Is There No Such Thing As Progress?

At the same time Hillary Rodham Clinton was testifying at her Senate confirmation hearings to become the next Secretary of State, after being the first viable woman candidate for the Democratic nomination for the presidency (not to belittle Shirley Chisholm's 1972 candidacy), the clerics in Saudi Arabia announced that girls at 10 and 12 are not too young to marry. To deny them those rights, according to these Saudi religious scholars, is unfair to the girls. Check this out!

The concept of progress is intellectual, mostly a progressive Western ideal, and has never equated with reality. Otherwise we wouldn't have had such things as the Third Reich, Rwanda, Northern Ireland, the Palestinian -Israeli wars, I think you get the picture.

More from this amazing book The Forger's Spell by Edward Dolnick, as it relates to the Bernard Madoff scandal. The Forger's Spell is about how a third rate artist fooled Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering into paying big, big bucks for obviously forged Vermeer paintings. Han Van Meegeren didn't even try to copy Vermeer paintings, but instead painted in the style of Vermeer, using Bakelite to set the paints to make they appear old.

Dolnick observes that a forger's success has scarcely anything to do with his skill as a painter. "Buyers want to believe they have found something extraordinary; the forger's task is to find ways to bolster that belief."

The same is true of Bernard Madoff. Like the purchaser of a forged painting, the victim of a ponzi scheme sorta knows that he is getting too good a deal. Insider trading, something not quite kosher, is behind the profits. Forgers often create such elaborate paper trails for paintings so that their pedigrees look much better than the actual work. So, too, the returns on the Madoff investments were too good to be true, but greed allowed the victims to pretend they didn't see.