To Envision
We’re sorry for the mess. Our ambitious remodeling effort is nearly complete. Soon we’ll be able to sweep the dust and dirt out of the parlor and return some semblance of order to this nest of rats and shoddy alacrity.
Wild web master Paul Miller is poised to visit sheer impossibility on the emerging motif. We challenged this over-achiever to cap off his illustrious career with a crescendo of madness and disorder. To enhance his insanity Miller is currently engaged in being a Detroit Lions fan.
To envision what is coming soon to a black lagoon far away from you, we direct your attention to the Middle East, where both Israeli and Palestinian leaders remain incapable of finding any promising mix of agreement relative to the lingering issues that prevent peace from permeating the region they share.
Questions of legitimacy stifle progress. The rest of the world drifts around the ennui, perpetuated by stubborn partisans for sixty years … and counting.
America seeks to be even-handed in all of this, the same way Las Vegas makes sure you don’t win. Winks and nods fill the void left by failure to evolve such a critical discussion.
How about it, Israel? Since legitimacy seems to be the stumbling block to moving this gruesome stalemate off the mark, let’s start with you.
No one denies the Holocaust, no one with a working brain, that is. It occurred.
To envision the Holocaust as a construct set in place to set the stage for the displacement of Palestinian people is beyond any rational process of thought.
Holocaust is a given, a never-to-be-tolerated-again catastrophe casting a permanent stain on the legacy of the twentieth-century.
To envision the displacement of the Palestinian people as justifiable given the need for threatened religious sectarians to gain their own homeland is also out of the mental range of any cogent and cognizant seeker of objectivity, clarity and historic verity.
As proprietor of this site, my own lack of clarity on matters related to this epic showdown threatening the future of our species on our planet defines the direction of its content, senora.
Here are primary questions to visitors to this nuttier than heck cyber shadow:
We’re going to kick those questions around, elicit input, promulgate output, abolish oatmeal and accentuate the phlegmatic. We’re going to eat some thin-crusted pizza and see if we can’t help save the world, or at least some small segment thereof.
We, in this case, are the co-directors of this venture – Rabbi Allen P. Feldstein-Berg and Rev. Julie Delano Trout Sky. We have no idea why you’re here or if you’re you. All we know is not much at all. Our only objective is to keep the neighborhood beer store open. Do check back soon.
Paul Miller is web master and keeper of an immaculate driveway. Trout Pomeroy is on leave from the Copenhagen Poly-ethnic Chorale and struggles with stuttering.
Bernie Made Off
Bernie made off with a lot of people's money and futures. Still, and this is a big still, it is important to understand, he didn't mean to do it.
As a matter of celestial fact, there is a huge difference between action and intent. Just because you step on someone's foot doesn't necessarily mean you planned on doing so. The other person's foot may have just inadvertently ended up beneath your foot and the rest was just misery.
Bernie says he originally expected to conduct a legitimate investment business. Only when some measure of adversity intervened did he skimp on that commitment and embark on decades of deception. Last time I checked the other hockey player went flying into the boards. Bernie did not invent adversity nor is he currently responsible for the actions of the North Korean dictator ilk, like Rev. Moon and Rabbi Sun.
Everyone I know has been teeing off on Bernie and Frank Lee, it's beginning to remind me of the talk I had last night with Randy “Duke” Cunningham. Duke was recalling the time he accepted illegal kickbacks and sexual favors from defense contractors whose interests he advanced through his position as a congressman. He said it wasn't his fault God invented avarice. As a good listener and a fan of God, I told Duke even if he is full of shit he isn't so full of shit a little more shit can't fit into his giant frame, diminished now by a steady diet of processed meat sandwiches. Duke said, if he could get his hands on me he'd make me wish I'd never endured a hip transplant. To which I replied, “Randy, you cretin, I am too hip already.”
Being as tuned-in as I have become entails considerable verve not to mention spiritual ferocity. And when it comes to getting a handle why Bernie made off with so many people's bank accounts and futures, there are few observers in America with my capacity to grasp the big picture without losing sight of the small fixture.
“Unseasoned investigators from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) were alternately intimidated and enthralled by a name-dropping, yarn-spinning Bernard L Madoff as he dodged questions about his financial house of cards.”
Those are the words of reporter David Stout, who cited a new report on the agency's repeated failure to uncover the huge investment fraud that was noted in The New York Times. Investigators failed to follow incriminating evidence and were cowed by Madof's inflated reputation on Wall Street. SEC received at least six substantive complaints against Bernie, all of which were investigated. But the agency never verified Madoff's trading through a third party. When the enforcement staff received a report showing Madoff had no options positions on a certain date, the agency took no further action. Investigators actually earned high grades for their botched efforts and Madoff used SEC's inquiries as a selling point to reassure investors that the government had looked over his operations and found no problem.
For someone who had no intention of becoming a world-class, galactic presence in his field of misanthropic endeavor, Bernie had more gall than a hospital incinerator. His larger-than-life willingness to spin lies, steal from little old ladies and purposefully rip off even Jewish charitable institutions for God's sake ranks him as lower than turkey dung in the hierarchy of phlegm. This writer feels so superior to Bernie at this very minute this writer expects to in just a few moments indulge in a ritual of self-appreciation including but not limited to the consumption of a bottle of beer.
If Abraham is father, David is son and Saul detractor, color me offended, call me a cab and shiver me timbers, please.
Millions lost billions in the past few years, including this scribe who gained from his losses, took pride
in his capitulation to dog biscuits and found a home in the cyber swirl, where opinions mean less than food stamps.
Madoff's scheme collapsed last December. In June, he was sentenced to Forever in federal prison, where he remains the focus of the cumulative hate of the thousands of ruined investors and charitable organizations who entrusted in this unhealthy individual their belief and trust.
Private fraud investigator Harry Markopolus had been trying since 1999 to get the SEC's Boston office to investigate Madoff. SEC's inept failure to heed his complaints was inexplicable, while Stout reports that horrific ball dropping of sorts was attributable to the fact officials did not like Markopolis personally. Who would take exception to that? Likeable is everything in a world of subterfuge, exploitation, endless and abiding darkness and overall pity.
Madoff is/was a remarkable piece of work, a douche bag of the lowest caliber, a dirty hankie in a world of false linen and haute cousins. It is now said Bernie had/has/had a remarkable ability to conceal his conduct and communicate an image of integrity to the public. If this is true, and it is, I can only add, his charm was a byproduct of deep-seated psychological havoc in the personalities of both his maternal and paternal grandfathers, not to mention the entire UJA.
The SEC actually botched its first chance to figure out Bernie in 1992. Most believed Madoff's assertion that it was simply “gut feeling” that enabled him to earn clients inflated profits – ostensibly of course. Madoff even told friends that he might become SEC chairman. On top of that, I expect to win the next U.S. Open golf tournament to be held next year in a bomb shelter outside West Memphis.
Madoff's victims cite “consistent negligence” in the government's inability to detect and stop in its tracks Madoff's decades of client abuse. His misconduct is generally perceived as symbolic of an era of “I Got Mine” avarice and deceit in the financial marketplace, a time when official corruption and greed has been increasingly evident across the world with cynicism and despair gaining an unfortunate foothold in the human spirit.
In his jail cell in some forlorn corner of obscurity, Bernie, who made off with all the dough, now exists on poly-unsaturated cookie crumbs, compliments of Carl the Con who cooks all his carbohydrates. Bernie now tells the pigeons he does not give a flying fig about any else's cynicism and despair as long at his TV still works. Bernie tells anyone who won't listen he didn't do anything anyone else would not have themselves. No sir, not … if they'd had the chance to screw a few hundred thousand people; to destroy their lives; ruin their faith; sell out their dreams and forever eviscerate their capacity to awake in the morning with a song in their hearts.
Bernie made off with more than a bunch of loot – he stole the essence of life from everyone sufficiently naïve to buy into his unrealistically inflated promises. In doing so, he sealed his spot in the Mussolini Museum of Nauseatingly Awful Aberrant Souls, alongside the likes of Jack Ruby, Bull Connor and the entire Black Sox scandal.
Bernie didn't mean to do it. He just did it. There is a difference you know.
As the man said, there is no such thing as a bad cowboy; only a sick one.
Yes sir, pretty sick all right.