A review of David Instone-Brewer's Bible Contexts Series - Chapter 20: Cain's "wife"

Dr. David Instone-Brewer is an eminent Bible Scholar in England, one of the experts responsible for the last tranche of changes to the NIV. He knows a lot more than I do about a lot of things, and since he makes it easy to access most of what he writes, I follow him to my advantage--especially in the area of Old Testament Studies, which is his specialty. What I've learned from him, however, are generally facts and insights I hadn't been exposed to before. I don't sit at his feet for much of what he weaves into his teaching, which are just standard tenets of atheism (although I admit, some of them are new to me as well). For although he identifies as an evangelical, he nonetheless looks to atheist scholars and their disciples to inform his interpretation of the Scriptures--and is thus oft led astray.

Dr. D is greatly hampered in his ability to gain insights from the book of Genesis, believing as he does that it was composed as a sort of religious fiction during the Babylonian captivity to inspire Jews not to lose hope in their present situation, or something along those lines. He doesn't believe that it is even intended to be a serious historical record, and certainly not that it was compiled from written eyewitness accounts. There is therefore no apparent limit to the imaginations his mind can supply from a reading of this section of the Scriptures, guided by the speculations of the atheists which lie behind much of his theology. And since he drinks deeply at the font of those who have no access to absolute truth, he all but admits that what he sincerely believes to be true today may be ridiculed a decade or a century from now, as atheist philosophers discard old and unworkable alternative explanations for how the world works, and imagine new ones yet to be disproven. This approach leads him far astray from orthodox understanding. 

Take, for example, his chapter on Cain's Wife. He already reinterprets the first two chapters of Genesis in an atheistic framework, starting with a random humanoid whose ancestral line went back to stardust. He then departs from the atheist narrative just a bit to give God credit for taking this human-looking animal, the pinnacle of billions of years of random evolution, miraculously granting him a human spirit, and then--in a most unusual departure from his involvement of the previous billions of years, and in a biological process we can hardly imagine, much less explain scientifically--splitting off a half-clone which became the first human woman. He then set the newly enlightened couple in special walled enclosure he called Eden and commanded them not to eat a certain fruit. They did so regardless, and as a result they were cast out of Eden to resume their evolutionary progress without any life-sustaining access to the fruit of the tree that conveyed some sort of immortality. And here enters Cain's Wife, who he proposes was a non-human, implying along the way that the host of present mankind must be descended from her.

I hesitate to critique Dr. D in any area of actual OT Studies, as he is an acknowledged expert in both the Hebrew language and rabbinical literature. But here he has left far behind anything directly related to the Hebrew Scriptures to dabble in Evolutionary Biology, in which he is no expert--leaving me on much firmer ground to dispute him. [Edit: he does claim biological expertise based on his undergraduate studies, but then, so could I, having sat for General Science in Bible College.]

I will be interacting in this post with Chapter 20 of his book Bible Contexts which, at least for now, can be found at his website http://www.biblecontexts.com/. He introduces the chapter as follows:

If Cain married someone living outside Eden, this would explain some strange details in Genesis. It would also explain how our gene pool contains so much variation.

---

His book is all about explaining strange details in Genesis with even stranger speculations. He sees a problem with God selecting just two humanoids--really, only one--to begin the human family tree. Although his God is capable of many amazing feats, Dr. D seems constrained by his acceptance of atheist teaching to place the Laws of Nature at a higher tier on the hierarchy than that occupied by Nature's God. The God who could split the first man in half at the sub-cellular level to produce the first woman was nonetheless stumped at providing this pair's descendants with enough genetic variety to produce the four blood types, so He needed to pull in some genes from the neighboring humanoids to pull it off. Thus, Cain's Wife. 

Now Mrs. Cain was not a Neanderthal, mind you--Cain had already inherited those genes from his long-dead humanoid ancestors. What she provided instead was access to the "rich gene pool" that had resulted from millions of years of primate evolution. Dr. D uses a modern analogy to explain why this was not only sufficient, but necessary, if humanity were to survive The Fall:

 Cain could, of course, have married his sister – though the Bible doesn’t say this happened. It is difficult to imagine her wanting to marry a brother (especially the nasty brother who murdered the nice one). Presumably this incest wouldn’t be dangerous like it is today because God could have made sure there weren’t any dangerous recessive genes in Adam’s chromosomes. However, our human race would be very weak if the entire gene pool had been limited to just Adam’s chromosomes. Restricted gene pools often cause problems in overrefined agricultural animals or crop lines because this makes them vulnerable to pests and changes in the environment. This is solved by interbreeding with wild species to reinvigorate the gene pool by introducing more variety.

Here he makes a mistake commonly perpetuated by pseudoscientists, assuming that a genetic bottleneck always results in a dangerously depleted gene pool. The reason modern agricultural crops and animals have depleted gene pools, and wild varieties don't, is precisely the result of human intervention to breed out unwanted variation. Absent that unnatural selection, a fairly robust set of genes will continue to be passed on, even in a small population. But racism is a powerful and primordial urge, such that organisms resist hybridisation and generally seek to mate with creatures most like themselves, resulting in further speciation, as any organisms that depart from the standard in the same direction tend to seek out each other for breeding, leaving an even more depleted genome to their descendants. Were it not for the balancing act of another primordial urge--that of men, having gone forth to conquer, seeking and finding sexual release amongst the females of the conquered races--humans would be much more genetically depleted than we are. 

If I were to hypothesize myself, I would say that God created Adam with two completely different sets of chromosomes, with each of the millions of gene pairs consisting of different alleles. Thus Eve was far more distant from Adam, genetically, than any two humans are today; at the time she was split off from him, she only shared 50 per cent of his genetic material. And if God were powerful enough to pull off forming yet another haploid set for the rest of Eve, then he only shared half of her genome--providing far more diversity than Cain could have brought into the young race by impregnating a distant descendant of the Neanderthals and Denisovans. Adam could well have carried one haploid gene for Type A blood, and one for Type B. We don't even have to split that in half again to get all three of the blood types just among their children, provided that Eve possessed the same. And if, post-Fall, any two of their children ended up with an allele that lacked the information for producing either the A or B antigen, Type O could emerge as early as their grandchildren's generation. It's a stupendous pity that Dr. D, with all his learning, didn't see how God could accomplish this without having Cain interbreed with a non-human. 

       Mutations occur very rarely, unless there are carcinogens present. This is good, because most mutations are dangerous – as seen by the effects of carcinogens. Reproductive cells are protected from mutations by DNA repair mechanisms, which make sure that accidental mutations are rarely passed on to our children. A few do get through – on average sixty-four mutations – though this is tiny compared to the three billion base pairs that are copied perfectly.⁴ However, some of these are so harmful that they result in miscarriage – about 10 percent of pregnancies end this way. So even a small increase in mutation rate would result in a lot more miscarriages.

Dr. D goes on at length to describe just how humanly impossible it would have been for God to actually get the human race going with just two people. Okay, and where does the book of Genesis imply that God can't do anything humanly impossible? This cognitive dissonance would be laughable, did he not with such sincerity lend credence to the atheist hypotheses. Of course, the way heredity works now, in our currently depleted human population, where any two humans on the planet share at least 99.9 per cent of the same genome, does not necessarily speak to how things would have worked back when they shared barely half of that. We don't really have any idea what a genuinely rich gene pool looks like, as the nature of genetic recombination means that some genes go missing with each successive generation, and after several thousands of years, every genome has become depleted to one extent or another--unnatural selection greatly accelerating the process. And since this goes against the collective wisdom of Evolution--which imagines, contrary to all evidence, the gene pool at large becoming progressively richer over time--Dr. D. just isn't going to hear this from his atheist mentors or their disciples.

So whom DID Cain marry? Well, as all scholars have noted, Genesis doesn't say. And why should it? If humanity began with only one man and one woman, and no ape-men to "enrich the gene pool," then of course he married his sister. Anyone with even half a human brain could figure that out with just a little help; there's no need to state the obvious. All we need is the succinct statement of the compiler of Genesis 3 that Eve was "the mother of all living." That leaves no room for any previous races to insert their alleles into the human genome, period. 

Dr. D should have stuck with interpreting and explaining the Bible, and left fairy-tale speculations to those who reject the Genesis account out of theological necessity. 

Why there's no such thing as a Stone Age Tribe

This post has been percolating for many months, so I decided to go ahead and give it a go now, but subject it to revision as I continue to ponder the question.
Two videos have brought about this rush to print: one a series actually, to which I will get shortly; the other being this National Geographic Special about the Waorani tribe of Ecuador. In a documentary like this, the narrator typically gushes that they live as they did 20,000 years ago, and are just now finally emerging from the Stone Age.
These claims not only have no historical basis; they defy logic. The lifestyle of the Waorani is totally incompatible with the evolutionist's claim that they are descended from people who crossed the Bering Straight tens of thousands of years ago. They make their living by using darts (made from one palm) dipped in poison (scraped from the bark of a certain vine, and only deadly if injected) shot through a blowgun (made from another palm). That, for their meat supply; their vegetable staple is manioc, a domesticated crop that only grows in the tropics. Granted, they have been doing this from time immemorial, but only since their ancestors took up residence in the rain forest of the Amazon. It's impossible that their ancestors could have lived any such way before arriving there--and the forensic evidence from this video series (especially beginning with video #10) indicates that their ancestors only arrived there a few centuries earlier than the conquistadors--and that the people whom they displaced were accomplished agrarians.
Just one of the bits that jumped out at me from the movie was that the "uncontacted" Waorani no longer use stone axes or earthen pots--they trade for steel versions of the same. Only the oldest man in the community can even remember how to use a stone axe, and he made a startling revelation---the tribe had no knowledge of where stone axe heads even came from!  They found the heads abandoned in the jungle by a previous civilisation--just as my sons like to comb newly plowed fields every spring for stone arrowheads--and assumed that they fell from heaven or something. A "stone age" tribe equally dependent on outside civilisation for their axe heads, whether they be of stone or steel--incredible!
Elisabeth Elliot, half of the first team of outsiders to live among the Waorani and record their culture, reported that the Waorani told her their ancestors also had worn clothes, but had eventually abandoned all clothing but for a single string around their loins, and perhaps--to dress up--one around each arm. Obviously their ancestors would have needed quite a bit more than that to make the trek to North America!
The native ability of evolutionists to suspend the use of logic continues to astound me.
Another bit that jumped out to me: an anthropologist, who learned the language from the Waoroni civilised by their contact with Elisabeth Elliot and Rachel Saint, led the documentary team eastward to contact their downriver relatives. His research indicated that 70% of the males in the past five generations had died of homicide (oral history traces this murderous tendency back to a falling out over a tribal celebration about ten generations back). Clearly outsiders who bring in diseases that kill off a quarter, a third, or even half of the population are not the major threat to their continued existence. And those who do survive modern diseases will tend to pass their resistance to the following generations.
Again, a wee bit of logic would be helpful. How could a tribe that has lived on this land, disease-free for centuries, still only number in the hundreds--while the descendants of just a couple dozen men on the Mayflower now number in the tens of millions? Obviously murder, from conception onward, is a serious threat to population growth--in the case of "uncontacted tribes" still numbering only a few hundred individuals, clearly the greatest threat. It is notable that, the documentary reports, word filtered back to the uncontacted members of the tribe--along with the steel pots and axes--that there's no need to kill each other any more; so they've stopped the carnage (else, obviously the team would have never made it back out alive with their footage). Note: Mincaye, who had been one of, if not the oldest man in the tribe for over sixty years, has finally died of old age in his 90's. He manged to live long enough to give up his murderous lifestyle shortly before his life expectancy ran out, and "walk Waogongi's path" for the next two-thirds of his life, and on into the hereafter.
Everything in the documentary trumpets the same thing: this is not an ancient tribe peacefully perpetuating the lifestyle of their ancestors--a way of life under threat only by outside intrusion--but instead, a degenerate community in serious danger of completing the process of self-extinction if they are NOT contacted by outsiders.

How many metres in a cubit? The answer may astound you.

Dear Readers,
I know it's only been a day since I edited my last post (if you haven't read it yet, I highly advise it), but I just have to share what I learned today about the Egyptian cubit. If you watch the relevant minute of the referenced video, you will see that the most ancient Egyptian cubit is a function of the ratio of pi and phi in metres, out to four or five digits (.52356) over the precise 230,366½-millimetre width of each of the Great Pyramid's four sides.
This would indicate that the most ancient Egyptians were aware of the relationship of geometry to base ten out to five digits--a metre is the distance from the equator to the pole, divided by ten thousand--as well as the irrational numbers of higher mathematics. As later generations of Egyptians lost this knowledge, it stands to reason that their cubits became less and less precise--ranging as much as a centimetre off the ancient standard (and even more so by the time we get to the TNIV).
If the Egyptians at the dawn of history were capable of manipulating such abstract numbers to such precision, it lends credence to the idea that the numbers in Genesis chapter five--even more ancient--are the result of equally complex calculations. Note that in each of the nine generations enumerated, the age at which the son was begotten always ends in zero, two, five, or seven--as do the lifespans of the first seven generations. This is regardless of whether one follows the Hebrew, Greek, or Samaritan numbers. And as it turns out, two and five are among the factors of phi squared; it appears that some complicated mathematical formula was at work in producing ages that always ended in one of these two factors of phi squared, or the sum of them. And it appears that we are only now finally coming to the point in our understanding of ancient mathematics to be able to transcribe these numbers into something more useful to our purposes, which is establishing the time span between Creation and the Flood.

Added on August 19:
This video shows a tablet from ancient Babylon now understood to contain formulas of higher mathematics used to construct triangles from an entirely different perspective than has been used for the past 2500 years. Clearly Ancient Man was much more intelligent than materialist paradigm has been willing to accept. Perhaps more on that, in a later post.

Was Noah the First Albino?

Albinism continues to be the only topic which consistently draws the most people to this blog, month after month, so I've developed a label for it. Today, we address the question, Was Noah the first albino?
The pseudopigraphal Book of Enoch contains the following account:

And after some days my son Methuselah took a wife for his son Lamech, and she became pregnant by him and bore a son.
And his body was white as snow and red as the blooming of a rose, and the hair of his head and his long locks were white as wool, and his eyes beautiful.
And when he opened his eyes, he lighted up the whole house like the sun, and the whole house was very bright.
 And thereupon he arose in the hands of the midwife, opened his mouth, and conversed with the Lord of righteousness. And his father Lamech was afraid of him and fled, and came to his father Methuselah.
And he said unto him: 'I have begotten a strange son, diverse from and unlike man, and resembling the sons of the God of heaven; and his nature is different and he is not like us, and his eyes are as the rays of the sun, and his countenance is glorious.
And it seems to me that he is not sprung from me but from the angels, and I fear that in his days a wonder may be wrought on the earth.
And now, my father, I am here to petition thee and implore thee that thou mayest go to Enoch, our father, and learn from him the truth, for his dwelling-place is amongst the angels.'
And when Methuselah heard the words of his son, he came to me to the ends of the earth; for he had heard that I was there, and he cried aloud, and I heard his voice and I came to him. And 1 said unto him: 'Behold, here am I, my son, wherefore hast thou come to me?'
And he answered and said: 'Because of a great cause of anxiety have I come to thee, and because of a disturbing vision have I approached.
And now, my father, hear me: unto Lamech my son there hath been born a son, the like of whom there is none, and his nature is not like man's nature, and the colour of his body is whiter than snow and redder than the bloom of a rose, and the hair of his head is whiter than white wool, and his eyes are like the rays of the sun, and he opened his eyes and thereupon lighted up the whole house.

Thus it is that some people see albinistic traits in Noah. Since Lamech and his wife Batenosh (according to accounts contemporary with the Book of Enoch) were first cousins, it would have been Enoch who originated the albinism gene, passed it on to Methuselah and one of the parents of Lamech's wife, and thus through both of them to Noah, the first full albino.

I don't put any stock in this story. If Noah were albino, then all three of his sons would have been half-abino, and likely half of his grandchildren. Then, when they married each other, albinism would have broken out in a big way among his great-grandchildren. Suffice it to say that Noah may have been the first blue-eyed blond, and passed that trait on down to several of his great-grandchildren. But I don't even think that theory is sufficient to account for the existence of this story.

Furthermore, there are several different gene mutations that contribute to the various forms of albinism, each one probably arising independently. It's unlikely that Noah had them all.

Moses the Ayoubian

I’ve been looking at the life of Job lately, and pondering just how it fits into the general scheme of Scripture. Job itself is a fascinating work: it’s quite possibly the first book of the Bible to be written. We know absolutely nothing about the author, but he must have lived some time after Job did, as the chronology of the book stretches out for one hundred and forty years. The format of the book lends credence to the idea of an inspired editor, collecting various pieces of data together into one highly poetic stream of discourses, sandwiched between an introductory and conclusive narrative.

1. Job has to be about the age of his friends Eliphaz the Temanite, a descendant of Esau, and Bildad the Shuhite, possibly a descendant of Abraham’s youngest son Shuah. So he couldn’t have lived any earlier than Eliphaz the father of Teman, who quite possibly is the same as Job’s friend. That would put his birth at around 2220 AM, the earliest date suggested by the Babylonian Talmud. And it’s quite likely that he was a fairly close relative of both, being descended, like them, from Abraham—in his case, most likely through Keturah.

2. Job’s story picks up after his ten children are grown, which would put his age around sixty. He then lived another 140 years, and it was very uncommon for someone to live that long after Abraham’s time. And any time after Moses’ generation is completely unreasonable.

3. Although written in Hebrew, the text of Job contains several archaic words, references to ice age conditions, mention of a monetary unit current in Jacob’s day, and a total lack of any Levitical system of worship. All of these features support the early date for Job’s life, as well as an eyewitness source for the historical data in the book.

4. The references to Job’s enemies in chapter one are quite compatible with an early date, but not a late one.

5. The reference to iron in ch. 19 and ch. 28 drive evolutionists to a late date, as they don’t believe iron-working had yet evolved by the beginning of the second millennium BC. Those of us who have read the history of those times know otherwise, so the early date is not threatened. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to these people that the reason there isn’t any archeological iron in the early layers is that it has long since rusted away by now.

Okay, so we’re going with the early date (not the earliest date, which is before Abraham). Job lived from about 1780 to 1580 BC, and his trials occurred around 1720. The question then arises, who compiled the book of Job in the 16^th century BC? The most obvious answer is Moses, who was born in 1576 BC and was not only highly literate, but also a native speaker of Hebrew. 

Now, this is the interesting thing: how did Moses find out about Job? Well, it’s quite possible that Job was one of his own ancestors. The final words of the book are to the effect that Job died after living to see his great-grandchildren. What if one of those was Moses?

Let’s start with Job’s daughters: they are special because Job gave them an inheritance with their brothers. This means that, in addition to the dowry which every daughter was due from her father, they each received an eleventh of Job’s estate when he died (unless he disbursed it earlier). This was their own property which then passed on to their children when they died.

So, let’s say that Job’s last daughter, Keren, was born in 1700 BC, when he was eighty. That was the year that Jacob moved his clan to Egypt. It’s quite possible that when Jacob’s grandsons went looking for wives, that they may have lighted upon the daughters of Job, who had several things going for them: they were beautiful, they were rich, and they were godly. Not only that, Job’s family would also have been traveling the same roads to Egypt to buy grain during the famine. It’s not at all unlikely, in fact, that all three daughters married into the nascent nation of Israel, where their property rights would be respected. 

To carry it just one step farther, Job had three daughters; his second cousin Levi had three sons. If Kohath the son of Levi had married any one of the daughters of Job, Amram would have been Job’s grandson, and Moses his great-grandson. Some of Moses’ second cousins would have been the great-grandsons whom Job lived to see. And it stands to reason that Moses’ grandmother would have brought with her as part of her dowry an account of her famous father, brought up to date as far as her adulthood. It only remained for Amram, when he acquired the document by inheritance, to bring it up to date with the death of his maternal grandfather, before making it available to his son Moses to have copied for his personal library.

The Septuagint edition of Job differs from the Hebrew in many important particulars, indicating the possibility that for this portion of their translation, the Seventy used a local copy of the book that derived from one Moses had deposited in the Egyptian royal archives, with the attendant textual errors that had crept in independent of those in the edition preserved by the Hebrews.

There are several other mentions of Job in literature of the Middle East, all of dubious historical value. They’re all clearly based on the Scriptures themselves, and typically confuse Job with Jobab, the second King of Edom. That simply doesn’t leave enough time for Job to be a contemporary of Eliphaz, so I’m going with the theory that he was descended not from Abraham’s grandson, but from Abraham himself, through one of the sons of Keturah whom Abraham sent off ‘to the east.’

So, there we have it: Job was a descendant of Abraham, but not through the promised seed—so his ascending genealogy was of no interest to the Hebrew compiler. Job was an ancestor of some tribe of Israelites—quite possibly the Levites—but not through the male line, so that was of no interest to the compiler either. It is for this reason that neither Job’s father, nor any of his sons, are mentioned by name in the account that has come down to us as Scripture. The fact that all three of his surviving daughters are named, however, is a strong an indication as we need that it was through at least one, and quite possibly all of them, that a major part of the nation that emerged from its Egyptian captivity was descended.

One more thing: remember the daughters of Zelophehad?

"The daughters of Zelophehad speak right: thou shalt surely give them a possession of an inheritance among their father's brethren; and thou shalt cause the inheritance of their father to pass unto them. And thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel, saying, If a man die, and have no son, then ye shall cause his inheritance to pass unto his daughter. And if he have no daughter, then ye shall give his inheritance unto his brethren. And if he have no brethren, then ye shall give his inheritance unto his father's brethren. And if his father have no brethren, then ye shall give his inheritance unto his kinsman that is next to him of his family, and he shall possess it: and it shall be unto the children of Israel a statute of judgment, as the LORD commanded Moses." --Numbers 27:8-11

The judgment Moses rendered in this case is reminiscent of the way Job’s daughters, one of whom was likely his own grandmother, received an inheritance that had passed all the way down to him. And it’s another indication that all three daughters may well have married into the same family.

If this hypothesis is correct, all men carrying the Cohen Haplotype on their Y-chromosome are descended from Job and his wife through one of their lovely daughters. And if the three sons of Levi married the three daughters of Job, all men carrying one of the other two Levitical haplotypes are, as well.

My son, who just read the foregoing, objected somewhat to its highly speculative content. In response, all I can say is that generations of Jewish rabbis did exactly the same thing for centuries, yet it didn’t keep them from being quoted with a growing level of authority.

Future centuries will reveal whether I am fit, or not, to stand in their number.

PS  'Ayoubian' is a fancy way of saying 'descended from Job.'

The First American African President

The White Man never forgets that no one is perfect, especially he. So when I do recognise a mistake in what I wrote, I prefer to be the first to announce it. This is one of those times.

It came to my attention today that, despite claims that Barack Hussein Obama had no ancestors who were American Slaves, he actually appears to be descended--through his 'white' grandmother--from the very first African to be enslaved in Anglo America: John Punch.

PROVO, UTAH – July 30, 2012 – A research team from Ancestry.com, the world’s largest online family history resource, has concluded that President Barack Obama is the 11th great-grandson of John Punch, the first documented African enslaved for life in American history. Remarkably, the connection was made through President Obama’s Caucasian mother’s side of the family.
The discovery is the result of years of research by Ancestry.com genealogists who, through early Virginia records and DNA analysis, linked Obama to John Punch. An indentured servant in Colonial Virginia, Punch was punished for trying to escape his servitude in 1640 by being enslaved for life. This marked the first actual documented case of slavery for life in the colonies, occurring decades before initial slavery laws were enacted in Virginia.
In the 372 years since, many significant records have been lost – a common problem for early Virginia (and the South in general) – destroyed over time by floods, fires and war. While this reality greatly challenged the research project, Ancestry.com genealogists were able to make the connection, starting with Obama’s family tree.
President Obama is traditionally viewed as an African-American because of his father’s heritage in Kenya. However, while researching his Caucasian mother, Stanley Ann Dunham’s lineage, Ancestry.com genealogists found her to have African heritage as well, which piqued the researchers’ interest and inspired further digging into Obama’s African-American roots.
In tracing the family back from Obama’s mother, Ancestry.com used DNA analysis to learn that her ancestors, known as white landowners in Colonial Virginia, actually descended from an African man. Existing records suggest that this man, John Punch, had children with a white woman who then passed her free status on to their offspring.

Is the White Man a racist?

The White man has written about race on this blog. Does that make him a racist? Well, no. Earlier on this blog (in a post which, among other things, gave Abe Lincoln's own words identifying him as one), racism was defined as follows:

The belief that a certain race is superior to all others, and that with that superiority come certain rights and privileges.

My own race, it should be obvious, is European. To specify further (which is not quite so obvious), I am of English extraction. This is my race, but I do not consider it superior to all others. There are those among my race who, however, do. These are adherents of British Israelitism, and they are convinced, from their interpretation of the Bible and history, that the English people, wherever in the world they may live, are God's chosen people-- that only those of my nation are objects of His special favour. They are racists.

Do you see the problem? Their racism is part and parcel of their understanding of the Bible. But how can racism be biblical, when the Bible clearly shows that we are all part of the same human race?

Well, it all comes down to passages in the Bible like this one:

Genesis 27:22 And Jacob (also called Israel) went near unto Isaac his father . . . 26 And his father Isaac said unto him . . . See, the smell of my son is as the smell of a field which the LORD hath blessed: 28 Therefore God give thee of the dew of heaven, and the fatness of the earth, and plenty of corn and wine: 29 Let people serve thee, and nations bow down to thee: be lord over thy brethren, and let thy mother's sons bow down to thee: cursed be every one that curseth thee, and blessed be he that blesseth thee.

Was Jacob a racist?

You see, on the most personal level, a racist believes that "I am superior to others, and that superiority entitles me to certain rights and privileges." Clearly Jacob believed this, and this belief was behind the scheming that ended up with him getting the rights and privileges away from his older brother Esau. But however he got them, he did get them. There's no denying the fact that in historical terms, Israel has fared better than Esau. Better than Ishmael. Better than Lot. Better than Nahor. Better, in short, than any of his other relatives in the earth. Why, for example, were half of the doctors in pre-WWII Hungary Jews? It certainly wasn't because Jews were half the population of Hungary. Why were such a huge percentage of the early nuclear physicists in Germany Jews? It certainly wasn't because Jews were a huge percentage of the population of Germany.

Wherever Jews have gone in the world, they have suffered persecution--even in the land of Israel, 60 years after independence, they are daily targeted for elimination. And yet, wherever Jews have gone in the world, they have prospered. In whatever country takes them in--on whatever terms--Jews rise to the top in fields too numerous to mention.

Is it merely because they believe that their race is superior to all others, and that they are thereby entitled to certain rights and privileges--certain blessings?

Or is it because God said that they actually are?

Now, there are only two responses to the realization that the agnate descendants of Jacob are uniquely the objects of God's favour--hatred toward them, or a love and respect. The former are the objects of God's curses, the latter the objects of his blessing.

Take just one example: Adolph Hitler. There is no question that Germany would have had the atomic bomb before any other nation but for one thing: Hitler's oppression of the Jews meant that the top nuclear physicists in his nation--men like Albert Einstein--would be forced to flee to his enemies merely because they were Jews. He went ahead with his nuclear program anyway, using only Teutonic physicists, but at such a delay that the Allies were able to send in special forces to take out his top nuclear facility before it had produced enough heavy hydrogen to make a bomb.

Hitler's single-minded hatred of Jews led him to invade Poland to start off WWII. There were two and a half million Jews in Poland, and Hitler managed to kill just about all of them. But he wasn't done; millions more were in Russia, his ally. So he turned his back on conquering the rest of Western Europe and launched a surprise attack on Russia--where his forces killed millions more Jews. But Russia, that great bear, merely retreated behind a bone-chilling curtain of frost, while Hitler's men, deprived of the attention of Jewish doctors, died by the tens of thousands. Awakened, and armed by Hitler's unconquered enemies, Russia moved in on Germany itself, and--rather than send his last six tank divisions to defend his borders, Hitler ordered them moved into his last remaining ally in Europe, Hungary. Why? Because Hungary had a million Jews, which they refused to give up to the gas chambers. Hitler's forces were able to kill only half a million Hungarian Jews before the gates of Berlin fell to the Russians. Meanwhile, virtually every German woman along the Eastern Front was gang-raped by Russian soldiers (and, to my nation's shame, a large proportion along the Western Front suffered similar treatment): a heavy price indeed to pay for their loyalty to one who so hated God's favoured people.

In short, there are really only two kinds of racism: a racism that springs from an acceptance of the historical implications of God's promised blessings--and curses--; and a racism that springs from a rejection of them.

In that sense, everybody is a racist: either a realistic racist, or a rebellious one.

The White Man, if he must be called a racist, would definitely choose the former. As, for the most part, has his nation.

And may it ever be so.

Or else.

I am not a hyphenated American

Since news links rarely last very long, I'm quoting the relevant sections below:'

BERLIN (Reuters Life!) – Percy MacLean can call on 250 years of experience to weigh up how immigrants integrate in Germany. Since his Scottish ancestor arrived in 1753, the family has produced mayors, members of parliament and even a Nazi.
Today, the 63-year-old MacLean, a chief judge in Berlin's administrative court, says Germany risks losing the openness that allowed his family to flourish for generations because of a divisive national debate over the integration of Muslims.
At the age of 16, MacLean's ancestor Archibald left the Hebridean island of Coll for Danzig (now Gdansk in Poland) during the crackdown on Highland clans that followed the failure of Bonnie Prince Charlie's Jacobite Rebellion in 1745-6.
Archibald's grandson Richard later became mayor of the Prussian port of Memel -- now Klaipeda in Lithuania -- and three MacLeans went on to sit in Prussia's state parliament.
The family continued to thrive after Germany united in 1871, all the while maintaining its ties with Scotland. Percy's uncle Curt Hugo MacLean served as a major in the Wehrmacht in World War II, while another, Donald, joined the Nazi party.
"All my forebears went back to Scotland to keep up with things," said MacLean, who first went at 16. "Obviously I don't have citizenship but I'm still very attached to the country."

Mr. MacLean is obviously a Scottish-German. It's rather incredible that his family has kept up their ties to the fatherland for 250 years, without ever diminishing their loyalty to their current homeland. But such is the case with a hyphenated nationality.
I am not a hyphenated American. Every last one of my ancestors, as best as I can trace, originated in northern Europe before their departure for the New World. But I have no ties whatsoever to their countries of origin. I know I have distant cousins in the Old World, and people of my and all preceding generations have in fact kept up with them, even to the point of physically getting together with them in some cases. But I really have no interest in defining myself as a European; I was born an American, and an American I remain--although at the time I married an American I had spent most of my life outside the country of my origin, there was really never any doubt that I would retain my national identity for life. Is it due in part to the fact that I'm from such a variety of European countries that I don't claim any one of them as my ancestral homeland? Or is it just in the nature of an American to identify himself ethnically as part of the American melting pot?

I have a friend who lives in Africa, and has for practically all his life. He's over 50 years old, but has never been counted in an American census, because he's always been in Africa when they were taken. Like him, his wife grew up in Africa. So have their children. But they are not Africans; they're Americans through and through. He keeps up on American football better than I do, and their children are more up on American styles than are mine, who have never left North America. Is it because between them they have grown up in 6 different African countries, but have retained their American identity all along? Is it because they know that as white people, they will never be able to fully identify as Africans? Whatever the case, they are still Americans, however seldom they actually get back to the country of their nationality.

On the other hand, I think of an African I know who could proudly trace back his ancestry to a Black American family that emigrated to Africa not long after the War To Preserve The Union. Like in the case of the MacLeans, his family held tightly to their American identity for generation after generation. He attended college in the US, but, lacking standing to remain in this country, had to return to Africa as an adult. But where is he now? In Northern Europe, married to a white European. Despite his African roots, he was too American in his mind to settle for an African existence. He may remain in Europe; he may return to America. But it's unlikely that he or any of his descendants will ever be able to consider themselves fully African.

One more thing. In Euro-American culture, one's last name is extremely significant. Geraldine Ferraro was never able to become a viable presidential candidate, perhaps in part because she had a different last name than did her husband and their children. Hilary Rodham, on the other hand, helped propel him into office by borrowing her husband's last name, one which she has continued to use ever since. She even ran for President under his surname, and nearly succeeded. One's identity is that tightly bound up in the name passed down through the generations to the legitimate male heir by his father. And thus Mr. MacLean maintains his Scottish identity, when he may have hundreds of third, fourth, and fifth German-surnamed cousins who aren't even aware that one of their many ancestors originated in Scotland.

Mutations in the genome--exciting? Only in Theory.

The White Man studies Evolution a lot. And I'm referring not to the Law of Evolution (all matter changes over time) which is so axiomatic that there's not much point in studying it. I refer to the Theory of Evolution--specifically, the official dogma of Naturalistic Materialism. This isn't hard, since it's the approved dogma of science textbooks, reference works, and most media outlets. In fact, it's virtually impossible not to be familiar with The Theory.

I like to watch Evolutionists debate Creationists. One thing I've noticed is that Evolutionists can't discuss their Theory without using the words create, created, or made/designed for. They just can't; I've never seen it happen. They often use them more than their opponent, and not to present his point of view, but their own.

In contrast to this, science articles of a technical nature almost never use these words. Even articles to a lay audience can get by quite well without them. This one, for instance.

When researchers are in the midst of a $50,000 project to examine mutations in the human genome--the very topic in which Darwin, or his Theory, is most often invoked--there's also not a single mention of his name or his Theory. Darwin's Theory, it turns out, is of no practical use whatsoever in predicting how genes will mutate and what changes in the phenotype will result from it. In fact, if you read between the lines, you'll find the Darwinian researchers surprised by their results--results that they now have to evaluate, not in light of Darwin's Theory, but of Mendel's Law.

That's right. Test results that don't conform to Medel's Law of Inheritance are tossed out as extraneous--regardless of how nice they may look for Darwin's Theory. When human lives are at stake, Science can't afford to follow an untestable Theory over a proven Law.

I, Too, Have a Dream

The late Martin Luther King Jr. was somewhat a hero of mine growing up, although I was never so thoroughly indoctrinated into his cult so as to confuse him with the original Martin Luther, whose name he shared for all of his public life (although it appears that he never legally changed his name from Michael L. King, and was known in his early ministry as "M. L. King").

I was so enthralled with his "I Have a Dream" speech that I memorized it for delivery at the annual MLK Holiday one year. Alas, being judged by the color of my skin, I was encouraged to find some other way of celebrating the holiday. Well, I didn't let that get me down, but as time went on I did find out more and more about MLK that dimmed my appreciation for him. But I still like the speech.

In the speech, Martin made reference to his sons and daughters:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Martin and Coretta's four children did grow up, and outlived them both. But one thing they did not do was provide the Kings with any grandchildren. Incredibly, when Coretta died in 2006 at the age of seventy-eight, none of her four children had produced any legal issue. In fact, none of them were even married. Her oldest son, MLK III, had yet to legitimize his relationship with his girlfriend, who later bore their child. Her oldest daughter Yolanda died the following year, and the remaining three are embroiled in a legal dispute over the administration of their father's legacy.

Martin got his wish---but not the way he wanted, I'm sure. His "four little children" are being judged by the content of their character--in fact, they're even calling each other's character into question as I write.

Well, I have a dream. It's perhaps not as grandiose as Martin Luther King's, but I'd say its chances of being fulfilled are at least as good. None of my children are yet married, so I have no grandchildren. But I dream of spending the last half of my life welcoming dozens of grandchildren into the world, one after another. I even dream of seeing my oldest grandchildren get married and have children of their own. I dream of setting up a society in memory of my father, membership in which being limited to his agnate descendants--and there being no inactive members.

I'm not out to leave a media legacy for my children to squabble over--or even to get my name on the history sites. I'm out to leave a legacy of descendants who can be glad to be judged by the content of their character--whether or not they are still being judged by the color of their skin--or the lack thereof.

Yehoshua bar Yosef was born in the year Zero

"Genealogists," my alleged ancestor Mohammad ibn Abdullah is said to have quipped, "are all liars." That didn't stop him, though, from retaining one to trace his ancestry back to Ibrahim ibn Tarah, and thence to Adam. What makes genealogists so inclined to stretch the truth, however, is not so much a lack of ancestral names, but an overabundance of them. Dozens of different cultures have maintained genealogical lines going back to the dawn of history. Since this predates the Dispersion of Tongues, it means that the earliest ancestors have many different names by which their various lines of descent remember them, resulting in a tendency to sometimes inflate one's genealogy with duplicate names.

Now, what does all this have to do with Jesus being born in the year Zero? Well, in addition to genealogists being liars, so are historians. History not being all that lucrative of an independent profession, historians tend to work for either the church or the state. Given that these two seldom play independent roles in establishing the facts of history, the two are for most historical purposes indistinguishable. Occasionally, though, a heretic will arise and point out that the officially sanctioned historians got it wrong. Although he may be shouted down for the rest of his (sometimes considerably shortened) lifetime, his version of history might just gain widespread acceptance--although it may eventually take a regime change to make it official.

One such case, joining history with both genealogy and biochemistry, was the long campaign of historical author Fawn Brodie to convince the historical establishment (of which she was not a bona fide member, never having majored in history) that Thomas Jefferson was the father, and his wife the aunt, of all the children born to their slave Sally Hemings. To do so, she had to resort to the chronology of respected Pulitzer-prize-winning historian Dumas Malone--and eventually, with the help of that new tool for forensic genealogy--DNA testing--won over all but the most ardent protectors of Jefferson's disputed honor, his adjunct descendants in the Euro-American line.

Another case has now come to my attention. John P. Pratt has proposed nothing more radical than that Dionysius Exiguus, a monk from Russia who died about 544, actually knew what he was talking about when he placed the conception of Jesus at the time of the spring equinox in the year he then called (European science not yet being familiar with the concept of Zero) 1 AD. This calculation, which set a date for Christmas which has never since ceased to be in effect, has nonetheless been ridiculed by some who have made the incredulous suggestion that Brother Denny "perhaps ... had never read the gospel account of the birth of Jesus" in researching for his momentous proclamation.

Ah well, another look at the evidence--by a published astronomer, no less--has now shown Brother Denny to have been right after all, at least to the significance of the spring equinox. Turns out that, in addition to failing to factor in the existence of a year named Zero, his assuming to have determined the date of Jesus' conception was a bit of a stretch; it was actually, though, within the Twelve Days of Christmas from the actual date of his birth.
Here's the article, in which John Pratt calculates Jesus to have been born the week of April 6, 0 AD. His public ministry began 29½ years later, and just about the time he was to have celebrated his 33rd birthday, the eclipsed full moon rose blood-red over the hill upon which he was crucified.

An Obama Chronology

Note: These dates have all been compiled from online sources.

ETA: All information on Lolo Soetoro's time in Hawaii was corrected in September 2012 following the release of his INS file.

c. 1500. Sudanese tribal chieftain Isingoma Labongo Rukidi conquers the coastal area of Lake Victoria and establishes the Luo kingdom in what is now Kenya and Tanzania.

c. 1895. Nyaoke, one of the four wives of wealthy Luo tribesman Obama, gives birth to her fifth son, Onyango. Raised a pagan, he flirts with Christianity as a young adult.

1896-1914. The British build a railway from the Indian Ocean to Lake Victoria, gradually bringing the Luo kingdom under their influence and eventual control.

c. 1914. Onyango enlists in the British army as Private Johnson, serving in Europe and India before settling in Zanzibar, a Muslim sultanate just coming under the influence of the British, who had replaced Germany as the regional superpower.

October 3, 1915. Ralph Waldo Emerson Dunham marries Ruth Lucille Armour in Wichita, Kansas. Their first son, Ralph Emerson Dunham, is born 11 months later.
March 23, 1918. Ruth Dunham gives birth to another son, Stanley Armour Dunham.

c. 1920's. Onyango coverts to Islam, takes the Islamic name Hussein, & marries Helima.

October 26, 1922. Madelyn Lee Payne is born to Kansans Rolla and Leola Payne.

November 25, 1926. Ruth Dunham is reported dead the morning after Thanksgiving; the local newspaper reports it as a case of inadvertent poisoning, but Barack Obama II later writes that it was self-inflicted. Ralph moves back with his parents and their two sons Ralph and Stanley are raised by Ruth's parents.

c. 1930. It becomes apparent that Helima is infertile. Hussein moves back to his ancestral homeland of Siaya, Nyanza Province, and marries Akumu, who takes the Muslim name Habiba. They settle in the village of Alego, which was notorious for its witchcraft. The area was nicknamed “Alego tat yien” (Alego, the roof of medicine”)

late June 1934 OR 1936 Hussein and Habiba's new son is given the Muslim name Barack Hussein.

Jan 2, 1935. Lolo Martodihardjo Soetoro born in Bandung, West Java, Indonesia.

May 5, 1940. Furniture salesman Stanley A. Dunham (age 22) marries high school senior Madelyn Lee Payne (age 17) in Wichita, KS, against the wishes of Madelyn's strict Methodist parents. Madelyn stays in school long enough to graduate.

c. March 1942. Madelyn becomes pregnant.

June 18, 1942. Stanley joins the Army. He is eventually stationed at Ft. Leavenworth in Kansas. Madelyn takes a job at a Boeing assembly plant in Wichita.

November 29, 1942. Stanley, hoping for a boy, names his newborn daughter Stanley A. Dunham. She will go by her middle name, Ann, all her life--but will later take on the last name of her Muslim husband. The Dunhams never have any other children.

c. 1945. Habiba Akumu Obama divorces Hussein Onyango Obama. Hussein's third wife Sarah, a Christian, raises Barack Hussein Obama.

c. 1946. Stanley finishes his army service and gets back into the furniture business.*

c. 1946. Lolo Soetoro's father and brother are killed in the Indonesian War of Independence.

1950's. The Dunhams move from KS to CA (where Madelyn [and Stanley*] attend Berkeley) to TX to WA. Stanley sells furniture and Madelyn works in restaurants. [ETA: in 1953 Ann is a student at a Catholic school in Beirut.*]

c. 1954. Barack Hussein Obama (age 18 or 20) marries Kezia before starting college.

1956. The Dunhams relocate* from Seattle to Mercer Island. Madelyn becomes an escrow officer in Bellevue and Ann attends Mercer Island High, where subjects taught include Marxism, taught by Jim Wichterman, and human sexuality a la Margaret Mead, taught by Val Foubert. John Stenhouse, the Chairman of the School Board, is a member of the Communist Party and president of the Dunham's Unitarian Church.

c. 1957. Barack and Kezia have their first son, whom they name Abongo. He goes by "Roy."

April 29, 1959 Barack receives a British Colonial Passport #84764, good for 10 years.

July 29, 1959 Barack receives an American F-1 student visa stamp in his British passport and is issued Alien Registration Number A11-983-537.

August 9, 1959. Barack Obama arrives in NYC on a BOAC flight from London. He left his pregnant wife behind to enroll in the University of Hawaii on an $1000 scholarship from the African American Institute. He also gets $190 from the University (raised to $200 the following year). The Territory of Hawaii was in the final process of joining the Union.

c. June 1960. Ann Dunham graduates from high school in Mercer Island, WA.

July 19, 1960. Apparently (all records of this have been deleted) Ann receives a 5-year passport in anticipation of traveling abroad while in college. It would have been issued in her maiden name, of course.

July 23, 1960. Barack is fingerprinted by the INS after requesting a work permit. His address is listed as 2036 Round Top Terrace, Honolulu.

August-September 1960 Barack claims living expenses of $2040 a year, so he gets permission to work for Dole Pineapple to cover the shortfall. He reports wages that "varied at $1.33 per hour."

September 26, 1960. The Dunham family moves to Hawaii, where Ann enrolls in the University. Madelyn finds work as a teller for the Bank of Hawaii.

c. September 1960. Ann, an anthropology major, meets Barack, an economics major, in a Russian class at the University of Hawaii. He pronounces his name with the accent on the first syllable, "Bear-ick." At that time the study of Russian was inextricably mixed up with communism. They hang around in the same group of anti-war students; she is the only female in it, and the only teenager. Barack is known for "his playboy ways" and is admonished to control them. He promises to try.

early to mid November 1960. UH freshman Ann Dunham (17) reportedly becomes pregnant by Barack Obama (24-26). Apparently after she refuses to abort their child, he agrees to marry her. At the time, he claims to have been divorced from Kezia.

c. December 1960. Ann drops out of UH after only one semester.

Feb 2, 1961. Barack reportedly marries Ann--an illegal marriage, even in progressive Hawaii. No records of their secret wedding on Maui are available.

March 3, 1961. In an application to extend his visa, Barack lists his address as 1704 Punahou St Apt #15. He leaves the lines for Spouse and Children blank.

c. May 1961 Barack is out of school for the summer; a good time to get home to visit his wife and children, including Auma, the daughter he's never met.

August 4, 1961. The date listed for the birth of Barack Hussein Obama II in Honolulu, Hawaii, on his Certificate of Live Birth (also on his Kenyan birth certificate). Later, his Hawaiian birth records are sealed by the Governor (in 2011, an extensively altered electronic copy is released by President Obama). No witness has come forward to testify having attended his birth in HI, but several of his Kenyan relatives insist that he was born in Mombasa, Kenya.

August 8, 1961. On this day, Barack's student visa was set to run out. Barack Hussein Obama II's Certificate of Live Birth is filed, showing parents as Stanley Ann and Barack Hussein Obama. They call their son "Barry," with the accent on the first syllable.

August 13, 1961. The Honolulu Advertiser lists among its birth announcements "Mr. and Mrs. Barack H. Obama, 6085 Kalanianaole Hwy, son, Aug. 4." Actually, Barack still maintains his own residence, and Ann lives with her parents at the above address. They are never to share a home.

September 6, 1961 Barack is living at 1482 Alancastre St, just outside the University of Hawaii. Ann has already returned to Washington, living at 516 13th Ave East, Apt #2 in Seattle. Barack receives permission to finish up his last year at UH. Ann, however, takes Barry to visit friends on Mercer Island and enrolls as an extension student at the University of Washington, completing 20 credits by the next summer.

June 1962. Barack graduates from UH with a B.A. in Mathematics and Economics and moves to Baltimore for the summer as a guest of the Koinonia Foundation. On his application to extend his student visa, he admits to being married but lists "Roy Obama" as his only son--no address given. He leaves the "Spouse" section blank.

Spring 1962. Moving back to Honolulu, Ann and her son move in with the Dunhams and enroll on welfare. Ann continues her studies at UH.

September 1962. Barack moves to Cambridge, MA to take a scholarship from Harvard for an MA in economics. He is not yet legally separated from Ann, who remains in Hawaii. Barack would be required to show an additional $1500 a year income in order for her to accompany him to Harvard. His scholarships total $3500 a year, only $300 over the required minimum for a single student. Meanwhile, he is known around Harvard as a womanizer.


December 12, 1963. Kenya assumes independence, led by a coalition of Kikuyu and Luo politicians, representing the first and second largest of over thirty ethnic groups in the highly divided country. On an INS extension request dated June 16, 1963, Barack had, for the first time, claimed Kenyan citizenship--and leaves the lines for "marital status" blank.

1963-64. At UH, Ann meets another student, Lolo Soetoro from Indonesia, there on a 2-year visa (A14 128 294) that expire June 14. Ann files for divorce in Hawaii. Barack signs the papers in Cambridge.

January 1964. Ann files for divorce. Barack's Kenyan girlfriend flies from New York to London for an abortion. The American Unitarian-Universalist Committee, which disapproved the flight, revokes their sponsorship of her and she is not permitted back in the US.

March 8, 1964. Barack and Ann's marriage is dissolved by order of Honolulu judge Samuel P. King Sr., for reasons of "grievous marital suffering inflicted Libellant by Libelee."

April 1964. Barack's request for another annual extension to his student visa is received by the INS. Their uncertainty over how many wives he has results in an exchange of correspondence with Harvard. Harvard, tired of his womanizing, agrees to expel him as a full-time student so the INS can deport him, but waits until after he has taken his final exams to tell him, "in case he might get upset and use that as an excuse for not passing." Barack appeals unsuccessfully.

June 15, 1964. Lolo Soetoro applies for a one-year extension on his student visa, in order to get a year's experience working at $2 an hour for Park Associates (his prospective job upon return to Indonesia with a masters in geology will only pay $2 to $10 a month). 

July 6, 1964. Having been deported by the INS when Harvard refused to sponsor his continuation in the US to work on his PhD in Economics, Barack returns to Kenya from NYC, his American girlfriend Ruth Nidesand following him. Barack goes on to marry her. They have two sons in Kenya before she divorces him to marry a Tanzanian. Barack goes on to marry at least 2 more Kenyan women.


December 1964. Lolo is laid off from his job at Park, but gets another one at Hawaii-Pacific Engineers.

1965 — Barack writes a paper titled "Problems Facing Our Socialism," published in the East Africa Journal, harshly criticizing the administration of then-President Jomo Kenyatta for moving the Third World country of Kenya away from socialism toward capitalism. At some point he is briefly jailed for his political views.

March 15, 1965. Ann marries Lolo Soetoro in Honolulu. Lolo Soetoro writes to Senator Fong to receive permission to overstay his extended visa, citing hardship on his wife if he is required to return to Indonesia without her.

June 4, 1965. Much to the frustration of Dr. Zumwinkle, Lolo Soetoro's visa extension is approved for another year by someone in INS acting outside of official channels.

July 1965. The Indonesian government recalls its foreign students, sending a cable to the UH demanding Lolo's return. Lolo appeals for another year to save the money to move Ann to Indonesia with him.

July 19, 1965. Ann receives US Passport F77788. The  application has been deleted from her passport file, apparently to conceal the fact that it was actually a passport renewal application. At any rate, it is not issued to Ann Soetoro, so she was not yet using her new married name.
June 1965-June 1966. Lolo continues to resist deportation, claiming that it would harm Ann's mental health to be left behind were he deported 'early.' Meanwhile, Ann is living with her parents--as she did during her marriage to Barack.

November 16, 1965. The Registrar at Harvard University advises Barack, now living in Nairobi, to finish up his PhD thesis in Kenya before trying to return to the US.

1966. Lolo is finally deported on June 20, after overstaying his 2-year visa by over 2 years, leaving Ann and Barack back in Honolulu, where she pays Barack's sitter $50 a month. Lolo, making $10 a month, lives with relative in Jakarta. He continues to spend the remainder of the year appealing for permission to return to the US before the mandatory 2-year absence. Ann applies for a job at the American embassy in Jakarta.

August 1966. Ann completes coursework from UH but does not have enough credits to graduate. She anticipates receiving a BA in Anthropology by the next February. Barack starts kindergarten at Noelani Elementary School in an upscale neighborhood of Honolulu.

February 28, 1967. Final rejection by INS of Lolo Soetoro's appeal. Ann is still short a few credits, but hopes to graduate in June (she doesn't).

June 29, 1967. Ann, still listed as living with her parents at 2234 University Ave, applies to amend her passport F77788 to the name Stanley Ann Soetoro. Her signature on this application isn't dated, so it's unsure if this was to replace a lost passport, or if she really changed her name twice while married to Lolo.

August 6, 1967. Ann finally accumulates the credits to graduate from UH.

August 21, 1967. INS official orders investigation into the citizenship and parenthood of Barack Obama II. It is concluded that he "is an American citizen by virtue of his birth in Honolulu Hawaii Aug. 4, 1961" and a stepson of Lolo Soetoro by virtue of his mother's marriage thereto. The INS copy of Barack's birth certificate has been withheld by the Department of Homeland Security on the grounds that its release "would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy."

October 1967. Ann and Barack travel to Indonesia to join her husband who has been there without her for a year. Ann finally gets a teaching job at the US embassy. The Soetoros settle on 16 Kyai Haji Ramli Tengah Street, in a poor Muslim neighborhood in Jakarta. Barry Soetoro enrolls in first grade at Franciscus Assisi Primary School, where he is listed as an Indonesian Muslim--in effect, having been adopted by his stepfather through marriage (Under Indonesian law, children could not inherit their mothers' citizenship, regardless of where they were born). Neighborhood children tease him for being a Catholic. He learns Indonesian at school; his mother tutors him in English at home.

August 1, 1968. Lolo's American residency is finally granted, expiring July 31, 1973.

August 13, 1968. Ann gets an amended passport in the name of Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro. She claims no plans to return to the US, based on her marriage to an Indonesian citizen--despite the fact that he has just that month been granted US residency! She lists Stanley Armour Dunham, Bank of Hawaii, as her contact person. She also starts to list as a dependent Barack Hussein Obama Soebarkah, but crosses the name out. Apparently this is when Barack gets his own US passport, which will expire in August 1973.

1968. Barack and Kezia have another son, Abo. Lolo Soetoro completes the mandatory 2-year absence and is eligible to return and reside in the US. But the Soetoros remain in Indonesia, even after Lolo receives residency status.

c. 1969. Barry writes in a third-grade essay that he wants to be President when he grows up.

1970. Madelyn Dunham becomes a vice president of her bank in Honolulu. Lolo gets a lucrative job with the Union Oil Company, and they move to 22 Taman Amir Hamzah Street in the upscale Matraman Dalam neighborhood, replacing their motorcycle with a car.

1970. Barack and Kezia have another son, Bernard.

July 18, 1970. Ann's passport expires. Apparently she doesn't bother to renew it. Barack spends the summer in Honolulu with his grandparents.

August 15, 1970. A daughter, Maya, is born to Lolo and Ann Soetoro. She will go on to marry Konrad Ng, a Bhuddist, and will give their daughter an Arabic name.

1970. Lolo's family moves to an upscale neighborhood on Dempo Street, and Barry Soetoro joins the 4th grade at the Besuki Primary School. He studies Indonesian and Arabic. His report card indicates that he makes faces while memorizing the Quran.

October 21, 1971. Ann, who supposedly couldn't bear the separation if her husband were deported to Indonesia, leaves him behind, taking Barry and Maya back to Hawaii with her. She has to pay a $25 fee to re-enter the country on an expired passport (she doesn't pay the bill for another month). Barry takes the last name Obama again. Lolo continues to hold US residency during this 5-year period.

December 1971. Barack Obama I swings through HI for a month--the only visit with him that Barry will remember.

Jan 4, 1972. Ann finally gets around to renewing her passport that expired 18 months earlier. She lists her permanent residence as DJL Taman Matraman Barat 22 Pav, Djakarta, Indonesia, to which she states an intent to return to within 3-5 years. The new passport C 030097 is approved that very day.

1972. Ann enrolls in UH to receive a master's degree in the anthropology of Indonesia.

1973.  Lolo Soetoro files for American income tax as a non-resident, thus disqualifying him for reentry to the US as the spouse of an American citizen. His residency permit is not renewed for this reason. Apparently this is the year Barack's passport is renewed until 1978.

May 21, 1974. Ann Soetoro, still married to Lolo whom she hasn't seen for several years, forwards a reentry permit application to him so he can return to Hawaii. He returns it, apologising for incorrectly (but factually) claiming to be a nonresident and promises to pay any back taxes due to his fraudulent filing. He never receives the extension.

September 1975. Ann returns briefly to Indonesia with Maya to research her PhD in anthropology. Barry stays in Honolulu with his grandparents while attending the prestigious and prohibitively expensive Punahou private school on scholarship. He plays on the varsity basketball team, where he is known as "Barry O'Bomber."

June 2, 1976. Ann is issued a new passport Z2433100 in Jakarta. Her former passport had expired 6 months earlier.

1977. Barry gets a job at a pizza shop, where he would supposedly have been required to furnish a Social Security number. No public record of this number exists.

1978. Apparently this is the year Barack's passport expires. He may have renewed it until 1983.

1979. Barry finishes his studies at Punahou School, where weekly chapel attendance is mandatory. His entry in the yearbook tributes "The Choom Gang," a maijuana smoking club to which he belonged, and Ray, their supplier. He also mentions his grandparents, but none of his parents.

1979-1981. Barry, now calling himself Barack, studies at Occidental College in Los Angeles. Evidence that he applied and received funding as a foreign student from Indonesia has been sealed by court order.

June 15, 1980 (approved August 28). Ann files for a no-fault, no-support divorce from Lolo in Hawaii. Barack is listed on the divorce decree as an adult student dependent of the marriage, with Ann retaining custody of the minor Maya. Ann's maiden name is restored, but she eventually changes her surname to Sutoro.
July 30, 1980. The date on Barry's Selective Service Registration form. He gives his address as 1617 Beretania Apt 1008, Honolulu, (808) 949-2317 (his grandmother's address and phone number at the time this record was made public in September 2008). Funny thing is--according to the postmark, he mailed it the day before signing it. The currently available copy of his Registration bears the last 4 digits of a Social Security Number issued in Connecticut to a man born in 1890, and later turns up on the deed to his Chicago home as belonging to Barack Soetoro.

Nov 5, 1980. The divorce becomes final.

January 1981- December 1982. Ann is under contract to the Ford Foundation as Program Officer.

April 28, 1981. Stanley Ann Dunham, living in Jakarta, is issued passport 3037221 before the expiration of her previous passport.

c. 1981. Ann Sutoro spends time developing a microfinance program in Pakistan as a consultant of the Asian Development Bank for Pakistan Agricultural Development Bank’s Agricultural Development Program. Her son Barack goes there to visit her. According to a later lawsuit, both used their Indonesian passports to travel to a country on the US State Department no-travel list. On the same trip, Barack travels to Kenya to meet his paternal relatives.

1981-1983. Barack Jr. finishes college at Columbia University in New York, majoring in political science with a specialization in international relations. His further education is financed by a Saudi billionaire. He has a Pakistani roommate. It is probably about the time his passport expires that he begins to use multiple identities, his currently available (forged) SS form now having been back-dated with a SSN he didn't have at the time.

1982. Political outcast Barack Hussein Obama I, a heavy drinker, dies as the result of an incident of drunken driving while engaged to his fourth wife Jael, with whom he has already had a child, George Obama. His son Barack does not attend the funeral.

1983-1985. Barack works in New York for the Business International Corporation and the New York Public Interest Research Group (Ralph Nader's organization).

December 18, 1983 Ann Sutoro graduates from UH with an M.A. in anthropology.

1984. Ann returns to Hawaii with 14 year old Maya.

1985. Barack first meets his older brother Abongo, now a fundamentalist Muslim known as Malik, in Washington DC, where Malik frequently travels on business.

March 1986. Stanley Ann Dunham, living at 1512 Spreckles St. in Honolulu, orders an expedited passport for travel to the Philippines.

1985-1988. Barack works in Chicago as a community organizer for Saul Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation and Wade Rathke's ACORN, where he begins attending Trinity United Church of Christ in order to be able to answer the frequent question, "Where do you go to church?" He goes on to become director of Alinsky's Developing Communities Project, which receives funding from the Woods Fund of Chicago.

1987. Lolo Soetoro, a heavy drinker, dies in Indonesia of liver disease.

1987-1992. Ann Dunham, now styling herself as Ann Sutoro, returns to Indonesia to build a microfinance network.


mid-1988. Barack travels to Kenya to visit his father's family.

fall 1988. Barack enrolls in Harvard Law School.

1989. Barack wins the competition for editor of The Harvard Law Review as a first-year student. The next year he is elected "the first black president" of the Law Review. His bio claims he was born in Kenya.

1989. Barack works as a summer intern at Sidley and Austin in Chicago, where Princeton- and Harvard-educated lawyer Michelle Robinson is his supervisor, and where retired domestic terrorist Bernadine Dohrn had been employed.

1990. Barack works as a summer intern at Hopkins and Sutter in Chicago.

1991. Barack graduates with a J.D. and gets a fellowship at the University of Chicago Law School to write a book on race relations. He and Michelle get engaged.

c. 1991. Barack fills out an application to join the Illinois Bar, on which he affirms that he has never been known by any other name than Barack Hussein Obama.

Feb 8, 1992. Stanley Armour Dunham dies and is buried in Hawaii.

August 9, 1992. Ann graduates from UH with a PhD in anthropology on blacksmithing in Indonesia.

October 3, 1992. Barack and Michelle are married at Trinity United Church of Christ.

1992. Barack is the founding director of Public Allies, and serves on the board of numerous organizations. He directs Illinois Project Vote, a drive to get Carol Moseley Braun elected as the US's first black senator. Her term is so tainted with scandal (she is implicated in corruption of the Nigerian government) that she declines to run for re-election in 1998, leaving the Senate without any black senator.

1992-2004. Barack teaches constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School.

1993-2002. Barack works for Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, becoming inactive in 2002 when his law license expires. He also serves on the board of directors of the Woods Fund of Chicago, where William Ayers serves as chairman. Obama and Ayers approve funding for the Arab-American Action Network, an anti-Israel group created by mutual friend Rashid Khalidia.

1994. In one of his few courtroom appearances, Barack represents ACORN in a lawsuit to force Citibank to grant sub-prime mortgages to minorities--a policy that will eventually result in a worldwide economic meltdown that continues into his presidency.

1994. Barack moves to Bali to finish writing Dreams of My Father with help from his mother, whom he doesn't realize is dying. Ann, diagnosed with ovarian cancer, moves back in with her widowed mother.

November 7, 1995. Ann dies in Hawaii. Barack misses being at her deathbed but attends the memorial, in which her ashes are scattered in the Pacific.

1995-2001. Barack serves on the board of the Annenberg Challenge Grant, along with retired domestic terrorist and leading education theorist Bill Ayers, who receives 50 million dollars through the Grant. The Annenberg Challenge Grant was funded by the same organization that now funds FactCheck.org. Financial grants approved included $175,000 and $482,662 to groups founded by Ayers and run by former communist party leader Mike Klonsky.

1996. Barack Obama launches his first run for the Illinois Senate in the home of William Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dohrn — who hosted meetings to introduce Obama to their neighbors. He runs for what he expected to be an open seat, but when the incumbent, (whom he had been supporting as a candidate for a US House seat) decides to run for re-election anyway, he hires a political hit man to get her and the other three primary candidates removed from the ballot so he can run unopposed. He receives support for the general election from "The Democratic Socialists of America’s New Party,” a national organization based in Chicago of which he is a voting member.

1998. Barack is re-elected to the Illinois Senate. His daughter Malia Ann Obama is born.

2000. Barack runs for the US House of Representatives, overwhelmingly losing in the Democratic Primary.

2001. Natasha is born to Barack and Michelle Obama.

2002. Barack is re-elected to the Illinois Senate.

2003. Barack pushes through a 4.5 million earmark to build a cultural center for the Munta Dance Theater. His wife Michelle is on their board.

December 2003. Maya Kasandra Soetoro, a teacher at UH's charter high school, marries Konrad Ng, a Canadian of Chinese-Malaysian origin and a professor at the University of Hawaii. Half-brother Barack Obama gives the opening speech at the secular ceremony.

2004. Zeituni Onyango, Barack H. Obama I's half-sister, applies for asylum in the US. Her request is denied on the grounds that she could safely remain in Kenya. She defies the government's order to leave the country, and moves into government housing in Boston. She was mentioned in Dreams of My Father.

2004. Barack wins the Democratic Primary for an open Senate seat once held by Carol Moseley-Braun. Political hit man David Axelrod fights for a public release of all records pertaining to the divorce of the Republican candidate, Jack Ryan. Against the wishes of both parties to the divorce, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Robert Schnider orders the records opened. Allegations contained in these files paint Ryan as a sexual pervert, and he drops out of the race 3 months before the election.

summer 2004. Barack gives the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention and goes on to win election to the US Senate in a historic landslide against carpetbagger Alan Keyes in the first ever black-on-black Senate race. He pledges not to run for national office in 2008.

2006. Senator Obama travels to Kenya to get tested for AIDS along with his wife. While there, he interferes with the Presidential elections, supporting his cousin Raila Odinga against incumbent Kikuyu Mwai Kibaki.

February 2007. Barack Obama announces his candidacy for President of the United States on the 2008 Democrat ticket, and his resolve to quit smoking. He refuses to release his birth certificate or school records.

May 2007. Michelle Obama resigns from the board of TreeHouse Foods, a major Wal-Mart supplier, immediately following her husband's public remarks critical of Wal-Mart at an AFL-CIO forum in Trenton, NJ. TreeHouse paid her $51,200 in 2006. She reduces her other responsibilities, including the Vice Presidency of the University of Chicago Hospitals, in order to join his campaign full-time. She had earlier limited herself to 2 or 3 days a week, "for the children's sake."

December 2007. Senator Obama raises 1 million dollars for Odinga's campaign for the Kenyan Presidency. Genocidal riots break out across the country when Odinga loses to a Kikuyu. 800 churches are destroyed, but no mosques.

January 3, 2008. Obama edges past Clinton and Edwards by a single vote (56 to 55/54) in a crucial precinct of the Iowa caucuses. Due to Democrat primary rules, Clinton is never able to pull ahead, despite leading in the popular vote throughout the campaign.

June 2008. Obama emerges as the presumptive Democrat Nominee when Hilary Clinton grudgingly concedes the primary race. He encourages his supporters to pay off her $25 million campaign bill (most of which she had loaned herself), after which she pledges him her guarded support.

August 2008. Hillary gives her enthusiastic support to Obama at the Democrat National Convention. He picks Senator Joe Biden as his running mate and they receive the nomination, but not in time to legally qualify for the ballot in Texas. A legal attempt to keep them off the ballot is summarily dismissed.

August 21, 2008. At the Eastern District Court in Philadelphia, former State Deputy Attorney General Philip J. Berg, a Hillary supporter, files for a declaratory judgment and injunction against Barack Hussein Obama II's qualification for US President, on the grounds that having been born while Barack and Ann (a minor) were out of the country, he is not a natural born US citizen.

October 25, 2008. Philip Berg's suit is dismissed on technicalities. He appeals to the Supreme Court, case no. 08-cv-04083, Berg v. Obama.

October 2008. Barack suspends his campaign to visit his ailing grandmother in Honolulu, and to request that the governor seal his birth records. The stock market crashes due to the insolubility of major banks stung by the sub-prime mortgage debacle. Senators McCain and Obama suspend their campaigns to vote for a 1-trillion dollar bailout that includes the first step in monetizing the National Debt, printing dollars in exchange for worthless obligations held by the failed banks.

Oct. 28, 2008 — The Obama campaign passed the $660 million mark in contributions since the beginning of the 2008 election cycle — a record.

October 31, 2008. Barack's Aunt Zeituni is still living in Boston public housing, prompting a special directive from Immigrations and Customs Enforcement not to initiate deportation proceedings until after the Election. It is unknown whether or not she plans to vote for her nephew to become President; she isn't eligible to, of course.

November 3, 2008. Madelyn Lee Dunham, whom her grandson had referred to as "a typical white woman," dies in Honolulu, attended by her only granddaughter, Barack's half-sister Maya--now the only one of Barack's near relatives eligible to vote for him as President--and that only by virtue of their mother having lived in the United States for a couple of years after he was born.

November 3, 2008. Berg's petition denied by Justice Souder. Justice Souder also denies a similar petition by Leo C. Donofrio on November 6th.

November 4, 2008. An estimated 96% of Black voters choose Barack Obama for president, happy to be electing their first Black president. But Obama's connection to Black America is rather ironic: Obama's American ancestors weren't slaves, but slave owners. Some people are voting for a man who is descended from their ancestor's oppressors.

November 14, 2008. Leo C. Donofrio's petition refiled and submitted to Justice Thomas, who assigns it to Conference for December 5th.

December 8, 2008. The Supreme Court in Conference declines to hear Donofrio's case.

December 15, 2008. The Supreme Court in Conference declines to hear a similar lawsuit brought by Cort Wrotnowski.

January 20, 2009. Barack Hussein Obama II is inaugurated as the first Black President of the United States of America. CFR member and best-selling author Rick Warren gives the invocation. Atheist Michael Nedow files a suit to prevent him from mentioning Jesus in his prayer, and Obama from saying "so help me God" in his oath of office. Both happen anyway, and God blesses America.

There will be no further entries to this post.

ETA May 2011: Entries extracted from BHOI's Immigration File have been added chronologically.
*ETA 2014 or later:  Evidence has now come out showing that the Dunham family business, all the way down to grandson Barack, has been Company roughly since its inception. Stanley, for instance, took French and Poly Sci at Berkeley--not what you'd typically expect of somebody pursing a career in, say, furniture sales as opposed to, say, international intrigue. Ann worked for USAID, a known front organization. And Barack worked for another front. This, by the way, finally explains everything. All the obfuscation about his past turns out to be a cover-up to keep from blowing his cover.  I've written dozens of posts on the topic of his secret past, so please realize that this newest revelation puts everything I've said so far in a new light.

Second-class African-Americans?

Due to the title of this blog, it attracts a fair amount of visitors who are searching for racially-themed websites. While this is inadvertent, it can nonetheless lead to some interesting insights. Today, however, the White Man will take on a racial topic, with what will be, for many readers, an unexpected twist.

The White Man is an African-American.

Now, in the interests of full disclosure, let it be known that the White Man traces his ancestry back to hundreds of first-generation Americans, all of whom arrived directly or indirectly from Europe between 1620 and 1870. So he is not an African-American in the classical sense.

Neither, it appears, are millions of first generation American immigrants from Africa.

In this article, the author, himself a Minnesotan of African origin, quotes a Minnesota government official referring to AIDS-infected residents of Minnesota who originate from specific African countries as "Africans." Not "African-Americans." In another article, she differentiates between "African-American men," "African-born residents," and "young gay men" (presumably white) who are at risk for AIDS.

So, it appears that African-born African-Americans are of a different class than the others. Which is the superior class is not clear--except that when it comes to AIDS, being born in Africa is definitely considered to be a risk factor by the Minnesota Department of Health.

But how does this affect the White Man? He wasn't born in Africa.

But one does not have to be born in Africa to be considered an African. Just ask the Minnesota Department of Health.

OK, so maybe I'm not really an African-American. Just an African who was born in America.

That, and being born ex-gay, should keep me from being at risk for the AIDS virus.

Unfortunately for the Minnesota Department of Health, neither of those categories are options on their forms.

Neither do they appear to have any clue, as The White Man does, as to the real reason why AIDS is so prevalent among peoples of African origin (hint: it has nothing to do with race).

A forgotten Patriot remembered

Genealogy starts out with a simple question: Who were my ancestors? For some people, the answers to this question are not important, and they never venture into their family's past. But for those of us who want to get every answer possible, it becomes necessary to probe farther and farther into the past, until every line has reached the end of the historical record and ventured even further into legend or speculation. Only at that point can one's genealogy be considered complete, and I don't know of any living genealogist who claims to know he has reached it.

Having traced (entirely through the research of others) my own ancestry back to many of the first White Men to settle in New England, I have run into a fair share of sloppy work--basically speculation disguised as research. This makes it much harder to know who my ancestors were, but enough probing eventually indicates who a few of them weren't. One common problem (we ran into this with Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel and Khalid al-Masri) is to assume that anyone with a certain first and last name (or given name and patronym) is the same person as someone of the same name, referenced elsewhere. This is a big no-no in genealogy, but it happens time after time. For the benefit of my several millions of fellow descendants of one such fellow, I'll illustrate one such instance, and a little bit about what followed in its discovery.

We start with a fellow by the name of Richard Otis, my ancestor of twelve generations removed who died in the Cochecho Massacre of 1689, along with various of his children and grandchildren. It's certain, given his age, that he had been born in England. But where, and to whom?

In an attempt to answer this important question, we begin our story with Richard Oates (or Otis) who lived in Glastonbury, Somersetshire, England. This information was gleaned from a will dated sometime in the fall of 1611; thus Richard's death dates to shortly thereafter, as people of that culture rarely finalized their wills until they were at death's door. We know from this will that Richard had sons John, Stephen, and Thomas. Of Thomas we admit to knowing nothing more, but for men named John and Stephen Otis there are records in the New World, and amateur genealogists have concluded, on no other basis, that these men were both sons of Richard and Lydia. Richard himself is thought to have been born in 1581 in Barnstable, Devonshire; but evidence does not exist to confirm this. We only know of the Otis family home being in Glastonbury, and birth records in that parish do not predate 1602.

A John Otis was buried in Scituate, Massachusetts, on May 8, 1641, who cannot otherwise be accounted for, and may have been the father--or nephew--of the John Otis next mentioned. But certain it is that he wasn't his brother, and we must look for the father of our Richard Otis elsewhere. We can be fairly sure that it was one of Richard Oates' sons, either John or Stephen.

John Otise of New World fame seems to have immigrated with his wife Margaret and their young children to the new colony of Plymouth in 1635--or was it 1630?--from Hingham, Norfolk. Others from Hingham helped settle this area, formerly called Bare Cove, but henceforth known as Hingham. This information does not endear us to the supposition that he was the John named in Richard's will, but people were on the move in those days, and it's entirely possible. John's wife Margaret died in April of 1653--or was it January of 1654?-- after which he left Hingham and moved to Weymouth, where he died on May 31, 1657–only 4 years later. His will names his children, as John, Margaret, Anna, Ann, and Alice. It also mentions Mary and Thomas Gile Jr., Mary apparently being the heir of a son who predeceased him. Evidence points to this being one Richard Otis, born in February 1616 in Glastonbury. It is this Richard, son of John, who found himself listed on the LDS database as being killed at Cocheco--a simple case of mistaken idententity a la Zerubbabel.

John Jr., John's other son, born in Barnstable, Devonshire on Jan. 14, 1621, married Mary Jacobs in 1652, and moved with her to Scituate in 1661. They moved on to the town of Barnstable in 1678, before returning to Scituate where he eventually died in 1727. His children, as named in his will, were Mary, Elizabeth, John, Hannah, Stephen, James, Joseph, and Job. Inasmuch as he was a man of note in the province, many details on his children are available, but the question is, was he actually the nephew of one Stephen Otis, who died in Scituate in 1637? A Stephen Otis who could well stand in the missing generation linking the two Richards? Proof is hard to come by, but amateur genealogists use a principal here that can be put into play when all the names of a person's children are known; that is, Family Names Tend to be Passed Down. We note the preponderance of the names John, James, and Joseph among early Otises in New England. At the same time we note the presence of a Stephen (with the same name as John Sr's grandson), and, among this Stephen's children, a son named Richard. So we tend to draw the conclusion that all these Otises were in fact related, and that the two Richard Otises were first cousins, named after their grandfather. Even that is tentative, as the Stephen Otis who died in 1637 may not have been the Stephen Otis who was known to be Richard Oates' son, and is thought to be Richard Otis' father. See how confusing this gets? Thus we leave off the uncertainties of the Richards and Stephens, and get back into the well-documented line of the Johns.

The third John Otis went on to name his son John, but there the story finally ends, as far as John Otises are concerned. For it was the last child of this prominent man of Barnstable who went on to fame as a patriot judge, colonel, and legislator in the last days of the colony. His name was James Otis, and he named his first son James as well. That man's only son was "Jemmy", or James Otis The Third, and with his death on board a British prison ship during the War of American Independence, the line of James Otises went extinct.

All three sons of James Sr. who lived to adulthood were influential American lawyers. James Jr. himself is not nearly as well known as two of his courtroom quotations: "A man's home is his castle"* and "Taxation without representation is tyranny." Yet he gave these quotations in the process of fighting in the courts for what later became known as the Constitutional Rights of Americans; he was a proto-Patriot during the infancy of the American Struggle for Independence.

So why doesn't anyone remember James Otis, Jr? Because by the time of the American Revolution proper, he had gone insane. Brief moments of clarity allowed him, for instance, to sneak off with a borrowed rifle to join the ranks of rebels at the Battle of Bunker Hill, but for the most part he spent the rest of the Revolution as a raving lunatic. Just weeks before it finally ended, he died in exactly the manner he had desired, being struck in the doorway of his house by a solitary bolt of lightning that caused no other damage whatsoever.

What was the cause of James Otis' insanity? Perhaps I am not qualified to say, but based on the fact that he married into a staunch Loyalist family not long before Loyalists and Patriots began to hate each other's guts, it is apparent that the division of his own family into opposing factions of the war took a toll on his already violent temper and drove him over the edge. Once insane, he was finally free of the violent outbursts of temper for which he was famous (the event that caused him to crack mentally was a barroom brawl with political opponents in which his head was cracked physically); thus his insanity seems to have been a subconscious effort to tame his fury, which succeeded when nothing else would.

Nowadays when a person goes insane his first violent act is sometimes to kill as many people as he can before he dies in the attempt. James Otis could be said to have tried to do the same, but he nonetheless emerged unscathed from the Battle of Bunker Hill. Nowadays, a certified lunatic isn't allowed to join or stay in the military, and the controls over the entrance of one-day volunteers into the battlefield are much more stringent then they were in 1775.

But it's interesting that in the eighteenth century, a man with a fractured family life and a history of violence, having been certified a lunatic by the courts, was still allowed to bear arms--and killed no civilians while doing so. Apparently his most violent incident of lunacy, with a most common weapon, was recorded in the following anecdote:

Men and boys, heartless and thoughtless, would sometimes make themselves merry at his expense when he was seen in the streets afflicted with lunacy. On one occasion he was passing a crockery store, when a young man, who had a knowledge of Latin, sprinkled some water upon him from a sprinkling-pot with which he was wetting the floor of the second story, at the same time saying, Pluit tantum, nescio quantum, Scis ne tu? "It rains so much, I know not how much. Don't you know?" Otis immediately picked up a missile, and, hurling it through the window of the crockery store, it smashing every thing in its way, exclaimed, Fregi tôt, nescio quot, Scis ne tu? "I have broken so many, I know not how many. Don't you know?"

So much for the efficacy of background checks.

James Otis died honorably, having lived honorably enough that his mental deficiencies, both pre- and post- the cracking of his skull, were overlooked in his obituary. After his death, Thomas Dawes said of the departed:

Yes, when the glorious work which he begun
Shall stand the most complete beneath the sun –
When peace shall come to crown the grand design,
His eyes shall live to see the work divine –
The heavens shall then his generous spirit claim,
In storms as loud as his immortal fame.
Hark! the deep thunders echo round the skies!
On wings of flame the eternal errand flies;
One chosen, charitable bolt is sped,
And Otis mingles with the glorious dead.

So whence the origin of my interest in the Forgotten Patriot? Well, it all started because one of my ancestors, Richard Otis, entered the history books by being killed in the Cocheco Massacre of June 27, 1689. Richard has been thought to have been a son of the original John Otis, but my research has shown him to more likely have been a son of John's alleged brother Stephen. John himself had a son Richard, whose sole claim to fame is having been confused with the other Richard Otis. In an effort to sort it all out, I followed John's line all the way down to its termination in James Otis, Jr, the Forgotten Patriot.

I learned an important lesson or two from studying the life of this sixth cousin seven times removed.

First, be careful whom you marry; family ties last a long time. James Otis Jr. died twenty-three years into the Revolution he helped start, with his wife and half his surviving children still supporting the other side.

Secondly, sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. Overcome anger, or it will overcome you.

*This expression, however, was not original to Otis, but part of English common law, having been cited as far back as the judicial decisions of Sir Edward Coke (1552-1634).