BREAKING NEWS ON THE TIMO MILLER CASE

The White Man has it on reliable authority that all federal charges against Timothy David Miller have been dropped, and he is free to return home to Nicaragua--older, wiser, and very thankful to God and country.

UPDATE 12 hours later: And judging by the every-few-minutes hits I'm getting on this topic from the first eight time zones west of Greenwich, a LOT of people have been following this case.

UPDATE OCT 31: I'm still getting hits every few minutes, and the news has finally started to spread on the web. The latest information is that Timo has agreed to "help" with the investigation, even to the point of returning from Nicaragua to testify if needed.

The usual interpretation of such a statement is that the charges were dropped in return for the accused turning on a co-defendant. If that is indeed the case, it means that Janet Jenkins did get what she wanted and this will result in the return of Lisa Miller for prosecution. This in turn would indicate that the US Attorney, Tristam Coffin, has an ace up his sleeve and may already have Lisa in custody awaiting extradition.

But I sincerely doubt all this. There's a lot going on behind the scenes that isn't getting reported. This case is part of a much bigger picture, and the best result for all concerned would be if Lisa and Janet are reconciled, to the point that custody of Isabella is no longer even an issue. That, I believe, is still the goal of the major players in this case, and we will stay turned for more developments to be reported. There will be no further updates to this post. I think.

The Mennonite Drug Trade

Whenever a universal draft is levied against a populace, Mennonites opposed to shooting humans come under persecution, and start looking for somewhere else to live. This is what brought them from Greater Germany to America in the first place, back when the King of England guaranteed their right to live peacefully in his overseas dominions.

The war between England and her American colonies was the impetus behind the Mennonite immigration into Canada, still under the King of England. The Civil War drove even more Mennonites northward, as their only other choices were conscription or going into hiding. [UPDATE: This is not the history of the Mennonites in our story, who, over the centuries, were driven in turn from The Netherlands, to East Prussia, to the Ukraine, and finally to Canada.] By the time World War I came along, there were sizable communities of Mennonites throughout Canada. Many of these, seeking to emigrate, bypassed the troublesome USA and moved directly to northern Mexico, filling out the colonies recently vacated by polygamous Mormons such as those in the ancestry of Willard Romney.

Over the years, these Plattdeutsch-speaking Mexicans have kept in close contact with their Canadian cousins--thus setting up the Mennonite version of the NAFTA Superhighway. As everyone knows, labour costs in Mexico are low. This results in Mennonites building their famous Deutsch furniture in the Mexican colonies, and exporting it northward--often all the way to Canada, where it is sold as authentic Mennonite artistry. And thus the steady stream of Mennonite truckers hauling furniture out of Mexico.

Turns out that a lot of times, this furniture is tucked full of drugs. The Mennonite drivers claim not to know anything about it when it is found, and the Mennonite furniture stores claim not to be expecting anything hidden inside their furniture consignments. Either one or the other is lying, or someone on either side of the border is surreptitiously dipping into the furniture shipment unbeknownst to any of the Mennonites.

At any rate, border guards have been alerted that just because a driver is a Mennonite, it doesn't mean he is any less needful of having his load searched for illegal drugs.

May 2014: This topic made the news recently.

UPDATE June 2016: and again.

October 2019: It's big news in Canada.

Niggerhood in Iraq

Imagine not being allowed to attend school with the other children in your neighborhood because of what your ID card says. Imagine being told that your rent is going to go up simply because of who you are. Imagine losing your job when your employer finds out that you're one of "those people."

As explained in an earlier post, I've appropriated the word "nigger"--no longer allowed to be used by outsiders to describe those of a particular race--for a new use, one for which no suitable word previously existed (one of the many ways languages evolve). A "nigger" is anyone who is discriminated against because he belongs to a suppressed class. Crucial to this discrimination is being able to identify "niggers." In Iraq, it's a matter of which word one has on his ID card under the heading "Religion."

Iraqi society is strictly segregated by race and religion. Until recently, the two were one and the same. Assyrians were Orthodox; Chaldeans were Catholic; Armenians were Apostolic; and other than a smattering of Zoroastrians and Yezidis, everyone else was Muslim. Much as the two groups were at each other's throats, no distinction was made between Shia and Sunni; both classes enjoyed, at least in name, the full benefits of citizenship. For the others, a certain level of second-class citizenship was readily available, and as long as one did not aspire to anything higher than two stars in the military or a cabinet level position in the government, he was free to advance as long as he kept to his proper place.

But, ah. The 'uppity' Muslim who tries to become a Christian! Instant niggerhood.

Arrest me once, shame on you--the continuing saga of Timo Miller

Note: for earlier stories on this topic, search on the label 'agents'.

Well, I don't have any further updates on this story, just some comments.

It is clear from reading the FBI's affidavit that the prosecution's main evidence in this trial is going to come from Timothy Miller himself. The Judge will no doubt rule that the evidence admissible, however, due to the fact that Timo voluntarily provided it--in the form of private emails he sent his friends and associates during the time he was helping Lisa Miller and her daughter Isabella move to Nicaragua. This information was, at the time he sent it, liable to interception by the FBI--although it's apparent that they didn't begin tapping his emails until later. If Timo ends up doing time for his crime, it will largely be his own fault, for leaving such a vivid electronic trail from the scene of the crime directly to his own front door.

But, should that come about, the prosecution's victory will be bittersweet. After all, it isn't really Timo they want, but Lisa. And it's not even Lisa, but her daughter, that the FBI was originally tasked with kidnapping. "I am looking forward to having my daughter home safe with me very soon," said Janet Jenkins in a statement released by Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, her legal counsel. If she thinks that turning the screws on Timothy Miller will have anything to do with that, she can think again. Her ex-stepdaughter is already home safe--but with her real mother, and intends to keep it that way.

Arresting Timo when they did basically killed the goose that was laying the electronic golden eggs. Timo will sit through a long trial, maybe serve some time, and then go back home, while Isabella marches on toward eventual majority forever outside the clutches of her wicked stepmother. For, thanks to Timo's sudden arrest, it is now obvious to everyone involved that if you want to keep a fugitive hidden, you don't use your regular email account to broadcast the process into cyberspace! Wherever Lisa and Isabella went after fleeing Jinotega, their presence there is under an electronic blackout, and will continue to be so until the statute of limitations has expired.

The Mennonites in Nicaragua were babes in the woods when it came to carrying out their criminal activities undercover. And it is costing them--some more than others. But they're learning from this--and we can be sure that other innocents are learning from their experience.

Finally, I think Timo's lawyer has a definite case that even the black-and-white evidence that will be put before the jury does not sufficiently implicate Timothy David Miller in "Aiding in the removing of a child from the United States, and retaining a child (who has been in the United States) outside of the United States with intent to obstruct the lawful exercise of parental rights."

Aiding he did. Retaining he did. But the law is clear that for these actions to be criminal, criminal intent must be shown, and the only intent evident in Timo's many intercepted emails is one of giving shelter to widows and orphans. He must be shown to have been aware of Janet Jenkin's legal rights as a wicked stepmother, and to have had the intent that his actions in keeping Isabella in Nicaragua would deprive her of those legal rights.  As a lifelong resident of Central America, he can hardly be expected to have kept up on the bewildering proliferation of lawful parental rights in the United States of late.

I have one more piece of advice for Timo: I suggest that he demand a Spanish translator for all further court proceedings. It will drive the point home that he was, as it were, snatched from a foreign country for this trial, for deeds done entirely on foreign soil. The FBI agents who arrested him were dispatched while the plane in which he landed was still in international airspace. His American citizenship was purely incidental to the alleged crime. This despite the affadavit's claim that his crime was committed "in the District of Vermont."

Think about it, folks. To the global enforcers of family law, Vermont isn't a state--it's a Federal District.

Murdoch the Octopus: The money trail behind the media smears of vaccine truthers

It's been over a year since I posted an article on vaccines, and new information continues to come out, both from the US government and vaccine pushers on the one hand, and media investigators on the other. This article in the Vaccine Truth Newsletter reveals that there was corporate pressure directly behind the smearing in The London Times of Dr. Andrew Wakefield's research into effects from the MMR triple vaccine. It also reveals that vaccines now incorporate DNA in a way that suggests genetic modification of an entire populace through the mandatory vaccination of their children.

The medical side of the argument is highly controversial, but no one can deny what happens when you "follow the money." Summing up the article is this excerpt from near the bottom of the piece:

Now here’s where all the above ties up into a huge red bow: Rupert Murdoch has hefty financial interests and ties to the pharmaceutical industry, international banking connections, and stock market power brokers who hold the world’s financial interests in their ‘covetous’ hands. Newton says that Members of this group, along with George Soros-directed assets, virtually monopolized the genetics industry during the 1990s, culminating in the corporate privatization of the Human Genome Project. Of course, everyone knows that George Soros is a backer of U.S. President Barack Obama’s agenda.

Topping off all this is the fact that Rupert Murdoch’s son, James—heir apparent, according to Newton, oversees GlaxoSmithKline, another major H1N1 vaccine maker. Many more of Rupert Murdoch’s business associates sit as members of the boards of directors of Merck & Company; Kolberg, Kravitz, Robertz & Company (KKR); and even one of KKR’s top echelon personnel was one of the founders of the Coalition to Advance Healthcare Reform (CAHR) now known as “ObamaCare.”

It sounds like Rupert Murdoch is akin to an octopus with tentacles far reaching and some very deeply, especially in pharmaceuticals and the global media, i.e., radio, television, newspapers, and other print media. Let’s see how far the inquiry goes into the British cell hacking fiasco and if it will cross the pond into the United States. If what we are hearing about what went on at his newspapers multiplies, we can only imagine what has been going on behind closed doors in the world of pharmaceuticals.

And, I suppose that it is neither here nor there that Rupert Murdoch's publishing empire is also behind the latest edition of the NIV.

Coming up: 1000 more casualties of Death Penalty legislation

Joel Rosenberg writes:

IDF soldier Gilad Shalit was released Tuesday in a deal brokered by Egypt. He had been held by Hamas for a horrifying 1,941 days after being captured on June 25, 2006 in an attack that triggered the Second Lebanon War. The deal is not without controversy, however. Israel has released 477 Palestinian prisoners in the first swap, and will ultimately release more than 1,000. Some have been involved in deadly attacks on Israeli citizens. Not a few Israelis are deeply concerned these terrorists will be back to capture, torture and kill more Israelis soon.

Many of these murderers have been in prison for decades, and now that they are able to do get back to doing what they do best, we can expect at least a thousand more Israelis to be murdered. All this, because Israelis, through their elected representatives in the Knesset, have chosen to eliminate the chance that any murderer will ever face execution for his crimes. And now that this system has proved to work so well, I can hardly imagine it will be another 25 years before the next Gilad Shalit is traded back on such lucrative terms.

This case also represents the fallacy of "life in prison without possibility of parole," the imparted sentence of these now-free murderers. There is at least on American still in prison who was sentenced to death for murder prior to 1967 (when the Supreme Court denied the right of states to execute their murderers), but I can't find evidence of any person still in prison who was sentenced in the decades prior to 1967 to "life in prison without possibility of parole." As far as I have been able to determine, all such cases did in fact lead to eventual release of the prisoner, if he didn't die young before they quite got around to releasing him.

The Missing Link in Child Abuse Cases

I've added another blog to my list, TulipGirl. She commented on my latest post, which led me indirectly back to her blog. I see she has written on a wide variety of parenting subjects.

As a veteran parent myself, I thought her blog would well complement mine, since I seldom write on such topics myself (it probably has a lot to do with the fact that she's a mom and I'm not--sorry, egalitarians, but that's just the way it is).

Anyway, in tracking back TulipGirl's comment, I realized that the reason why I'm getting so many hits lately from Michael Pearl searches is that yet another child's death has been blamed indirectly on Micheal Pearl. The link in these three deaths is that in each case, the father and/or mother read the Pearls' book before punishing their adopted child to death.

Ah, yes. Adoption--it's the other link that seems to be missing in most discussions of this case. Michael doesn't talk much about it--perhaps he should--but when he's responsible for raising children that aren't his own he NEVER spanks them--especially not the ones he gets from overseas. Yet he's done very well in instilling both love and discipline into quite a few orphans and otherwise untrained children over the years.

Michael Pearl should probably put a warning on his TTUAC book that it is most effective for married couples training their own children. All others should consult his other book (yet to be written), To Train Up Another Parent's Child (TTUAPC).

I may come back and add a few UPDATES to this post, but I've probably said enough already that I should stop for now and let it sink in.

UPDATE: Well, here we are already. Thanks to TulipGirl, another story of a woman spanking her adopted son to death: but this was in 1996, a bit before the Pearls' TTUAC book had taken the nation by storm. Moral of the story: Parents determined to conquer the will of an adopted child are perfectly capable of killing him in the process, with or without any help from the Pearls. And the Pearls aren't offering any.

Michael Pearl, False Prophet?

In a comment posted to my article on the death of Lydia Schatz, an anonymous reader stated the following, which I quote, interspersed with my response:

Regardless of a few "good" pointers and some Scripture verses, the Pearl philosophy is abusive towards women and children. Scripture is not even carefully applied and rightfully divided in many of their writings, especially Debi's writings.

Anyone can give a few pointers and quote some Scripture verses. Doing this doesn't make the Pearls any different than the hundreds of others who have written on the subject of child raising over the past 500 years.

Jesus said we will know a tree by the fruit it bears. Three dead children is enough to make any intelligent person question the Pearls' philosophy.

In that quote, Jesus was specifically warning about false teachers, and telling his listeners that false teaching inevitable reveals itself by bad results. However, three children isn't even remotely enough to qualify the Pearls as bad-fruit producers. Take any apple orchard with 100,000 apples as they come off the tree. Would you, as a fruit inspector, consign the whole harvest to the landfill because you found three bad apples in the lot? I hope not, because with you in charge, we'd all have to get our food at the dump. Only three dead children is a remarkable accomplishment; I doubt that any state social service agency can say that of the last 100,000 children that came through their system, less than three died while in state custody. [UPDATE: the latest figures I've come across indicate that over a THOUSAND American children die in foster care AFTER being taken away from their parent(s) 'for their own protection.'] And the Pearls' methods have been used on hundreds of thousands of children.

We need to pray for the Pearls, though, and hope that they stop publishing irresponsible documents that can be used by any parent who decides to pay for the book.

No doubt the Pearls need prayer, so I won't say anything to discourage that. But if Michael Pearl is a false prophet, three dead children out of half a million books sold don't serve as compelling evidence.

On Beyond Zebra: The NIV "spins" Acts 7:43

In Acts 7:43, Stephen seems to misquote a verse of Amos which mentions Israel being exiled "beyond Damascus:"

You have taken up the tabernacle of Molek 
   and the star of your god Rephan, 
   the idols you made to worship. 
Therefore I will send you into exile’^[a] beyond Babylon.

Footnotes:

1. Acts 7:43 Amos 5:25-27 (see Septuagint)

Thus the NNIV. The only change made in this most recent update was to add the reference to the Septuagint--as if this would solve the problem. But notice that they haven't changed the quote: they end it right before "beyond Babylon" when in fact the word 'beyond' most certainly is in the Amos passage. The problem is, the word 'Babylon' isn't--not even in the standard edition of the Septuagint.

We may ask how the NIV read before the TNIV. Well, actually, the ONIV had no changes going all the way back to the original 1973 edition, but it did read "Shrine of Moloch" instead of the TNIV's "Tabernacle of Moloch." But in every case, the quote stops at the end of "exile," implying that Stephen wasn't misquoting the Amos passage, just tacking on his own historical interpretation to the end of it.

This is ludicrous. Even in a worse case scenario, the quotation doesn't stop at 'exile,' but at 'beyond.'  And if the CBT did find an ancient Greek manuscript with 'Babylon' in it, they should have moved the quotation mark all the way over to the end of the sentence.

But, in the interests of artificially maintaining biblical inerrancy, they kept it where it was.

There's another place that modern translators, with their pedantic concern for inerrancy, could have avoided a theological scuffle with a little creative use of quotation marks:

"The virgin 'will be with child'" --Matthew 1:23, quoting from Isaiah 7:14, where the NIV does use the word 'virgin' but other modern translations don't.

Getting paid to recite Muslim prayers

Thirty-four Muslim car transporters were caught praying on the job. And they got in big trouble for it--but not because Hertz has anything against Muslims or anyone else praying while they work. The problem was that these workers weren't working while they prayed. And that wouldn't have been a problem, either, if they had managed to whip through their memorized prayers in 10 minutes or less each of the 5 times a day they recite them. The problem was that:

1. Hertz hired drivers who were observant Muslims.
2. The drivers asked that Hertz accommodate their religious need to quit work for a few minutes 5 times a day.
3. The Teamsters Union, which takes a cut out of the $9 or so an hour Hertz is paying the drivers to drive, demanded that Hertz comply, and pay them to pray every day instead of driving.
4. Some drivers took advantage of these paid prayer breaks and extended them past the allotted 10 minutes.
5. Hertz warned drivers who didn't drive when they were supposed to be that they couldn't work for Hertz.
6. The drivers still took over-long prayer breaks, expecting to get something out of their union dues.
7. Hertz suspended 34 drivers for breaking their agreement with Hertz.
8. The shocked drivers looked to Teamsters to get them reinstated with back pay.

You can see that Christians have a distinct advantage over Muslims, Bhuddists, and Jews when it comes to getting a driving job: Christians can, and often do, pray while on the road (with their eyes open of course). Muslims and Jews can't. This makes the Christians much more employable as drivers than the Muslims, and slightly more employable than Jews (who can typically get their prayers in while off the job).

The solution: either discriminate against employers who prefer to hire workers who actually work, or discriminate against the more employable workers by not employing them as fully.

There are no other options.

On being of many minds on striking Iran

A few quotes to consider:

Israel should launch a pre-emptive strike to prevent arch-foe Iran from going nuclear, a former head of Israel's Mossad intelligence agency said on Monday. "I am of the opinion that, since there is an ongoing war, since the threat is permanent, since the intention of the enemy in this case is to annihilate you, the right doctrine is one of pre-emption and not of retaliation," Ex-Mossad Chief Shabtai Shavit told a conference.

--From Newsmax, Tuesday, 22 Jun 2010

Senior Israeli officials often say that “all options are on the table” in respect to Iran’s nuclear program, yet former Mossad Director Meir Dagan presented a different thesis Friday. While Israel must not accept nuclear weapons in Iran’s hands, he said, “An aerial strike on the reactors is a dumb idea that has no benefit.” Dagan made the comments during a forum discussion at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University.

--From The Yeshiva World, Saturday, May 7th, 2011

Israel won’t withstand war in wake of strike on Iran, ex-Mossad chief says. Speaking at Tel Aviv conference, Meir Dagan says use of force should be Israel’s last option, adding that the IDF could not stop Tehran’s nuclear program, only delay it.

--From DETIR, Wednesday, 5 October 2011

A senior U.S. administration official flies to Tel Aviv to pressure the Israeli government not to launch a preemptive strike against Iran, despite the rapidly growing nuclear threat posed by the Ayatollah and the mullahs and the increasing possibility that Iran could unleash a Second Holocaust. "Under no circumstances can the president tolerate an Israeli first strike against Iran," warns the U.S. official. "I am here as a personal representative of the President of the United States to make it unequivocally clear that our government wholly, completely, and utterly opposes a preemptive strike by the State of Israel on the Islamic Republic of Iran."

Fact or fiction? The answer is both. The paragraph above comes from p. 173 of my forthcoming political thriller, "The Tehran Initiative." But this scenario is no longer fiction. Earlier this week, a senior U.S. official flew to Israel to apply this very same pressure, and do so in a surprisingly high profile manner. "U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta visited Israel Monday with a clear message from his boss in Washington: The United States opposes any Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear facilities," reported the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. "The United States, he said, is 'very concerned, and we will work together to do whatever is necessary" to keep Iran from posing "a threat to this region.' But doing so 'depends on the countries working together,' he added. He repeated the word 'together' several times in this context."

--From Joel Rosenberg's blog

Another one-term president--but how?

According to Snopes, Proctor & Gamble Former Executive Lou Pritchett really did write an open letter to the newly elected President Obama in which he stated the following:

You scare me because after months of exposure, I know nothing about you.

You scare me because I do not know how you paid for your expensive Ivy League education and your upscale lifestyle and housing with no visible signs of support.

You scare me because you did not spend the formative years of youth growing up in America and culturally you are not an American.

You scare me because you have never run a company or met a payroll.

You scare me because you have never had military experience, thus don't understand it at its core.

You scare me because you lack humility and 'class', always blaming others.

You scare me because for over half your life you have aligned yourself with radical extremists who hate America and you refuse to publicly denounce these radicals who wish to see America fail.

You scare me because you are a cheerleader for the 'blame America ' crowd and deliver this message abroad.

You scare me because you want to change America to a European style country where the government sector dominates instead of the private sector.

You scare me because you want to replace our health care system with a government controlled one.

You scare me because you prefer 'wind mills' to responsibly capitalizing on our own vast oil, coal and shale reserves.

You scare me because you want to kill the American capitalist goose that lays the golden egg which provides the highest standard of living in the world.

You scare me because you have begun to use 'extortion' tactics against certain banks and corporations.

You scare me because your own political party shrinks from challenging you on your wild and irresponsible spending proposals.

You scare me because you will not openly listen to or even consider opposing points of view from intelligent people.

You scare me because you falsely believe that you are both omnipotent and omniscient.

You scare me because the media gives you a free pass on everything you do.

You scare me because you demonize and want to silence the Limbaugh's, Hannitys, O'Reillys and Becks who offer opposing, conservative points of view.

You scare me because you prefer controlling over governing.

Finally, you scare me because if you serve a second term I will probably not feel safe in writing a similar letter in 8 years.

According to Pritchett, he "sent it to the NY Times but they never acknowledged or published it."

Well, the writing is on the wall: President Obama's chances of being re-elected are slim to none. Rather than let a Republican take over the White House, however, it appears that the Democratic National Committee has an ace up their sleeve: Hilary Clinton.

It's been over a decade since a Clinton lived in the White House, and there's still a lot of pent-up support for The First Woman President. Having already passed the milestone of The First Black President, there's little incentive in keeping Obama on retainer; and Hilary is likely to be too old to run if she waits another 4 years.

I will admit, the idea's not original with me, but I wouldn't be surprised to see Obama announce in the next couple months that he won't be running for re-election, but will instead throw all his support behind Hillary and get on with the job of running the country for the last year of his single term.

By the way, there is quite a precedent for such a move. The following presidents failed to be nominated by their parties to serve a second term:

John Tyler*
James Polk
Milliard Fillmore*
Franklin Pierce
James Buchanan
Andrew Johnson*
Rutherford Hayes
Chester Arthur*

*(these were former vice-presidents who took over upon the death of the former president, but were never nominated by their party to the presidency itself)

These former vice-presidents served more than one term as president, but failed to be nominated for a third, for which they were eligible:

Theodore Roosevelt
Calvin Coolidge
Harry Truman
Lyndon Johnson

And this president served two full terms in his own right, but was twice denied nomination to a third:

Ulysses S. Grant, who--as Obama is expected to do--successfully campaigned for the winner of his party's nomination.