clinton era and a media which reports gravely on the most atrocious lies and in a fair and balance manner, giving the lies legs.

Tiger Woods, in giving his opponent his due, was a lot like the Democrats: playing the sportsman. But the Obama opposition is beyond sportsmanship and truth. It’s all winter lies, moving the ball for a better position to destroy your opponent.

The God of Probabilities: How voting fraud in Iran demonstrates the existence of God

Is the title of this piece a jest? Am I kidding? What possible relationship could there be between voting fraud and the issue of God’s existence. Well there is, at least metaphorically; but it will take some explanation. Bear with me. You may actually find a pay-off here.

When I was but seven years old, I began catechism class in the Catholic Church. Once a week we were “released” two hours early from public school so that we could go to our local churches for religious instructions. As I recall, the very first lesson we learned from our blue-covered Baltimore Catechism was that we could never understand God because he was immortal, had always existed and his ways were beyond human comprehension. Having taught me at age seven that God was incomprehensible, the Church has spent the last 65 years explaining God to me. I think there’s a incongruity there.

I transferred from public school to Catholic school for grammar school and high school. I won a gold medal for science and although I didn’t pursue science as a career, it has always been an interest of mine. So to has been my religion for which I also won a gold medal.

It is a fact of history that science and religion have been at best uneasy intellectual partners in the quest for meaning of the human condition. Many things that were thought to be divine and supernatural in earlier times have yielded to scientific explanation. The supernatural became the natural. Early gods included fire, wind, the oceans, volcanoes, star, planets, comets, the moon, and the sun, among other phenomena we now explain blithely in scientific terms.

Twenty or so years ago, I suffered a mild crisis of faith. I had been become familiar with a smattering of chaos theory and quantum analysis. I was startled to learn that atoms were not like miniature solar systems. The popular conception was a nucleus of protons and neutrons around which electrons orbited. Rather, this basic structure of all matter was chaotic and the location of “particle” of it unknowable at any given moment. It seemed that all of existence, at its most basic level was governed by the “Law of Probability.”

That’s a tough thing for a person of religious bent to digest. Is all of existence merely the result of a cosmic coin flips? But then another thought took hold. If there is a “Law” of “Probability” whose law is it? Why should the chaos of quantum existence ever be ordered by anything?

Concurrent with the scientific thought that all existence was chaos ordered only by the Law of Probability, has been scientific investigations into the issue of human consciousness and, as is claimed by some, the interaction of human consciousness with a greater consciousness which some claim to have observed. Piere Teilhard Chardin and others have discerned a “noosphere” of intertwined human consciousness that has evolved from interactions that lower level of consciousness are incapable of joining. Freud’s heretical protégé, Carl Jung, postulated a “collective unconsciousness” which might be better described as collective consciousness.

Ironically, perhaps, scientific experiments designed to explore the issue of collective consciousness rely primarily on the applications of the law of probability. Among the most accessible is that of The Global Consciousness Project: Meaningful Correlations in Random Data whose work is explained at http://noosphere.princeton.edu/

The purpose of the project is “”to examine subtle correlations that may reflect the presence and activity of consciousness in the world.” It’s principal activity is to “collect data continuously from a global network of physical random number generators located in 65 host sites around the world.” The issue is whether major events that effect the psyche or consciousness of large masses of people distort the results of the random number generators into more than standard deviations from the norm. In sum, the scientist involved in this project believe they do, and their data demonstrates they do.

There are a number of other projects of a similar vein described by journalist Lynn McTaggart in The Field, (Harpers, New York Updated Edition 2008). Among the experiments she describes are coordinated remote prayer. The Field has an extensive bibliography if you are interested. The results reported by Ms. McTaggert all show consciousness interactions that distort results beyond those expected from standard deviations of the law of probabilities.

So how does election fraud in Iran relate to the issue of God’s existence?

On June 20, 2009, the Washington Post, published a study by Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco, Ph.D. candidates in political science at Columbia University. They analyzed the results of the Iranian elections. Their thesis was that given the length of the numbers reported in the results, that the last digits, irrespective of their original authenticity, should have reflected the law probabilities. In sum, there are ten digits, 0 to 9, and in the absence of consciousness intervention by humans attempting to jiggle the results, there ten digits should have been distributed relative evenly in the last column (i.e. each digit approximately 10% of the time). This was of course subject to standard deviations which depend on the size of the sample and in this case the length of the numbers preceding the last digit.

The point of the authors was that the variations were not in accord with the law of probabilities and well beyond standard deviations. They also used a second neutral analysis (the number of non-adjacent digits in the last two columns). That also exceeded standard deviations.

Their conclusion was that the probabilities of the election results not being manipulated was one in two hundred. By applying the law of probabilities we learn that there has been conscious intervention. This is not the same thing as the Global Consciousness Project, but it is at least a metaphor about the interplay of probabilities and consciousness on a cosmic level. But then, even St. Augustine recognized the Genesis was not history but a metaphor for deeper truths - truths that have now been overtaken by science in the “Big Bang” theory and evolution.

So existence is governed by the law of probability, but deviations from law are evidence, at least in some cases, for conscious intervention. In Iran, the conscious intervention was by the operatives of a corrupt regime engineering a fraudulent election. But, in the chaos of quantum existence, the evidence of conscious intervention leads ultimately to a consciousness beyond just humanity, beyond just this universe, but inclusive of all the infinite number of universes that may exist.

All hail the God of Probabilities who creates the law and then lights the way to move beyond it. I believe that way is love. But that’s another story. See http://johnklotz.blogspot.com/2007_10_01_archive.html

Obama, Notre Dame and the Ghetto Catholic mentality

Notre Dame has invited President Obama to speak and the radical right wing of the Church is having a cow. How a Catholic University invite the President of the United States to address its commencement. A recent comment on this by Salon.com editor Joan Walsh, engendered a flurry of responses. http://www.salon.com/opinion/walsh/politics/2009/04/01/notre_dame_obama/

I am saddened by the number of her readers who described themselves as Ex-Catholics, even atheists. For all of its two millennia of folly, the fact is that the Catholic Church is still the most direct route back to the preacher who lived and died in the land between the seas, and taught us what love meant.

The Church has always been much bigger and more diverse an institution than the Vatican likes to admit. Umberto Eco's masterpiece, “The Name of the Rose,” was much more than a medieval mystery story. It was a snapshot of the ferment, and intellectual diversity, of the Church in the Middle Ages. That ferment and diversity persists.

It was also a paean of praise for St. Francis who single-handily staved off the reformation for two centuries. I remain a Catholic because the essential issue of the Reformation was salvation by faith alone. Luther was reacting to the scandal of the Church pedaling indulgences. He ignores St. Paul. I believe that love engenders faith and I am one with St. Paul: I can have faith so as to move mountains, but without love, I am nothing. Only I believe that literally: without love there is only oblivion.

I attended a Catholic High School and we had to spend a buck to get a black bound copy of the New Testament. More than fifty years later, I still have it, and refer to it. I once remarked to one of my sons and a friend of his that the trouble was nobody feared the judgment of God anymore and they laughed. But that was before I could explain what I meant by the judgment of God. It's all there in my little black book.

There is but one commandment, one truth and one existence. It is love. When we love, we play with eternal fire. If we don't love, we lapse into the hell of oblivion. I believe that. I also believe that it is the essence of a Catholic life.

The problem with Donahue, Opus Dei, the new Newman Society et al, is that there is no love in them. Only an intellectual self-indulgence pointing the way to oblivion.

The Catholic Thing to Do

Pope Benedict has done it gain. His tin ear and tin policies has led him to reinstate the Pius X Society, a collection of renegade Catholics with a history of Anti-Semitism who were excommunicated by Pope John Paul II (not exactly a cutting edge liberal himself).

I don't mean to downplay the impact of anti-Semitism of the Pius X Society’s recall to the bosom of the Church, but if Jews have a problem with this, so too I believe will many, many Catholics, especially those who actually read the Gospels.

The concept of a militant Church shedding members by the millions may be okay with Pope Benedict but I am not sure the Christ who commanded his disciples to teach all nations would agree.

While the actions of many Christians might make it hard to believe, the essence of the Christian message boils down to just one word: Love. The mark of any Christian is his or her understanding that love is he foundation of all, not just their faith but existence itself. In the halcyon days of John XXIII, we used to sing a song called: “You will know we are Christians by our love.” But singing it isn't enough, it must be lived.

In the jungles of Central America, many Catholics, including one Archbishop, several Jesuit priests and their house keepers, nuns and lay workers followed love to a martyrs grave. But because in their work they sometimes brushed shoulders with Marxists, their martyrdom is an embarrassment to the Vatican and unrecognized.

Instead, we find organizations founded by fascists like Opus Dei and the Pius X Society afforded honored places in the Vatican.

Some of reaction to Pope Benedict’s action have focused on the activities of saint in waiting Pius XII in the thirties in reaching a compromise with the Nazis. But if there is any more dramatic point that political expediency of the Vatican may not reflect the "Catholic" view, the simple fact is that of all the religious and demographic groups in Germany (excepting Marxists and Socialists) the most opposed to the Nazi's were the Catholics, Pius XII be damned.

There was a report on Sixty Minutes some years ago about righteous Gentiles (I believe it was Poland) who hid Jewish children during the Holocaust. If discovered by the Nazi's, the parents were forced to watch while their own children were hanged, and then their posterity destroyed, they were hanged.

One woman, who was a little girl at the time, was interviewed by CBS. "I asked my mother, 'Why are we doing this?' She replied ‘Because it's the Catholic thing to do.’"

I happen to be a vanishing relic of American demographics: a second generation German-American, all four of whose grandparents emigrated to the US before the turn of the last century. Unlike Pope Benedict, the members of my family did not serve in the Wehrmacht and one of my cousins is buried in the American Cemetery perched on the bluff above Omaha Beach. (See http://www.johnklotz.com/billy.htm)

God is love, John the Evangelist wrote. In the words and work of the Pius X Society, I see no love and no God. In so many ways, large numbers of Catholics do get the message. The scandal is that it is often despite of, not because of, the Vatican.

I remain a Catholic, it’s just the Roman part that is getting difficult.