Monday, September 7, 2015

x - 30 Louis Sheehan 305

      Knapp also dug up a 1982 Los Alamos Monitor news article mentioning '(...)Lazar, a physicist at the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility(...).'


Bob Lazar runs United Nuclear, a scientific supply company based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. United Nuclear sells a variety of materials including radioactive ores, powerful magnets, scientific curiosities like aerogel, and a variety of lab chemicals. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com
 United Nuclear claims "over 300,000 satisfied customers," including law-enforcement agencies, schools, and amateur scientists.

United Nuclear's site also advertises a prototype kit for adapting normal road vehicles to run on hydrogen power. The company says the kits are on hold due to the actions of the Consumer Product Safety Commission.


Lazar and Gene Huff also run Desert Blast, an annual festival for "explodaholics" in the Nevada desert. Starting in 1987 (but only formally named in 1991, inspired by Desert Storm) the festival features home-made explosives, rockets, jet-powered vehicles, and other pyrotechnics, with the intention of emphasizing the fun aspect of physics.





A hair trail has now shed light on a two-centuries-old historical question.

Napoleon Bonaparte, the famous dictator of France, died in exile on the island of St. Helena in the southern Atlantic Ocean. While doctors at the time cited stomach cancer as the cause of death, some historians believe that arsenic did him in—high levels of the toxic substance were found in hair samples after he died. But not so fast, says a team of Italian scientists—the arsenic in Napoleon’s hair probably didn’t kill him.

The scientists took samples of Napoleon’s hair from the collections of museums in Rome, Paris, and Parma, Italy, which date from his boyhood, his first exile on Elba in 1814 and his death in 1821 . Upon putting the hairs into a nuclear reactor—radiation allows scientists to identify the elements present, and apparently doesn’t bother the hairs—the researchers found that Napoleon had consistent arsenic levels in his body his whole life, not just one spike in the end that doomed him. The levels are very high, but that makes sense—small doses of arsenic were used as a health tonic in Napoleon’s day, and medicines with tiny arsenic concentrations are still used today.

Hairs aren’t the only historical artifacts that have been brought into the Napoleon death foray. In 2005, scientists studied his pants, and found that the little corporal was even littler at his death, having dropped almost 5 inches on his waist, which the Swiss researchers said parallels the weight drop of modern stomach cancer patients.

So if the Italians are right, Napoleon’s original doctors have been vindicated. And they have his hair and trousers to thank.













Shaking a virus to death is not a new idea. Arizona State University physicist Kong-Thon Tsen, who pioneered the practice, conducted eight peer-reviewed studies in 2006 and 2007 demonstrating that vibrations can deactivate a number of viruses. But Tsen’s latest work may have found a way to destroy HIV, just by hitting the right note.

In much the same way that opera singers use sound waves to shatter glass, laser light has shown considerable potential for killing viruses such as the tobacco necrosis virus and M13 bacteriophages. Like a wineglass, a virus’s outer shell—known as a capsid—has an intrinsic frequency of vibration. Tsen uses a near-infrared laser to excite the target’s outer shell and spur vibrations powerful enough to rupture the capsid.

In March 2008, preliminary testing revealed that Tsen’s lasers were able to destroy HIV in test tubes. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com
For people with AIDS, Tsen’s antiviral attack could be more effective and safer than the current drug cocktails, which have a slew of side effects. In the next two or three years, Tsen hopes to test the technology’s effects on HIV in monkeys, zapping blood outside the body.

“When the blood is channeled outside the body in dialysis,” Tsen says, “the laser can be applied to inactivate the HIV, and the HIV-free blood can be circulated back to the body.” Blood cells would not be affected.

The findings have yet to be published, and final FDA approval could be more than a decade away. Still, Tsen believes his preliminary tests give hope that this technique could ultimately help destroy HIV and possibly prevent AIDS.








Sela Miller was perplexed—and so was I. She had just emerged from our clinic restroom, specimen in hand. But her urine was far from the bright yellow most people produce.

“So this is what it looks like,” she said, staring at the milky sample. “For weeks I thought something was wrong, but I couldn’t tell for sure.” Then Sela, a Polynesian woman with long, dark hair—the wife of a custom car builder and mother of several youngsters—gave a tiny shrug as if to say, Oh, well.

For a moment I remained quiet. Like Sela, I had never seen anything quite like the opalescent urine now sitting in a sterile screw-top jar on my desk.

Sometimes doctors are secretly grateful when patients underreact. Over my years of practice, specializing in tropical medicine, I had certainly seen patients at the other end of the spectrum. Creative people with fertile imaginations seemed especially prone to panic. Sela—her sci-fi urine notwithstanding—was different.

And so I focused on the job ahead. “I’ll walk this to the lab,” I said, holding the jar in one hand while reaching for a requisition slip with my other.

Examined under a microscope lens, the fluid teemed with microorganisms and both white and red blood cells. That gave me one diagnosis, anyway: In addition to strange, milky-white urine, my new patient had a routine bacterial infection. Back in the exam room, where she stood ready to leave, I quickly wrote a prescription for antibiotics.

A day later, Sela’s urine culture had grown a garden-variety strain of E. coli, the single most common cause of urinary tract infections the world over. Good, I thought. The sulfa drug would make quick work of that.

However, I had asked the lab to perform additional urine assays, including protein, cholesterol, and triglycerides.

“Wow!” the tech exclaimed. “Now here’s something we almost never see. Her sample is loaded with fat.”

That gave me a second diagnosis—of sorts. The finding suggested that my patient’s milky urine was not just infected but also laced with lipid-rich lymphatic fluid. In medical-ese, the condition is called chyluria. From a purely anatomic standpoint, chyluria represents a fistula, or microscopic leak, between lymphatic vessels and the kidney.

The fancy name still left unanswered the most important question: What underlying process had led to the breach in the first place? My patient was not likely to have kidney cancer or tuberculosis, two diseases that occasionally cause chyluria. Had some toxic chemical in her husband’s car barn silently damaged her kidneys? Or, as her primary-care doctor had casually asked when he referred her to me, was a parasite involved? If so, the likely culprit was Wuchereria bancrofti, a slender nematode transmitted by tropical mosquitoes. Adult worms of Wuchereria bancrofti are famous for damming up lymphatic vessels. If they settle near the kidneys, obstruction and backflow within the delicate lymph vessels nearby can, over time, cause ruptures and spills of lymphatic fluid into adjacent drainage structures of the human urinary tract.

Wuchereria bancrofti can inflict still more harm upon its human hosts. In some cases, the threadlike worms—which measure several inches in length when fully grown—damage even larger lymphatic channels. When this happens victims may eventually develop elephantiasis—grotesquely swollen limbs and genitalia encased in thick, pebbly skin.

Picture yourself in a mosquito-ridden enclave with an early case of elephantiasis in, say, a lower extremity. Over years, periodic nicks and cuts leading to superficial skin infections—the everyday stuff of tropical poverty—compound the internal lymphatic damage caused by the adult worms. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com
Meanwhile, tiny bloodborne larval offspring transmit the infection to new mosquitoes.

“Hey, aren’t you getting ahead of yourself?” I suddenly wondered. My patient was a middle-class housewife, not a tropical villager, and aside from chyluria she had no sign of damaged lymphatics. I wasn’t even sure if Wuchereria bancrofti existed in her Polynesian birthplace.

At her next appointment, Sela patiently answered my questions one by one. Yes, her husband used many paints and chemicals in his custom car business, but she was rarely at his shop. No, to her knowledge she had never been exposed to tuberculosis. As for encountering a tropical parasite, who knew? Until age 10, she had lived in the South Pacific, returning for periodic visits until she married.

When I pressed her for details about ailments where she grew up, she nodded. From her childhood she vaguely remembered stories of people with disfigured body parts. A woman with a leg as thick as a palm tree. A man whose massive, warty foot had required a homemade rubber sandal. An aged neighbor whose flapping cotton shorts were rumored to hide an unusually large scrotum.
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    Picture yourself in a mosquito-ridden enclave with an early case of elephantiasis.

Finally, she dropped the clue that cracked her case. A few years earlier, after Sela gave birth, a lab tech in another hospital had spied tiny larval worms in her blood. Sela then took a special drug whose name she could no longer recall. But that was long before the weird pee began, she quickly added.

I was dumbfounded. Had this bright, capable woman—juggling family, work, and other demands—simply forgotten her prior diagnosis? Failed to connect the dots between her earlier treatment and her new milky urine? Or, I wondered, briefly playing amateur psychologist, had she deliberately avoided the thought that she, too, might one day develop elephantiasis?

I never explored those questions. She’s just plain lucky that this is the only problem I found, I finally told myself, and decided to leave it at that.

My patient remained lucky. On the suspicion that she might still harbor live worms, I prescribed for her an old-fashioned medicine called diethylcarbamazine. Within a week or two, her abnormal urine abruptly stopped: Her hidden fistula had healed. Whether diethylcarbamazine or the earlier course of antibiotics was responsible, I’ll never know for sure. Chyluria resulting from progressive lymphatic damage can crop up well after an active filarial infection has burned out. In any event, I was relieved. If Sela had come to me with a more ominous harbinger of elephantiasis—say, a mildly swollen leg—it is doubtful that any drug would have reversed the problem.

Fast-forward five years. Once again Sela battled Los Angeles traffic and met me in the room where we had first stared at her milky urine. She couldn’t remember the last time she had seen a doctor. As we talked, she admitted that her calves sometimes hurt and her skin felt flaky and dry. These were normal complaints, it seemed to me, for a busy homemaker with little time to prop up her feet at the end of the day or pamper herself with lotion. Of course, just to make sure, I asked Sela if there had been any problems with her urine. Still yellow, she replied. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com


Again I wondered if Sela truly grasped the physical horror that might have befallen her. Then I thought: “Oh, heck, why add one more worry? Life already has more than enough.”



















The blame game for obesity (was it your parents or those cupcakes?) continues to escalate. Two recent studies—one in mice and another in humans—provide new evidence that a mind-numbingly complex array of genes influence body weight. By sampling fat tissue, one group of researchers found that the activity of 17,000 genes correlate with body mass index (a measure of body fat based on height and weight), and 14,900 correlate with waist-to-hip ratio. Complicating matters further, these genes seem to operate in large networks, interacting with each other and the environment to influence weight.

So should you blame genes—with labels like Lpl, Lactb, and Ppm1l—or fast food and failure to exercise for your weighty woes? The top researchers say they still don’t know.

Data from identical twins going back as far as the 1930s suggest that body weight is at least partly inherited, but only in recent years have scientists begun to appreciate the complexity of the genetic factors underlying obesity. Robert Kushner, a specialist in obesity medicine at Northwestern University, says that identifying the interacting genes will help screen those at risk, but far more research is needed before pharmaceutical interventions might emerge.

And even then, no one thinks that genetic testing or manipulation will ever lead to a catch-all cure. George Bray, who heads the clinical obesity and metabolism department at Louisiana State University, says environment and behavior—like lack of access to exercise facilities and overeating—so strongly affect gene activity that you cannot focus on one while ignoring the other. Both experts agree that addressing energy balance—the number of calories consumed versus the number used in physical activity—is a good starting point for anyone struggling with obesity. Research continues, but holding out for a miracle weight-loss drug is probably not the answer. As Kushner puts it, “a magic bullet is highly unlikely.”









If Machiavelli sat down at his iMac to confect "The Billionaire Prince," it might sound remarkably like Felix Dennis's "How to Get Rich" – without the poetry or the rollicking vulgarity, of course.


Bearded and blustery, Mr. Dennis is the English high-school dropout who parlayed a 1960s hippie magazine called Oz and wall-poster tributes to kung fu martyr Bruce Lee into a publishing empire of computer publications and beer-and-boobs lad mags like Maxim that has made him one of the richest men in Britain. He has, as he likes to remind readers, more money than he can possibly count – somewhere between $400 million and $900 million, "I honestly cannot fix a number any closer than that."

Mr. Dennis calls his effort "an anti-self-improvement" book, and he's telling the truth. "The chances of anyone reading it and then becoming rich are minuscule," he writes. His basic message is that only those able to turn themselves into monomaniacal workaholics estranged from loved ones and reviled by rivals – or willing to unsheathe their inner monster – can hope to hit the mega jackpot. "Somewhere in the invisible heart of all self-made wealthy men and women," he says, "is a sliver of razored ice."

He likes to boast about his hedonistic appetites. Counseling wannabe zillionaires to think big but "act small" – "Keeping a sense of proportion and humility" – he invokes his bad old days in the late 1980s and early 1990s: "I spent millions of dollars on drinking, taking drugs and running around with whores. . . . At one time, there were no less than fourteen 'mistresses' depending on a regular stipend from my personal bank account. A single evening's entertainment could come to thirty or forty thousand in the Big Apple, London or Hong Kong."

And he can be hilariously mordant about the magazine industry that made his fortune: "It is a business," he writes, "where our main activity is chopping down millions and millions of trees, flattening the pulp and printing hieroglyphics and images on both sides of it. Then we send the end product out in diesel-guzzling trucks to shops were perhaps 60 percent [about 25% in the U.S.] of them sell to customers. Then we pile the remaining unsold magazines into more diesel-guzzling trucks and take them to a plant where they are either consumed as fuel, buried or shredded or used to make cardboard boxes for refrigerators."

But beneath the braggadocio and buffoonery, Mr. Dennis's book is full of cold-hearted advice for succeeding in any field, some of it familiar, some quite sophisticated. He harps on the essential virtues of stamina, persistence and focus, and on the paramount importance of execution. http://louis1j1sheehan.us
"If you never have a great idea in your life, but become skilled in executing the great ideas of others," he says, "you can succeed beyond your wildest dreams." It's good to panic in a crisis, he says, because it focuses the mind on what has to be done. Grovel for capital if you need to but always remember: "No deal is a must-do deal."

Indeed, Mr. Dennis's don'ts are probably more useful than his do's. Never part with even a share of a business you founded, although partnerships in new ventures are acceptable because you can always walk away from them. Give generous bonuses to your employees, but don't let them share in the money from an asset sale. Don't hand out company credit cards, cellphones or cars – the expenses run riot. Never delegate authority to people just like you – find a complementary brain instead. Avoid venture capitalists with their mania for short-term results. Never loan money to friends – make it a gift. Never trust a senior accountant who won't take a vacation (because he is afraid that his thievery will be uncovered while he is away from the office). http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com


Close readers of "How to Get Rich" will find an opaque reference midway through to the author's determination "never to be sent back to prison." Later Mr. Dennis clarifies the story a tad – it was an obscenity case against Oz magazine. But you've got to look elsewhere for the details. In 1971, three editors of Oz, including Mr. Dennis, then 24, were found guilty of corrupting children and sentenced to hard labor at Wormwood Scrubs prison in west London. Mr. Dennis was given a lighter sentence than his confederates because the judge deemed him "very much less intelligent" than the other two and thus less responsible. As it happened, Mr. Dennis served only a few days before he was sprung. In early April, he created a small flap when he bragged in a Times of London interview that, about 25 years ago, he killed a man – who was harassing one of his woman friends, he said – by pushing him off a cliff. Mr. Dennis later called the reporter to say that it was the Chablis and his medicine talking.

Mr. Dennis's prose has its flaws. He seems to think, for example, that prevaricate is a synonym for procrastinate. He can contradict himself. "Lead. Do not be led," he exhorts on one page, but three pages later he hails the virtues of listening to staffers. And he can be comically unaware of his own predilections. "Watch out for blowhards," he warns. But no matter, his book is full of lively ideas and language to match – and, besides, his true writing interest these days is poetry. He has published a couple of volumes and even had his poems recited by members of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Based on the examples in "How to Get Rich," his verse will never be confused with that of his beloved Metaphysical Poets, but some of it is deft.

Another of his aesthetic preoccupations is the Forest of Dennis, an ambitious project to plant a huge tract in Warwickshire with saplings to create the largest deciduous forest in England – late but fitting atonement, perhaps, for all those trees that had to be sacrificed to make Felix Dennis rich.




The Los Angeles Times reported today that Judge Alex Kosinski, who's presiding over the Ira Isaacs obscenity trial, had a personal website on which he posted sexually explicit photos and videos.

Kosinzki, who is chief judge of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, said he was unaware that the public would be able to access the material. The site, http://alex.kosinski.com, has been taken down.

The site's content included a photo of naked women on all fours dressed to look like cows and another of a man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal. The judge conceded that some of the material was inappropriate but said that other parts were "funny."

Also posted were images of masturbation and public sex and a slide show of a striptease featuring a transsexual.

Kosinski, who is one of the country's highest ranking judges, said he used the site for his personal storage and wasn't aware the public could get access to it. He told a Times reporter that he didn't think any of the material posted would qualify as "obscene."

At issue is whether the judge should recuse himself from the Isaacs case. Kosinski said this afternoon that he was considering disqualifying himself.

"I didn't know about the [Times] story before the jury was sworn," Kosinski told reporters this afternoon in court. "I don't really have any comment on the story."
Attorney Roger Jon Diamond told the judge, "We would oppose disqualification."

Judge Kosinksi replied, " I hope to move forward, but I would understand if counsel objects."





A BBC documentary uncovers, for the first time, the original manuscript where Newton forecast the date of the end of the world.

Newton, the father of modern mathematics, dedicated a large part of his life to a quest to decode the Bible which he believed to be the word of God.

For over 50 years, he studied the Bible trying to unravel God's secret laws of the Universe.

He was fanatical in his quest to discover the date for the Second Coming of Christ and the end of the world.

Scholars have spent years trying to unravel Newton's writings on the Book of Revelation to establish when he thought the apocalypse was coming.

For the first time, Newton: The Dark Heretic reveals the date he forecast is within many people's lifetimes - 2060. http://louis1j1sheehan.us


The BBC was given rare access to Newton's original manuscripts in the Hebrew National Library in Jerusalem.

Buried in his papers, Dr Stephen Snobelen, from the University of King's College in Nova Scotia, found the original document where Newton had written down his prediction.

In 2060, Newton believed the dramatic events forecast in the apocalyptic Book of Revelation would occur: massive plagues and fires; the terrible battle of Armageddon between good and evil and the destruction and eternal damnation of the wicked.

Producer Malcolm Neaum says: "Newton prayed daily for the end of the world which he believed would herald the Second Coming of Christ. This would usher in the 1000 year rule of the Saints and Newton believed he would then take his place as Chief Saint."


Viktor Schauberger (30 June 1885 – 25 September 1958) was an Austrian forester/forest warden, naturalist, philosopher and inventor.

The inventor of what he called "implosion technology", Schauberger developed his own theories based on fluidic vortices and movement in nature. Very little of Schauberger's work has received mainstream acceptance, although his work is directly related to valid accepted mathematical principles and harmonics.


Viktor Schauberger was born in Holzschlag, Austria, to a long line of Austrian foresters. Creek and river flow fascinated him during his youth. He went on to develop a basic theory that contains a twofold movement principle for such phenomena.

His first idea was brought upon by trout. The fact that they could use so little force to go against the current invoked him to study the force that allowed such effortless motion. His study of trout concluded in the theory of natural vortexes.

Schauberger's second major theory was in the structure of water. He believed that water is at its densest when cold (and at the time of a full moon), and that there are many layers in the structure of flowing water. He claimed that nature creates vortexes to create equilibriums. He further claimed that our current form of energy production/consumption scatters matter into disequilibrium. His studies were not approved by science at the time, even when his ideas were put into practice.

In 1926, he undertook research at a timber flotation installation in Neuberg an der Mürz in Styria. In 1929 Schauberger submitted his first applications for patents in the fields of water engineering and turbine construction. He conducted research on how to artificially generate centripetal movement in various types of machines. He proposed a means of utilising hydroelectric power by a jet turbine. The log flumes used for timber flotation allegedly disregarded the Law of Archimedes, i.e., Schauberger was allegedly able to transport heavier-than-water objects by creating a centripetal movement (making the timber spin around its own axis, by special guiding-vanes which caused the water to spiral).


In 1934 Viktor was meeting with Hitler, and had discussions about fundamental principles of agriculture, forestry and water engineering. However, Schauberger refused to work for the German Reich.

In 1941, an intrigue caused by the Viennese Association of Engineers[citation needed] resulted in Schauberger's enforced confinement in a mental hospital in Mauer-Öhling, under continuous observation by the SS. In Augsburg, Schauberger worked with Messerschmidt on engine cooling systems and was in correspondence with designer Heinkel about aircraft engines.

In 1944, Schauberger continued to develop his Repulsine machine at the Technical College of Engineering at Rosenhügel in Vienna. By May 1945 a prototype had been constructed.

In 1945 Schauberger started to work on his "Klimator".

At the end of the war Schauberger was apprehended by US intelligence agents, and kept in custody for 9 months. They confiscated all his documents and prototypes, and interrogated him to determine his activities during the war.[1]

After the war Schauberger continued his work, leading to water-based power generation through vortex action in a closed cycle, the "Spiral Plough", an "Apparatus for soil cultivation made of copper", tests with "spiral pipes", and so on.


In 1958 Schauberger was approached by Karl Gerchsheimer and Robert Donner, with an invitation to come to the US to further develop his inventions. http://louis1j1sheehan.us


Schauberger spent several months in the US making drawings and reports, and then returned to Austria. He died in Linz, Austria, on September 25 1958.



Nazi UFOs (German: Rundflugzeug, Diskus, Haunebu, Hauneburg-Geräte, VRIL, Andromeda-Geräte, Flugkreisel or ironically Reichsflugscheiben) refers to claims about advanced aircraft or spacecraft Nazi Germany supposedly developed during World War II and which Nazi scientists continued to develop afterwards. References to such craft appear mostly in fiction, although some of these claims are said to be true.

These stories are often associated with esoteric Nazism, an ideology that supposes the possibility of Nazi restoration by supernatural or paranormal means.

These myths were likely inspired by historical German development of jet aircraft such as the Me 262, the Horten Ho 229 the guided missile V1 and the ballistic missile V2, which formed a basis for the early missile and space programs of both the Soviet Union and the United States.


Nazi UFO tales and myths conform largely to documented history on the following points:

    * Nazi Germany claimed the territory of New Swabia in Antarctica, sent an expedition there in 1938, and planned others.
    * Nazi Germany conducted research into advanced propulsion technology, including rocketry, Viktor Schauberger's turbine research, and the Arthur Sack A.S.6 experimental "flying disc".
    * Some UFO sightings during World War II, particularly those known as foo fighters, were thought to be enemy aircraft.


The earliest non-fiction assertions of Nazi flying saucers appear to be a series of articles by and about Italian turbine expert Giuseppe Belluzzo. The following week, German scientist Rudolph Schriever claimed to have developed flying saucers during the Nazi period.

Aeronautical engineer Roy Fedden remarked that the only craft that could approach the capabilities attributed to flying saucers were those being designed by the Germans towards the end of the war. Fedden also added that the Germans were working on a number of very unusual aeronautical projects, though he did not elaborate upon his statement.

Sir Roy Feddon, Chief of the Technical Mission to Germany for the Ministry of Aircraft Production, stated in 1945:
       I have seen enough of their designs and production plans to realise that if they (the Germans) had managed to prolong the war some months longer, we would have been confronted with a set of entirely new and deadly developments in air warfare.    

In 1956, Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, Chief of the US Air Force Project Bluebook, stated the following:
       When WWII ended, the Germans had several radical types of aircraft and guided missiles under development. The majority were in the most preliminary stages, but they were the only known craft that could even approach the performance of objects reported to UFO observers.        


A 1967 book by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier made many spectacular claims about the Vril Society of Berlin. Several later writers, including Jan van Helsing, Norbert-Jürgen Ratthofer, and Vladimir Terziski, have built on their work, connecting the Vril Society with UFOs. Among their claims, they write that the society had made contact with an alien race and dedicated itself to creating spacecraft to reach the aliens. In partnership with the Thule Society and the Nazi Party, it developed a series of flying disc prototypes. With the Nazi defeat, the society allegedly retreated to a base in Antarctica and vanished.

Terziski, a Bulgarian engineer who bills himself as president of the American Academy of Dissident Sciences, claims that the Germans collaborated in their advanced craft research with Axis powers Italy and Japan, and continued their space effort after the war from New Swabia. He writes that Germans landed on the Moon as early as 1942 and established an underground base there. When Russians and Americans secretly landeƒd on the moon in the 1950s, says Terziski, they stayed at this still-operating base. According to Terziski, "there is atmosphere, water and vegetation on the Moon," which NASA conceals to exclude the third world from moon exploration. http://louis1j1sheehan.us
Terziski has been accused of fabricating his video and photographic evidence.

When German Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel started Samisdat Publishers in the 1970s, he initially catered to the UFOlogy community, which was then at its peak of public acceptance. His main offerings were his own books claiming that flying saucers were Nazi secret weapons launched from an underground base in Antarctica, from which the Nazis hoped to conquer the world.  Zündel also sold (for $9999) seats on an exploration team to locate the polar entrance to the hollow earth. Some people who interviewed Zündel about this material claim that he privately admitted it was a deliberate hoax to build publicity for Samisdat, although he still defended it as late as 2002.


In 1978 Miguel Serrano, a Chilean diplomat and Nazi sympathizer, published The Golden Band, in which he claimed that Adolf Hitler was an avatar of Vishnu and was then communing with Hyperborean gods in an underground Antarctic base. Serrano predicted that Hitler would lead a fleet of UFOs from the base to establish the Fourth Reich.







































Secrecy has clouded “Sex and the City” since it was first announced. When would the film appear? Who would find a husband? Would one of the main characters die? If so, would she commit suicide by self-pity (a constant threat), or would a crocodile escape from the Bronx Zoo and wreak a flesh-ripping revenge for all those handbags? As the release date neared, the paranoia thickened; at the screening I attended, we were asked not only to surrender our cell phones but to march through a beeping security gate, as if boarding a plane to Tel Aviv. There was even a full-body pat-down, by far the biggest turn-on of the night. Not a drop of the forthcoming plot had been leaked in advance, but I took a wild guess. “Apparently,” I said to the woman behind me in line, “some of the girls have problems with their men, break up for a while, and then get back together again.” “Oh, my God!” she cried. “How do you know?”

What followed was not strictly a movie. It was more like a TV show on steroids. The televised episodes, which ran from 1998 to 2004, lasted for no more than half an hour each. So, spare a thought for the director of the film, Michael Patrick King, who also wrote the screenplay. Faced with the flimsiest of concepts, he had to take it by both ends and pull until he stretched it out to two and a quarter hours. Two and a quarter! When Garbo made “Anna Karenina,” in 1935, she got happy, unhappy, loved, left, and under the train in less than a hundred minutes, so how the hell are her successors supposed to fill the time?

To be fair, there are four of them—banded together, like hormonal hobbits, and all obsessed with a ring. As the story begins, two are married already. First, there is Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), who has a job, a child, and not enough sex with her husband, Steve (David Eigenberg), perhaps because he reminds her of Radar, from “M*A*S*H.” Then comes Charlotte (Kristin Davis), who is blissfully wedded to—well, what is she wedded to, exactly? He goes by the name of Harry (Evan Handler), but he’s a ringer for Dr. Evil, from the “Austin Powers” franchise, with all the evil sucked away; what remains is fey and shiny-headed, smiling sweetly about something known only to himself. For a movie about the need for real men—lusty, loyal, and loaded—this unusual earthling is truly a most peculiar advertisement for the gender. http://louis-j-sheehaN.NET




Next, we have Samantha (Kim Cattrall). Everyone has Samantha, or had her at some point; so she would like us to believe, and this is where the film of “Sex and the City” begins to part company with the original. The TV show was smart enough to trade on both the sentimentality and the shockability of its viewers, encouraging them to sigh at romantic satisfaction while snickering at the dirty talk that gave it spice. Behind it all, one caught a whiff of stale Puritanism: despite the women’s knowing bid for urbanity, there was an old-school, anti-sophisticated wish to put desire in its proper place, or, better still, to disperse it in a shared public giggle, for fear of where it might lead. Now the whiff has become a blast, and Samantha’s efforts to signal her appeal, which might have seemed languorous on the small screen, are blown up here into an embarrassing semaphore: thudding closeups of her slurping through a cocktail straw or swallowing a mouthful of guacamole. No self-respecting maker of soft erotica would countenance such shots, and, as for the matching dialogue (“Something just came up,” Samantha murmurs over the phone, as her boyfriend stands beside her in bulging briefs), it’s a straight lift from flaccid, mid-period James Bond. In a daring plot development, she buys a dog the size of a child’s slipper; the camera keeps cutting away to it, and guess what—the pooch screws, too! Mirth is unconfined.

I was never sure how funny the TV series was meant to be. It kept lapsing into a straight face, even a weepy one, as the characters’ contentment came under serious threat. This uncertainty survives into the movie, which made me laugh precisely once, as a magazine editor let fly with a Diane Arbus gag. It is no coincidence that she is played by Candice Bergen, who gets just the one scene, but who is nonetheless the only bona-fide movie star on show. http://louis-j-sheehan.com

You cannot simply shift a load of television actors onto a movie screen and expect them to command its greater expanse; only one in a thousand will be able to summon that mysterious confluence of presence and reserve on which stardom relies—the will both to offer oneself to the camera and yet to keep back the hidden, unguessable sources of that self. We should not be surprised, therefore, that Kim Cattrall’s come-ons wilt in the transition; but who would have guessed that Sarah Jessica Parker, a nimble performer who has had a career in movies aside from the TV show, should also seem diminished and ill at ease?

She plays Carrie, the writer whose voice-overs keep us up to speed with the doings of her friends, and with the reckless amassing of what she calls “the two Ls: labels and love.” Whether Carrie is able to acknowledge how tightly the two Ls lock together in her mind is another matter. Early in the film, she receives a proposal of marriage from her long-term boyfriend, Mr. Big (Chris Noth), and this triggers a Babylonian orgy of spending. In a montage of wedding-dress fittings, she honors “new friends like Vera Wang and Carolina Herrera and Christian Lacroix, Lanvin and Dior,” and so on; what I object to is not the name-dropping—think of it as a chick response to “American Psycho”—but the montage itself, which is shot in lazy veils of schmaltz. Compare the quick-change sequence in “Funny Face,” with Audrey Hepburn robed in one Givenchy masterpiece after another, and you sense not merely the greater snap in Stanley Donen’s direction (with more than a hand from Richard Avedon), and the hotter bloom of the coloring, but the way in which Hepburn herself outglows the frocks, with her smile and her imperious shout—“Take the picture, take the picture!” No thoroughbred was ever just a clotheshorse.

The women in “Sex and the City,” by that standard, are little better than also-rans, and their gallops of conspicuous consumption seem oddly joyless, as displacement activities tend to be. “When Samantha couldn’t get off, she got things,” Carrie says. Look at the beam in your own eye, sister. Mr. Big not only buys her a penthouse apartment (“I got it”), he offers to customize the space for her shoes and other fetishes. “I can build you a better closet,” he says, as if that were a binding condition of their sexual harmony: if he builds it, she will come. The creepiest aspect of this sequence was the sound that rose from the audience as he displayed the finished closet: gasps, fluttering moans, and, beside me, two women applauding. The tactic here is basically pornographic—arouse the viewer with image upon image of what lies just beyond her reach—and the film makes feeble attempts to rein it in. When the wedding hits a bump (look out for Kristin Davis screaming “No! No!” at Chris Noth like a ninth grader auditioning for “The Crucible”), and the bridegroom veers away, our heroine’s reaction to the split is typical: “How am I going to get my clothes?” What, honey, even the puffball skirt that you wear to the catwalk show—the one that makes you look like a giant inverted mushroom? That plea gets second prize for the most revealing line in the film, the winner being Miranda’s outburst as she hunts for an apartment in a mainly Chinese district: “White guy with a baby! Let’s follow him.” So that’s what drives these people: Aryan real estate.

At least, you could argue, Miranda has a job, as a lawyer. But the film pays it zero attention, and the other women expect her to drop it and fly to Mexico without demur. (And she does.) Worse still is the sneering cut as the scene shifts from Carrie, carefree and childless in the New York Public Library, to the face of Miranda’s young son, smeared with spaghetti sauce. In short, to anyone facing the quandaries of being a working mother, the movie sends a vicious memo: Don’t be a mother. And don’t work. Is this really where we have ended up—with this superannuated fantasy posing as a slice of modern life? On TV, “Sex and the City” was never as insulting as “Desperate Housewives,” which strikes me as catastrophically retrograde, but, almost sixty years after “All About Eve,” which also featured four major female roles, there is a deep sadness in the sight of Carrie and friends defining themselves not as Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, Celeste Holm, and Thelma Ritter did—by their talents, their hats, and the swordplay of their wits—but purely by their ability to snare and keep a man. Believe me, ladies, we’re not worth it. It’s true that Samantha finally disposes of one paramour, but only with a view to landing another, and her parting shot is a beauty: “I love you, but I love me more.” I have a terrible feeling that “Sex and the City” expects us not to disapprove of that line, or even to laugh at it, but to exclaim in unison, “You go, girl.” I walked into the theatre hoping for a nice evening and came out as a hard-line Marxist, my head a whirl of closets, delusions, and blunt-clawed cattiness. Louis Sheehan

All the film lacks is a subtitle: “The Lying, the Bitch, and the Wardrobe.”



Tug of war, which was yanked out of the Olympics in 1920, would like to get back in. The Tug of War International Federation acknowledges, however, that the sport falls on its face in the vital Olympic arena of mass exposure. "The biggest thing with tug of war is we don't get any television," says Glen Johnson, a construction worker in Orfordville, Wis., and the federation's secretary general.

You can't say that about ballroom dancing. Like tug of war, it's on the International Olympic Committee's 31-sport waiting list for a spot in the Summer Games. On the IOC's latest seven-sport short list, at least two -- golf and rugby -- get good play on TV. But for the world-wide mega-audiences that Olympic impresarios place high on their checklists, ballroom has outdone them both.

It's got a reality show.
See ballroom dancers Eugene Katsevman, Maria Manusova and their proteges in action. (June 6)

"Dancing With the Stars," a pastiche of samba, celebrity and melodrama, went world-wide in 2005, a year after the Olympics in Athens. Local versions now air in 25 countries -- from Estonia to India to Israel to South Africa. In the U.S., where the show's newest boldface champ is ex-Olympic figure skater Kristi Yamaguchi, 20 million people watch. In China, the first week's audience was 40 million.

To ballroom's promoters and to the show's producers, those numbers ought to convince the IOC that tango has as good a claim to Olympic status as beach volleyball, a recent addition with a similar emphasis on deep tans.

"We run a serious competition that has massively raised the profile of ballroom dancing and would make it a successful Olympic sport," says Paul Telegdy, the executive at BBC Worldwide America who introduced "Dancing with the Stars" to ABC.

"Ten years ago, the only people who would watch ballroom dancing were ladies over the age of 50," says Peter Pover, who heads the U.S. arm of ballroom's main amateur body, which now calls itself the International DanceSport Federation. "It's all been transformed by 'Dancing With the Stars.' "

So has ballroom's customary decorum. TV fame -- plus the idea of Olympic glory -- has ignited a feud between the amateur federation and ballroom's international organization of professional dancers. The professionals, who mount big for-profit competitions like England's famous Blackpool Dance Festival, worry that the Olympics will relegate their own events to ballroom's bush league. http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US




The spat has led to angry public exchanges and the rise of rival world championships. But aside from the chances of making or not making a lot of money, the quarrel comes down to differences over ballroom's true nature.

Is it an art, like ballet? A sport, like fencing? Or a contest, like hot-dog eating?
[Ballroom photo]
Barry Newman for the Wall Street Journal
Eugene Katsevman practicing part of his dance routine in a studio in Times Square, in New York City.

"It's competitive," Eugene Katsevman was saying not long ago, as he drove his SUV in New York City traffic. "But it's artistic."

From the back seat, Maria Manusova said, "And creative. But accidents happen. You crash into other couples."

"I guess we're dancers," said Mr. Katsevman.

"Or athletes," said Ms. Manusova.

Either way, they are good at it. Mr. Katsevman, 29 years old, and Ms. Manusova, 28 -- both born in Ukraine -- won the U.S. National Latin Championships 11 years in a row before turning pro this year. They were heading home, to Brooklyn, after an hour with an instructor in a Times Square studio, working through a dramatically physical pasodoble they planned to unreel in Blackpool.

Reality TV piles on publicity, they agreed, and the Olympics confers legitimacy. But neither quite addresses ballroom's essence, which seems to lie somewhere between bumper cars and choreography.

"That show isn't about dancing," said Mr. Katsevman, hunting for a parking place in Bensonhurst. Said Ms. Manusova, who weighs 100 pounds, "It's about diets. Always, 'Look how much weight I lost.' "

"The whole sports thing came from the DanceSport federation and the IOC," Mr. Katsevman said. He found a spot to park in front of a Turkish snack bar. "The word wasn't in our vocabulary before all that."

All that began in 1990, after the IOC rejected an application from what was then the International Council of Amateur Dancers. Mr. Pover, now 76, was a council officer. "What did we have to do to convince these Olympic people that we were a sport?" he says. "Well, the first thing was to call ourselves a sport."

So ballroom dancing was rechristened as "DanceSport." A video was made in Germany of splendidly fit dancers swimming laps. A split screen showed an 800-meter runner alongside a couple doing the quickstep. Then, a German researcher from the University of Freiberg performed tests demonstrating stress levels in the two events to be equal. "And our women do it backwards in high heels," says Mr. Pover.

DanceSport was a game without rules. It doesn't even have a set of tricks like figure skating. Couples moved with the music and tried catching the spirit of a dance. Judges watched and picked winners. Still, the federation got something down on paper -- including a code of ethics -- and in 1997, DanceSport achieved Olympic "recognition."

That put it in a class with bridge and bowling. DanceSport hired IMG, the sports marketer, to impress the IOC with TV deals in more countries. No luck. At the 2000 Sydney Olympics, hundreds of dancers did a samba with big kewpie dolls in the closing ceremony. Their reward was a joke about pulled hamstrings by a sportscaster on NBC.

Then reality TV struck. Revitalized, DanceSport now has branches in 90 countries and IOC affiliates in 65. In May, Mr. Pover got an invitation, his first, to visit the U.S. Olympic Committee in Colorado Springs. "I met all these people from hockey, swimming, curling," he says. "We instantly bonded. It was totally great."

The IOC itself, though, is sitting this one out. Its officials have nothing public to say about ballroom's aspirations. But 2012's Olympic calendar is already full, and the IOC drew up its short list of candidates for 2016 before "Dancing With the Stars" blasted off. So if DanceSport ever does ride the reality comet into the Games, it won't be for 12 years -- too late for Bensonhurst's Eugene and Maria. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire


After a Turkish meal in a neighborhood where Italians once discoed, they were in their own mirror-walled row-house studio, laying down the laws of cha-cha for two potential 2020 Olympians.

Armen Petrosyan, 17, from Armenia, and Nicole Pyatetskaya, 14, from Ukraine -- the 2008 U.S. National Youth Latin Champions -- took a break to think about it: Will they go to the Olympics?

"As soon as possible," young Armen said.

"Probably not," said Nicole. "All sports in the Olympics are different 

x - 31 Louis Sheehan

After more than 200 foreigners were kidnapped in the Delta in 2007, foreign oil companies pulled out their nonessential employees and increased security rather than rely on the undermanned Nigerian Navy. With foreign vessels no longer an easy target, pirates have been forced to look elsewhere for their victims.

They found them in the defenseless fishing trawlers that chug up and down the coastlines, never far enough from shore to be out of reach of the pirates’ gun-mounted speedboats.

The surge in deadly attacks on fishing crews caused the Nigerian Trawler Owners Association to call the fleets of its members, nearly 200 vessels, back to shore in February. That meant a work stoppage for an estimated 20,000 workers and the drying up of the bulk of the local fish market.

Although the domestic fish market accounts for just 20 percent of all the fish consumed in Nigeria, that percentage has steadily decreased over the past five years as a result of the rise in violence offshore, according to a 2007 study by the United States Department of Agriculture.

Comfort Ajayi, 50, a fish seller, works in a market in Lagos amid rows of empty tables. “These tables are usually completely full,” she said. “We’re only selling imported fish now. No local. It’s affecting us very much.”

After weeks of protests and negotiations, the Nigerian Navy assured fishing companies that their fleets would be protected. Boat owners warily sent their trawlers back out to sea. “There is no way that they can say security anywhere is 100 percent,” said Rear Adm. Ishaya Ibrahim. But he said the navy was doing its best to protect the fishermen. http://Louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us




“We beefed up the security accordingly to guarantee them free and peaceful fishing activities,” Admiral Ibrahim added.

But just days after the admiral’s promise, three trawlers were attacked.

The bulky fishing trawlers are no match for the speedboats and weapons that the pirates use. The pirates who attacked the Mareena took radar and sonar equipment, radios, cellphones, the crew’s money and mattresses and even their shoes and socks.

“How can we send them back out to sea when we can’t guarantee their safety?” said Paul Kirubakaran, manager of Seabless, one of the larger fishing companies operating in Nigeria.

Now many fishermen are wondering if it is worth going back out to sea. “I’m scared,” said Godwin, 34, a fisherman who gave only his first name. “I can’t sail, I’m afraid.”

“They are killing us,” he said. “I’ve been sailing 15 years and the pirate thing got worse last year. Before if they came, if you gave them fish or money, they will leave you. Now they’ll kill you. Before you go on a fishing vessel you have to think twice.”

Recently, another trawler was attacked in the Delta. Pirates fired at the boat and then robbed it. No casualties were reported.




Shamil U. Odamanov used to call his parents almost daily from Moscow, where he worked as a laborer after moving from his village in Russia’s North Caucasus region in search of a better job. Then, just over a year ago, the phone calls stopped.

Now, to the family’s horror, they think they know why. They have identified Mr. Odamanov, 24, as the man beheaded in a video of a double killing apparently carried out by members of a Russian neo-Nazi group last year.

“It’s not only that he’s similar, it is him, period,” Umakhan Odamanov, Mr. Odamanov’s father, said by telephone from his home in Dagestan, a Russian republic in the North Caucasus. The Odamanovs, who have lived in Dagestan for generations, are Kumyks, a tiny ethnic group native to the region. Investigators have said that Shamil Odamanov is probably one of the two victims in the video, dark-skinned men who appear kneeling below a Nazi flag before they are killed.

Though initially considered a fake, the video, which originally appeared on Russian ultra-nationalist Web sites in August, spread quickly across the Internet and was shown in edited versions on national television. It shoved the problem of violence against ethnic minorities into the foreground of national discourse, if only for a short time.

The police are investigating several individuals, some from nationalist groups, in connection with the killings, but no suspects have officially been identified, Vladimir I. Markin, the spokesman for the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor General’s Office, said in an interview.

In February, a court found Viktor Milkov, a student from Adygei, in southern Russia, guilty of helping to circulate the video and sentenced him to a year in prison. He claims an unknown person e-mailed the video to him.

The police have not yet found the victims’ bodies, Mr. Markin said, nor have they identified where the murders took place.

Attacks against ethnic minorities in Russia have steadily increased over the last several years, as more and more immigrants from abroad or from Russia’s poorer ethnic enclaves have moved into large urban centers in search of work.

Mr. Odamanov was among them. He left his home village of Sultanyangiyurt in Dagestan about two years ago and moved to Moscow to look for a job “and possibly a bride,” his father said.

In his regular calls home, he frequently complained about run-ins with skinheads, who sometimes stalk the low-income residential areas around Moscow, harassing dark-skinned people.

In late March 2007 Mr. Odamanov called “to wish me a happy birthday,” his father said. “That was the last time I heard from him.”

The next time he saw his son was in the video. He was tied, kneeling next to another man and wearing the black Adidas jacket and shirt given to him by his brother, Artur, Mr. Odamanov said.

Set against a soundtrack of heavy metal music, the video opens with the title “Operation of the National-Socialist Party of Russia to Arrest and Execute Two Colonists From Dagestan and Tajikistan.” There are initially shots of the countryside that investigators now believe is somewhere in the Kaluzhkaya region, about 120 miles southwest of Moscow.

“We were arrested by National-Socialists,” the two bound men mumble through their gags. Louis J. Sheehan


In the next scene, one of the captors, in camouflage and wearing heavy black gloves, yells, “Glory to Russia!” then plunges what looks like a large knife into the neck of the man thought to be Mr. Odamanov. He is decapitated in seconds.

Then the second man, whom the police have not identified, is shot in the head and crumples face first into a shallow grave. In the final scene, two men in camouflage, wearing black masks, give Nazi salutes.

There were about 600 violent racist attacks, including 80 murders, reported in Russia in 2007, according to the Sova center, an organization that monitors hate crimes in Russia. The number of attacks this year reached 232 as of June 1, 57 of which were murders.

Human rights groups have often accused officials of ignoring the problem of racist violence in Russia, though, in Moscow at least, a recent spike in murders of dark-skinned people has prompted a noticeable response among law enforcement agencies.

“Moscow prosecutors have definitely started to more actively engage this problem, beginning from last year,” said Aleksandr Verkhovsky, the director of the Sova center.

The Interior Ministry announced last week that the police had arrested more than 50 people this year who were thought to be involved in xenophobic attacks in Moscow and St. Petersburg, the cities with the highest levels of racist violence.

Still, the number of attacks nationwide continues to grow steadily by about 15 to 20 percent each year, as it has for about the last five years, Mr. Verkhovsky said. Moreover, he said, the percentage of murders is growing as teenagers involved in violent nationalist groups grow into adults.

“They simply take their affairs more seriously,” he said.


Some shark populations in the Mediterranean Sea have completely collapsed, according to a new study, with numbers of five species declining by more than 96 percent over the past two centuries.

“This loss of top predators could hold serious implications for the entire marine ecosystem, greatly affecting food webs throughout this region,” said the lead author of the study, Francesco Ferretti, a doctoral student in marine biology at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia.

Particularly troubling, the researchers said, were patterns indicating a lack of females of breeding age, which are essential if populations are to recover even with new conservation measures.

“Because sharks are long-lived and slow to mature, they need fully grown females to keep their populations reproductively healthy,” said Heike K. Lotze, a study author who is at Dalhousie.

The study is scheduled for publication in the journal Conservation Biology and was posted on Wednesday at lenfestocean.org by the Lenfest Ocean Program, a private group in Washington that paid for the research.

The study focused on five species for which there were sufficient records to chart a long-term trend — hammerhead, blue and thresher sharks and two types of mackerel sharks. The Mediterranean is home to some 47 shark species, and similar declines are presumed to have occurred in many of them.

Sharks take years to reach sexual maturity and, unlike most other fishes, produce small numbers of young, making them particularly vulnerable to overfishing. Populations have declined worldwide, but experts say the Mediterranean — bordered by many countries with diverse rules and fished intensively for centuries — has had bigger losses of sharks and other large predatory fish, including tuna.

The region’s long-term decline was revealed by sifting decades of catch records and other scattered sources of data, which showed that over time the Mediterranean ecosystem had been utterly transformed. With top-tier predators removed, the populations of other fish and invertebrates have shifted drastically.

In November, the International Union for Conservation of Nature warned that more than 40 percent of shark and ray species in the Mediterranean were threatened with extinction because of intense fishing pressure.


Nietzsche said that if a human being put his ear to the heart chamber of the world and heard the roar of existence, the “innumerable shouts of pleasure and woe,” he would surely break into pieces. But a newspaper, pumping its inky current of despair, might serve as well. On a single day, Thursday, May 15th, the Times contained the following. The lead article was about the earthquake in China, now estimated to have killed more than fifty thousand people. It was titled “Tiny Bodies in a Morgue, and Unspeakable Grief in China,” and was accompanied by a photograph of two parents sitting next to their dead child. A story about the recent cyclone in Myanmar estimated the number of deaths at anywhere between 68,833 and 127,990. The journalist mentioned a man named Zaw Ayea, twenty-seven, who found his sister’s body; his mother and two younger brothers are missing. He cannot speak: “He stares straight ahead with a strangely placid expression on his face. His friends say he has been in shock since the cyclone.”

And the minor stories, on this day? At least ten people killed in a bomb attack west of Baghdad, in Abu Ghraib; a policeman killed in a bomb attack in northern Spain (probably ETA terrorists); a possible missile strike on a Pakistani border village that killed about a dozen people (this may well have been the work of an American drone); and a piece about a radical Islamic cleric, resident in Italy but “transferred,” perhaps thanks to American help, by the process of “extraordinary rendition,” to a jail in Egypt, where he was allegedly tortured. His wife told an Italian court, “He was tied up like he was being crucified. He was beat up, especially around his ears. He was subjected to electroshocks to many body parts.”

A large proportion of life involves our refusing to put our ear to the mundane heart chamber, lest we die from hearing “the roar which lies on the other side of silence.” It is considered almost gauche to wave the flag of general suffering in other people’s faces, as Dostoyevsky does repeatedly in his novels, most famously in “The Brothers Karamazov,” when the rebellious Ivan confronts his pious brother Alyosha with a list of degradations, some of which Dostoyevsky had got from real accounts—Turkish soldiers tossing babies on their bayonets in front of the mothers, parents punishing their five-year-old girl for wetting her bed by locking her all night in a freezing outhouse and smearing her face with excrement. http://louis-j-sheehan.com




For the lucky few, there is reason to hope that life will be a business of evenly rationed suffering: stern parents perhaps, a few humiliations at school, then a love affair or two gone wrong, maybe a marriage broken. Our parents will die, and farther off, ideally deferred, will come our own steady demise. Plenty of suffering for a life, certainly, but most of us subsist on the plausible expectation that fortune will draw a circle around that personal portion, and that the truly unbearable—murder, rape, dead children, torture, war—will remain outside the cordon. Norman Rush, in his novel “Mortals,” calls this “hellmouth”: “the opening up of the mouth of hell right in front of you, without warning, through no fault of your own.” Without warning, and yet always feared. Job, whom God places into hellmouth to test him, knew that paradox: “For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me.”

Theologians and philosophers talk about “the problem of evil,” and the hygienic phrase itself bespeaks a certain distance from extreme suffering, the view from a life inside the charmed circle. They mean the classic difficulty of how we justify the existence of suffering and iniquity with belief in a God who created us, who loves us, and who providentially manages the world. The term for this justification is “theodicy,” which nowadays seems a very old-fashioned exercise in turning around and around the stripped screw of theological scholastics. Still, if polls are correct, about eighty per cent of Americans ought to be engaged in such antiquarianism. Union University, in Jackson, Tennessee, might profit from intense classes in theodicy. “God protected this campus,” one of the students there said, because no one was killed in the tornadoes that devastated parts of Tennessee on February 5th. Since ordinary Tennesseans were killed elsewhere that night, the logic of such shamanism is that God either did not or could not protect those unfortunates from something that the state’s governor once likened to “the wrath of God.”

Antique and abstract it may be, but thinking about theodicy still has the power to change lives. I know this, because it was how I began to separate myself from the somewhat austere Christian environment I grew up in. I remember the day, in my late teens, when I drew a line down the middle of a piece of paper, on one side of which I wrote my reasons for belief in God, on the other my reasons against. I can’t remember the order of my negatives now, but the inefficacy of prayer was likely at the top. Here was a demonstrable case of promises made (if you have faith, you can move a mountain) but not kept (the mountain not only stays put but suddenly erupts and consumes a few villages). During my teens, two members of my parents’ congregation died of cancer, despite all the prayers offered up on their behalf. When I looked at the congregants kneeling on cushions, their heads bent to touch the wooden pews, it seemed to me as if they were literally butting their heads against a palpable impossibility. And this was years before I discovered Samuel Butler’s image for the inutility of prayer in his novel “The Way of All Flesh”—the bee that has strayed into a drawing room and is buzzing against the wallpaper, trying to extract nectar from one of the painted roses.

Theodicy, or, rather, its failure, was the other major entry on my debit side. I was trapped within the age-old conundrum: the world is full of pain and wickedness; God may be jealous but is also merciful and all-loving (how much more so, if one believes that Christ incarnated him). If he has the power to alleviate this suffering but does not, he is cruel; if he cannot, he is weak. I wasn’t consoled by the standard responses. Suffering is a mystery, I was told, as is God’s absence in the face of suffering. But this was what I was also told when prayers failed to make their mark: the old “incomprehensibility” routine. It seemed to me that the Gospels, central to my family life, made some fairly specific promises and laid on us some fairly specific obligations; yet that specificity could simply go on holiday whenever God himself seemed to have gone on holiday. (“God moves in mysterious ways.”)

God “suffers with us,” I was told; he feels our pain. If Christ was God incarnate, then God suffered on the Cross. He walks with us in our suffering. This has been the great twentieth-century addition to the familiar arguments, which is perhaps unsurprising, amid so much carnage. The Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Zizek argues, in his book “On Belief,” that when God abandoned Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane he abandoned himself. Christianity, he asserts, returns at this moment to the story of Job, the man abandoned by God: “It is Christ (God) himself who has to occupy the place of Job. . . . Man’s existence is living proof of God’s self-limitation.” A God whose power has been so drastically limited, and who sounds so like us in our abjection, might be loved, but why should he be worshipped? Twenty-five years ago, as I hunched over my piece of paper with its vertical line, I decided that if God existed, which I strongly doubted, then this entity was neither describable nor cherishable but was a vaporous, quite possibly malign force at the horizon of the sayable.

Another attempted consolation is that God intended us to have free will, and free will requires the liberty to do bad as well as good. If we were unable to err, our relation to God would be robotic, meaningless in its hapless obedience. It is regrettable that Hitlers are allowed to exist; but universal freedom is a higher good than the release from local pain. This is still the best available response to the theodicy problem. But even at sixteen I could see an enormous, iridescent flaw in this colorless argument: it is that the Bible is full of divine intervention, full of infringements of free will. God hardens Pharaoh’s heart, and brings plagues, and spares the firstborn of the Israelites (while conveniently murdering the Egyptians’), and, if you accept the New Testament, anoints his son as a sacrificial lamb for the sins of the world. We pray to him precisely because we believe in the power of such intervention. But when we actually need his intervention—say, to put a stop to a few concentration camps—he has . . . gone on holiday again, leaving people to drone on about the paramount importance of unmolested “free will.”

They were at it again when the tsunami killed hundreds of thousands in 2004. The Archbishop of Canterbury, a distinguished theologian, wrote an article at the time, reminding his Anglican communion that such tragedies challenge faith. But then he circled around a kind of physicist’s version of the free-will argument when he cautioned that “the world has to have a regular order and pattern of its own. . . . So there is something odd about expecting that God will constantly step in if things are getting dangerous.” Well, there would be something odd if you had never read the Bible. But one of the repeated indices of God’s power, as invoked in many of the Psalms, is his ability to control the waves—after all, the Psalmist knew that a great flood had consumed the world, at God’s command, and that the Red Sea had been divinely parted. How dangerous would things have to get before divine intervention was justified? To this, the Gospels can reply succinctly: not very. For when the disciples were out on the Sea of Galilee, and things took a stormy turn, Jesus appeared, walked on water, and calmed the storm. Perhaps the disciples just meant more to Jesus than a few hundred thousand Asians.

There is something adolescent about such complaint; I can hear it like a boy’s breaking voice in my own prose. For anti-theodicy is permanent rebellion. It is not quite atheism but wounded theism, condemned to argue ceaselessly against a God it is supposed not to believe in. Bart D. Ehrman’s new book, “God’s Problem” (HarperOne; $25.95), is highly adolescent in tone. Its jabbing subtitle, “How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer,” sounds as if it should be furiously triple-underlined on the dust jacket. Ehrman has been the favorite academic of the new wave of atheism since his book “Misquoting Jesus” (2005) became an unlikely best-seller. He is a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, and is obviously a fine teacher, because his books are naturally pedagogic. “Misquoting Jesus” is a lucid, painstaking introduction to the unreliability of the Bible as a text, especially the New Testament. It summarizes the scholarly consensus on passages like Jesus’ defense of the adulteress, when Christ asked those without sin to cast the first stone at her. Ehrman argues, along with most recent scholars, that this story is almost certainly not original to John’s Gospel but “probably a well-known story circulating in the oral tradition about Jesus, which at some point was added in the margin of a manuscript.” It is not found in the oldest manuscripts of John, and is written in a different style from the rest of the Gospel. Louis Sheehan

What warmed up Ehrman’s reputation on the New Atheists’ circuit, though, was probably not so much his diligent textual labors as what he revealed in the book’s introduction. Readers learned that he had been reared in a conservative family in Kansas, was “born again” in high school, attended the fundamentalist Moody Bible Institute, in Chicago, and then Wheaton College, Billy Graham’s alma mater. When he was at Princeton Theological Seminary, prolonged reflection on the textual status of the Gospels began to weaken his religious certitude. But, in coyly declaring that the book was “the end result of a long journey,” he left readers to reach their own conclusions about his ultimate destination. In his new work, there is no such reticence. “I no longer go to church, no longer believe, no longer consider myself a Christian,” he announces on the third page. “The subject of this book is the reason why.” In a nutshell: “I could no longer explain how there can be a good and all-powerful God actively involved with this world, given the state of things. . . . The problem of suffering became for me the problem of faith.”

If he no longer believes, of course, suffering should not be a theological “problem.” But the rebel is stuck, as Dostoyevsky knew well, in an aggrieved nostalgia for belief. For the believer, theodicy is merely “the problem of evil”; for the rebel, theodicy is also “the problem of theodicy,” and protest, even rage, is the loudest tone. Throughout the book, Ehrman recounts gigantic tragedies—the influenza epidemic of 1918, the Second World War, the Holocaust, the killing fields of Cambodia, the five people who die of malaria every minute—and then bawls in horror and hatred: “How could God allow it to happen? . . . How could God allow this to happen to anyone, let alone his ‘chosen people’?” Later: “It is hard to believe that God inflicts people with cancer, flu, or AIDS in order to make sure they praise him to the end. Praise him for what? Mutilation and torture? For his great power to inflict pain and misery on innocent people? . . . What kind of God is this?”

This full-throated anger is very far from the sterile laboratories of the professional theodicists, where white-coated philosophers quite often crush suffering down to the logician’s granules of P and Q . (“Let P be the proposition that God is benevolent, and let Q be the existence of what Levinas calls useless suffering.”) But this entrapped invocation of a God who is not believed in but is nonetheless despised is what gives the book a rough power. Ehrman rightly dislikes the philosophers of theodicy, calling their work obtuse and disconnected from life, but he also, in a revealing moment, distinguishes himself from “recent agnostic or atheist authors.” Unlike them, he says, “I do not think that every reasonable and reasonably intelligent person will in the end come to see things my way when it comes to the important issues in life.” He is too polite to say it, but one of the weaknesses of otherwise useful atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris is that, lacking nostalgia for lost belief, they also lack the power to imagine why anyone would ever have professed it.

Awash in negative belief, Ehrman unabashedly fights his God, and wants to discover what the Bible has to say about suffering. He is a lucid expositor, the weaknesses of his book being the aural clatter of the lecture room (“Still, most Jews didn’t buy it, and this was a major source of pain to Paul”) and its limited perspective. He seldom connects Biblical passages with the larger philosophical or literary traditions. You will find no Pierre Bayle or Rousseau or Schopenhauer here, and no Milton, or Hardy, or Camus. The early Church Fathers are hardly mentioned. There is almost a sense that Ehrman, fearing scholasticism, does not want to get sucked into the philosophical history of theodicy. It is also true that, as Ehrman says, theodicy as such does not exist in the Bible. Nowadays, theodicy always has a wary eye on the theological exit: this makes no sense, therefore I will have to reject the idea of God. But there was no such exit before about 1700, at the very earliest. “Ancient Jews and Christians never questioned whether God existed,” Ehrman notes. “What they wanted to know was how to understand God and how to relate to him, given the state of the world.”

So Ehrman concentrates on what you could call the first responders to hellmouth—the Prophets, the Psalmists, the Apocalypticists—and he is often illuminating. He separates three large strands in the Biblical writings: the idea that suffering is a punishment for sinful behavior; the idea that suffering is either ultimately redemptive or some kind of test of virtue; and the idea that God will finally vanquish evil and establish his kingdom of peace and harmony. We are probably most familiar with suffering as punishment, since it runs throughout the Hebrew Bible. Creation almost begins with a curse, God’s determination that women will give birth in pain as a result of Eve’s disobedience. The earth is then quickly condemned to the Flood, because God is unhappy with his sinful creation, and wants to start over again—what the English comedian Eddie Izzard calls the Etch A Sketch approach. (Izzard, whose standup routines often circle around religion, is very funny, also, about the unjust deaths of all those animals. What would constitute, say, a wicked giraffe? “I will eat all the leaves on this tree. I will eat more leaves than I should and then other giraffes may die.”) The Israelites, of course, are alternately rescued and abandoned by their jealous God, depending on the quality of their disobedience. And the Prophets majestically harp on punishment as a consequence of sinfulness—the oppression of the poor, sexual deviance (Amos), worship of false gods and idols (Hosea). Military defeat, captivity, and exile are the retributions for this alleged errancy.

This strain may be the least fashionable of all Biblical responses to suffering, except among evangelicals like Pat Robertson, who seemed perfectly happy to ascribe Ariel Sharon’s stroke to his surrender of Gaza to the Palestinians. But it widely persists in a slightly transferred form, as Ehrman points out. Judaism was a religion of sacrifice, in which the proffered gifts were seen as an atonement for sin. Punishment is bought off, effectively, by the garnishing of one’s wages. “Because sin brings horrible judgment in the manifestation of God’s wrath, this wrath needs to be averted,” Ehrman writes. “It is averted by the proper sacrifice of an animal.” It is not entirely clear how this atonement worked. “Whatever the answer to the question of mechanics, the Israelite temple cult was focused on sacrifice as a way of restoring a lost relationship with God, broken by disobedience.” Eventually, this religion of atonement would offer the very largest sacrificial lamb, God’s own son, as a scapegoat for the sins of the world. As Ehrman puts it, “a relatively simple formula” undergirds Paul’s salvationism: “sin leads to punishment; Christ took the punishment upon himself; therefore, Christ’s death can atone for the sins of others.” Ehrman might have added that Kierkegaard has it right when, in “The Sickness Unto Death,” he gloomily writes that Christianity “begins with the doctrine of sin.”

The second major Biblical response is the notion of suffering as a test or something otherwise improving. Ehrman mentions that when Joseph, after his travails in Egypt, finally is confronted by his traitorous brothers he rather piously tells them, “Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today.” Abraham was tested by God when he was commanded to kill his son Isaac, and Job, after a period of affliction and loss, was restored to health and prosperity as a reward for his righteousness. Isaiah speaks of “the servant of the Lord,” whose suffering will heal the nation of Israel. Once again, it is Christianity that greedily fattens itself on the scattered suggestions of the Hebrew Bible, reading Isaiah’s suffering servant as nothing less than the suffering Messiah, and turning Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac into a harbinger of God’s completed sacrifice of Jesus. (The libretto for Handel’s Messiah may represent the purest form of this Christian overreading.) For Paul, in Romans 5:3-4, “Tribulation worketh patience; And patience, experience; and experience, hope.”

It is now widespread, this rather repellent idea that suffering is dimly watermarked by redemption; that behind our pain lies His plan. (Most monstrously, a televangelist named John C. Hagee has argued that the Holocaust was God’s way of achieving the greater good of allowing the Jews to reclaim Israel.) The believer talks about providence; the secularist about how clouds have silver linings. The dazed survivor of an accident tells the TV crews that he thinks God has something special in mind for him. Newspapers run pieces about how estranged relatives were at last brought together by tragedy. Simone Weil, in her essay on affliction, says that pain is like the moment when an apprentice hurts himself for the first time on the job; at such moments workers say, “It is the trade entering his body.” Affliction, she implies, similarly trains us. If so, it also kills us, as it killed her. And, theologically, one has to remember that all this apparently useful suffering is supposedly taking place under God’s watch. In the seventeenth century, Pierre Bayle likened this godly surveillance to a father who lets his son break his leg just so that he can show off his skill by mending it. http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US



Ehrman is bluntly commonsensical: “The reality is that most suffering is not positive, does not have a silver lining, is not good for the body or soul, and leads to wretched and miserable, not positive, outcomes.”

In the Biblical world, God did not simply gaze—our modern diminishment of him—but also acted. Ehrman’s third category of response to suffering concerns the apocalyptic and messianic certainty that God was involved in an epic battle with evil which he would eventually win, allowing the final establishment of his Kingdom. Deftly summarizing the current scholarly conclusions, Ehrman sees the apocalyptic strain in Biblical Judaism (as in, say, the Book of Daniel) as a response to different foreign oppressions in the second century B.C.E., and again in the first century B.C.E. The greatest Jewish apocalyptic, Jesus, seems to have believed in the imminent arrival of God’s Kingdom—not up in Heaven but here on earth. Ehrman remarks that the inversions of the beatitudes (the poor shall inherit the earth, and so on) make sense because it is the poor and the lowly who will be rewarded in this approaching utopia. Paul, too, believed in this fearful imminence, though one notes that already, less than a hundred years after Jesus’ death, this Kingdom is half-etherealized: for Paul, it is above, not here on earth. Eternal life is now in Heaven, secure for those who have faith in Christ.

Heaven, one of the tenderest verses in the Bible has it, is where God will wipe away all tears from our faces. In her novel “Gilead,” Marilynne Robinson adds, in a line just as tender, if a little sterner, “It takes nothing from the loveliness of the verse to say that is exactly what will be required.” Robinson, herself a devout Protestant, means that the immense surge of human suffering in the world will need, and deserves, a great deal of heavenly love and repair; it is as close as her novel comes to righteous complaint. But one could also say, more skeptically, that Christianity needs the concept of Heaven simply to make sense of all the world’s suffering—that, theologically speaking, Heaven is “exactly what will be required.” In the end, Heaven, it seems, is the only tenable response to the problem of evil. It is where God’s mysterious plan will be revealed; it is where the poor and the downtrodden, the sick and the tortured, will be healed; it is where everything that we went through on earth will suddenly seem “worth it.”

But Heaven is also a problem for theodicists who take the freedom to choose between good and evil as paramount. For Heaven must be a place where either our freedom to sin has been abolished or we have been so transfigured that we no longer want to sin: in Heaven, our will miraculously coincides with God’s will. And here the free-will defense unravels, and is unravelled by the very idea of Heaven. If Heaven obviates the great human freedom to sin, why was it ever such a momentous ideal on earth, “worth” all that pain and suffering?

The difficulty can be recast in terms of the continuity of the self. If we will be so differently constituted in Heaven as to be strangers to sin, then no meaningful connection will exist between the person who suffers here and the exalted soul who will enjoy the great system of rewards and promises and tears wiped from faces: our faces there will not be the faces we have here. And, if there were to be real continuity between our earthly selves and our heavenly ones, then Heaven might dangerously begin to resemble earth. This idea haunted Dostoyevsky, who wrote a chilling fable about it called “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” in which the protagonist, on the verge of suicide, has a dream in which he has died and ended up on a pristine Greek island, a heavenly utopia where there is no sin. Then this man tells his first lie, and eventually utopia is corrupted: Heaven is just Eden all over again, and man is busy wrecking it.

“Come quickly, Lord” is the great refrain of both the Old Testament and the New. But the problem for Jews is that the Messiah never came, and everything stayed the same (or got worse), while the problem for Christians is that the Messiah did come, and everything stayed the same (or got worse). Jews and Christians are dependent, in different ways, on an always deferred Second Coming. Heaven—because it comes next and is not now—is, as so often in religious thought, a solution that merely creates another problem. If God supposedly wipes away all tears from our faces in Heaven, why does he not do it now? Why does God not now establish paradise on earth, as the Jehovah’s Witnesses believe he will do? And what is the purpose of these eighty or so years we spend on earth not having the tears wiped from our faces?















Pound turns up five times in Peter Gay’s big survey of the modern movement in literature and the arts, “Modernism: The Lure of Heresy”—once in connection with T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (which Pound edited), once as the author of an anti-Semitic sentiment (one of many), and three times as the originator of the slogan “Make It New” (which suits the theme of Gay’s account). Pound’s poetry and criticism are not discussed; no reader of Gay’s book would have any idea of what his importance or influence as a writer might be. Gay’s is a commodious volume with a long reach, “From Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond”; still, a handful of passing references seems a sharp decline in market value for a writer who was once the hero of a book called “The Pound Era.”

Pound’s aspirations for literature were grand. He believed that bad writing destroyed civilizations and that good writing could save them, and although he was an élitist about what counted as art and who mattered as an artist, he thought that literature could enhance the appreciation of life for everyone. He was vain and idiosyncratic, but he had no wish to be a prima donna. No doubt Eliot, James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, H.D., Ernest Hemingway, Ford Madox Ford, and Marianne Moore would have produced interesting and innovative work whether they had known Pound or not, but Pound’s attention and interventions helped their writing and sped their careers. He edited them, reviewed them, got them published in magazines he was associated with, and included them in anthologies he compiled; he introduced them to editors, to publishers, and to patrons; he gave them the benefit of his time, his learning, his money, and his old clothes. “A miracle of ebulliency, gusto, and help,” Joyce called him. It’s true that he was flamboyant, immodest, opinionated, tactless, a pinwheel of affectation; he made people crazy and he became crazy himself. Gertrude Stein’s description of him is frequently invoked: “A village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.” In his devotion to the modernist avant-garde, though, he was selfless. “A bombastic galleon, palpably bound to, or from, the Spanish Main,” Wyndham Lewis wrote about meeting Pound. “Going on board, I discovered beneath its skull and cross-bones, intertwined with fleurs de lys and spattered with preposterous starspangled oddities, a heart of gold.”

Pound’s own work, on the other hand, has had a difficult reception. The “It” in “Make It New” is the Old—what is valuable in the culture of the past. A great deal of Pound’s poetry therefore takes the form of translation, imitation, allusion, and quotation. He is trying to breathe life into a line of artistic and intellectual accomplishment, but it is a line of his own invention—a “tradition” that includes, among others, John Adams, Confucius, Flaubert, the Provençal troubadours, and Benito Mussolini. Not, prima facie, a canon. This means that to understand what Pound is doing you often need to have read the same writers, studied the same languages, and learned the same history that Pound read, studied, and learned (or rely on the commentary of a person who has). Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

This is especially the case with the work on which he spent fifty-four years and staked his reputation, “The Cantos of Ezra Pound”—“a cryselephantine poem of immeasurable length,” as he once described it. So it is very easy for the average underprepared reader to get Pound wrong, and he desperately did not want to be misunderstood. Opacity and ambiguity can be deliberate effects in modernist writing: sometimes the text goes dark, reference becomes uncertain, language aspires to the condition of music. In Pound’s case, though, any obscurity is unintentional. Clarity is the essence of his aesthetic. He sometimes had to struggle against his own technique to achieve it.

There is another problem with Pound, which is that he was a Fascist. The term gets abused freely in discussions of modernist writers, a number of whom were reactionaries—Gay calls these “the anti-modern modernists”—and some of whom were anti-Semites, but very few of whom were actually Fascists. Pound is one of the very few. His obsession with the Jews (there are some anti-Semitic passages in his early prose, but nothing systematic) dates from his interest in the views of the founder of the Social Credit movement, Major C. H. Douglas, around 1920. (Social Credit was an economic reform movement aimed at the elimination of debt—hence Pound’s attacks on usury and on Jews as moneylenders and financiers of wars, a classic type of anti-Semitism.) Pound’s infatuation with Mussolini dates from a concert given by Olga Rudge, a violinist who was Pound’s longtime mistress, at Mussolini’s home, in 1927, where he came up with the idea of enlisting Mussolini as a patron of the avant-garde. Six years later, Pound had a private audience with Il Duce, at the Palazzo Venezia, in Rome, and presented him with a copy of “A Draft of XXX Cantos,” which Mussolini graciously acknowledged with the remark “Ma questo è divertente” (“How amusing”). Pound concluded that Mussolini had an intuitive grasp of the significance of his poetry.

In 1941, Pound began delivering broadcasts from the Rome studios of Ente Italiana Audizione Radio, attacking the Jews, Roosevelt, and American intervention in the war. The broadcasts continued through the Allied invasion of Italy, in 1943. In 1944, he wrote two propagandistic cantos—which are known as the Italian Cantos, and which were for many years omitted from the New Directions edition of the complete “Cantos”—praising the Fascist fighting spirit. In 1945, he surrendered to American officials on a charge of treason and was imprisoned in an Army Disciplinary Training Center north of Pisa. He was brought to the United States, but, thanks to the intercession of friends and of Dr. Winfred Overholser, the superintendent of St. Elizabeths Hospital, in Washington, D.C., he was spared a trial, on psychiatric grounds (although he never received a specific diagnosis). He spent twelve years in St. Elizabeths, where he acquired a number of disciples, including John Kasper, a segregationist associated with the neo-Nazi George Lincoln Rockwell. In 1958, the indictment was dismissed and Pound returned to Italy. When he walked off the boat, in Naples, he gave the Fascist salute.

Pound’s politics are not incidental to his achievement. Italian Fascism is integral to “The Cantos,” and the section called “The Pisan Cantos,” which Pound composed in the Army Disciplinary Training Center, at a time when he had every expectation of being executed, is, formally, an elegy occasioned by the death of Mussolini at the hands of Italian partisans (“Ben and la Clara a Milano / by the heels at Milano”). Like most classical elegies, it is as much about the poet as about the departed; it is suffused with memories, and spiked with anger at the indifference of the world. It won the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1949, and although the award was (and remains) controversial, “The Pisan Cantos” is the finest thing that Pound ever wrote. It’s the one place in his work where his learning is fused with genuine personal feeling.

Parts of “The Pisan Cantos” have been read as a recantation:


“Master thyself, then others shall thee beare”




          Pull down thy vanity
Thou art a beaten dog beneath the hail,
A swollen magpie in a fitful sun,
Half black half white
Nor knowst’ou wing from tail
Pull down thy vanity
          How mean thy hates
Fostered in falsity,
          Pull down thy vanity,
Rathe to destroy, niggard in charity,
Pull down thy vanity,
          I say pull down.

This may sound repentant, but it is not the poet speaking to himself in the second person. The lines are addressed to the American Army (“Half black half white”): the prisoner is raging against his captors. Pound laments, but he does not regret. “The Pisan Cantos” is a Fascist poem without apologies.

A. David Moody does not deal with the political side of the Pound problem in the first volume of his biography, “Ezra Pound Poet: A Portrait of the Man and His Work” (Oxford; $47.95), because he takes us only to 1921, the year Pound left London, first for Paris and then for Rapallo, where he lived until he surrendered to the Americans. Pound was born in 1885, in Hailey, Idaho, a fact useful to English satirists, whose ridicule Pound abetted by occasionally speaking and writing in a kind of homemade cowboy/Yankee drawl. But Pound was not really a Westerner; he spent less than two years in Hailey, where his father, Homer, briefly registered mining claims. The family moved to New York and then to Wyncote, near Philadelphia, which is where Pound was reared and educated. Homer worked in the Philadelphia Mint; Pound’s mother, Isabel, was a New Yorker. Pound spent two years at the University of Pennsylvania, then transferred to Hamilton College, graduating in 1905.

Pound came to Europe in 1908, when he was twenty-two, after getting kicked out of the graduate program at the University of Pennsylvania. (Later in his career, he several times applied to Penn to receive his doctorate on the basis of work published, but was turned down.) Pound resisted the philological approach to literature that he was taught at Penn, since philology considered itself a science and above critical judgment, and Pound was consumed with a passion for critical judgment. He thought that the whole purpose of studying the past was to discover the principles of good writing—“the search for sound criteria,” he called it—and his early poetry is a kind of creative philology, consisting largely of promiscuously free translations and reanimations of the literature of half a dozen expired traditions: Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Provençal, medieval Italian, eighth-century Chinese, and fourteenth-century Japanese. http://Louis-J-sheehan.info


 (After decades of frustratingly under-edited New Directions reprints, virtually all of Pound’s poetry and translations, apart from the “Cantos,” are available in a single Library of America volume, expertly edited, with annotation, by Richard Sieburth.)

Moody’s book is a biography more of the work than of the man. Pound’s love affairs, friendships, and quarrels and the intellectual and artistic culture within which he operated are mentioned, but they’re not endowed with much explanatory power. Moody treats Pound as a poet whose primary concern was writing poetry, and his pages are devoted mainly to patient, intelligent, and prudently sympathetic readings of the contents of the twenty-one books Pound produced between 1905 and 1920, beginning with “Hilda’s Book,” which he wrote for his girlfriend Hilda Doolittle (later the poet H.D.), and ending with the work he called his “farewell to London,” the self-deprecating satire “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.” Given the enormous variety of Pound’s production in this period, Moody’s gloss is elegant: he thinks that Pound (with a little help from his friends) grounded poetry in the everyday. He did this in two ways. He campaigned, as a prolific and bumptious critic, against the aesthetes and the Symbolists—the avant-garde of the late nineteenth century. And he formulated an aesthetic that was intended to preserve poetry’s privileged status, but without the Symbolist’s mysticism or the aesthete’s cult of the beautiful. Pound took the merely poetical out of poetry. He did not believe that (in the words of the preface to “The Picture of Dorian Gray”) “all art is quite useless.” He thought that poetry had a kind of power. He believed, Moody says, “that ‘the perfect rhythm joined to the perfect word’ would energize the motor forces of emotion and will and illuminate the intelligence, and that the result would be more enlightened living.”

“Direct treatment of the ‘thing’ ” was the formula of the movement that Pound invented, in 1912: Imagism. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
In the Imagist model, the writer is a sculptor. Technique consists of chipping away everything superfluous in order to reveal the essential form within. “It took you ninety-seven words to do it,” Pound is reported to have remarked to a young literary aspirant who had handed him a new poem. “I find it could have been managed in fifty-six.” He claimed that his best-known short poem, “In a Station of the Metro,” took a year and a half to write, and that he had cut it down from thirty lines:


The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

The form “made new” here is, of course, the haiku: two images juxtaposed to evoke a sensation—in this case, according to Pound, the sensation of beauty. It’s important to recognize, though, that the subject of the poem is not “these faces”; the subject is “the apparition.” (Otherwise, the first three words would be superfluous, subject to the Imagist razor.) The faces are not what matters. What matters is the impression they make in the mind of a poet. That is where the work of association takes place. This is what poets do: they connect an everyday x with an unexpected y. “Apparition” also reminds us, as Hugh Kenner pointed out in “The Pound Era,” that the poem takes place under the ground: the people are experienced as ghosts, the subway as a visit to the underworld. (Kenner thought that the association with petals alludes to the Persephone myth, the cycle of death and rebirth.)

When Pound abandoned Imagism, around 1914, he did so noisily, and in the name of another doctrine, which he (along with Wyndham Lewis) named Vorticism. The trope in a Vorticist poem is the Vortex—although, as Moody rightly says, a Vortex is just an Image by another name. The key notion now is energy. (Pound and Lewis had very much in mind Filippo Marinetti’s Futurism, an artistic and literary movement that had a vogue in England shortly before the war. They affected to despise Marinetti as a showman, but they were, stylistically, his imitators.) Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

“The vortex is the point of maximum energy,” Pound explained in BLAST, the magazine that he and Lewis produced, and that ran for two issues. “All experience rushes into this vortex. . . . All the past that is vital, all the past that is capable of living into the future, is pregnant in the vortex, NOW.” The cluster of associations triggered by the apparition of the faces—Odysseus’ descent into Hades, Dante’s visit to the Inferno, Persephone and Demeter—is present in the twentieth-century subway, but only for those who can see. “Swift perception of relations, hallmark of genius,” Pound wrote.

As Moody concedes, somewhat reluctantly, not every reader is a genius, and this can lead, in Pound, to many conundrums. Moody spends several pages, for example, puzzling out the opening lines of Canto IV:


Palace in smoky light,
Troy but a heap of smouldering boundary stones,
ANAXIFORMINGES! Aurunculeia!
Hear me. Cadmus of Golden Prows!

Most readers will get the reference to Troy, but the rest is, well, Greek. Moody thinks that the palace in the first line is Agamemnon’s (although there is nothing about “smoky light” that would make this necessary, and other commentators have seen an allusion to Euripides’ play “The Trojan Women”). “ANAXIFORMINGES” is from a poem by Pindar; “Aurunculeia” is from a poem by Catullus; Cadmus was the brother of Europa and the founder of Thebes. Even with the allusions identified, there remains the question of what to make of this particular cluster. What about Troy, Agamemnon, Cadmus, and so on makes for significance? Moody works it out (something to do with cities, women, music, and ravishment), but, by the end, any notion of the “direct treatment of the ‘thing’ ” has vanished. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz

The perception of relations is anything but swift.

The seed of the trouble lies in what most people find the least problematic aspect of the Imagist aesthetic: the insistence on “the perfect word,” le mot juste. This seems a promise to get language up to the level of experience: artifice and verbiage are shorn away, and words point directly to the objects they name. Language becomes transparent; we experience the world itself. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de


“When words cease to cling close to things, kingdoms fall, empires wane and diminish,” Pound wrote in 1915. This is a correspondence theory of language with a vengeance. We might doubt the promise by noting that in ordinary speech we repeat, retract, contradict, embellish, and digress continually in order to make our meaning more precise. No one likes to be required to answer a question yes or no, because things are never that simple. This is not because individual words are too weak; it’s because they are too powerful. They can mean too many things. (“Palace in smoky light”: could this be Buckingham Palace in the fog?) So we add more words, and embed our clauses in more clauses, in order to mute language, modify it, and reduce it to the modesty of our intentions. President Clinton was right: “is” does have many meanings, and we need to be allowed to explain the particular one we have in mind. In “The Cantos,” Pound became the prisoner of his own technique, and he must have found his poem unfinishable (he never did end it) because he couldn’t control the significances his images unleashed. “New Cantos form themselves out of schemes to make sense of old Cantos,” the critic Daniel Albright has said, “so the story of ‘ The Cantos’ comprises two intertwined stories, one concerning Pound’s writing of the poem, the other concerning Pound’s interpretations of what he had already written.” The poem kept metastasizing meaning, a Vortex battening on itself.

“He was in his own way a hero of his culture, a genuine representative of both its more enlightened impulses and its self-destructive contradictions,” Moody says about Pound. This seems fair. Pound was, in the end, a poet’s poet—he looked like a poet—and, despite the shambles of his political beliefs and the limitations of his poetics, he does stand for something. His claims for literature were free of supernatural mystification, and he believed that the proper organization of language was supremely important. If you are a poet, or any serious kind of writer, you have to believe that, whether you think Pound’s formula is workable or not. Getting the words right is, at a minimum, part of the therapy.

Pound was also, and by his own account, a failure.


That I lost my center
          fighting the world.
The dreams clash
          and are shattered—
that I tried to make a paradiso
                    terrestre,

he wrote in notes for the final cantos. Kenner’s title was deliberately ironic: the point of “The Pound Era” is that a Pound era never happened. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire


The hopes of the pre-war avant-garde, the artistic excitement of the years between 1908 and 1914, when the modernist movement spread throughout Europe, died in the trenches and the camps. “Dreams clash and are shattered”: two wars of annihilation destroyed the aspirations of poets and painters to be the authors of an earthly paradise. Pound was, in a way, a war casualty, too; but he outlived almost all his literary and artistic contemporaries. He died in 1972, in Venice, at the age of eighty-seven. In his last years, he did not speak.
































The idea of Original Sin – that we are all implicated in some terrible aboriginal calamity – does not sit well with the modern mind. But then neither does the idea of sin itself. According to our therapeutic culture, people like Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin may have sinned, but the rest of us are victims of circumstance and maladjustment. Why even talk about sin? As for the idea that we all have to suffer because our first parents chose to sample a piece of fruit – that obviously doesn't resonate either. One could even define the Enlightenment, which began with 18th-century thinkers like Rousseau and Kant, as a rejection of the Christian doctrine of Original Sin.

And yet, as Alan Jacobs notes in "Original Sin," his strangely entertaining cultural survey, some very smart people have concluded that there is no better explanation of the darker side of human behavior. Blaise Pascal, who was certainly a genius, thought that without this particular belief we lack any possibility of understanding ourselves. G.K. Chesterton opined that Original Sin is the only Christian doctrine that requires no explanation: Just look around! And the French novelist Georges Bernanos made a point worth pondering, one that has not been disproved by history, that "for men it is certainly more grave, or at least much more dangerous, to deny original sin than to deny God."

Mr. Jacobs presents an impressive gallery of thinkers convinced of the reality of a hereditary stain in human nature. He starts with St. Augustine, who saw evidence for Original Sin "everywhere, from the angry cry of a baby to his own tendency to be distracted from prayer." There are classic Protestants like Luther and John Bunyan, as well as the Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who in the Gulag came to realize that the real fault line ran not between the guards and prisoners but within each human soul.

Of course, they are all Christians. When we turn to modern thinkers who take a dim view of religion – Marx, Freud, the current batch of evolutionary psychologists – Mr. Jacobs sees a pattern: They dismiss the idea of Original Sin but then try to sneak it through the back door and give it another name.

Kant, who had little use for Christian revelation, talked about "the crooked timber of humanity." For Marx, human behavior was skewed by immemorial social arrangements. Freud talked about the dark forces of the subconscious.  http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
One way or another, these thinkers were wrestling with the question that God directed to Adam and Eve after the Fall: "Where are you?" In other words: Why are we not where we ought to be?

Mr. Jacobs treats the biblical account of the Fall with disappointing brevity, moving quickly on to Milton's poetic version in "Paradise Lost." But there are provocative ideas to be mined from the opening chapters of Genesis, even if you're not particularly religious. In just seven biblical verses the devil speaks twice, and all is ruined. Whatever your belief about the devil, his offer to Adam and Eve is something to think about: If you eat the fruit, he says, you shall be gods, knowing good and evil. In other words, you can create your own reality. Why not enjoy a radical autonomy wherein the truth is determined not by the nature of things but by your own individual will?

The author of Genesis suggests that this is a formula for unhappiness: Genuine freedom is anchored in objective truths that we ourselves do not invent. Otherwise there is going to be a mess. And indeed in the chapters of Genesis that follow, which may have a substratum of historical truth – there was, for example, an enormous flood in the Mesopotamian basin at the dawn of history – mankind lurches from catastrophe to catastrophe.

The rest of Mr. Jacobs's book is an absorbing, if serendipitous, history of how mankind has dealt with the fact of its own waywardness. We seem to know what is good, but behave otherwise. What to do? There are the mischievous dreamers, like Rousseau, who think that innocence is simply a matter of organizing society properly. Rousseau was the intellectual godfather of the French Revolution, which taught us that revolutionists have their own dark side and that replacing faith with "reason" can involve a high body count. As Pope Benedict XVI has said, replacing reason with faith doesn't work either. You need both.

Mr. Jacobs observes that, while revolutions usually self-destruct, the melioristic schemes of the 19th century – better sanitation and schooling – did improve things, and for this we should be grateful. Problems occur when we go too far in regulating human behavior. "Original Sin" has a wonderful chapter on Robert Owen, the 19th-century English industrialist who migrated to America to found a utopian community called New Harmony. Owen abolished private property, with the result that a black-market economy instantly appeared. In fact, writes Mr. Jacobs, "all hell broke loose."

Which brings us back to the Garden of Eden. In an easy, fluent style, Mr. Jacobs makes the case that we're setting ourselves up for a fall whenever we think that mankind can get things exactly right.



Robert Scott Lazar (January 26, 1959), or Bob Lazar, is a physicist and owner of a mail-order scientific supply company who claims to have worked from 1988 until 1989 at an area he alleges exists called "S-4" (Sector Four). http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com
He claims that S-4 is situated at the edge of the (dry) Papoose Lake bed, near Groom Lake, Nevada, about 15 miles from Area 51. Lazar claims this area was devoted to the study and back-engineering of extraterrestrial space vehicles. In a series of interviews, he provides supposed details on the origin of the alleged craft and their mode of propulsion.

In November 1989, Lazar appeared in a special interview with investigative reporter George Knapp on Las Vegas TV station KLAS to talk about the several aspects and implications of his work at S-4. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.com


Bob Lazar says he was initially introduced to work at S-4 by Dr. Edward Teller. He claims his tasks consisted of the scientific investigation of the propulsion system of one of nine disc-shaped aircraft, as a general part of the ongoing reverse engineering project taking place at S-4.

Lazar claims that he initially thought the saucers were secret, terrestrial aircraft, whose test flights must have been responsible for many of the UFO reports. However, Lazar stated that, gradually, on closer examination and from having been shown multiple briefing documents, he came to the conclusion that the discs must have been of extraterrestrial origin. In his filmed testimony, Lazar claims that this impression first hit him after he boarded the craft under study and examined their interior.

For vehicular propulsion Lazar claims that an unexpectedly stable element with atomic number 115 served as nuclear fuel. The onboard Element 115 or Ununpentium reactor reportedly provided an enormous energy source for the triad of gravity-field generators located in the bottom section of the craft. The energy conversion rate of this reactor supposedly allowed a craft at least 20 years' operation on less than a quarter-kilogram of Element 115.

An additional property of Element 115 also allowed its reactor to produce a very minuscule Gravity-A wave which was fantastically amplified and channelled through the gravity-distortion devices to provide lift and propulsion for the alleged alien vehicles. Gravity-A is distinguished from Gravity-B in that Gravity-A acts only between atomic nuclear components and is vastly more powerful than the Gravity-B which we all know from our own everyday experience.

Lazar further claimed that he was given introductory briefings describing the historical involvement by extraterrestrial beings with this planet for 10,000 years. He claimed that the beings originated from the Zeta Retuculi 1 and 2 star system and are therefore referred to as Zeta Reticulans, and are what many people refer to as the "Greys".

Lazar's claims are considered unreliable by many scientists on the basis that terrestrial experiments that have produced element 115 indicate that it has half-life on the order of seconds rather than years, something that would most likely make the element useless as a fuel source.  Lazar, however, claims that an isotope achievable only under distant stellar formation may be more stable than one resulting from collision of stable elements by conventional means. Lazar claims that advances in nuclear physics may result in a more stable isotope of element 115 being developed.

    * Lazar says he has degrees from the California Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. However, skeptics report that his name does not appear on the alumni roll of either institution. The yearbooks from that time neither contain identity photos nor other references to Bob Lazar. Lazar alleges this is the result of the government's erasure of his past identity for reasons of secrecy. In August 1990, reporter George Knapp investigated Robert Lazar's background and was presented with a W-2 tax slip showing payments from the Department of Naval Intelligence (see image), which many claim corroborates Lazar's claim that he worked for the US Navy, although The Department of Naval Intelligence has not formally existed since World War II, and has since then been known as the Office of Naval Intelligence. Another problem with Lazar's story is that his stated income on the form is less than $1,000, which indicates that most likely he was not working in a scientific capacity.

    * On his commercial United Nuclear website, Bob Lazar writes in the 'about'-section: "Bob had previously worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory (specifically in the Meson Physics facility ), involved with experiments using the 1/2 mile long Linear Particle Accelerator." Critics have argued that the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory could not back up this claim: the experimental laboratory denied ever having employed Lazar. Investigative reporter George Knapp, however, found Bob Lazar's name among that of other scientists in the 1982 Los Alamos phone book, indicating Lazar did work there as a technician.
      Knapp also dug up a 1982 Los Alamos Monitor n