SEC’s Becker/Madoff saga: How could it smell worse?

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"It was THIS big!"


The announcement on Monday Former SEC Counsel Rejoins Cleary Gottlieb Amid Madoff Scrutiny by Joshua Gallu (Bloomberg May 9, 2011) pretty much settles the matter: former General Counsel David Becker’s departure from the Agency was hasty and unplanned. Becker had been unemployed since the end of February: no professional living by generating hourly fees would normally permit such a gap.

As I have previously noted, Becker was recruited to the Agency in February 2009 by incoming Chairwoman Mary Schapiro — who herself got her job as a direct consequence of the Madoff fiasco which had shattered the reputation of the SEC the previous December. The following month, in a meeting with Schapiro and whistleblower Harry Markopolos, Becker

picked a quarrel over extraneous trivia and threw a tantrum so violent that Markopolos’ lawyer “thought that he was about to come right over that table and go for my throat” (Markopolos, 249). Consequently, the meeting was terminated

See Is the Madoff Scandal Paradigmatic? In this essay, Kevin Macdonald and I suggested this was another example of the typically lethal Jewish response to those deemed to have been instrumental (however innocently) in harming Jewish interests. We cited the notorious Cliff Robertson blacklisting: and Professor Macdonald has subsequently reported another. However, it turned out that David Becker had a more personal motive: a few days after the abrupt February 1st announcement of his departure he and his two brothers were sued by the Madoff trustee for some $1.545 million of the $2.045 million Madoff account they inherited from their mother in 2004 and liquidated the following year. While he claimed not to know this was happening, the suit was filed in late 2010 and it is inconceivable that the Trustee did not try to settle before litigating. It rapidly became clear that few if any of his colleagues with whom he dealt on Madoff matters had any idea that Becker had such an involvement. Read more

Timothy Garton Ash: We need more pro-multicultural propaganda

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Timothy Garton Ash has an op-ed in today’s LA Times showing once again the high anxiety pervading European elites about the rise of anti-Muslim parties (“Geert Wilders and how to handle a gold-medal hypocrite“). The idea is that Wilders is a hypocrite because he “calls for the holy book of some 1.5 billion people to be banned!” Ash leaves out Wilders’  charge that the Koran is a fascist book that incites violence. And Ash never mentions Wilders’ point that Islam in Europe has had a chilling effect on free speech:

Speech now deemed suspect includes subjects that are commonly and openly aired when not involving Islam: women’s subordination, violence, child marriages, criminalization of homosexuality and animal cruelty. While not all such cases resulted in convictions, all contribute to a broad and chilling effect on speech. Because there is little predictability in the prosecution and adjudication of such cases, hinging as they do on subjective feelings, nobody knows what can be said with impunity. The flawed premise that religious views can easily be compartmentalized into personal or social realms itself violates the teaching of most religions.

Not to mention the fact that people critical of Islam have been threatened, physically attacked, and even murdered. Wilders has an around-the-clock body guard. Read more

Black Student at University of Virginia Law School Lies About the Police; UVa Blames the Police

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(Editor’s note: This article appeared originally at the Political Cesspool Website. See here.)

On April 22, 2011, the Virginia Law Weekly published a letter to the editor written by Johnathan Perkins, a law student at the University of Virginia (UVa). In his letter, Perkins, who is black, describes an encounter he had, in which he claims he was sorely harassed by two White university police officers. Perkins’s description reads like the script of a made-for-TV movie:

I noticed a police car approaching me. As it neared, the squad car slowed down, blue lights flashing. One of the officers inside pointed the car’s spotlight on me. The UVA officers (both white) stopped their car, got out and confronted me. They demanded that I provide identification and I complied. When I asked the officers if there was a problem, one responded, “You fit the description of someone we’re looking for.” I asked what the description was and what had happened. One of the officers responded, “You don’t need to worry about that. . .” It was clear at that point that the officers were toying with me for their own entertainment. [I]informed them that I was a law student, they looked at one another and sarcastically said, “Oh, he’s a law student. . .” [H]aving just taken Criminal Procedure, I knew to ask the officer whether I was free to leave. When he responded, “We just need to make sure you’re not carrying any weapons . . . it’ll only take a second.” I was doubly surprised: the officers had all but expressed that I was not the person they were looking for (if such a person even existed), yet the two were about to subject me to a search. I knew that all the cases, regulations, and remedies that I learned in class would be of no avail. These two officers alone controlled my fate.

At that point, one of the officers spun me around, pushed me toward their car, and placed my hands on the rear of the vehicle. . .One of the officers searched me, removing all of my belongings from my pockets. The other officer then proceeded to rifle through my wallet . . .Whenever I attempted to turn to answer their questions, they forcibly turned me back around to face the car. When their questioning ended, I asked the officers for their names and badge numbers. One of them responded, “You don’t need to worry about that either. . .” I knew that there would be no remedy for the indignity that I suffered at the hands of two of the University of Virginia’s “finest.”

This was not the first time that I have been harassed by police officers and it will not be the last. As I stood there, humiliated, with my hands on the police car, my only thought was: “There is nothing I can do to right this wrong. I have absolutely no recourse.”

Read more

“During 1917”: Chapter 14 of Solzhenitsyn’s “200 Years Together”

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Chapter 14 of Solzhenitsyn’s 200 Years Together (available here) recounts the events of 1917, a pivotal year in Russia. The main impression conveyed throughout the chapter is the sheer energy of the Jews—what I have elsewhere (pp. 24–26) labeled the psychological intensity of Jewish activism.

1917 in Russia was a year of rapid change, uncertainty and chaos—exactly the situation where even a relatively small but well-organized, energetic and highly motivated force may have a very large impact. As an analogy, consider how relatively easy it would have been to influence the structure of the U.S. government in the unsettled period after the Revolutionary War than it is today.

Jews developed a huge range of organizations of all types. Politically, they ranged from the center to the far left.

From the very first days after the February Revolution, central newspapers published enormous number of announcements about private meetings, assemblies and sessions of various Jewish parties, initially mostly the Bund [a socialist-labor party with a strong Jewish identity], and later of Poale Zion, Zionists, Socialist Zionists, Territorialist Zionists, and the Socialist Jewish Workers’ Party (SJWP). Already by March 7 we read about an oncoming assembly of the All-Russian Jewish Congress.

The various Zionist groups were the most popular among Jews; these groups tended to support socialist candidates in the Russian milieu. As an aside, one can’t help but notice the irony in the fact that Jacob Schiff, who had bankrolled Jewish revolutionary groups in Russia (see here, p. 36), announced that he had decided to join the Zionists “because of fear of Jewish assimilation as a result of Jewish civil equality in Russia. He believes that Palestine could become the center to spread ideals of Jewish culture all over the world.”

Would that he had directed all his financial support to Zionist causes rather than at attempts to topple the Czar. Wasn’t it obvious that Jewish civil equality would make assimilation and intermarriage more likely? Read more

Jewish Behavior During the German Occupation of The Netherlands

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Business as usual with the Germans

On March 24 1933 the British newspaper Daily Express headlined “Judea declares war on Germany”. Despite the numerous calls for a boycott, Jews generally continued to do business with Germany, even during the war. Even Otto Frank, the father of the famous diarist Anne Frank, engaged in providing supplies to the German Wehrmacht after the occupation of Holland in May 1940. Not only relatively small businessmen engaged in trade with the German occupiers, but also the government, most notably secretary-general Hans Hirschfeld.

Hans Max Hirschfeld, born into a Jewish-German business-family, began his career as a civil servant in the department of Labour, Trade and Industry, specializing in relations with Germany. Despite the regime-change in Germany in 1933 Hirschfeld continued to focus on Germany as the premier business partner of Holland. His Jewish background did not prevent him from conducting business as usual: “Beyond the ministerial directorates begins the madness.” Read more

Schrödinger’s International Terrorist Cat: A Philosophical View of Bin Laden’s Death

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In 1935, the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger conceived a famous thought experiment known as Schrödinger’s Cat to express a paradox that exists between unverified states in quantum mechanics. The basic idea Schrödinger wished to ridicule was that with two unobserved possibilities – in this case a cat in a box that was either dead or alive – both exist until the box is opened.

This thought experiment with its element of the absurd is rather similar to the case we have today of whether Osama Bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad or not, especially as the process by which this was ‘perceived’ by the outside world is so suspect. While some people believe the story, others subscribe to a growing number of conspiracy theories. Just like Schrödinger’s unobserved cat therefore, the murky news from Abbottabad is helping to generate alternative Bin Ladens – some walking around, some already long dead, some even chuckling away with their CIA controllers. Read more

Helmuth Nyborg on the Genetic Decline of Western Civilization: Denmark as a Case Study

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Prof. Helmuth Nyborg

The Danish psychologist Helmuth Nyborg has an academic paper soon to be published in Personality and Individual Differences (“The decay of Western Civilization: Double Relaxed Natural Selection“). Nyborg is well-known for his work showing a sex difference in IQ favoring males, a paper which resulted in an investigation of his work and a reprimand from his university. (Nyborg describes the “witch hunt” he endured  here.)

Nyborg’s latest paper charts past trends and projects IQ changes in Denmark as a result of two trends: relaxation of natural selection among the traditional Danes, and an influx of low-IQ immigrants. These two trends together amount to what he terms a “double relaxation of natural selection” (DRNS).

Relying on Richard Lynn’s work Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations, the relaxation of internal selection is thought to have begun around 1850 as the fertility of the lower classes exceeded the upper classes because of improvements in hygiene and reduction in diseases. He cites Lynn’s estimate that England lost 6.9 IQ points over 90 years (1920-2010) and estimates that Denmark’s average IQ dropped around 10 points since 1850 due to internal relaxation of natural selection. Read more