Children’s shows are exploding with hidden penises

In light of this idea of selective attention, it’s surprising to me that not many mentions of Donald in Mathmagic Land show up among the Illuminati theories, as there is a detailed description of the pentagram (which is widely misinterpreted by conspiracy theorists following the Illuminati paradigm as a Satanic symbol), as well as a positive description of the Pythagorean cult.  You’d think that they would be all over this one.

from Donald Duck: High Priest of the Illuminati at Disinfo.

Yeah, you'd think so....

More on Whackypoodle

See also Hidden in Plain Sight

Masonry and Related, Austin/Dallas

.sWineDriveR. makes a photo set available called Masonry and Related, Austin/Dallas, including some shots taken on my visit to Austin which inspired my Lone Star Republics post.

Please check them out and then go onto the other brilliant photo sets.

Pictured are:

• the doors of the Zavala State Archives and Library Building, Austin
• statues of Sam Houston and Anson Jones in front of the Zavala Building  
• a Masonic Temple in Dallas
• Scottish Rite mosaic and sculpture of the double-headed eagle
  
• a window in the General Land Office with a pair of six-pointed stars
• a Ten Commandments monument which led to a Supreme Court Case, decorated with an All-Seeing Eye 

This last monument has an interesting history.  Presented to the city in 1961 as a kind of weird tie-in to Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments, it led in 2005 to

a United States Supreme Court case involving whether a display of the Ten Commandments on a monument given to the government at the Texas State Capitol in Austin violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

The court ruled it didn't.  What intrigued me about the monument is that the tablets have another image of the tablets contained within them, in a strange lettering.  Looking into this I came across the following post.

The Ten Commandment Tablets actually pictured in the DeMille film used a classic Reformed Christian Church version of Ten Commandments divided into four and six. The chiseled lettering was "early Canaanite type".

Of course, those pictured in the DeMille film are those pictured in miniature on this monument.  The writer of the first post I ran across is Avrahaum Segol, a Jewish activist who sees the monolith and the film as an attempt to Christianize the Ten Commandments and promote Christianity.  He may have a point.  I've actually written about Segol before.  He was the guy who

claims the swastika shape of Wesley Acres in Decatur pays homage to the German scientists who came to nearby Huntsville after World War II and designed the rockets that put Americans on the moon.

Segol's got a hard graft ahead of him:

Between 1955 and 1985, more than 150 monoliths were dedicated in 34 states and Canada.  (here)

In any event, a less shrill history of the FOE monuments can be found here:   

THE REAL HISTORY OF THE TEN COMMANDMENTS PROJECT, OF THE FRATERNAL ORDER OF EAGLES.

 Fraternal Order of Eagles stated mission is to unite fraternally for mutual benefit, protection, improvement, social enjoyment and association, all persons of good moral character who believe in a Supreme Being to inculcate the principles of liberty, truth, justice and equality, to perpetuate itself as a fraternal organization and to provide for its government as it's Constitution, Laws, Rituals, by-laws or other rules and regulations may from time to time provide, and to promote the general welfare, the Fraternal Order of Eagles ordains this constitution.

The officers of a Fraternal Order of Eagles Aerie are: Worthy President, Worthy Vice President, Junior Past Worthy President, Secretary, Treasurer, Worthy Chaplain, Worthy Conductor, Trustees, Inside Guard, and Outside Guard.

The mission and officers listed here lead me to believe the FOE was influenced a great deal by Freemasonry. Phoenix Masonry furnishes an initiation ritual. If you're familiar with Masonic ritual, you can decide for yourself if it influenced the FOE, or not.

Anyway, check out the pics and clamor for more!

Fun with Hitler

In Hitler Branding, we looked at weird uses of Hitler's name and Nazi imagery in a Thai restaurant and a few Indian stores and films.  We suggested that the historical signifcance of the Nazi regime simply doesn't have the same weight in Asia, with it's own horrors and teeming millions, their attention is focused on other aspects of their history.  A good many young Asians probably couldn't even tell you who Hilter was.

Can you name the Japanese emperor during WW2?  What about its current prime minister?  Can you name one political party in Thailand or India?  Any of its leaders in the last 50 years?

Westerners also joke about Hitler.  Are these people anti-Semites?  Are they insensitive?  Is it healthy to reduce Hitler to a joke?

What about......cats that look like Hitler?  Back before the internet, I had a friend with a cat that looked like Hitler.  They called it Adolf, naturally.

A so-called "Kitler"

Most cats on the "Cats that look like Hilter" website, don't really look the part.  The one above, on the other hand....

Then there's the "Hitler House"in Swansea, Wales.  This one dates back to 2011, originally tweeted by a young Welsh woman.  It got picked up by some comedian and then went viral.

Lebensraum

Says owner Clive Davies:

“I have never noticed any similarity before and most people who pass by are so close they probably never notice. Some people say they can see images of Jesus Christ on items such as toast, and I suppose it is just a variation on a theme. I don’t really think it looks like Hitler.”

Me neither.

Back in May, JCPenney caught flack for putting out a teapot, designed by Michael Graves, that looked liked Hilter.  In the "there is no such thing as bad publicity" vein, Forbes writes an interesting piece about this brouhaha as a marketing opportunity.

Hitler was also short and stout

Companies let things get to market that are obviously dumb only in hindsight all the time (how else could so many smart people working on Star Wars miss the ugly racial overtones of Jar Jar Binks?). It is inconceivable that the merchandisers at JC Penney purposefully green-lighted a Hitler product, though I had a laugh when somebody tweeted that the company would discontinue its planned Pol Pot pot (clearly part of a homicidal despot-themed housewares line).

JC Penney still sells this, btw, but they've taken a different photo....

A new look

So, we can laugh, right?

Conan O'Brien seems to think so.  Dig the following, replete with jokes about a swastika-bladed fan that "exterminates hot air" and the Bavarian pasta pot "with a conveniently-located gravy ladle brush that wipes away impurities."

Speaking of comedy, we'd be remiss to leave out Charlie Chaplin, who has the distinction of looking like Hitler before even Hitler did!

The Great Dictator

I don't what my point with any of this is, to be honest.  Just to say that people find humor in juxtaposing the cute and innocuous with the monstrous.  Hell, Mel Brooks made "Springtime for Hitler" and people find it amusing, which is actually quite relevant here, as he is satirizing the fact that the general public could find humor in a Nazi-themed show.

Anyway, I have no poignant commentary to make.  Just a collection of random stuff I've come across over the past few years that people compare to Hitler.

Masonic lobbying in the Vatican....?

You may have heard that Pope Francis has made a surprising statement regarding gays.  "Who am I to judge?"

The orientation is ok, he says, but a "gay lobby" (another thing he recently referred to) is not.  Neither is a greed lobby, an overtly political lobby, nor....Masonic lobbies.

"The problem is not having this orientation," he said. "We must be brothers. The problem is lobbying by this orientation, or lobbies of greedy people, political lobbies, Masonic lobbies, so many lobbies. This is the worse problem." (link)

So, there are Masonic lobbies in the Vatican?  Or is he talking about elsewhere?

No sarcasm meant here, I honestly want to know what he's referring to.....

Father Alexander Lucie-Smith, writing for the UK's Catholic Herald has a couple of theories:

If there is a masonic lobby in the Vatican, it could mean that there are Deists in the Vatican – people with a watered down version of the Church, religious indifferentists, people who no longer believe in the efficacy of the sacraments except as pieces of theatre, certainly not outward signs of inward grace.

Secondly, the masonic lobby, if it exists, could be the lobby of Italian big business and Italian banking. As such it might have an interest in the way the Vatican bank is run; or it could be trying to undermine the Church’s social teaching. It could – historically – have been steering the Vatican away from compromises with the Italian left, the traditional enemy of the masons.

This isn't so far-fetched, given the sordid history of Italy's Propaganda Due (P2) Lodge:

a Masonic lodge operating under the jurisdiction of the Grand Orient of Italy from 1945 to 1976 (when its charter was withdrawn), and a pseudo-Masonic, "black", or "covert" lodge operating illegally (in contravention of Article 18 of the Constitution of Italy banning secret associations) from 1976 to 1981. During the years that the lodge was headed by Licio Gelli, P2 was implicated in numerous Italian crimes and mysteries, including the collapse of the Vatican-affiliated Banco Ambrosiano, the murders of journalist Mino Pecorelli and banker Roberto Calvi, and corruption cases within the nationwide bribe scandal Tangentopoli. P2 came to light through the investigations into the collapse of Michele Sindona's financial empire.

Note that it's charter was revoked due to its shenanigans, and it operated illegally for a few years, but hell, this could be exactly the kind of thing The Pope was on about.  I actually think Lucie-Smith's hypotheses aren't too far-fetched.

P2 is a sinister story I know far too little about, and I'd like to know more about it.  Looks like I know where my next book euros are going!

Hitler branding

Back in 2010, an LoS post entitled Mein Kampf Vindaloo consisted of this weird quote:

Dimple Kumari, a research associate in Pune, has not read Mein Kampf but she would wear the Hitler T-shirt out of admiration for him. She calls him "a legend" and tries to put her admiration for him in perspective: "The killing of Jews was not good, but everybody has a positive and negative side."

The BBC article explains:

Slowly but steadily, a decade-old business around the dead and universally despised dictator Adolf Hitler is emerging as a small-scale industry in India.

Books and memorabilia on the German leader's life have found a steady market in some sections of Indian society where he is idolised and admired, mostly by the young. 

This came flooding back to me when I read a HuffPo article about a chicken joint in Bangkok called "Hitler", whose logo is a parody of KFC's Colonel Sanders.  To whit:

According to the article, KFC is considering legal action.  It goes on to say:

Alan Robertson, 43, who lives in Bangkok, told The Daily Mail the chicken was "pretty good" and said a server told him the proprietors thought Hitler was a "good image."

A good image?  Apparently, in Thailand this explanation has wings.  CNN reports that "Hitler chic" is all the rage in Thailand, where young people sport T-shirts with cartoonish Hitler images on them:  Smurfs, Teletubbies, Ronald McDonald, etc. are mashed up with Hitler to produce weird hybrids.

Westerners may be shocked, even incensed.  Locals are oblivious.  This is normal....trendy....fun....

Somehow this seems logical in a city renowned for prostitution named "Bangkok".  A pun at which anglophones can titter, but which in Thai of course, means squat.

2010.  Back in India, a clothing store in Ahmedabad called "Hitler" got a lot of people riled up, and the German and Israeli diplomatic missions got involved.  According to the proprietor, he didn't know Hitler was responsible for the deaths of so many, or what his ideology represents.  He just wanted to honor his grandfather, who was called Hitler because he was so strict.

Notice the swastika in the photo isn't at the same angle as in the Nazi version.  In fact, what we see as totally shocking in this context is perfectly acceptable in India, where it's a sacred symbol dating back millennia before Adolf and Co. were flying it.

Again, Westerners are aghast, but I'd bet many young Indians sincerely don't know who Hitler was.  And why should they?  Can you tell me the name of any Indian political figure besides Nehru and Gandhi, who were alive 60 years ago....anything recent?  No?  It's only the second-most populous nation in the world we're talking about.  Ponder that over your next hamburger....

I also assume the owner was unaware of the irony of having a "Superman" T-shirt in the window.....

2006.  In Mumbai, a restaurant called Hitler's Cross not only featured a "correct" Nazi swastika in the logo, but was decorated in red, white and black and an enormous portrait of the man himself was hanging inside.  Again, an outcry caused the restaurant to reconsider the name.  Oddly, a lot of local dignitaries and celebrities were at its inauguration, with nary a peep.

"When asked by a news reporter if he felt disturbed by the name of the restaurant, [actor Murli Sharma]: "I am not really agitated as I have not read much about the man (Hitler). However, from what I know about Hitler, I find this name rather amusing."

Ho! Ho!  On the menu:  Pol Pot roast!

The restaurant is now called the Cross Café.  One of the new names that had been considered was Exotic Goblet. 

This is all part of the banality of Hitler in India.  Consider the following two examples:

2011 - Present.  Here is a daily soap opera called Hitler Didi.  Why Hitler?  Because Auntie Hitler is strict.  Like the Hitler store guy's grandfather.

Hitler Didi is all about the strict, tough and strong minded Indira Sharma (Rati Pandey) who is the "Hitler Didi" of Chandni chowk . She has the responsibility of her whole family, as she is the sole earner. Her life revolves around bills and the financial situation of their family. And due to the heavy burden of her family, her life has become dull and colorless and she has become a mere working machine without any emotions in her. Until one day when her new tenant Rishi Kumar (Sumit Vats) arrives, who lights up her life. He brings joy in her life, helps her at every step of life. He becomes the shoulder she can cry on, the one person she can trust the most.

2011.  Hero Hitler in Love.

Hero Hitler in Love revolves around Hitler who lives in his village Ishqpura. Hitler is a man with unique and different thoughts who loves his fellow villagers and helps soul mates come together. Hitler falls in love with Sahiban, who lives in Pakistan and decides to bring her to his village. Hitler believes in solving problems by talking about them but when something crosses the line, he decides to become real "Adolf Hitler".

So he decided to become "real" Adolf Hitler?  What does that mean?  He trims his mustache?  Practices his elocution?  Starts murdering Indian Jews?

The film also revolves around car racing. Hitler who loves to race, but when he is set up to fail in the Asian Car Racing competition he decides to take revenge. The story relates how Hitler takes his revenge and fights to win his girl and reunite the nations of India and Pakistan.

Much like Hitler "reuniting" Czechoslovakia, Austria and Poland with the Fatherland, I suppose.  Except Adolf Hitler, as far as I know, didn't race cars.

Clearly, there's some vast cultural difference to explain all this.  These things would get you fined in France and to be honest, I'm pretty sure you'd be denied your freedom of speech in the USA in these cases....can you imagine a Hitler Chicken in Williamsburg, Ybor City or the French Quarter?

It's weird, I gotta admit.  The whole Engrish thing is more than just bad grammar, it's also a misunderstanding of Western cultural norms.  And Westerners don't get the East, either, it would appear.

I'm just waiting for a pizza joint called Mussolini's:  "Hey, whatsa matta you!  Bada bing!"

I guess it could all be written off with a smirk, but in India, there is a nationalist element that admires Hitler, substituting Muslims for Jews.  The article I link to is a bit alarmist, dropping figures like 100,000 copies of Mein Kampf  sold over seven years as if it means fuck all in a country of 1 billion.

So, I don't think these droplets in an ocean mean Indians have taken to Antisemitism, it's just one of those weird losses in translation that leaves us aghast and the Indians, for the most part....indifferent.