I swear; I am not making any of this up. The hero of this story was born Buffalo Bill Hawkins (his legal name) in 1934, in the tiny town of Purcell, Oklahoma. He was the sixth of eight children. His father was an honest hard working sharecropper and his mother was a devoutly religious woman, one third Cherokee.
In 1952 Bill married Rosa Bell Boulding in Muskogee, Oklahoma, and they then moved to Enid. A year later Rosa moved out, and a woman named Darlene moved in. In 1954 Bill followed his older brother, J.G. Hawkins, to a Christian bible college, but Bill dropped out after just two months. He made his living selling bibles and “ice makers” door-to-door. The ice makers did not work. One relative later told Robert Draper for “Texas Magazine” that Bill, “…could charm a rattler”. A brother-in-law told Draper, “…there isn’t a bigger liar in the world than Bill Hawkins”. The brothers (and Darlene) now moved to Graham, Texas and formed a rockabilly band, “Buffalo Bill and His Whippoorwills”. Bill sang out front and kept track of the money, and according to one of the members, “he always kept the biggest part for himself.”
In the early sixties the brothers went their separate ways. J.G. moved to Romney, Texas and founded a church. Bill moved to Cross Plains, Texas, and raised coonhounds and opened a welding shop. He also convinced Darlene to use a settlement she had received to invest in a pair of Laundromats. Then, in 1967, he joined the Abilene, Texas police department and moved Darlene and their four children to that city. In 1969 J.G. had a vision and moved to Israel. He began calling himself “Jacob” or sometimes “Yaagob”.
In 1972 one of Bill’s children found him in bed with another woman and shortly thereafter Darlene left with the children (although she might have forced Bill to leave, the details are in dispute.) That was also the same year that Bill’s father fell ill. Bill raced back to Oklahoma where he sold his father’s pigs and his truck, before returning (with the cash) to Texas. In 1975 Yaagob (J.G.) Hawkins returned from Israel with another vision. He opened a new church in Odessa, Texas, which he called “The House of Yahweh, Odessa”. He preached a doctrine that celebrated the Jewish holidays and following the 613 laws contained in the Torah. It also relied heavily on the doomsday predictions in the New Testament Book of Revelations. Most importantly the theology preached the importance of tithing, with 1/3 of all a convert’s earnings going to the House of Yahweh. That part of Texas was fertile ground for church start-ups in the 1970’s and Yaagob’s church quickly grew.
In 1976 Bill filed for divorce from his first wife Rosa Bell. Why he chose just then to finally make this move is unclear, as he does not appear to have ever been legally married to Darlene. The next year Bill legally married a woman named Kay, with whom he bought a trailer park, although she now contends he told her he only managed it. Bill resigned from the police department and was ordained as a priest in his brother’s church. He also invested in a Dale Carnegie Course in public speaking. But the brothers soon fell out over theology. Yaagob preached that God’s true name was Elohim. Bill preached that it was Yahweh. In addition Bill opened his own church in his trailer park, “The House of Yahweh, Abilene”. And on December 2, 1980, Buffalo Bill Hawkins dedicated a new church building outside of Abilene. And in 1982 Bill legally changed his name to “Yisrayl (pronounced Yis-Ireal) Hawkins”.
Bill’s church quickly outstripped his brother’s in growth. The House (Abilene) built a world wide following with newsletters, a fancy web site, tapes of all Yisrayl’s pronouncements and the careful crafting of Yisrayl’s message by Kay and the support of her son., Justin. And the tithes poured in, including money from ex-members of the white supremacist Posse Comitatus. By 1990 the tithing for the House of Yahweh allowed High Priest Ysrayl Hawkins to buy 44 acres surrounding his church, where he established a gated compound. The 1-200 members who had “bought” a share of the property (actually it was a lease) were also allowed to buy trailers from a company owned by Yisrayl. And after the House began to preach the end of the world was coming in the year 2000, they also began buying survival supplies in vast quantities, from Life Nutrition Products, a company owned by Yisrayl. By this time converts where divesting themselves of all worldly property and turning it all over to the House. There were also cutting themselves off from all family and friends. The House, by any definition, had now become a cult.
In 1991 Yaagob (J.T.) died if cancer. It was reported that at the funeral Yisrayl fell on Yaagob’s coffin and bid him to rise from the grave. Yaagob refused. In 1994 Kay confronted Yisrayl (Bill) with irrefutable proof that he was sleeping with another woman. He informed her that God had told him in a revelation that all men should practice polygamy. When Kay then filed for divorce from Yisrayl both she and her son Justin were excommunicated from the church and escorted off the property. By 1994 some 300 members of the House had legally changed their names to Yisrayl, to make it easier for God to recognize them on the coming doomsday, October, 2000.
As we all know (now) the world did not end in October 2000. This lack of disaster was explained by Yisrayl as a mis-reading of the pronouncements of Yisrayl by his followers (Yisrayl did not make mistakes!). What he had actually said was that October 2000 was the beginning of a period of trial for humanity, culminating on July 12, 2006 with a nuclear holocaust, when the “nuclear baby” is born and “…a third of man (is) dead in a fourth part of the earth.” On July 12, 2006 several hundred followers in Kenya put on gas masks and retired to bomb shelters. But unfortunately, again, the nuclear baby was either still born or had miscarried at some point. However Yisrayl now claimed his followers had once again mis-read his statements, and the new date for doomsday was Thursday June 12, 2008. Alas, if you can believe it, that date also passed sans the wraith of God.
However, in a possible note of hope, in May of 2008, Yisrayl (Bill) was arrested and charged with bigamy and child labor law violations. His trial is set to begin in September. So, with any luck, come September 2008 Yisrayl (aka Buffalo Bill) Hawkins may yet face his own personal doomsday, as we all eventually do. And then God can figure out what the hell to do with him. But can you believe this guy got away with all of this stuff for this long?
- 30 -
Are we running out of oil? According to U.S. government sources, we have burned over 875 billion barrels of oil over the last 75 years. There are 42 gallons in every barrel of oil, so we burn about 9 billion gallons of oil every day in the United States. But there are 1,000 billion barrels of proven and probable reserves still in the ground. No, we are not running out of oil in the near future. It is clearly time to start conserving and moving to other energy sources, but despite what the mainstream media would have you believe, the experts can find no logical explanation for the current price run-up. Even after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York oil was selling for just $17.45 a barrel. Michael Lynch, President of Strategic Energy & Economic Research believes that “…at about $80 a barrel the market crossed into the irrational exuberance level…It’s hard to find a rational explanation for the gain of the last six months.” Unless of course, the explanation has nothing to do the true value of oil, but with market gaming. The price of oil has risen 697%, that is six hundred ninety-seven percent, since November 2001, and on June 6, 2008 it hit $139 a barrel. Why?
There is no mystery here. There is a long history of people “gaming” isolated unregulated or under regulated markets. In 1979-80 the Hunt brothers pushed the price of silver from $11 an ounce to $50 an ounce in 5 months by controlling just 100 ounces out of a world supply estimated at more than 400 million ounces. That bubble collapsed by April of 1980 but the same thing is happening now with essential commodities, including oil and food, because we are talking about a tiny market, relative to the global economy: the futures market. The commodity futures can be manipulated by buying on “margin”, which means that with access to a few million dollars, usually in unregulated “hedge funds,” speculators can leverage hundreds of billions of dollars in profit for themselves with the connivance of bureaucrats blinded by ideology.
You might call it the revenge of the unregulated economy, or maybe “Enron, risen from the grave”, because that is the most recent philosophical base of the current market mess. Wikipedia most succinctly describes the process in the California electricity market in 2000, in which Enron was a central player; “Deregulating the producers …did not encourage new producers to create more power and drive down prices. Instead,…The producers used moments of spike energy production to inflate the price of energy… Manipulation strategies were known to energy traders under names such as "Fat Boy", "Death Star”, "Forney Perpetual Loop", "Ricochet", "Ping Pong", "Black Widow", "Big Foot", "Red Congo", "Cong Catcher" and "Get Shorty"…. On December 15, 2000…California was paying a wholesale price. .of over $1400 per megawatt, compared to $45 per megawatt average one year earlier.” In 2002 S. David Freeman, who ran California’s Power Authority during the so called energy crises, could have been describing the current (2008) oil price spikes when he testified before a Senate Subcommittee; “…a market approach for electricity (or commodity trading) is inherently gameable….Never again can we allow private interest to create artificial or even real shortages and to be in control.” 
Because they are risking so little (and in any case it is OPM, Other People’s Money) they take huge risks, driving prices in huge swings up and then down. And it isn’t just oil. Again, from Der Spiegal: “In Chicago, the home of the world’s largest commodities futures exchange, the volume of futures being traded is already 30 times as high as the annual grain production in the United States…”Real Trading”, says Hubert Gabrisch of the Institute for Economic Research…has “become the exception on the exchanges”. Prices are now determined by speculators, financial jugglers with no interest whatsoever in having any contact with or physically delivering the vast amounts of grain they own.”
Hedge fund manager, Micheal Masters, told congress last month that speculators had purchased 1.1 billion barrels of oil futures, 8 times the amount in the national strategic oil reserve. They certainly never expect to actually deliver that oil to a customer, or even get within smelling distance of it. And speculators have now bought enough corn futures to fuel the entire U.S. ethanol program for a year. The closest these traders ever get to corn is if it shows up on their dinner plate. Trading House Morgan Stanley now owns agricultural land in the Ukraine. A New York fund owns 2,700 acres of farmland in Britain. And the British Emergent Asset Management company is buying African farms south of the Sahara Desert. What the hell are these brokers going to do with that property? This is not trading commodity futures, it is fantasy trading like a fantasy baseball or a fantasy football league. And it desperately needs to be brought under control
How did we get in this mess? It was easy. Step one was the historically low interest rates, which meant that cash was plentiful and at the same time you couldn’t make much money lending money. That drove investors to look elsewhere for large profits, at places they had never bothered to look at before. Couple this with the “free market” fanatics, and the “deregulation” craze, and a “bubble” was inevitable. In fact, we have now suffered through a dozen bubbles, each one bigger than the last and all fueled by the deregulation craze. And investment guru George Soros believes we are approaching a “Super Bubble” that could pop and throw us into another worldwide “Great Depression”. And that is why the Saudi oil minister is our new best friend. A world wide depression might mean a revolution in his nation: and ours.
We need to return to a real market economy. We need to do that while we still have a choice, before a complete economic collapse forces us to do it.
Pardon my gloating, but these pompous Republican pols were supposed to be taking over the entire world because they were morally superior to 
Mr. Ward had the power to wire transfer money from half a dozen RNC accounts without having to seek clearance from anybody
In fact things may be far worse than that. The investigators had to admit under questioning by reporters that there were some accounts and documentation that they didn’t have access to. It must have been some investigation. Good God, is there anybody high up at the GOP who is not a crook or an idiot, or both? And, I might also begin to wonder, are any of these morally pure GOP leaders actually hetrosexuals?
I ask this second question because the list of Gay-Old-Party members who made their living by gay baiting goes back at least as far as Roy Cohen, Joe McCarthy’s "gay" attack dog. There was the Reverend Ted Haggard, leader of the homophobic National Association of Evangelicals who was forced to first declare, “I did not have a homosexual relationship with a man from Denver”, and was then forced to admit that, yes, actually he had. Then there was Bob Allen, a Florida state Representative and State Chairman of John McCain’s Presidential campaign, until last year when he was forced to resign after offering a cop twenty bucks to accept oral sex from the Represenative. More recently there was Congressman Mark “The Page Boy” Foley, and Senator Larry “Mr. Wide Stance” Craig, and Washington State Republican Representative Richard Curtis, who was busted for soliciting a gay prostitute. And now we have Mr. Glenn Murphy Jr., who last year at this time ran the Clark County Kentucky Republican Committee and was head of the Young Republican National Federation. Then last July, at about 6:40 am, Glenn was displaying passionate affection to a 22 year old man who was sleeping in the bottom bunk bed after a late night party at Glenn’s house. The application of unsought attention awoke and inspired the young recipient to debunk him self and, two days later, to secretly record Glenn’s confession and apology. What do you say in a situation like that? “I should have never given up smoking?” Or perhaps you could try and blame it on your sinus medication, or perhaps it was a desperate an attempt to save the young man from one of those dangerous four hour erections we hear so much about.
And this is the second time Glenn got “up” early with a younger man. He did it at least once before in 1998. This time Glenn Murphy took a plea deal, and will be sentenced on June 30, 2008. He negotiated two years with four suspended. But I wonder if any of these Republicans will ever serve any time for hypocrisy. It appears to me that homophobia and homosexuality have a very similar genetic element, the primary difference being that you usually have no choice about being gay, but hating gays is all about choice.
In 1791 in Phi
The original badger game involved sticking a live badger in a box and then sending in a terrier. After a few seconds the owner would pull the dog out. If the dog held the badger in its jaws, it
Shortly after Hamilton’s first liaison with Mrs. Reynolds, Mister Reynolds 
Reynolds and his partner Jacob Clingman were arrested for cheating 
In contrast there was Mr. William A.E. Moore, a “friend” (meaning finanical supporter) of President McKinley. Mckimley appointed William as U.S. Counsel to Durban, South Africa. William was in route to Durban with h
And in case you are thinking that these are historical footnotes, in 2007 in San Antonio, Texas, an attorney, Ted H. Roberts, was convicted of 
%25202_web.jpg)
