each piece she's torn from the whole she gathers up to organize in a way that makes sense... A discussion point where ideas, articles, and stories that contain much of what you want and need to become aware of the existing corrupt reality we are experiencing and of ways to solve them...
Friday, March 2, 2018
Poor
They used to use urine to tan animal skins, so families used to all pee in a pot & then once a day it was taken & Sold to the tannery.......if you had to do this to survive you were "Piss Poor"
But worse than that were the really poor folk who couldn't even afford to buy a pot......they "didn't have a pot to piss in" & were the lowest of the low
The next time you are washing your hands and complain because the water temperature isn't just how you like it, think about how things used to be. Here are some facts about the 1500s:
Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May, and they still smelled pretty good by June.. However, since they were starting to smell . ...... . Brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odor. Hence the custom today of carrying a bouquet when getting Married.
Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the women and finally the children. Last of all the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it.. Hence the saying, "Don't throw the baby out with the Bath water!"
Houses had thatched roofs-thick straw-piled high, with no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the cats and other small animals (mice, bugs) lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof... Hence the saying "It's raining cats and dogs."
There was nothing to stop things from falling into the house. This posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings could mess up your nice clean bed. Hence, a bed with big posts and a sheet hung over the top afforded some protection. That's how canopy beds came into existence.
The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt. Hence the saying, "Dirt poor." The wealthy had slate floors that would get slippery in the winter when wet, so they spread thresh (straw) on floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they added more thresh until, when you opened the door, it would all start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entrance-way. Hence: a thresh hold.
In those old days, they cooked in the kitchen with a big kettle that always hung over the fire.. Every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot. They ate mostly vegetables and did not get much meat. They would eat the stew for dinner, leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight and then start over the next day. Sometimes stew had food in it that had been there for quite a while. Hence the rhyme: Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old. Sometimes they could obtain pork, which made them feel quite special. When visitors came over, they would hang up their bacon to show off. It was a sign of wealth that a man could, "bring home the bacon." They would cut off a little to share with guests and would all sit around and chew the fat.
Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with high acid content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food, causing lead poisoning death. This happened most often with tomatoes, so for the next 400 years or so, tomatoes were considered poisonous.
Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or the upper crust.
Lead cups were used to drink ale or whisky. The combination would Sometimes knock the imbibers out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial.. They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up. Hence the custom of holding a wake.
England is old and small and the local folks started running out of places to bury people. So they would dig up coffins and would take the bones to a bone-house, and reuse the grave. When reopening these coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive... So they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night (the graveyard shift.) to listen for the bell; thus, someone could be, saved by the bell or was considered a dead ringer.
And that's the truth....Now, whoever said History was boring?
Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Jordan Peterson’s Gospel of Masculinity
Illustration by Ross MacDonald
In February, 2000, The American Journal of Psychiatry published a concise review of a not-at-all-concise book. The book, "Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief," was nearly six hundred pages long, and, although it was published by the academic press Routledge, it fit neatly within no scholarly discipline. The reviewer, a sympathetic professor of psychiatry, bravely attempted to explain such forbidding phrases as "the grammatical structure of transformational mythology." Then he admitted defeat. "Doing justice to this tome in a two-paragraph synopsis is impossible," he concluded. "This is not a book to be abstracted and summarized." But he expressed the hope that curious souls would nevertheless discover this curious book, and savor it "at leisure."
Eighteen years later, the author of "Maps of Meaning," Jordan B. Peterson, has produced a sequel, of sorts. It's called "12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos," and it has become an international blockbuster. Peterson, formerly an obscure professor, is now one of the most influential—and polarizing—public intellectuals in the English-speaking world. Lots of fans find him on YouTube, where he is an unusual sort of celebrity, a stern but mercurial lecturer who often holds forth for hours, mixing polemics with pep talks. Peterson grew up in Fairview, Canada, a small town in Northern Alberta, and he has a fondness for quaint slang; his accent and vocabulary combine to make him seem like a man out of time and out of place, especially in America. His central message is a thoroughgoing critique of modern liberal culture, which he views as suicidal in its eagerness to upend age-old verities. And he has learned to distill his wide-ranging theories into pithy sentences, including one that has become his de facto catchphrase, a possibly spurious quote that nevertheless captures his style and his substance: "Sort yourself out, bucko."
Peterson is fifty-five, and his delayed success should give hope to underappreciated academics everywhere. For a few years, in the nineteen-nineties, he taught psychology at Harvard; by the time he published "Maps of Meaning," in 1999, he was back in Canada—teaching at the University of Toronto, working as a clinical psychologist, and building a reputation, on television, as an acerbic pundit. His fame grew in 2016, during the debate over a Canadian bill known as C-16. The bill sought to expand human-rights law by adding "gender identity and gender expression" to the list of grounds upon which discrimination is prohibited. In a series of videotaped lectures, Peterson argued that such a law could be a serious infringement of free speech. His main focus was the issue of pronouns: many transgender or gender-nonbinary people use pronouns different from the ones they were assigned at birth—including, sometimes, "they," in the singular, or nontraditional ones, like "ze." The Ontario Human Rights Commission had found that, in a workplace or a school, "refusing to refer to a trans person by their chosen name and a personal pronoun that matches their gender identity" would probably be considered discrimination. Peterson resented the idea that the government might force him to use what he called neologisms of politically correct "authoritarians." During one debate, recorded at the University of Toronto, he said, "I am not going to be a mouthpiece for language that I detest." Then he folded his arms, adding, "And that's that!"
Such videos reached millions of online viewers, including plenty with no particular stake in Canadian human-rights legislation. To many people disturbed by reports of intolerant radicals on campus, Peterson was a rallying figure: a fearsomely self-assured debater, unintimidated by liberal condemnation. Students staged rowdy protests. The dean of the university sent him a letter warning that his pledge not to use certain pronouns revealed "discriminatory intentions"; the letter also warned, "The impact of your behavior runs the risk of undermining your ability to conduct essential components of your job as a faculty member." Last fall, a teaching assistant at Wilfrid Laurier University, in Waterloo, Ontario, was reprimanded by professors for showing her class a clip of one of Peterson's debates. (The university later apologized.) The reprisals only raised Peterson's profile, and he capitalized on the attention on his Patreon page, where devotees can pledge monthly payments in exchange for exclusive Q. & A. sessions and online courses.
Earlier this year, Peterson appeared on Channel 4 News, in Britain. The interviewer, Cathy Newman, asked what gave him the right to offend transgender people. He asked, cheerfully, what gave her the right to risk offending him. Newman paused for an excruciating few moments, and Peterson allowed himself a moment of triumph. "Ha! Gotcha," he said. David Brooks, in the Times, said that Peterson reminded him of "a young William F. Buckley." Tucker Carlson, on Fox News, called the exchange with Newman "one of the great interviews of all time."
Given the popularity of these online debates, it can be easy to forget that arguing against political correctness is not Peterson's main occupation. He remains a psychology professor by trade, and he still spends much of his time doing something like therapy. Anyone in need of his counsel can find plenty of it in "12 Rules for Life." The book is far easier to comprehend than its predecessor, though it may confuse those who know Peterson only as a culture warrior. One of his many fans is PewDiePie, a Swedish video gamer who is known as the most widely viewed YouTube personality in the world—his channel has more than sixty million subscribers. In a video review of "12 Rules for Life," PewDiePie confessed that the book had surprised him. "It's a self-help book!" he said. "I don't think I ever would have read a self-help book." (He nonetheless declared that Peterson's book, at least the parts he read, was "very interesting.") Peterson himself embraces the self-help genre, to a point. The book is built around forthright and perhaps impractically specific advice, from Chapter 1, "Stand Up Straight with Your Shoulders Back," to Chapter 12, "Pet a Cat When You Encounter One on the Street." Political polemic plays a relatively small role; Peterson's goal is less to help his readers change the world than to help them find a stable place within it. One of his most compelling maxims is strikingly modest: "You should do what other people do, unless you have a very good reason not to." Of course, he is famous today precisely because he has determined that, in a range of circumstances, there are good reasons to buck the popular tide. He is, by turns, a defender of conformity and a critic of it, and he thinks that if readers pay close attention, they, too, can learn when to be which.
Peterson is fifty-five, and his delayed success should give hope to underappreciated academics everywhere. For a few years, in the nineteen-nineties, he taught psychology at Harvard; by the time he published "Maps of Meaning," in 1999, he was back in Canada—teaching at the University of Toronto, working as a clinical psychologist, and building a reputation, on television, as an acerbic pundit. His fame grew in 2016, during the debate over a Canadian bill known as C-16. The bill sought to expand human-rights law by adding "gender identity and gender expression" to the list of grounds upon which discrimination is prohibited. In a series of videotaped lectures, Peterson argued that such a law could be a serious infringement of free speech. His main focus was the issue of pronouns: many transgender or gender-nonbinary people use pronouns different from the ones they were assigned at birth—including, sometimes, "they," in the singular, or nontraditional ones, like "ze." The Ontario Human Rights Commission had found that, in a workplace or a school, "refusing to refer to a trans person by their chosen name and a personal pronoun that matches their gender identity" would probably be considered discrimination. Peterson resented the idea that the government might force him to use what he called neologisms of politically correct "authoritarians." During one debate, recorded at the University of Toronto, he said, "I am not going to be a mouthpiece for language that I detest." Then he folded his arms, adding, "And that's that!"
Such videos reached millions of online viewers, including plenty with no particular stake in Canadian human-rights legislation. To many people disturbed by reports of intolerant radicals on campus, Peterson was a rallying figure: a fearsomely self-assured debater, unintimidated by liberal condemnation. Students staged rowdy protests. The dean of the university sent him a letter warning that his pledge not to use certain pronouns revealed "discriminatory intentions"; the letter also warned, "The impact of your behavior runs the risk of undermining your ability to conduct essential components of your job as a faculty member." Last fall, a teaching assistant at Wilfrid Laurier University, in Waterloo, Ontario, was reprimanded by professors for showing her class a clip of one of Peterson's debates. (The university later apologized.) The reprisals only raised Peterson's profile, and he capitalized on the attention on his Patreon page, where devotees can pledge monthly payments in exchange for exclusive Q. & A. sessions and online courses.
Earlier this year, Peterson appeared on Channel 4 News, in Britain. The interviewer, Cathy Newman, asked what gave him the right to offend transgender people. He asked, cheerfully, what gave her the right to risk offending him. Newman paused for an excruciating few moments, and Peterson allowed himself a moment of triumph. "Ha! Gotcha," he said. David Brooks, in the Times, said that Peterson reminded him of "a young William F. Buckley." Tucker Carlson, on Fox News, called the exchange with Newman "one of the great interviews of all time."
Given the popularity of these online debates, it can be easy to forget that arguing against political correctness is not Peterson's main occupation. He remains a psychology professor by trade, and he still spends much of his time doing something like therapy. Anyone in need of his counsel can find plenty of it in "12 Rules for Life." The book is far easier to comprehend than its predecessor, though it may confuse those who know Peterson only as a culture warrior. One of his many fans is PewDiePie, a Swedish video gamer who is known as the most widely viewed YouTube personality in the world—his channel has more than sixty million subscribers. In a video review of "12 Rules for Life," PewDiePie confessed that the book had surprised him. "It's a self-help book!" he said. "I don't think I ever would have read a self-help book." (He nonetheless declared that Peterson's book, at least the parts he read, was "very interesting.") Peterson himself embraces the self-help genre, to a point. The book is built around forthright and perhaps impractically specific advice, from Chapter 1, "Stand Up Straight with Your Shoulders Back," to Chapter 12, "Pet a Cat When You Encounter One on the Street." Political polemic plays a relatively small role; Peterson's goal is less to help his readers change the world than to help them find a stable place within it. One of his most compelling maxims is strikingly modest: "You should do what other people do, unless you have a very good reason not to." Of course, he is famous today precisely because he has determined that, in a range of circumstances, there are good reasons to buck the popular tide. He is, by turns, a defender of conformity and a critic of it, and he thinks that if readers pay close attention, they, too, can learn when to be which.
Like many conversion stories, Peterson's begins with a crisis of faith—a series of them, in fact. He was raised Protestant, and as a boy he was sent to confirmation class, where he asked the teacher to defend the literal truth of Biblical creation stories. The teacher's response was convincing neither to Peterson nor, Peterson suspected, to the teacher himself. In "Maps of Meaning," he remembered his reaction. "Religion was for the ignorant, weak, and superstitious," he wrote. "I stopped attending church, and joined the modern world." He turned first to socialism and then to political science, seeking an explanation for "the general social and political insanity and evil of the world," and each time finding himself unsatisfied. (This was the Cold War era, and Peterson was preoccupied by the possibility of nuclear annihilation.) The question was, he decided, a psychological one, so he sought psychological answers, and eventually earned a Ph.D. from McGill University, having written a thesis examining the heritability of alcoholism.
All the while, Peterson was also pursuing a grander, stranger project. He had fallen under the sway of Carl Jung, the mystical Swiss psychology pioneer who interpreted modern life as an endless drama, haunted by ancient myths. (Peterson calls Jung "ever-terrifying," which is a very Jungian sort of compliment.) In "Maps of Meaning," Peterson drew from Jung, and from evolutionary psychology: he wanted to show that modern culture is "natural," having evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to reflect and meet our human needs. Then, rather audaciously, he sought to explain exactly how our minds work, illustrating his theory with elaborate geometric diagrams ("The Constituent Elements of Experience as Personality, Territory, and Process") that seemed to have been created for the purpose of torturing undergraduates.
The new book replaces charts with cheerful drawings of Peterson's children acting out his advice. In the foreword, Peterson's friend Norman Doidge, a prominent psychiatrist, tells about meeting him at an outdoor lunch at the house of a mutual friend; Peterson was wearing cowboy boots, and determinedly ignoring a swarm of bees. "He had this odd habit," Doidge writes, "of speaking about the deepest questions to whoever was at this table—most of them new acquaintances—as though he were just making small talk."
Throughout the book, Peterson supplies small and strange interjections of autobiography. He recalls the time an old friend named Ed came to visit, accompanied by another guy who was, in Peterson's estimation, "stoned out of his gourd." Alarmed, Peterson staged a kind of intervention. "I took Ed aside and told him politely that he had to leave," Peterson writes. "I said that he shouldn't have brought his useless bastard of a companion." Ed took his friend and left—fearing, perhaps, to discover what a less polite admonition would have sounded like.
Peterson has a way of making even the mildest pronouncement sound like the dying declaration of a political prisoner. In "Maps of Meaning," he traced this sense of urgency to a feeling of fraudulence that overcame him in college. When he started to speak, he would hear a voice telling him, "You don't believe that. That isn't true." To ward off mental breakdown, he resolved not to say anything unless he was sure he believed it; this practice calmed the inner voice, and in time it shaped his rhetorical style, which is forceful but careful. In "12 Rules for Life," Peterson recounts a similar experience when, as a psychologist, he worked with a client diagnosed with paranoia. He says that such patients are "almost uncanny in their ability to detect mixed motives, judgment, and falsehood," and so he redoubled his efforts to say only what he meant. "You have to listen very carefully and tell the truth if you are going to get a paranoid person to open up to you," he writes. Peterson seems to have found that this approach works on much of the general population, too.
If he once had a tendency to shut himself up, Peterson has wholly overcome it. "Do Not Bother Children When They Are Skateboarding," he proclaims (Rule 11), but the expected riff about "overprotected" children leads elsewhere: to a grim story about a troubled friend who committed suicide, and then to a remembrance of a professor who boasted that he and his wife had made an ethical decision to have only one child, and from there to an argument that both the unhappy friend and the arrogant professor were "anti-human, to the core." Elsewhere in the chapter, he writes that "boys' interests tilt towards things" and "girls' interests tilt towards people," and that these interests are "strongly influenced by biological factors." He is particularly concerned about boys and men, and he flatters them with regular doses of tough love. "Boys are suffering in the modern world," he writes, and he suggests that the problem is that they're not boyish enough. Near the end of the chapter, he tries to coin a new catchphrase: "Toughen up, you weasel."
When he does battle as a culture warrior, especially on television, Peterson sometimes assumes the role of a strident anti-feminist, intent on ending the oppression of males by destroying the myth of male oppression. (He once referred to his critics as "rabid harpies.") But his tone is more pragmatic in this book, and some of his critics might be surprised to find much of the advice he offers unobjectionable, if old-fashioned: he wants young men to be better fathers, better husbands, better community members. In this way, he might be seen as an heir to older gurus of manhood like Elbert Hubbard, who in 1899 published a stern and wildly popular homily called "A Message to Garcia." (What young men most needed, Hubbard wrote, was "a stiffening of the vertebrae.") Peterson is an heir, too, to the professional pickup artists who proliferated in the aughts, making a different appeal to feckless men. Where the pickup artists promised to make guys better sexual salesmen (sexual consummation was called "full close," as in closing a deal), Peterson, more ambitious, promises to help them get married and stay married. "You have to scour your psyche," he tells them. "You have to clean the damned thing up." When he claims to have identified "the culminating ethic of the canon of the West," one might brace for provocation. But what follows, instead, is prescription so canonical that it seems self-evident: "Attend to the day, but aim at the highest good." In urging men to overachieve, he is also urging them to fit in, and become productive members of Western society.
All the while, Peterson was also pursuing a grander, stranger project. He had fallen under the sway of Carl Jung, the mystical Swiss psychology pioneer who interpreted modern life as an endless drama, haunted by ancient myths. (Peterson calls Jung "ever-terrifying," which is a very Jungian sort of compliment.) In "Maps of Meaning," Peterson drew from Jung, and from evolutionary psychology: he wanted to show that modern culture is "natural," having evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to reflect and meet our human needs. Then, rather audaciously, he sought to explain exactly how our minds work, illustrating his theory with elaborate geometric diagrams ("The Constituent Elements of Experience as Personality, Territory, and Process") that seemed to have been created for the purpose of torturing undergraduates.
Throughout the book, Peterson supplies small and strange interjections of autobiography. He recalls the time an old friend named Ed came to visit, accompanied by another guy who was, in Peterson's estimation, "stoned out of his gourd." Alarmed, Peterson staged a kind of intervention. "I took Ed aside and told him politely that he had to leave," Peterson writes. "I said that he shouldn't have brought his useless bastard of a companion." Ed took his friend and left—fearing, perhaps, to discover what a less polite admonition would have sounded like.
Peterson has a way of making even the mildest pronouncement sound like the dying declaration of a political prisoner. In "Maps of Meaning," he traced this sense of urgency to a feeling of fraudulence that overcame him in college. When he started to speak, he would hear a voice telling him, "You don't believe that. That isn't true." To ward off mental breakdown, he resolved not to say anything unless he was sure he believed it; this practice calmed the inner voice, and in time it shaped his rhetorical style, which is forceful but careful. In "12 Rules for Life," Peterson recounts a similar experience when, as a psychologist, he worked with a client diagnosed with paranoia. He says that such patients are "almost uncanny in their ability to detect mixed motives, judgment, and falsehood," and so he redoubled his efforts to say only what he meant. "You have to listen very carefully and tell the truth if you are going to get a paranoid person to open up to you," he writes. Peterson seems to have found that this approach works on much of the general population, too.
If he once had a tendency to shut himself up, Peterson has wholly overcome it. "Do Not Bother Children When They Are Skateboarding," he proclaims (Rule 11), but the expected riff about "overprotected" children leads elsewhere: to a grim story about a troubled friend who committed suicide, and then to a remembrance of a professor who boasted that he and his wife had made an ethical decision to have only one child, and from there to an argument that both the unhappy friend and the arrogant professor were "anti-human, to the core." Elsewhere in the chapter, he writes that "boys' interests tilt towards things" and "girls' interests tilt towards people," and that these interests are "strongly influenced by biological factors." He is particularly concerned about boys and men, and he flatters them with regular doses of tough love. "Boys are suffering in the modern world," he writes, and he suggests that the problem is that they're not boyish enough. Near the end of the chapter, he tries to coin a new catchphrase: "Toughen up, you weasel."
When he does battle as a culture warrior, especially on television, Peterson sometimes assumes the role of a strident anti-feminist, intent on ending the oppression of males by destroying the myth of male oppression. (He once referred to his critics as "rabid harpies.") But his tone is more pragmatic in this book, and some of his critics might be surprised to find much of the advice he offers unobjectionable, if old-fashioned: he wants young men to be better fathers, better husbands, better community members. In this way, he might be seen as an heir to older gurus of manhood like Elbert Hubbard, who in 1899 published a stern and wildly popular homily called "A Message to Garcia." (What young men most needed, Hubbard wrote, was "a stiffening of the vertebrae.") Peterson is an heir, too, to the professional pickup artists who proliferated in the aughts, making a different appeal to feckless men. Where the pickup artists promised to make guys better sexual salesmen (sexual consummation was called "full close," as in closing a deal), Peterson, more ambitious, promises to help them get married and stay married. "You have to scour your psyche," he tells them. "You have to clean the damned thing up." When he claims to have identified "the culminating ethic of the canon of the West," one might brace for provocation. But what follows, instead, is prescription so canonical that it seems self-evident: "Attend to the day, but aim at the highest good." In urging men to overachieve, he is also urging them to fit in, and become productive members of Western society.
Every so often, Peterson pauses to remind his readers how lucky they are. "The highly functional infrastructure that surrounds us, particularly in the West," he writes, "is a gift from our ancestors: the comparatively uncorrupt political and economic systems, the technology, the wealth, the lifespan, the freedom, the luxury, and the opportunity." This may sound strange to readers in the United States, where a widespread perception of dysfunction unites politicians and commentators who agree on little else. But Peterson does not live in Donald Trump's America; in Canada, the Prime Minister is Justin Trudeau, who seems to strike Peterson as the embodiment of wimpy and fraudulent liberalism. Recently, after Trudeau tried to cut off a rambling questioner by half-joking that she should say "peoplekind" instead of "mankind," Peterson appeared on "Fox & Friends" to register his objection. "I'm afraid that our Prime Minister is only capable of running his ideas on a few very narrow ideological tracks," he said.
Peterson seems to view Trump, by contrast, as a symptom of modern problems, rather than a cause of them. He suggests that Trump's rise was unfortunate but inevitable—"part of the same process," he writes, as the rise of "far-right" politicians in Europe. "If men are pushed too hard to feminize," he warns, "they will become more and more interested in harsh, fascist political ideology." Peterson sometimes asks audiences to view him as an alternative to political excesses on both sides. During an interview on BBC Radio 5, he said, "I've had thousands of letters from people who were tempted by the blandishments of the radical right, who've moved towards the reasonable center as a consequence of watching my videos." But he typically sees liberals, or leftists, or "postmodernists," as aggressors—which leads him, rather ironically, to frame some of those on the "radical right" as victims. Many of his political stances are built on this type of inversion. Postmodernists, he says, are obsessed with the idea of oppression, and, by waging war on oppressors real and imagined, they become oppressors themselves. Liberals, he says, are always talking about the importance of compassion—and yet "there's nothing more horrible for children, and developing people, than an excess of compassion." (This horror, he says, is embodied in the figure of the "Freudian devouring mother"; as an example, he cites Ursula, the sea witch from "The Little Mermaid.") The danger, it seems, is that those who want to improve Western society may end up destroying it.
Peterson thinks that this danger has a lot to do with men and women, and the changing way we think about them. "The division of life into its twin sexes occurred before the evolution of multi-cellular animals," he writes, by way of arguing that human beings are bound to care about this division. During his Channel 4 News debate, Cathy Newman pressed him on whether he supported gender equality, and he replied that it depended on what the term meant. "If it means equality of outcome, then almost certainly it's undesirable," he said. "Men and women won't sort themselves into the same categories, if you leave them alone." (He mentioned that in Scandinavia, an unusually egalitarian part of the world, men are vastly overrepresented among engineers, and women among nurses.) Convictions such as these inspire in him a general skepticism of efforts to redress gender inequality. He has argued that traditionally feminine traits, such as agreeableness, are not historically correlated with professional success. (He says that, as a psychologist, he has often counselled female clients to be more assertive at work.) When Newman suggested that this correlation might merely reflect the ways women have been shut out of corporate leadership, Peterson sounded doubtful. "It could be the case that if companies modified their behavior, and became more feminine, that they would be successful," he said. "But there's no evidence for that."
Peterson is not primarily interested in policy, but he was eager to join the debate over C-16, the Canadian bill forbidding discrimination on the basis of gender identity or expression. In opposing the bill, Peterson claimed the mantle of free speech. "There's a difference," he explained, "between saying that there's something you can't say, and saying that there are things that you have to say." But if laws against discrimination also prohibit harassment, they will necessarily prohibit some forms of verbal harassment—and they will therefore, to a greater or lesser extent, limit speech. Canada already limits speech in ways that the U.S. does not: a law against "hate speech" was repealed in 2013, but the government still bans "hate propaganda." From an American perspective, such laws may seem ill-advised, or even oppressive. Still, like many free-speech arguments, this one was in large part a debate over the political status of a minority group.
The C-16 debate is over, for now—the bill passed and was enacted last summer. But Peterson remains a figurehead for the movement to block or curtail transgender rights. When he lampoons "made-up pronouns," he sometimes seems to be lampooning the people who use them, encouraging his fans to view transgender or gender-nonbinary people as confused, or deluded. Once, after a lecture, he was approached on campus by a critic who wanted to know why he would not use nonbinary pronouns. "I don't believe that using your pronouns will do you any good, in the long run," he replied.
So what does Peterson actually believe about gender and pronouns? It can be hard to tell. Later in that campus conversation, when asked whether, in the absence of legal coercion, he would be willing to use pronouns such as "they" and "them" if a trans person asked him to, Peterson demurred. "It might depend on how they asked," he said. One of his foundational beliefs is that cultures evolve, which suggests that nonstandard pronouns could become standard. In a debate about gender on Canadian television, in 2016, he tried to find some middle ground. "If our society comes to some sort of consensus over the next while about how we'll solve the pronoun problem," he said, "and that becomes part of popular parlance, and it seems to solve the problem properly, without sacrificing the distinction between singular and plural, and without requiring me to memorize an impossible list of an indefinite number of pronouns, then I would be willing to reconsider my position."
Despite his fondness for moral absolutes, Peterson is something of a relativist; he is inclined to defer to a Western society that is changing in unpredictable ways. In discussing the many women who have criticized him, he has talked about how verbal disagreements commonly contain an implicit threat of violence, and about how such implicit threats are "forbidden" when men are addressing women. And yet, even when the topic is as elemental as male-female violence, our norms are changing: in the United States, laws against spousal violence were first enacted in the middle of the nineteenth century; laws against spousal rape are only a few decades old. Not long ago, these laws might have seemed intrusive and disruptive; now, many people shudder at the notion that it might ever have been legal for a man to physically assault his wife. Peterson excels at explaining why we should be careful about social change, but not at helping us assess which changes we should favor; just about any modern human arrangement could be portrayed as a radical deviation from what came before. In the case of gender identity, Peterson's judgment is that "our society" has not yet agreed to adopt nontraditional pronouns, which isn't quite an argument that we shouldn't. And this judgment isn't likely to be persuasive to people in places—like some North American college campuses, perhaps—where the singular "they" has already come to seem like part of the social fabric.
Peterson seems to view Trump, by contrast, as a symptom of modern problems, rather than a cause of them. He suggests that Trump's rise was unfortunate but inevitable—"part of the same process," he writes, as the rise of "far-right" politicians in Europe. "If men are pushed too hard to feminize," he warns, "they will become more and more interested in harsh, fascist political ideology." Peterson sometimes asks audiences to view him as an alternative to political excesses on both sides. During an interview on BBC Radio 5, he said, "I've had thousands of letters from people who were tempted by the blandishments of the radical right, who've moved towards the reasonable center as a consequence of watching my videos." But he typically sees liberals, or leftists, or "postmodernists," as aggressors—which leads him, rather ironically, to frame some of those on the "radical right" as victims. Many of his political stances are built on this type of inversion. Postmodernists, he says, are obsessed with the idea of oppression, and, by waging war on oppressors real and imagined, they become oppressors themselves. Liberals, he says, are always talking about the importance of compassion—and yet "there's nothing more horrible for children, and developing people, than an excess of compassion." (This horror, he says, is embodied in the figure of the "Freudian devouring mother"; as an example, he cites Ursula, the sea witch from "The Little Mermaid.") The danger, it seems, is that those who want to improve Western society may end up destroying it.
Peterson thinks that this danger has a lot to do with men and women, and the changing way we think about them. "The division of life into its twin sexes occurred before the evolution of multi-cellular animals," he writes, by way of arguing that human beings are bound to care about this division. During his Channel 4 News debate, Cathy Newman pressed him on whether he supported gender equality, and he replied that it depended on what the term meant. "If it means equality of outcome, then almost certainly it's undesirable," he said. "Men and women won't sort themselves into the same categories, if you leave them alone." (He mentioned that in Scandinavia, an unusually egalitarian part of the world, men are vastly overrepresented among engineers, and women among nurses.) Convictions such as these inspire in him a general skepticism of efforts to redress gender inequality. He has argued that traditionally feminine traits, such as agreeableness, are not historically correlated with professional success. (He says that, as a psychologist, he has often counselled female clients to be more assertive at work.) When Newman suggested that this correlation might merely reflect the ways women have been shut out of corporate leadership, Peterson sounded doubtful. "It could be the case that if companies modified their behavior, and became more feminine, that they would be successful," he said. "But there's no evidence for that."
Peterson is not primarily interested in policy, but he was eager to join the debate over C-16, the Canadian bill forbidding discrimination on the basis of gender identity or expression. In opposing the bill, Peterson claimed the mantle of free speech. "There's a difference," he explained, "between saying that there's something you can't say, and saying that there are things that you have to say." But if laws against discrimination also prohibit harassment, they will necessarily prohibit some forms of verbal harassment—and they will therefore, to a greater or lesser extent, limit speech. Canada already limits speech in ways that the U.S. does not: a law against "hate speech" was repealed in 2013, but the government still bans "hate propaganda." From an American perspective, such laws may seem ill-advised, or even oppressive. Still, like many free-speech arguments, this one was in large part a debate over the political status of a minority group.
The C-16 debate is over, for now—the bill passed and was enacted last summer. But Peterson remains a figurehead for the movement to block or curtail transgender rights. When he lampoons "made-up pronouns," he sometimes seems to be lampooning the people who use them, encouraging his fans to view transgender or gender-nonbinary people as confused, or deluded. Once, after a lecture, he was approached on campus by a critic who wanted to know why he would not use nonbinary pronouns. "I don't believe that using your pronouns will do you any good, in the long run," he replied.
So what does Peterson actually believe about gender and pronouns? It can be hard to tell. Later in that campus conversation, when asked whether, in the absence of legal coercion, he would be willing to use pronouns such as "they" and "them" if a trans person asked him to, Peterson demurred. "It might depend on how they asked," he said. One of his foundational beliefs is that cultures evolve, which suggests that nonstandard pronouns could become standard. In a debate about gender on Canadian television, in 2016, he tried to find some middle ground. "If our society comes to some sort of consensus over the next while about how we'll solve the pronoun problem," he said, "and that becomes part of popular parlance, and it seems to solve the problem properly, without sacrificing the distinction between singular and plural, and without requiring me to memorize an impossible list of an indefinite number of pronouns, then I would be willing to reconsider my position."
Despite his fondness for moral absolutes, Peterson is something of a relativist; he is inclined to defer to a Western society that is changing in unpredictable ways. In discussing the many women who have criticized him, he has talked about how verbal disagreements commonly contain an implicit threat of violence, and about how such implicit threats are "forbidden" when men are addressing women. And yet, even when the topic is as elemental as male-female violence, our norms are changing: in the United States, laws against spousal violence were first enacted in the middle of the nineteenth century; laws against spousal rape are only a few decades old. Not long ago, these laws might have seemed intrusive and disruptive; now, many people shudder at the notion that it might ever have been legal for a man to physically assault his wife. Peterson excels at explaining why we should be careful about social change, but not at helping us assess which changes we should favor; just about any modern human arrangement could be portrayed as a radical deviation from what came before. In the case of gender identity, Peterson's judgment is that "our society" has not yet agreed to adopt nontraditional pronouns, which isn't quite an argument that we shouldn't. And this judgment isn't likely to be persuasive to people in places—like some North American college campuses, perhaps—where the singular "they" has already come to seem like part of the social fabric.
A different kind of culture warrior might express hostility to nontraditional pronouns in religious terms—in the United States, the fight against legal rights for L.G.B.T.Q. people has largely been led by believers. But Peterson—like his hero, Jung—has a complicated relationship to religious belief. He reveres the Bible for its stories, reasoning that any stories that we have been telling ourselves for so long must be, in some important sense, true. In a recent podcast interview, he mentioned that people sometimes ask him if he believes in God. "I don't respond well to that question," he said. "The answer to that question is forty hours long, and I can't condense it into a sentence." Forty hours, it turns out, is the approximate length of a lecture series that he created based on "Maps of Meaning."
At times, Peterson emphasizes his interest in empirical knowledge and scientific research—although these tend to be the least convincing parts of "12 Rules for Life." There is an extended analogy between human beings and lobsters, based on the observation that male lobsters that have proven themselves dominant produce more serotonin; he suggests that when people "slump around," like weakling lobsters, they, too, will run short on serotonin, which will make them unhappy. The fact that serotonin has varied and sometimes contradictory effects scarcely matters here: Peterson's story about the lobster is essentially a modern myth. He wants forlorn readers to imagine themselves as heroic lobsters; he wants an image of claws to appear in their mind whenever they feel themselves start to slump; he wants to help them.
Peterson wants to help everyone, in fact. In his least measured moments, he permits himself to dream of a world transformed. "Who knows," he writes, "what existence might be like if we all decided to strive for the best?" His many years of study fostered in him a conviction that good and evil exist, and that we can discern them without recourse to any particular religious authority. This is a reassuring belief, especially in confusing times: "Each human being understands, a priori, perhaps not what is good, but certainly what is not." No doubt there are therapists and life coaches all over the world dispensing some version of this formula, nudging their clients to pursue lives that better conform to their own moral intuitions. The problem is that, when it comes to the question of how to order our societies—when it comes, in other words, to politics—our intuitions have proved neither reliable nor coherent. The "highly functional infrastructure" he praises is the product of an unceasing argument over what is good, for all of us; over when to conform, and when to dissent. We can, most of us, sort ourselves out, or learn how to do it. That doesn't mean we will ever agree on how to sort out everyone else. ♦
At times, Peterson emphasizes his interest in empirical knowledge and scientific research—although these tend to be the least convincing parts of "12 Rules for Life." There is an extended analogy between human beings and lobsters, based on the observation that male lobsters that have proven themselves dominant produce more serotonin; he suggests that when people "slump around," like weakling lobsters, they, too, will run short on serotonin, which will make them unhappy. The fact that serotonin has varied and sometimes contradictory effects scarcely matters here: Peterson's story about the lobster is essentially a modern myth. He wants forlorn readers to imagine themselves as heroic lobsters; he wants an image of claws to appear in their mind whenever they feel themselves start to slump; he wants to help them.
Peterson wants to help everyone, in fact. In his least measured moments, he permits himself to dream of a world transformed. "Who knows," he writes, "what existence might be like if we all decided to strive for the best?" His many years of study fostered in him a conviction that good and evil exist, and that we can discern them without recourse to any particular religious authority. This is a reassuring belief, especially in confusing times: "Each human being understands, a priori, perhaps not what is good, but certainly what is not." No doubt there are therapists and life coaches all over the world dispensing some version of this formula, nudging their clients to pursue lives that better conform to their own moral intuitions. The problem is that, when it comes to the question of how to order our societies—when it comes, in other words, to politics—our intuitions have proved neither reliable nor coherent. The "highly functional infrastructure" he praises is the product of an unceasing argument over what is good, for all of us; over when to conform, and when to dissent. We can, most of us, sort ourselves out, or learn how to do it. That doesn't mean we will ever agree on how to sort out everyone else. ♦
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When Scientists "Discover" What Indigenous People Have Known For Centuries
When it supports their claims, Western scientists value what Traditional Knowledge has to offer. If not, they dismiss it
A team of researchers in northern Australia have documented kites and falcons, "firehawks," intentionally carrying burning sticks to spread fire: It is just one example of western science catching up to Indigenous Traditional Knowledge. (James Padolsey/Unsplash)
It's thus no surprise that this study has attracted great attention as it adds intentionality and planning to the repertoire of non-human use of tools. Previous accounts of avian use of fire have been dismissed or at least viewed with some skepticism.
But while new to Western science, the behaviors of the nighthawks have long been known to the Alawa, MalakMalak, Jawoyn and other Indigenous peoples of northern Australia whose ancestors occupied their lands for tens of thousands of years. Unlike most scientific studies, Bonta and Gosford's team foregrounded their research in traditional Indigenous ecological knowledge. They also note that local awareness of the behavior of the firehawks is ingrained within some of their ceremonial practices, beliefs and creation accounts.
The worldwide attention given to the firehawks article provides an opportunity to explore the double standard that exists concerning the acceptance of Traditional Knowledge by practitioners of Western science.
Traditional Knowledge ranges from medicinal properties of plants and insights into the value of biological diversity to caribou migration patterns and the effects of intentional burning of the landscape to manage particular resources. Today, it's become a highly valued source of information for archaeologists, ecologists, biologists, ethnobotanists, climatologists and others. For example, some climatology studies have incorporated Qaujimajatuqangit (Inuit traditional knowledge) to explain changes in sea ice conditions observed over many generations.
Yet despite the wide acknowledgement of their demonstrated value, many scientists continue to have had an uneasy alliance with Traditional Knowledge and Indigenous oral histories.
On the one hand, these types of knowledge are valued when they support or supplements archaeological, or other scientific evidence. But when the situation is reversed—when Traditional Knowledge is seen to challenge scientific "truths —then its utility is questioned or dismissed as myth. Science is promoted as objective, quantifiable, and the foundation for "real" knowledge creation or evaluation while Traditional Knowledge may be seen as anecdotal, imprecise and unfamiliar in form.
Are Indigenous and Western systems of knowledge categorically antithetical? Or do they offer multiple points of entry into knowledge of the world, past and present?
Kwaxsistalla Chief Adam Dick with a butter clam (Nancy Turner)
There are many cases where science and history are catching up with what Indigenous peoples have long known.
For instance, in the past two decades, archaeologists and environmental scientists working in coastal British Columbia have come to recognize evidence of mariculture—the intentional management of marine resources—that pre-dates European settlement. Over the course of thousands of years, the ancestors of the Kwakwaka'wakw and other Indigenous groups there created and maintained what have become known as "clam gardens"—rock-walled, terrace-like constructions that provide ideal habit for butter clams and other edible shellfish.
To the Kwakwaka'wakw, these were known as loxiwey, according to Clan Chief Adam Dick (Kwaxsistalla) who has shared this term and his knowledge of the practice with researchers. As marine ecologist Amy Groesbeck and colleagues have demonstrated, these structures increase shellfish productivity and resource security significantly. This resource management strategy reflects a sophisticated body of ecological understanding and practice that predates modern management systems by millennia.
These published research studies now prove that Indigenous communities knew about mariculture for generations—but Western scientists never asked them about it before. Once tangible remains were detected, it was clear mariculture management was in use for thousands of years. There is a move underway by various Indigenous communities in the region to restore and recreate clam gardens and put them back into use.
A second example demonstrates how Indigenous oral histories correct inaccurate or incomplete historical accounts. There are significant differences between Lakota and Cheyenne accounts of what transpired at the Battle of Greasy Grass (Little Big Horn) in 1876, and the historical accounts that appeared soon after the battle by white commentators.
The Lakota and Cheyenne can be considered more objective than white accounts of the battle that are tainted by Eurocentric bias. The ledger drawings of Red Horse, a Minneconjou Sioux participant in the battle, record precise details such as trooper's uniforms, the location of wounds on horses, and the distribution of Indian and white casualties.
In 1984, a fire at the battleground revealed military artifacts and human remains that prompted archaeological excavations. What this work revealed was a new, more accurate history of the battle that validated many elements of the Native American oral histories and accompanying pictographs and drawings of the events. However, without the archaeological evidence, many historians gave limited credence to the accounts obtained from the participating Native American warriors.
Hypotheses incorporating traditional knowledge-based information can lead the way toward unanticipated insights. The travels of Glooscap, a major figure in Abenaki oral history and worldview, are found throughout the Mi'kmaw homeland of the Maritime provinces of eastern Canada. As a Transformer, Glooscap created many landscape features. Anthropologist Trudy Sable (Saint Mary's University) has noted a significant degree of correlation between places named in Mi'kmaw legends and oral histories and recorded archaeological sites.
Untitled from the Red Horse Pictographic Account of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, 1881. Red Horse (Minneconjou Lakota Sioux, 1822-1907), Graphite, colored pencil, and ink (NAA MS 2367A_08570700, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institute)
As ways of knowing, Western and Indigenous Knowledge share several important and fundamental attributes. Both are constantly verified through repetition and verification, inference and prediction, empirical observations and recognition of pattern events.
While some actions leave no physical evidence (e.g. clam cultivation), and some experiments can't be replicated (e.g. cold fusion), in the case of Indigenous knowledge, the absence of "empirical evidence" can be damning in terms of wider acceptance.
Some types of Indigenous knowledge, however, simply fall outside the realm of prior Western understanding. In contrast to Western knowledge, which tends to be text-based, reductionist, hierarchical and dependent on categorization (putting things into categories), Indigenous science does not strive for a universal set of explanations but is particularistic in orientation and often contextual. This can be a boon to Western science: hypotheses incorporating traditional knowledge-based information can lead the way toward unanticipated insights.
There are partnerships developing worldwide with Indigenous knowledge holders and Western scientists working together. This includes Traditional Ecological Knowledge informing government policies on resource management in some instances. But it is nonetheless problematic when their knowledge, which has been dismissed for so long by so many, becomes a valuable data set or used selectively by academics and others.
To return to the firehawks example, one way to look at this is that the scientists confirmed what the Indigenous peoples have long known about the birds' use of fire. Or we can say that the Western scientists finally caught up with Traditional Knowledge after several thousand years.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
George Nicholas, Professor of Archaeology, Simon Fraser University
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Manafort's LA bankruptcy fight may offer new avenue for Mueller probe
By Nathan Layne
February 26, 2018
Manafort's LA bankruptcy fight may offer new avenue for Mueller probe
By Nathan Layne
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Federal prosecutors who have already indicted President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort on charges of money laundering, bank fraud and covertly lobbying for pro-Russian interests may have additional leverage arising from a loan he received while engaged in the bankruptcies of properties in California, several former law enforcement officials say.
Reuters has found new information about Manafort's handling of the loan and its potential link to the bankruptcies as Special Counsel Robert Mueller seeks to pressure Manafort to cooperate with his investigation into Trump's campaign team and possible collusion with Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 election.
At issue is whether the failure to disclose a loan from a lender that was also the main creditor in the California bankruptcy cases represented an illegal concealment of material information.
Reuters has also learned that over the past several months Mueller has begun focusing on Jeffrey Yohai, Manafort's former son-in-law and his partner in four California property deals that failed and were placed in bankruptcy, as a potentially valuable witness in his probe.
Last week Mueller filed new criminal charges against Manafort and Rick Gates, a former business partner who served as Trump's deputy campaign manager. The California bankruptcies might be yet another avenue of inquiry for Mueller's team, said Frank Figliuzzi, who was assistant director of counterintelligence for the Federal Bureau of Investigation under Mueller until 2012.
"It's all about increasing pressure on Manafort to cooperate," he said.
A Reuters review of property records and California bankruptcy court filings shows that a Manafort-controlled company secured in early 2017 a loan against a Brooklyn home from Genesis Capital LLC, now owned by Goldman Sachs, which was the top secured creditor in the bankruptcies of the four high-priced properties in the Los Angeles area.
Genesis signed off on the $303,750 loan two days after a judge overseeing the bankruptcies agreed to release from creditor protection one of the properties - a Spanish colonial-style home.
The move, pushed by Manafort's lawyers and requested in court by a lawyer representing the bankrupt properties, allowed Genesis to put the property up for sale, while the loan helped Manafort finalize a $6.8 million refinancing of the Brooklyn home with another lender. (Graphic: http://tmsnrt.rs/2BQ5MPe)
Neither Manafort, Genesis, nor the lawyer representing the bankrupt properties disclosed the Brooklyn loan to the bankruptcy court - and all told Reuters they had no obligation to do so. Yohai was also kept in the dark, his lawyer said.
Under federal law, the knowing concealment of an asset or financial transaction that materially impacts a bankruptcy proceeding constitutes bankruptcy fraud. Four former federal prosecutors who reviewed Reuters' findings said not disclosing the Brooklyn loan could amount to fraud if the loan and the Spanish colonial home's release were connected to each other and deliberately concealed.
"You can't just do things on the side and not tell," said Patrick Cotter, a criminal defense lawyer in Chicago and former assistant U.S. attorney in New York.
Dan Guthrie, a Dallas white collar defense lawyer and former federal prosecutor, said it would be unlikely that a prosecutor would pursue an indictment without firm evidence of a "quid pro quo"
"As a prosecutor you are not going to want to go forward with an indictment without solid proof of that connection," he said.
Catherine Bauer, the judge overseeing the bankruptcy cases in California, and Michael Hauser, the U.S. trustee assigned to the cases, both declined to comment.
Matthew Browndorf, a partner at the law firm that represented Manafort, said all of its court filings "followed the required process and disclosures of the California Bankruptcy Court." He declined further comment.
Jeffrey Dulberg, a lawyer for Genesis, said his client was unaware of what was behind the decision to release the Spanish colonial home from bankruptcy. Of the other three properties, Genesis foreclosed on one and two remain in bankruptcy proceedings.
Manafort referred questions to his spokesman, who declined to comment, citing a gag order in the criminal case.
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Federal prosecutors who have already indicted President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort on charges of money laundering, bank fraud and covertly lobbying for pro-Russian interests may have additional leverage arising from a loan he received while engaged in the bankruptcies of properties in California, several former law enforcement officials say.
Reuters has found new information about Manafort's handling of the loan and its potential link to the bankruptcies as Special Counsel Robert Mueller seeks to pressure Manafort to cooperate with his investigation into Trump's campaign team and possible collusion with Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 election.
At issue is whether the failure to disclose a loan from a lender that was also the main creditor in the California bankruptcy cases represented an illegal concealment of material information.
Reuters has also learned that over the past several months Mueller has begun focusing on Jeffrey Yohai, Manafort's former son-in-law and his partner in four California property deals that failed and were placed in bankruptcy, as a potentially valuable witness in his probe.
Last week Mueller filed new criminal charges against Manafort and Rick Gates, a former business partner who served as Trump's deputy campaign manager. The California bankruptcies might be yet another avenue of inquiry for Mueller's team, said Frank Figliuzzi, who was assistant director of counterintelligence for the Federal Bureau of Investigation under Mueller until 2012.
"It's all about increasing pressure on Manafort to cooperate," he said.
A Reuters review of property records and California bankruptcy court filings shows that a Manafort-controlled company secured in early 2017 a loan against a Brooklyn home from Genesis Capital LLC, now owned by Goldman Sachs, which was the top secured creditor in the bankruptcies of the four high-priced properties in the Los Angeles area.
Genesis signed off on the $303,750 loan two days after a judge overseeing the bankruptcies agreed to release from creditor protection one of the properties - a Spanish colonial-style home.
The move, pushed by Manafort's lawyers and requested in court by a lawyer representing the bankrupt properties, allowed Genesis to put the property up for sale, while the loan helped Manafort finalize a $6.8 million refinancing of the Brooklyn home with another lender. (Graphic: http://tmsnrt.rs/2BQ5MPe)
Neither Manafort, Genesis, nor the lawyer representing the bankrupt properties disclosed the Brooklyn loan to the bankruptcy court - and all told Reuters they had no obligation to do so. Yohai was also kept in the dark, his lawyer said.
Under federal law, the knowing concealment of an asset or financial transaction that materially impacts a bankruptcy proceeding constitutes bankruptcy fraud. Four former federal prosecutors who reviewed Reuters' findings said not disclosing the Brooklyn loan could amount to fraud if the loan and the Spanish colonial home's release were connected to each other and deliberately concealed.
"You can't just do things on the side and not tell," said Patrick Cotter, a criminal defense lawyer in Chicago and former assistant U.S. attorney in New York.
Dan Guthrie, a Dallas white collar defense lawyer and former federal prosecutor, said it would be unlikely that a prosecutor would pursue an indictment without firm evidence of a "quid pro quo"
"As a prosecutor you are not going to want to go forward with an indictment without solid proof of that connection," he said.
Catherine Bauer, the judge overseeing the bankruptcy cases in California, and Michael Hauser, the U.S. trustee assigned to the cases, both declined to comment.
Matthew Browndorf, a partner at the law firm that represented Manafort, said all of its court filings "followed the required process and disclosures of the California Bankruptcy Court." He declined further comment.
Jeffrey Dulberg, a lawyer for Genesis, said his client was unaware of what was behind the decision to release the Spanish colonial home from bankruptcy. Of the other three properties, Genesis foreclosed on one and two remain in bankruptcy proceedings.
Manafort referred questions to his spokesman, who declined to comment, citing a gag order in the criminal case.
Marc Forsythe, who represented the four limited liability companies that filed for bankruptcy, said he was not required to disclose the loan because he was never told that MC Brooklyn Holdings, LLC, the Manafort company that received the loan from Genesis, was a party to or had any interest in the bankruptcies.
PRESSURE
On Thursday, Mueller filed new criminal charges against Manafort and Gates, supplementing indictments in October. The two men stand accused of laundering more than $30 million, using secret offshore accounts, duping banks to get loans, and failing to register as foreign agents for the lobbying they did for a pro-Russian Ukranian political party.
On Friday, Gates pleaded guilty to conspiracy against the United States and lying to investigators, and he is cooperating with the probe, but Manafort maintains his innocence and has vowed to take his case to trial.
As a close business partner Yohai was privy to many of Manafort's financial dealings. They were 50-50 partners in parent company of the four bankrupt LLCs and were working together on refinancing strategies before they had a falling out last September over a plan to buy two of the four properties out of bankruptcy, court filings and emails show.
Mueller's prosecutors interviewed Yohai in June, asking him about Manafort's relationship with Trump, his ties to Russian oligarchs, and his recent mortgaging of various properties in New York, two people familiar with the matter said.
A Los Angeles federal prosecutor overseeing a separate probe into alleged financial wrongdoing by Yohai has recently pressured him to sign a plea deal that includes a cooperation component, they said. Reuters was unable to determine what sort of cooperation that deal sought.
Yohai's lawyers did not respond to questions about the interview or the Los Angeles investigation.
A spokesman for Mueller declined to comment.
The key events related to the loan for Manafort's Brooklyn brownstone played out in early 2017. On Jan. 13, two days after bankruptcy judge Bauer agreed at a hearing to release the Spanish colonial home, Genesis gave MC Brooklyn Holdings the $303,750 loan.
The loan was critical for Manafort to bridge the gap between $6.8 million needed to refinance the brownstone and $6.5 million that Federal Savings Bank agreed to lend him, two people familiar with the matter said.
Yohai was in an Arizona facility being treated for anxiety and was unaware of the loan at the time, according to those familiar with the matter.
When he left the facility in mid-January the decision to release the Spanish colonial-style home was not yet binding and Yohai had Forsythe draft a motion arguing the initial request did not reflect his views and seeking its reversal. But Yohai did not submit the motion and eventually agreed to let the move go forward in February.
(Reporting by Nathan Layne; Editing by Kieran Murray and Tomasz Janowski)
PRESSURE
On Thursday, Mueller filed new criminal charges against Manafort and Gates, supplementing indictments in October. The two men stand accused of laundering more than $30 million, using secret offshore accounts, duping banks to get loans, and failing to register as foreign agents for the lobbying they did for a pro-Russian Ukranian political party.
On Friday, Gates pleaded guilty to conspiracy against the United States and lying to investigators, and he is cooperating with the probe, but Manafort maintains his innocence and has vowed to take his case to trial.
As a close business partner Yohai was privy to many of Manafort's financial dealings. They were 50-50 partners in parent company of the four bankrupt LLCs and were working together on refinancing strategies before they had a falling out last September over a plan to buy two of the four properties out of bankruptcy, court filings and emails show.
Mueller's prosecutors interviewed Yohai in June, asking him about Manafort's relationship with Trump, his ties to Russian oligarchs, and his recent mortgaging of various properties in New York, two people familiar with the matter said.
A Los Angeles federal prosecutor overseeing a separate probe into alleged financial wrongdoing by Yohai has recently pressured him to sign a plea deal that includes a cooperation component, they said. Reuters was unable to determine what sort of cooperation that deal sought.
Yohai's lawyers did not respond to questions about the interview or the Los Angeles investigation.
A spokesman for Mueller declined to comment.
The key events related to the loan for Manafort's Brooklyn brownstone played out in early 2017. On Jan. 13, two days after bankruptcy judge Bauer agreed at a hearing to release the Spanish colonial home, Genesis gave MC Brooklyn Holdings the $303,750 loan.
The loan was critical for Manafort to bridge the gap between $6.8 million needed to refinance the brownstone and $6.5 million that Federal Savings Bank agreed to lend him, two people familiar with the matter said.
Yohai was in an Arizona facility being treated for anxiety and was unaware of the loan at the time, according to those familiar with the matter.
When he left the facility in mid-January the decision to release the Spanish colonial-style home was not yet binding and Yohai had Forsythe draft a motion arguing the initial request did not reflect his views and seeking its reversal. But Yohai did not submit the motion and eventually agreed to let the move go forward in February.
(Reporting by Nathan Layne; Editing by Kieran Murray and Tomasz Janowski)
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Donald Trump Claims
Donald Trump claimed he could "stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody" and not "lose any voters."
Sunday, February 25, 2018
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