"They Might Be Getting Somewhere With Male Contraceptives," by Alpha Unit

According to a recent article in The New York Times, male contraceptives are attracting growing interest from scientists, who believe they hold promise for being safe, effective, and, also important, reversible. Scientists have been studying male contraception for many years, but so far no method has met the stringent safety and effectiveness criteria female methods do, writes Pam Belluck. But some new approaches are encouraging enough that federal agencies are financing research. Some methods will be presented at an October conference by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The most studied approach in the United States involves using testosterone and progestin to send the body signals to stop producing sperm, says Belluck. Evidently this is supposed to be safe and effective for most men, but there are questions about side effects. So now scientists are investigating ways to interrupt sperm production, maturation, or mobility. One potential pill, gamendazole, interrupts sperm maturation so that you’re making non-functional sperm. Another drug blocks production of retinoic acid, which is important for sperm production. It involves the metabolism of Vitamin A. Vitamin A is converted into metabolically active retinoic acid, which binds to a protein in your cells called an RAR (retinoic acid receptor). The receptor protein initiates the expression of genes necessary for the creation of sperm. The drug being tested is an RAR antagonist (and there are concerns about side effects). A neurobiologist at Harvard discovered that sperm tails contain calcium ion channels, with electrically-charged atoms “turbo-charging” the sperm to reach eggs. He’s working on a drug that would disable this channel. Another experimental method involves injecting a copolymer gel into the scrotum to inactivate sperm. The injection is made into the vas deferens, the vessel through which sperm move before ejaculation. Within minutes, this gel coats the walls of the vas. Scientists believe this works by partially blocking the vas and also by rupturing the cell membranes of sperm, preventing them from penetrating ova. Yet another method involves briefly heating the testes with ultrasound, which can halt sperm production for months. Pharmaceutical companies haven’t signed on to any of these methods, waiting for something that’s shown to be both effective and relatively risk-free in healthy men.

“They Might Be Getting Somewhere With Male Contraceptives,” by Alpha Unit

According to a recent article in The New York Times, male contraceptives are attracting growing interest from scientists, who believe they hold promise for being safe, effective, and, also important, reversible.

Scientists have been studying male contraception for many years, but so far no method has met the stringent safety and effectiveness criteria female methods do, writes Pam Belluck.

But some new approaches are encouraging enough that federal agencies are financing research. Some methods will be presented at an October conference by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The most studied approach in the United States involves using testosterone and progestin to send the body signals to stop producing sperm, says Belluck. Evidently this is supposed to be safe and effective for most men, but there are questions about side effects.

So now scientists are investigating ways to interrupt sperm production, maturation, or mobility.

One potential pill, gamendazole, interrupts sperm maturation so that you’re making non-functional sperm.

Another drug blocks production of retinoic acid, which is important for sperm production. It involves the metabolism of Vitamin A. Vitamin A is converted into metabolically active retinoic acid, which binds to a protein in your cells called an RAR (retinoic acid receptor). The receptor protein initiates the expression of genes necessary for the creation of sperm. The drug being tested is an RAR antagonist (and there are concerns about side effects).

A neurobiologist at Harvard discovered that sperm tails contain calcium ion channels, with electrically-charged atoms “turbo-charging” the sperm to reach eggs. He’s working on a drug that would disable this channel.

Another experimental method involves injecting a copolymer gel into the scrotum to inactivate sperm. The injection is made into the vas deferens, the vessel through which sperm move before ejaculation. Within minutes, this gel coats the walls of the vas. Scientists believe this works by partially blocking the vas and also by rupturing the cell membranes of sperm, preventing them from penetrating ova.

Yet another method involves briefly heating the testes with ultrasound, which can halt sperm production for months.

Pharmaceutical companies haven’t signed on to any of these methods, waiting for something that’s shown to be both effective and relatively risk-free in healthy men.

"Summertime in Northern California," by Alpha Unit

It’s gotten so bad that you can’t go hunting, fishing, or hiking in peace in certain parts of Northern California anymore – all because of marijuana growers with guns. On Friday the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California announced that law enforcement officials had raided pot-growing farms in the Mendocino National Forest during a 2-week operation that will be ongoing. Every summer law enforcement launches this effort on public lands. At least half a dozen federal agencies took part this year, along with the state anti-narcotics bureau and 6 sheriff’s departments. This year’s bust, described as “huge,” is supposedly a major blow against illegal marijuana cultivation on public lands in Northern California. Agents uprooted over 460,000 pot plants. They also seized about 1,000 pounds of processed marijuana, almost 30 guns, and 11 vehicles. There have been over 100 arrests. According to the Associated Press:

The 900,000-acre forest – larger than Rhode Island – spans six counties in a region of mountains and forests known as the Emerald Triangle for its high concentration of pot farms. Agents raided more than 50 gardens teeming with trash, irrigation pipes, and chemicals that damage forestland and waterways, authorities said.

Pot growers favor public lands for their remote location and rugged terrain, people say. This year’s focus was on the Mendocino National Forest after nearby residents started complaining last year about the increasing number of confrontations with armed guards protecting pot grows. Moreover, Forest Service officials have complained about the environmental consequences of illegal pot farms. U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag says that the California National Guard, Forest Service workers, and volunteers removed 46,000 pounds of trash, 120 propane tanks, 116,000 feet of pipe, 13 man-made dams, 57 pounds of pesticides, and tons of fertilizer from raided grow sites. Usually Mexican drug cartels are blamed for some of this activity. The U.S. Attorney says that 25 of the people arrested are already facing federal charges, but she wouldn’t say where they’re from.

“Summertime in Northern California,” by Alpha Unit

It’s gotten so bad that you can’t go hunting, fishing, or hiking in peace in certain parts of Northern California anymore – all because of marijuana growers with guns.

On Friday the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California announced that law enforcement officials had raided pot-growing farms in the Mendocino National Forest during a 2-week operation that will be ongoing. Every summer law enforcement launches this effort on public lands. At least half a dozen federal agencies took part this year, along with the state anti-narcotics bureau and 6 sheriff’s departments.

This year’s bust, described as “huge,” is supposedly a major blow against illegal marijuana cultivation on public lands in Northern California.

Agents uprooted over 460,000 pot plants. They also seized about 1,000 pounds of processed marijuana, almost 30 guns, and 11 vehicles. There have been over 100 arrests.

According to the Associated Press:

The 900,000-acre forest – larger than Rhode Island – spans six counties in a region of mountains and forests known as the Emerald Triangle for its high concentration of pot farms. Agents raided more than 50 gardens teeming with trash, irrigation pipes, and chemicals that damage forestland and waterways, authorities said.

Pot growers favor public lands for their remote location and rugged terrain, people say. This year’s focus was on the Mendocino National Forest after nearby residents started complaining last year about the increasing number of confrontations with armed guards protecting pot grows.

Moreover, Forest Service officials have complained about the environmental consequences of illegal pot farms.

U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag says that the California National Guard, Forest Service workers, and volunteers removed 46,000 pounds of trash, 120 propane tanks, 116,000 feet of pipe, 13 man-made dams, 57 pounds of pesticides, and tons of fertilizer from raided grow sites.

Usually Mexican drug cartels are blamed for some of this activity. The U.S. Attorney says that 25 of the people arrested are already facing federal charges, but she wouldn’t say where they’re from.

Latest News From the Bigfoot World

Justin Smeja identified as Sierra Kills shooter. We can now confirm that Justin Smeja is the Sierra Kills shooter who supposedly shot and killed two Bigfoots in Plumas County, California in October 2010. I tried to keep his name a secret for 3 1/2 weeks, but now that he has been outed on various blogs and forums, there’s no need for secrecy anymore. From a screenshot on Taxidermy.net, forum participants found evidence the Smeja was the author of the thread.

A screenshot of the Taxidermy.net thread where it is suggested that Justin Smeja is the person who wrote the original Sierra Kills thread in November 2010.

Additional evidence was provided by an email from George Roof of Taxidermy.net confirming that Justin Smeja did indeed write the post on that site where he admitted that he shot and killed the two Bigfoots. Here is the email:

From: Justin Date: Sat, Jul 16, 2011 at 11:06 PM Subject: George Roof and Bigfoots!! To: George Roof

You do know that someone has been writing about you on the internet, saying you shut down a thread at Taxidermy at the request of a guy who was being harassed for shooting 2 Bigfoots, right?

Feel free to deny this and your knowledge of who this shooter is at anytime, so that your name is not involved in this crazy business anymore. Feel free to call out Ken Walker and Robert Lindsay as liars, if you can.

From: George Roof Date: Sun, Jul 17, 2011 at 6:03 AM Subject: Re: George Roof and Bigfoots!! To: Justin

Well then I guess you’re just out of luck then. You see I DID at the direct request of Jason Smeja ask the site administrator to close the post. Smeja claimed he was getting threatening emails. Now man-up and apologize to those two.

Smeja in danger due to being outed? Someone emailed me concerned that Smeja was in danger from crazy animal rights types now that he has been outed. This person felt that one of these anti-hunter types might try to harm or even kill Smeja. I do not think that there is any risk of that, but I do feel protective of Smeja. I have his address and phone number, but I am not giving it out. In addition, I put him in touch with an attorney in hopes that she can make a deal with him with the Feds for amnesty in case they are going to charge him over this incident.

Book and movie deal for Smeja? There are rumors that Smeja has been offered a $500,000 book and movie deal based on the Sierra Kills incident. I can’t confirm this rumor in any way; it’s just flying around.

Feds interested in the Sierra Kills? According to admittedly third hand and further away sources, the federal government is aware of what happened in the Sierra Kills, and they are closely monitoring the situation.

What exactly this means is not certain – whether they think the incident really occurred, whether they think it is a hoax, etc., no one really knows. But the source who received this information was told by his contacts in a federal investigative agency to “keep out of it and don’t get involved if you know what’s good for you.” What exactly this cryptic comment means is also unknown.

Ketchum DNA report delayed again. The Ketchum DNA report was sent out for peer review in early January. It was accepted for peer review about one month later. This means that the journal felt that the science behind the paper was basically sound and the paper would not be rejected, although it could be sent back for a rewrite ranging from minor to major. The paper was supposed to be through peer review first in late spring. Next it was said that the paper would be done by July.

The latest from Ketchum herself is that the paper will not be done until November or at the latest, the end of the year. I’m sick and tired of waiting for this paper, and I am starting to wonder if it is ever coming out.

Ketchum Project a one woman show? Richard Stubstad has argued on this site that Ketchum’s report is a one woman show. He suggested that the paper would have only one author, Ketchum, and no co-authors. This view has now been shown to be incorrect. The latest news is that Ketchum’s paper is authored by her and six co-authors.

About That $4 Trillion Obama Wants to Cut

Obama’s crazy “Gang of Six” plan to cut $4 trillion in the next 10 years out of the federal budget is nutty. Everyone I read says that that’s guaranteed to cause a recession or a depression. Some say it is a recipe for 10 years of recession or depression.

Obama has drunk from the Koolaid of the deficit hawks. According to Obama, when the government spends too much money by engaging in government spending, it “crowds out” private investment and thereby raises interest rates.

So if we cut government spending and the government stops borrowing so much money, that money will be freed up for the private sector. Government spending takes money out of the economy when it spends. If you reduce government spending and borrowing by $400 billion a year over the next 10 years, you will have an extra $400 billion for the economy and for the private sector to spend and borrow.

It’s looks sensible on its face, but in reality it makes no sense at all. Further, government has been running high deficits for some time now, and interest rates have been near zero. Nor is there any inflation on the corner. If you read nutty blogs like Zero Hedge, the deficit hawks there are always yelling that the sky is falling. Rising interest rates and inflation are right around the corner.

But they’re always right around the corner and never happening. There’s nothing to worry about. There has been some inflation in gas prices, but that’s been caused by excessive speculation in the commodity markets in London. Demand for gasoline is sinking, and supply is the same. There is no supply-demand reason why the price should be going up.

Nor is there any theory explaining that whatever small inflation we have now is being caused by borrowing or deficits. That’s because it isn’t being caused by borrowing or deficits. We have a demand problem. Demand is dead in the water. The economy is so screwed that it can’t even supply jobs for 1

The last ten years have proven the “crowding out” theorists wrong over and over. Look at Japan. Their debt is 21

Japan’s interest rates, instead of being through the roof, are near zero. They have been very low for years now. There is no inflation in Japan. Instead they have the opposite – deflation. The deficit hawk notions that high deficits lead to high interest rates and inflation like day follows night have been proven to be wrong.

Yet this is Barack Obama’s philosophy.

And that $4 trillion he wants to cut? That was the price of the Bush tax cuts. If we would have let the Bush tax cuts expire, that would have resulted in the entire $4 trillion in savings that he wants to get by cutting.

The debt problem was run up and will be run up by a variety of things. Most importantly, it is being driven by the rotten economy. Research shows that at the moment, the deficit is being driven almost entirely by a decline in tax revenues, which is caused directly by the downturn. To the extent that Obama’s plan wrecks the economy for the next 10 years, it will continue to drive deficit spending by declining tax revenues.

In addition, Bush deliberately ran up the deficit in order to create a debt crisis down the road. He admitted as much in statements and interviews. He started two wars that he declined to pay for. He instituted massive tax cuts which deprived the state of needed revenue. And he put in a prescription drug plan with no cost controls that he also refused to pay for. The drug plan is a great idea, but it needs cost controls and it needs to be paid for.

Most of the deficit run-up in the next decade is projected to be over the wars and the Bush tax cuts. A lesser amount will be due to lousy economy. TARP and the stimulus added nothing to the debt or deficit.

By instituting George Bush’s insane reactionary theories, Obama has done tremendous harm to the liberal label at the same time that he has tried to wreck the Democratic Party. Obama is trying to undo 100 years of progressive change.

That he is doing so under the banner of a liberal shows that the label has next to no meaning anymore. If liberal means to undo a century of progressive change, then liberals are just reactionaries, and the label has no meaning. At the same time, he is ruining the Democratic Party. Without the crown jewels of the Great Society and New Deal, the Democratic Party is nothing anymore. It’s just another Republican Party. The damage that Obama is causing to the Left is breathtaking and appalling.

Is Wikipedia a Front for Fascism?

Repost from the old site.

Check out this crap article. Not that such a thing does not exist, but in the true sense, it doesn’t really. Communists usually don’t go around blowing up markets and whatnot. I can’t believe Wikipedia even has an article like this – it’s blatant anti-Communist propaganda.

There used to be lots of BS articles like this – Kurdish Terrorism, Palestinian Terrorism, on and on, you get the picture. Of course, they were created and maintained by nationalist assholes, in the first case, Jewish nationalist assholes, and in the second case, Turkish nationalist assholes. Most of those articles have been deleted.

You really need to understand how Wikipedia is supposed to work. The very idea of an article called “______ Terrorism” is virtually an Neutral Point of View (NPOV) violation right there.

I am not saying that Wikipedia is complete crap. When it works as intended, it’s actually pretty nice. NPOV is often properly invoked, and articles are tempered down to be as objective as possible. The whole problem with Wikipedia is there are all these evil little cabals running around. In most cases, proper Wikipedians simply deny the cabals the opportunity to infest the site with their propaganda crap and lies.

Problem is that a few cabals have been allowed to run amok on Wikipedia – specifically, Jewish nationalists, Ukrainian nationalists and Indian Hindu nationalists. The anti-Communist cabal is apparently also being given free reign.

Problem here is that the top end of Wikipedia is completely overrun by conservative to libertarian types. The Jewish and Hindutva cabals have also been allowed to penetrate into the highest echelon. The anti-Communist line probably just goes along with the hard rightwing philosophy of the top Wikipedians.

It’s notable that Ukrainian, Hindutva and Jewish nationalism are all far rightwing ideologies that are frequently accused of being fascist movements. When you combine this with the extreme anti-Communist line that was often used by fascist movements, the frightening possibility here (And I do not mean to exaggerate, really!) is that Wikipedia is actually a front for various forms of fascist ideology.

It’s really too bad that this nice encyclopedia is so corrupted like this. The flaw is in the design. I have never seen a World Book or Brittanica article anywhere near as propagandistic as the worst Wikipedia stuff. In this sense, Wikipedia is never going to kill the best encyclopedias. The real encyclopedias’ criticism of Wikipedia is correct – in too many cases, it simply is an unprofessional joke.

Racialism Versus Racism

Repost from the old site.

There is a difference between racism and racialism. Racism is what most folks think it is. To me, it means to dislike or not wish to associate with a given individual based on their race or ethnic group. I don’t agree that disliking or wishing to avoid certain groups in their aggregate is racism.

For instance, it is certainly possible to look at US Blacks and say that, globally, they seem to have lower morals, high rates of sociopathy, lower IQ, less civilized behavior, much higher crime rates, higher rates of dishonesty and a tendency to break the rules, etc.

All of these things are more or less proven by empirical research, or, if not, based on my life experience, they are true anyway. I really don’t need science to prove that; I can see it with my very eyes. These differences appear most common at lower income levels. At greater income levels, I see less and less difference between Blacks and other races.

Where racism goes wrong, in my opinion, and where it is irrational, stupid and just plain immoral, sinful and wrong, is that it lumps all individuals of a given group into the average of the whole group. For instance, racists apply the negative portrayal above of the Black group to each and every individual Black that they meet. This is madness.

Despite the fact that I believe that the Black group does have greater rates of the negatives above, it’s clear to me that any given individual Black may be just as good and decent of a person, if not better, than any White friend I have or have ever had.

And there are many, many Blacks that do not have any of the qualities listed above. Therefore, it seems wrong for me to decide to have White friends and not to have friends of other races. That’s just a personal decision on my part.

I would also say that it is possible to have racist feelings while realizing that they are wrong and struggling against them. This is the essence of Christian morality. Obviously, it’s best if we limit our sins to the minimum. But many of us sin nevertheless. Regardless of the sin, one must recognize it’s immorality and strive to reduce or end the immoral behavior.

Now, I happen to think that the overwhelming majority of racists do not feel the tiniest bit guilty at all, but there are some that really do feel bad about their racism and work on ending it.

In fact, there is an entire field called Whiteness Studies, which, in spite of being ridiculous race-deniers, takes this as a given in its theory. Whiteness Studies authors, usually White, often write about how they battle against their own internalized racism against non-Whites. Some say it will be a lifelong journey and they do not expect to ever completely overcome it.

Although this entire field is mocked by White racists, I applaud these honest individuals and their efforts.

Racists are usually trying to give intellectual or moral cover to their feelings. For instance, it is quite common for White racists to just say that they are cutting their losses as far as other races. Sure, they may be a few good Blacks out there, but why bother trying to winnow through the good from the bad in trying to figure out who is worth associating with? Why not just be done with the entire group and avoid them?

I really do not believe that most White racists are just cutting their losses (they just use that as a phony excuse for their racism), though do I feel that there are a few like this, and I sympathize with them. I’m not even sure if they are really racists.

Racialism is actually a completely different term with a different meaning. The Wikipedia article gives a pretty good picture of the formal meaning of the term. Unfortunately, the term racialism has been taken over by White racists in an effort to cover up their racism with fake and nice-sounding words.

Even the Wikipedia article talk page shows that both anti-racist boneheads and White nationalist liars have taken over the article and tried to mangle it to serve there ridiculous or dishonest agendas.

Strictly speaking, racialism simply means that one accepts the existence of various races of mankind. I doubt if it really means anything more than that. Many racialists feel that there are real and objective genetic differences between the races, but I do not think that that is a requirement to be a racialist.

A racialist would look at things like IQ scores, the makeup of 100-yard dash winners in the Olympics and the NBA, crime rates, etc. and would say that race is a common factor behind these scores. The race-denier would say that, first, there is no such thing as race, and second, that race has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with these discrepancies.

So a non-racialist is, strictly speaking, a race-denier. This position, that there is no such thing as race, has become quite popular lately, but I think it is complete nonsense. A non-racialist would also argue that because race does not exist, all differential racial attributes on various performance, membership and incidence variables is strictly coincidental.

Yes, I do believe that there are races and there are average differences between them on various variables. I do not believe that race does not exist.

Nowadays, most folks who call themselves racialists are just racists, almost always White racists. I’m going to step out of the closet and become one of the first anti-racist racialists to publicly identify oneself.

The objective of the race-deniers is clear. Once one cuts past the nonsense and crap, it seems there is a laudable agenda here. The race-deniers believe that the more people focus on race, the more racist they become. Unfortunately, it is probably true. So, by saying that race does not exist, they hope to strike a blow against racism. This is a noble goal and I sympathize.

However, I do not believe in abusing science and truth to achieve societal objectives. The existence of race is an objective fact to me, and I am not interested in denying it to further some anti-racist objective. Perhaps I’m contributing to racism by doing this. I doubt it, but even if I am, I don’t really care. There are no truths that are so horrible that they should not be discussed or revealed.

There has also been a lot of confusion about me supporting White Pride. Well, I think that most every other race or ethnic group out there seems to have quite a bit of ethnic pride. Except Whites. This is denied to us.

The reason is that White Pride has led to some pretty nasty and horrible outcomes in the past 70 years or so. In wishing to avoid the recrudescence of such movements, people just want to do away with the sentiment altogether.

In other words, your average White who gets into the White Pride thing turns into, at worst, a raving Nazi or racist fascist fuck, or, at best, into some sort of genteel white bread polite racist type. So we have the strange scenario in which Whites all over the world deny that there is anything good about being White, deny any pride in their heritage, or even apologize for being White.

I think that that is a bit silly. I look in the mirror and see my White features and I like them and feel good about them. I’m comfortable with White folks, White behavior and White features because that’s what I’m used to, and also what I believe in and am attracted to. I don’t agree that we are bad or evil or need to apologize for ourselves. I do not think we need to be bred off the face of the Earth to protect the planet.

That’s all I am talking about. If the above really bothers you so much and you think I’m a racist jerk, well, fine, you really don’t have to come around here. We are not dying for readers; we get ~3,200 readers a day and can easily lose some.

I hope that that clears things up.

Muslims in France

Repost from the old site.

Clearly, the North African, mostly-Caucasian Muslims in France (primarily Algerians) have been a disaster. They are the ones that are rioting all the time and tearing up the country. Contrary to popular rumor, the N African Muslim population in France is ~1

The North Africans are there primarily due to French colonialism and imperialism. Algeria was a former French colony, brutally ruled by France for 134 years, from 1830 to 1964.

The Algerians fought a horribly brutal war of independence, in which 25,000 French and 1 million Algerians were killed. Incredibly, the anti-Communist Right in the US still sings the praises of French colonialism in this war, and makes the revolutionaries out to be the bad guys.

It’s true that the Algerian revolutionaries did not fight a very nice or pretty war. Yet they paid for it with 40 times the casualties of the French. To the dead person, I don’t think it really matters how they got killed (an accusation against the revolutionaries is that they killed people in brutal ways such as beheadings).

It’s true that you can go on the Internet, usually to Zionist sites, and see some horrible photos of those killed by the Algerian revolutionaries. A specialty was chopping the head off, chopping the genitals off, and stuffing the guy’s dick in his severed head.

Anyway, colonialism is always wrong, period. The French were wrong, and they lost. After the war, Algerians started showing up in France in large numbers. White nationalists (who, by the way, never met a White imperialist or colonialist project they did not adore) claim that the Algerians are in France due to insane liberals bringing them there to diversify France and I guess to dilute the European Whites.

The French may be liberal, but they are not retarded like liberal Americans and liberal Scandinavians.

I would like to point out that none of this White nationalist bullshit is true.

First of all, the Algerian Muslim immigrants were not brought in as some loony liberal experiment in diversity, but instead as pro-French refugees fleeing soon before or after the FLN won the war. Think of the fall of Saigon.

The White nationalist line is that the French used to be hardcore and nasty and brutal (after all, the guillotine was still used until the 1970’s) and the French Foreign Legion was brutal as Hell in the Algerian Civil War, but now the French have gone soft and wimpy, and they are letting Muslim punks run all over them.

That hardcore France the White nationalists love so much was rejected by none other than the French people themselves after the criminal colonial wars of Algeria and Vietnam. There was a big scandal about all the murdering and torturing the French Foreign Legion was doing in Algeria.

The US anti-Communist Hard Right, to this very day, sees this humanist sentiment, and its attendant rejection of colonialism, and even, to some extent, at least in popular culture, embrace of national liberation movements (see Fanon’s seminal work appeared in 1961, the year of his death, in the midst of the Algerian revolution, and that Debray started pushing his foco theories right around this time ( Revolution in the Revolution appeared in 1967).

The rebels were even worse than the Foreign Legion, but the French did not want to see themselves as brutal, colonialist maniacs.

This was also a period when France was supporting other imperialist and colonial powers in the Suez War in 1956, where British and French colonialism, with their colonial Jewish puppet state, attacked Egypt and tried to grab the Suez Canal back from Nasser, who had rightly and properly seized the canal as Egypt’s property.

After that, the French turned their backs on colonialism (more or less – they still, to their discredit, hold colonies in the South Pacific), and to some extent on imperialism – but not totally – see the crucial French role in the armed coup that threw out President Aristide in Haiti – elected with the support of 9

France as a colonial and imperial power was more or less finished by the late 1960’s, Situationists and other crazies were rioting in Paris in the summer of 1968, and the torch of imperialism passed to the US after the British lost stomach for it after Suez.

Suez pretty much led to a “peasant revolt” in the UK against British imperialism due to the blatant and sickening imperialism of the Suez War. British imperialism, of course, continues today, even, outrageously, in the Labor Party, really the last place anyone would hope to find it. See British support for the imperialist invasion and colonial occupation of Iraq for more.

To the dismay of White nationalists, who assume any criminals rioting in the streets must be a bunch of niggers*, the problem kids are North African Caucasians, not Blacks. These Arabs don’t act this way in North Africa. The whole mess is really because they are Muslims and refuse to assimilate. All other theories seem to fall flat on their faces.

White nationalists try to blame this mess on France being taken over by multiculturalist liberal idiots, but France has always been extremely assimilationist and anti-multiculturalist, so this isn’t a failure of multiculturalism at all. In fact, France has been brutal and cruel towards the Bretons, the Basques and the Corsicans, all of whom have every right to take up arms against the French state.

The Algerians are just a problem immigrant group that flat out refuses to assimilate.

One problem here is that the French have always assumed that all immigrants would just lose it all and become Frenchmen. There was never much racism in France and everyone was French anyway, so there was no need for affirmative action.

There is good evidence that the Muslims experience widespread discrimination in employment. The French refuse to remedy this with the only working remedy for discrimination – affirmative action and enforcement of anti-discrimination laws.

White nationalists argue that the discrimination is to be expected based on the behavior of so many of the Algerians, but that misses the point. If amelioration of discrimination against Algerians makes them happier, would they not riot less?

The Muslim areas are not particularly dangerous, unless maybe if you’re a cop. They give off instead the impression that Little Italys used to give off in this country, of a safe zone where the state does not rule and someone else does instead. In the Little Italys, it was the Mafia, and they did keep the crime rate down.

If one were not a resident, people knew that, and you were being watched, but everyone left you alone. The Islamists have, in a similar fashion, taken hold over Algerian zones. Therefore, the Islamist shadow state in the banlieus has a lot of responsibility for the insane rioting that goes on there just about every night.

There is not much to be done at this point except for France to quit importing Algerians. White nationalists like to scream that the French should deport all the Muslims. But I believe that most of these rioting idiots are citizens and hence un-deportable.

If I were running France, I am not sure what I would do.

The Muslims are yet only 1

*used sardonically.

Who Killed Rafik Hariri?

Repost from the old site.

One wonders where to begin with a post like this. Rafik Hariri, of course, was the Prime Minister and self-made billionaire who ruled Lebanon for a time recently. He was assassinated in an expertly planned car bomb attack, but no one really knows who did it. All suspicion fell on Syria, and Syria did have good reason to kill Hariri.

You really need a lot of background in Lebanese and Middle Eastern politics to even begin to understand the twists and turns of this sinuous murder mystery.

Hariri was elected head of Lebanon and proceeded to go on a borrowing spree, mostly with Saudi money, and rebuilt Lebanon after the Civil War destroyed it. He did this by playing all factions off each other. He also instituted a Lebanese version of free market economics, an economic system that, thank God, is largely absent from the Middle East because it contradicts Arab and especially Islamic values.

Hariri is a Sunni, but a fairly secular one. The Sunnis make up maybe 1

The Christians used to be the majority – in fact, Lebanon was originally split off from Syria by the French to give the Christians their own country. Partly for this reason, it’s very existence is resented by a number of Lebanese Muslims, especially Sunnis, who figure that Syria and Lebanon are all one country.

Syria itself has long regarded the severance of Lebanon from Mother Syria as illegitimate, and her behavior in recent years has been motivated in part by these feelings. The Shia were long-downtrodden, especially by the Sunnis. The Sunnis were the Muslims who were pretty much in charge of the place in terms of who was in charge of the Muslims in the country. The Sunni held the reigns, and discrimination against the Shia was rife.

Shia were regularly attacked by Sunni gangs in Beirut up into the 1970’s. The Shia complain that the Sunnis would only allow them to be garbagemen – that was the best job they could get. After the late 1950’s, when a Christian lost the election and Lebanese Christians feared that their power would be constricted, there has been a power-sharing agreement in place.

The Prime Minister must be a Sunni, another high post must be a Christian, etc, etc. As the Christians have gone from majority to minority, this system has become less and less fair. In particular, Muslims, especially the Shia, are dramatically underrepresented. The Christians did not want to give up their power in the late 1950’s, so the US Marines landed to enforce illegitimate Christian rule over Lebanon.

The Civil War began in part once again over demands that Lebanese democracy be derived more on one man one vote and that the excessive power of the Christians be curtailed. Further, the Christians have always run the Lebanese economy, at least in recent years.

I say all of this because in the US there is a strong tendency to side with the Lebanese Christians against the evil Muslims. Further, the Lebanese Maronite Christians (the largest sect) have made an important alliance with the Zionist Jews in Israel, an alliance that helped to drive the Civil War.

So US Zionist propaganda, which floods our media night and day, strongly favors the Maronites once again. As an example of this alliance, one of the highest ranking neoconservatives of all is a Maronite Lebanese lawyer named F. Michael Maloof who is very close to uber-neocons Douglas Feith and Richard Perle. He is up to his eyeballs in the planning of the war on Iraq.

With the Lebanese Civil War and the rise of Hezbollah, the Shia have finally been given a place at the table of Lebanese politics. The Druze are a real wild card. They shift all over the place on the whim of their erratic leader, Walid Jumblatt, from anti-Israel and anti-US to anti-Syrian and pro-US.

The Shia, and Hezbollah along with the more secular Amal Party, are allied with Syria and Iran. Syria keeps Hezbollah armed in Southern Lebanon as a tool to threaten Israel with in order to try to get the Golan Heights back. That’s all Syria gets out of the game. If Hezbollah is disarmed in Lebanon, Syria loses it’s most powerful weapon and may never get its land back.

Hezbollah has since taken up the cause of Lebanese nationalism, agitating for the return of the Shebaa Farms and some nearby hills that they say Israel is occupying. It is probably Lebanese land, but Israel seems to have captured that land from Syria when it grabbed the Golan.

For its purposes, Syria wants to say that the Shebaa is Lebanese for purposes of keeping Hezbollah armed, and to say it’s Syrian as soon as Hezbollah tries to make peace with Israel or vice versa. So Syria must play a double game here, but everyone is in this crazy part of the world.

As a condition of ending the Civil War, Syria was tasked with ruling the place. Syria had actually entered the war to save the Maronite Christians from defeat, but the Christians soon forgot about this and turned on the Syrians. The Taba Agreement, constructed with the help of the US and other powers, put Syria in charge until the Lebanese could figure out how to stop killing each other.

Syria quickly started meddling in Lebanese politics bigtime, and an independence movement arose to get Syria out of Lebanon. This was ignored by the US until George Bush came to office. Now the same US that put Syria in power started demanding that Syria leave. Not only that, but there were increasing demands on Lebanon to “disarm all militias”, code words for disarm Hezbollah.

Now, Syria needs Hezb in Lebanon until it gets the Golan back, so them’s fighting words to the Syrians. At the same time, the US invaded Iraq and threatened Iran, Libya, and Syria, while Israel killed Arafat by poisoning him.

This whole process was set into motion by the neocons who were operating in the interests of the Israeli government. It was an UN Security Council Resolution 1559, calling for Syria to get out of Lebanon and for the disarming of Hezbollah. Note that France is still an imperialist power in the region, defending the interests of the Christians who they put in charge of their former colony.

Also, the US Congress pushed a bill called the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act of 2003, a bill that may as well have been written by the Israeli Knesset. It’s so pro-Israeli, it’s almost impossible to comprehend that the US Congress wrote it. Apparently, it imposes sanctions on Syria for a variety of mostly-bullshit reasons.

The US is in Iraq, apparently forever, threatening Syria and Iran, for the most part in order to benefit the Israelis, since Syria and Iran have no particular beefs with the US. Iran and Syria clearly want the US out of Iraq and US guns away from their doorstep. They have no interest in keeping the US in Iraq at all.

Anyway, the US status of forces agreement that they are trying to negotiate with the Iraqis is explicitly meant to use Iraq as a base for attacking neighboring countries, mostly Iran but possibly Syria too. So rage at Syria and Iran for not being overjoyed about the US military in Iraq is misplaced. No sane Syrian or Iranian leader would want us there.

Amidst this backdrop, Hariri supported UN Resolution 1559, probably because finally even the Lebanese Sunnis were getting fed up with Syria’s high-handedness. They had supported Syria for a long time, but Syria kept trying to push people to their limits.

It was the Maronite Christians who really hated the Syrians being there. Why is uncertain. The Maronites despise the Shia and Hezbollah and want the Palestinian refugees gone too.

By the way, the reason that the Palestinians have never been allowed to work or become citizens in Lebanon is because of the Maronites. The Maronites fear that allowing the Pallies to become citizens will increase the Muslim population at the expense of the Christians.

So the Hariri crowd was riding the wave of anti-Syrianism. At the same time, he was closely allied with the Saudis. The Saudis’ whole role in the region is to support the Sunnis and screw the Shia, in a word. So the Saudis were backing Hariri solely because he is Sunni, and also to stop Iran and Hezbollah and increasingly Syria, who is allied with Iran and Hezbollah and hence in the enemy camp as far as the Saudis see it.

There really is not much sane reason for the Saudis to fear Iran. All the hate in the region goes from Sunni to Shia, pretty much. Perhaps the Iranians could energize the long-downtrodden Saudi Shia to rebel against the Saudis, but the Saudis ought to give them more rights anyway. Sunni fears of Iran attacking the region are simply insane, kind of like Nazi fears of the USSR overrunning Europe, so the Nazis had to attack first.

Iran has never attacked another state in at least 100 years and possibly longer. The Shia are on the outs in the Arab World, and the Sunnis have all the power. There are no nefarious Shia plots to evangelize Shia Islam and convert all the Sunnis – this is just mad Sunni paranoia. But the Saudis do work hard in Iran to convert the Shia Ahwaz Arabs to Wahhabi Sunnism, and they have had some success at this.

The Shia have been killing a lot of Sunnis in Iraq, but the Sunnis started it. Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, started the war against Iran for no good reason, and received volunteers and money from most of the Sunni states in the region.

Against this backdrop, as Syria was leaving Lebanon (though a spy network remains behind) Hariri was killed in the very professional car bomb attack. An Al Qaeda type radical Salafist Islamist associated with Jund al-Sham (Army of the Levant) was promptly fingered in the attack, though there were a lot of questions about whether or not Syria was actually involved.

The US and France got a UN commission to actually send a law enforcement team to investigate the killing. A couple of teams were sent out there and a couple of reports came back. One team was headed by Detlev Mehlis, a German.

Jürgen Cain Külbel, a journalist in Germany, is an acquaintance. He’s a former member of the STASI and is associated with the former East German government and the political party that came afterwards. Külbel is a Leftist, and for a long time he was pushing theories saying that US imperialism was in back of a lot of the shenanigans in the ME, including I guess the invasion of Iraq.

He showed a profound disinterest in investigating any Israeli or Jewish Lobby involvement in many of the conflicts over there. This is standard Leftist line that absolves Israel of everything and pushes it all off on imperialism.

So it is interesting that Külbel has now come around to the notion that Israel killed Hariri and then tried to pawn it off on Syria. He has also shown links that Mehlis had with the US AIPAC. Mehlis, as it turns out, used to work for WINEP, which is nothing AIPAC as a research arm. So his finding that Syria was involved has been attacked by Külbel.

Külbel was subsequently imprisoned for ten days for violating a court order by printing some East German STASI papers on his website. I’m not sure of their contents, but it may have shown how Mehlis was associated with WINEP. So the Voltaire Network has taken up the cause of Külbel, about which I feel they are making a mountain out of a molehill.

Of interest to our Maronite discussion above, a group called UNIFL, which has interests that are almost precisely in line with the Israeli government, figures in all of this. These are the most hardcore radical rightwing Maronites, who are for all intents and purposes a quasi-fascist movement.

They were deeply involved in the War Against Iraq and other great big messes. They’ve been selling this BS story about how the Christians are so persecuted in Lebanon, and the persecution is being done by evil fundamentalist Islamic Syria (run by ultra-secular Alawis).

It’s mostly just a pack of lies, but there were arrests, tortures and killings under Syrian rule, it is true. That’s all over now, and the Maronites did tons of killing in their own day.

After all, they committed the most and worst massacres of all during the Civil War.

Maloof is in with these guys, so is a guy named David Wurmser (Israeli agent neoconservative with dual citizenship) and his evil witch of the West wife Meyrav (read Hebrew for “Mary”, no? Israeli agent neoconservative with dual citizenship).

So is Richard Pele (Israeli agent neoconservative. Dual citizenship?), and worst of all, Daniel Pipes (Israeli agent neoconservative. Dual citizenship?) of Middle East Watch and Campus Watch and all of that Zionist fascist censorship, harassment and firing crap leaping up all over our land). Nice long sentence.

Pipes, whose father was an evil Cold War maniac and professional liar about the Soviet Union, inherited the evil maniac part, but all he cares about is Israel. Paul Wolfowitz (Israeli agent neoconservative with dual citizenship) is also in deep with these guys.

Harold Rhode (Israeli agent neoconservative. Dual citizenship?) is another one, but no one has ever heard of him, so I will make him famous today for all time. Rhode is a Jewish guy who is religious and was obsessed with attacking Iraq. He was in on the plot to attack Iraq with all the rest of them from the very start.

Afterward, he became obsessed with the Jewish religious relics that the evil anti-Semitic Arab-Nazi government had somehow, through a sudden stroke of anti-Semitism, managed to preserve, despite their genocidal intentions towards all the world’s Jews.

Saddam wanted to kill every Jew on Earth, of course, but damn right he was going to save those Jewish holy books. That proves Saddam was a madman all right, just like the yahoos screamed before the invasion.

Rhode ran over to Iraq as soon as the war was done and got himself a big team put together right away while the museums and archaeological relics of the nation were being devastated. After all, the history of Jews receives precedence of the history of those lowly, dirty Arabs and over the very history of mankind itself, right? Jews take precedence over Arabs. Jews take precedence over humanity. You get the picture.

Well, anyway, a lot of money was spent grabbing every single Jewish relic in Iraq and “storing” it away in the US (in Jewish hands, I guess). Well, that’s sort of illegal. Now that Iraq is more stable, the Iraqi government wants their Jewish stuff back. It belongs to Iraq, not to the world’s Jews. Whoops, I forgot. No nation is allowed to own Jewish relics. Jews take precedence over all real nations on Earth.

Also, it’s funny that the US (Are we the second Jewish state?) bent all over backwards to grab all that old Jewish stuff, while we sat back and watched, first, while the whole non-Jewish history of Iraq was looted and destroyed to Hell, in particular the History of the Ottoman Empire.

Well, screw the Ottomans, they were just evil Muslims who ruled the Arab World and treated the Jews like crap, right? Or they were just scummy Muslims, screw em. Anyway, obviously the Jewish history of Iraq got nabbed by the nimble hands of the Jewish “Americans”, but the non-Jewish history of Iraq was scatted to the Seven Winds and the Seventy Thousand Thieves.

After all, in any country with lots of Jews, only the Jewish history matters ,and the non-Jewish history is just, pshaw! Right? Trash the museums and the libraries and re-burn the Library of Alexandria if the US and Israel are in the book-burning and library-sacking business, which apparently they are.

Funny how the US can’t spare a soldier to save the history of Muslim Ottoman Iraq from being ruined. Those records have been flooded and subjected to all sorts of abuse, and the US can’t spare one sentry to guard that stuff. Wow, gee, why do they hate us anyway?

They must be jealous of all of our stuff, and our freedoms, and you know, our stuff.

Ever notice that the far-Right jingoist dickheads who scream the loudest about “our freedoms” and “they hate us for our freedom” are the first ones to start shutting freedoms down? catch one Mossad agent, and they just sentenced him to death after one of the shortest trials in recent history. If he’s really Mossad, hang him high, go ahead.

And I know that Iran is full of US spies and even US undercover troops (500 total? How many?). Same with British spies. Iran can’t catch these guys? The US guys are running around blowing up stuff up, and the British are giving bombs to Iranian rebels, including Al Qaeda types called Jundallah in Balochistan.

I guess Mossad, the US and probably the UK too, are all trying to get at Iran’s nuclear sites, and yes, I am certain the Iranians are making a nuclear bomb right now. I think they already have one, but it’s just a uranium bomb, and that isn’t good for anything but making one square mile of Earth uninhabitable for 70 years.

Actually, just to be a completely evil and horrible scumbag and make people hate me even more than they already do, I will right now officially support Iran’s efforts to get a nuclear bomb.

Is that an evil position or what?! Not to shoot one, just to get one.

Also to make a whole bunch of evil biological and chemical weapons and WMD-this and WMD-that. Also, just to be even more of an ass and arouse more hatred, I will say that I was deeply sad when North Korea blew up their reactor, because I wanted them to make more nukes to threaten people, namely the US, my country with. Not to shoot at us. Just to even it up.

Why be an ass? Long argument, but it has to do with imperialism’s gross abuse of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Agreement.

I’m not saying this is what happened or anything, Maronites and Mossad killing Hariri. No one on Earth will ever know what happened. Figure it out yourself, I give, and I spent many long hours reading and poring over this mystery until I finally just gave up and don’t want to read about it anymore.

Such are the homicidal intrigues of the Middle East, like vines in a jungle, no beginning, no end, no middle, nothing much to grab, and every new lead carries you off on more red herrings and impossibilities and possibilities, and everything seems possible, but still nothing ever totally adds up. God I love a mystery. To a point.

Sorry this went on, but I never wrote a Hariri post. Now it’s done, and hopefully I won’t need to write any more. Believe it or not, I could have written way more, but I’m not into putting readers to sleep. I’m long-winded enough, as it is.

Try the Angry Arab blog (I’ve talked to this guy; As’ad, a Leftist Arab nationalist professor at a university very close by) if you can’t get enough of this maddening Lebanon stuff.

Or Joshua Landis’ (an acquaintance) great Syria Comment if you want to dip into the Syrian mystery casserole, where nothing makes sense either, and you think you can see the fish in the bowl, but the more you look, the more you can hardly make them out, and plus they always change.

A North-South Chinese Mix Cline in SE Asia?

Repost from the old site.

A question from the comments about the Are SE Asians Australoids? article:

Aren’t Khmer a little more Australoid than people in Vietnam (at least Northern Vietnamese), most Thai, and Laotians? There seems to be a clear cline in Southeast Asia, the areas bordering China seem to have more NE Mongoloid Admixture than those of the Malay archipelago and the Khmer. I’m basing this on appearance and not genes, which you pointed out, rightly so, as being misleading.

This question keeps popping up because so many folks are convinced, based primarily on appearance, that many SE Asians are part-Australoid.

First of all, the Vietnamese, Filipinos, Thai and Khmer are all quite close to the Southern Chinese genetically. Of these, believe it or not, the Filipinos are possibly the closest of all. The Vietnamese are also very close, but I don’t have any figures. Both the Filipinos and the Vietnamese are very close to the coastal Southern Chinese of Fujian and Guangdong Province bordering the Taiwan Strait.

Next come the Thai, Lao and the Khmer. These groups are much closer to the Southern Chinese than Malays or Indonesians. All of them are about the equidistant from the Southern Chinese. Filipinos are much closer to the Southern Chinese than these three groups.

The Thai and Lao are primarily a Southern Chinese group called the Tai that came down into that area in a massive wave about 800 years ago. To some extent they bred in with whatever people were already there. This Tai group came from Yunnan.

The Vietnamese are very closely related to the Southern Chinese. A huge wave of Southern Chinese poured into Vietnam 2,200 years and bred in with existing people. This group came from the Taiwan Strait – the area north of Vietnam along the coast.

The Khmer came down into the area possibly 5,000 years ago with the first wave of Austroasiatics. They also came from Southern China, probably Yunnan once again, but longer ago than their neighbors the Thai, Lao and Vietnamese. The Austroasiatics are considered to be some of the original people of the SE Asia.

The Zhuang of South China are probably the purest relatives of the original Austroasiatics. They came from Central China (possibly originally as the Dai) to Yunnan about 5,000 years ago. One line went to the Zhuang in Guangxi in Southwest China and another line went to the modern Tai-Dai in Yunnan.

Also, the Khmer bred in much more than their neighbors with people from India who came about 1,500 years ago. So, the Khmer contain more of the original Austroasiatic group and less of recent Southern Chinese mixture than the Thai, Lao and Vietnamese. This accounts for their appearance.

Filipinos are closer to Southern Chinese (Guangdong) than any of the groups above except maybe Vietnamese. They are also very close to Taiwan aborigines. Most people have a hard time understanding this because they look so different from most Southern Chinese. But there are Chinese from around Fujian and Hong Kong who look quite dark and, to my mind, SE Asian-looking.

Malays are Taiwan aborigines in large part (Austronesians), and are also are made up of Southern Chinese who came down 4,000 years ago as Austroasiatics.

The Austronesians came through the Philippines, down into Borneo and Sumatra and then up into Malaysia about 2,000 years ago. The Malay do have some Papuan genes, but so do the Southern Chinese and the coastal Vietnamese. Once again, the Malays have less recent Southern Chinese admixture and more archaic Southern Chinese admixture (Austronesian and Austroasiatic).

Malays also definitely have Australoid ancestors in the Semang, the proto-Malay and the Senoi, although we can’t see it in their skulls or much of it in their genes.

The Indonesians in the Center and East of the country have quite a few Melanesian Australoid genes, but the ones in the West have almost none. The ones in the West appear to be Taiwanese aborigines similar to Filipinos.

It’s really a common fallacy that there is such a cline in SE Asia, with folks becoming more Australoid and less Chinese as you go south. What there is is that in some places, you find more recent Southern Chinese mixture and towards the South, you get more archaic Taiwanese and archaic Southern Chinese mixture.

A modern Southern Chinese woman from Chengdu Province. Isn’t she beautiful? God I love this kind of woman. It’s possible she may use some sort of skin whitener to make her skin look more white, or she may just stay out of the sun. White skin has been highly valued for a long time, and my blogging colleague Dragon Horse (feel free to check him out – he’s smart as Hell) notes that it had been highly valued long before Chinese even knew much about Europeans.

In other words, Chinese were not trying to look like White Europeans – they hardly even knew who they were. A preference for lighter skin was simply an independent development in China based on their own considerations and values. Many will look at this woman and say she has a NE Asian facial type. Well, that may be so, but Caucasians are closer to NE Asians than she is as a Southern Chinese. The genetic distance between Southern Chinese and Northern Chinese is vast.

We only find a few Australoid genes in SE Asians and even then only in Southern Chinese, coastal Vietnamese and Malays. Skull-wise, nothing exists, except that the Senoi of Malaysia do have Australoid skulls.

I guess people say this based on appearance. There is a SE Asian native type characterized most prominently by Malays, Khmer, Filipino, Western Indonesians, etc. that people think looks a bit primitive, and they associate that with Australoids.

Really it’s just a native indigenous development, although it does seem to represent a more archaic type – either archaic Taiwanese or archaic South Chinese – and has nothing to do per se with Australoids.

Recall however that the whole region slowly transitioned from Australoid types to modern SE Asian types about 5000 years ago, and that’s later than most groups. Maybe that is what people are seeing. But there’s nothing we can measure in genes or skulls.

Thai, Lao and Vietnamese don’t have any NE Asian mixture that we can see. There is a Southern Chinese look that can resemble Northern Chinese, but the two groups are very far apart. Even Southern Chinese don’t have much northern mixture, but there are some groups that are more northern than others.

The Wa (Va) of Yunnan and Burma are about 50-50 Northern and Southern Chinese, and the Hmong have more Northern Chinese than other Southern Chinese groups.

A Hmong woman. We have a huge Hmong population here in the Central Valley. By and large, they are good people and I like them a lot. The Hmong are interesting among Southern Chinese in that they have more Northern Chinese than most of the rest of the Southern Chinese. They also have a unique genetic line going back up to 42,000 years (!). It’s pretty incredible that some sort of proto-Hmong have been evolving for that long.

The website I got this off described Hmong as partly Australoid, but I think that’s silly. They are saying this by looking at the faces and saying that the face looks somewhat Australoid. The Hmong are probably less Australoid than that Chengdu woman above.

I find some of these Hmong women, like this one, to be really beautiful. They definitely look different. They have round, moon-shaped faces, and short, stocky, bodies. Character-wise, they are very Chinese-like.

Their IQ in the US is only 82.5 (lower than US Blacks) but that must be due to language difficulties. Their verbal IQ was insanely low, while their performance IQ was quite high. The Hmong have also been living like hillbillies for centuries, so there is probably a lot of potential for Flynn Effects in the US. That’s a traditional costume she is wearing.

Caucasians are closer to Northern Chinese than Southern Chinese are.

A classic NE Asian, in this case a Manchu woman. The Caucasians that they most resemble are Northern Turkics such as some of the people in the Altai and the residents of the Stans.

I can’t see much difference in phenotype between her and the Southern Chinese beauty above, but maybe folks who understand Asian phenotypes better can see these things. These people are also quite close genetically to Amerindians. Koreans, Japanese and NE Chinese are all quite genetically close, although I guess they mostly hate each other and would not want to believe that.

A Tajik man. Boy, does he look Jewish or what? These people are quite closely related to NE Asians and also to Northern Indians. They are closest to Iranians. A very interesting people, they are thought to be the original Aryans. Funny how Aryans White Power types go back to Aryan dudes who look like nice Jewish boys. Wonders never cease.

People base so much popular anthropology on superficial appearances, but that’s not really scientific.

The Death of White America Will Be a Great and Glorious Thing

Hacienda writes:

I say to all people white, yellow, brown, red, black everywhere that the Americas, both North and South, Australia, New Zealand and all the conquered lands of racist imperialist powers, that these lands belong to you.

Only by settlement of these lands by all peoples, will whites be able to finally and ultimately cleanse themselves of their infinite sins of genocide, enslavements, displacements, rapes, and tortures. Only by settlement by all peoples can the world be free from white materialism, technological estrangement, ecological disasters, race alienation, planet scale unending wars.

You may choose to live in these lands as citizens. Or you may not. But you have as much right and as much stake in living in these lands as the current citizenry. In me you will find a sympathetic friend to your cause. The new future belongs to all people regardless of location.

There will be no planetary apartheid springing from lands where the natives were killed. Whites never earned the right to live in these lands as sole possessors or even majority possessor. Let’s make these lands truly free, not just an anthemic free or free for a diminishing minority. But FREE for ALL people.

Most of this is just the usual non-White CRT nonsense. There’s nothing particularly evil about Whites in general. Most White countries, with the exception of the reactionary and imperialist slimepit called America, are very nice places full of excellent people.

The main thing that has to be stopped is US Whites. They are some of the worst people on Earth. Fiercely imperialistic, insanely reactionary and just plain backwards and stupid, they are an anchor dragging down the planet. As one who lives in the Diversity, I will acknowledge that it’s not exactly optimal. In many ways, it’s a downgrade from a White habitation. But I can live with the Diversity.

I can even survive its dirtyness, violence, backwardsness, stupidity, crime and and run-down, degraded nature. What I can’t survive is white picket fence America. That’s what’s got to go. There’s no use in nice pretty, calm, law abiding White towns if you’re too sick, wrecked, broke, near dead or dead to live there and survive. White rule means ruined lives, disease, homelessness, economic wreckage, and ultimately death.

In the gritty Diversity, all is not well, but at least we can survive. Most of us will survive the gangsters and the criminals. We can avert our eyes to the dirtiness and trash. We can choose to ignore the degraded 3rd Worldization and resulting backwardsness. We can still live, stay healthy, drive our cars, eat enough food, exercise, work, save some money, live with a roof over our head, go to the doctor and live out our long lives.

We can survive in the slums and barrios of 3rd World America, but Leave it to Beaver White America means personal and economic ruin, wreckage and early death.

Such is our miserable choice.

One thing great that the future holds for us will be the glorious death of White America.

We should stand up and shout a great cheer to the skies every time one of these reactionary Whites bites the dust. The planet will thank us!

The Republican Budget Nightmare

This article goes on and on about how horrible the House Republican debt ceiling plan is. Granted, it would be an utter catastrophe. According to the article, the plan will cause:

the greatest increase in poverty and hardship produced by any law in modern U.S. history

Why in the Hell should we do that? This is class war, nothing more, nothing less. The only way the plan would work is by doing the following:

Policymakers would essentially have three choices:  1) cut Social Security and Medicare benefits heavily for current retirees, something that all budget plans from both parties (including House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s plan) have ruled out; 2) repeal the Affordable Care Act’s coverage expansions while retaining its measures that cut Medicare payments and raise tax revenues, even though Republicans seek to repeal many of those measures as well; or 3) eviscerate the safety net for low-income children, parents, senior citizens, and people with disabilities.

In other words, it would wreck health care reform, axe Social Security and Medicare every single year until there is nothing left by slashing benefits for current retirees (something even the Ryan Plan does not do), and utterly eviscerate the social safety net. In particular, Medicaid would be wrecked almost beyond recognition.

Obviously, that’s a nightmare, but what does it say that possible the majority of Americans might support such a plan? What does that say about what kind of people we really are?

Barack Obama is Satan

In contrast to the Republican budget plan, I am supposed to support something called the Obama Plan or the Gang of Six Plan, cooked by six rich guys in Congress and the Black Reagan Barack Obama. This plan also wrecks Medicare and Social Security, but doesn’t slash them quite as much. It also demands devastating cuts to Medicaid, but not at much as the Republican plan. It also eviscerates the safety net, but not as much. The big selling point is that it supposedly raises taxes on the rich by closing some tax loopholes.

So I have the Republican plan, massive cuts with no tax increases, or the Obama Plan, massive cuts with higher “taxes on the rich.” LOL, I’m supposed to support the Obama Plan? Why in God’s name should I do that? I don’t want these massive cuts. They are unnecessary, and there is no debt crisis anyway. Why should I support massive cuts with higher taxes on the rich versus massive cuts with no tax increases on the rich?

As long as we are slashing away, I don’t care if the rich pay their fair share or not. The programs get eviscerated one way or another. The outcome is the same. With one plan, the rich get taxed a bit more, and with another, they don’t.

Why should, or anyone else for that matter, care whether the rich get taxed or not, as long as the programs get wrecked? What’s it to me? What’s it to anyone else? How do we benefit? Is the state going to collect those taxes on the rich and give me a cut of them? Nope. What’s it going to do with that money? The money will feed a corporatist and oligarchic state that attacks me and my kind.

Nevertheless, the vast majority of liberals are rallying around the Obama Plan, which is a nightmare for America.

Photos of Anders Behring Breivik and an Exposition of His Treatise

Anders Breivik is of course the anti-Islamic Norwegian cultural conservative who killed 76 people in two attacks in Oslo, Norway the other day. Much nonsense has been written about these attacks. He wrote a manifesto, which I am currently reading. It’s 1,510 pages long. I’ve only read some of it – about 750 pages or so, but it’s very interesting. I agree with Kevin MacDonald that he is an important political thinker.

He’s simply a political terrorist like Osama bin Laden and his followers. He attacked arguably political institutions – first of all, buildings of the Norwegian state in an attempt to kill the Prime Minister, then later a youth camp for young leaders of Norwegian Labour Party. These are the elite children of the leadership of the party, and most of them will probably go on to become party political operative and even leaders. So it was a political attack by an armed terrorist organization.

The only thing yucky about the attack is that many of those targeted were children. Even if you argue that these kids were going to go on to become party political operatives and leaders, there is something nasty about killing unarmed minors. However, this aspect was overblown, and my analysis showed that about 2/3 of those killed were adults, making them legitimate targets.

I do not think that government officials and adults who are in line to become the future leadership of a political party are “innocent civilians,” sorry. This guy says he’s at war with the state, and in that role, political figures are certainly legitimate targets.

Photo of the seemingly normal shooter in a nice pose.

Not that I agree with his ideology or his goals. As a Leftist, of course I am saddened that my comrades were gunned down so cruelly like this. I also don’t agree with his anti-Islamic agenda.

His document is very interesting. I will have more to write about it. Much nonsense has been written about this guy which would have been dispelled with a simple review of his document, which apparently no one bothered to do.

The shooter in a scuba outfit with an automatic weapon. The insignia on his shoulder says "Marxist Hunter" and "Multicultural Traitor Hunting Permit."

The killer is a Christian fundamentalist. He most certainly is not! In fact, he states in his book that he lacks a personal relationship with Jesus or God. Nevertheless, he prayed before his operation, and he quotes liberally from the Bible, mostly Old Testament verse that dispels the notion that Christianity is a religion of peace. He quotes sections saying that Christians have a right to fight back against their enemies.

What this guy is is a cultural Christian. It’s a phrase he uses a lot. He even supports what he calls atheist Christians and agnostic Christians in his crusade against Islam. He feels that Europe is a culturally Christian continent, and of course he is right. He feels that this nominally Christian culture is in danger from the encroachment of Islam.

The killer is a racist. He’s not really a racist, though he flirts with it a bit. The document is confused in this regard. He states over and over that he is an anti-racist, but that’s not exactly the case either.

For instance, he does not believe that European Whites should breed with non-Whites. He worries about the allegiances of European non-White non-Muslims in the Civil War that he predicts will engulf Europe.

And he recommends that the US be partitioned off into a White state for Whites and a multicultural state for everyone else. So as far as his recommendations for the US go, he’s a White nationalist. He is also very sympathetic to the plight of the South African Afrikaners, and he feels that the Blacks are waging a race war against them. He acknowledges that Gypsies are widely hated, and he wants to set up a homeland for them somewhere in Anatolia after it is heavily cleansed of Muslims.

But he does enlist the support of non-White Hindus, Jews, Buddhists, atheists and agnostics in his war against the Muslims. He’s had many friends of all different races, and in his personal views, he’s not much of a racialist.

The killer in a photo, apparently with his mother and sister.

The killer is a fascist. This is more difficult to refute, though he claims to be an antifascist, and he writes a lot about how much he dislikes the National Socialist racists in Europe. In particular, as a Judeophile, he opposes their anti-Semitism, which he sees as ridiculous.

However, at the same time, he also praises certain aspects of National Socialism and offers an apologetics for Hitler’s treatment of the Jews. He acknowledges that the Holocaust occurred, but says that Hitler originally just wanted to deport the Jews, but was forced to exterminate them to get rid of a Fifth Column when the Nazis started losing the war in 1942. Actually, I think the Holocaust started before then. He also approves of National Socialist anti-feminism, monoculture and conservative values.

The killer in some sort of a military uniform.

At the same time, he sees the Nazi card as an albatross around the neck of European nationalists, and he says that they need to break free of that if they are ever going to succeed. He opposes White nationalism for similar reasons, that it will never get majority support from Europeans.

What he wants is majority support for his War on Islam project, and the best way to get that is to chuck the Nazism and White ethnic nationalism. He sees anti-Islamic nationalism as having potentially majority support, and he wants to get rid of all of the problematic elements that could diminish such support.

His political project involves rightwing coups in Europe that overthrow the multiculturalist states. They would then institute a short lived dictatorship in which rights would be suspended. 100-200,000 top level multiculturalist traitors would be hunted down and executed by the new state. Many others would be exiled. Freedom of speech would be curtailed indefinitely under the new regimes as “multiculturalist propaganda” would be banned.

Those Muslims who do not convert out would be deported from Europe back to Muslim lands. Muslim lands in the Balkans, Anatolia, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt would be conquered and resettled with Greeks, Macedonians, Serbs, Croats, Armenians, Assyrians and Copts. This is frankly a fascist project whether he admits it or not.

The killer in his Crusader Knights Templar uniform. He saw himself as a modern day Knight Templar waging a latter day crusade against Islam.

The killer is mentally ill. Having read through hundreds of pages of his stuff, I do not agree with this charge at all. Some of his politics is a bit confused, but that goes with the territory. On the other hand, the document is lucid, well-written and coherent. Ideologically, it fits together very well. He’s very intelligent and very well-read. His political project is sensible, well thought out and follows logically. He doesn’t believe in conspiracy theory, which makes him less nuts that your average Muslim or American.

The killer is a sociopath. I don’t agree. I think he is just a political terrorist. There are acts of political terrorism occurring all over the world, all the time. Those who engage in them and those who order them are not necessarily sociopaths. They are warriors, either members of militaries or some sort of guerrillas.

He actually seemed somewhat sensitive, and he spent quite a few pages agonizing over the nature of the acts he was about to engage in.

He concluded that Catholic Church absolves sins committed in the defense of religion, in particular in defense a Christian Crusade against Islam. This came up quite a bit back in the day when Crusaders were accused of sin during the various Crusades. The Church concluded that sins committed during the Crusades were absolved by the Church as necessary for the defense of the religion.

In addition, they could be redeemed via indulgences bought up by the collective good deeds of Jesus and the saints. By the theory of indulgences, sinners can redeem their sins by trading them in as it were for redemption. The redemption would be purchased via the good deeds done by Jesus, the saints and other good Christians.

At one point, he launches into an argument about whether it is a good idea to kill 100 to save 1000. He thinks it is.

On the other hand, he also feels that his targets, the multicultural Cultural Marxist elite of Europe, are traitors that need to be killed in order to save the continent from Islam. However, many political terrorists think their victims have it coming. Such a belief is not indicative of sociopathy.

Photo of the killer in the outfit he used to mix explosives at his farm. The process was very long and convoluted, and he spends a great many pages discussing it in depth in his book.

The killers is an anarchist. He is most certainly not. He believes very much in a future fascist-like state. He opposes the current multiculturalist regimes, but that does not make him an anarchist.

The document is rambling, incoherent and consists mostly of cut and paste jobs from other works. None of this is true. It is mostly his own work, and he writes very well. His English is excellent. The document does not ramble but instead follows quite well. It’s very coherent and easy to follow and understand.

The killer was provoked and incited to act by works by such anti-Islamic authors as

A photo of the killer looking like a quiet, normal fellow.

The killers has no point or legitimate project. Unfortunately, he does have a point and a legitimate project. Islam frankly has been a total disaster in Western Europe. Importing millions of Muslims, most of whom will never assimilate, into the UK, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Switzerland and Germany has been a complete catastrophe. It’s time to admit that it’s a failure.

A few Muslims are not much of a problem, but over a certain percentage, they are simply not compatible with a modern, Western, secular, culturally Christian state. Projections showing an Islamic Europe in 70 years or so are terrifying. There’s not much to do about it except to stop importing them to Western Europe.

Many nations of the West don’t have a Muslim problem yet. These include the nations of Eastern Europe, Finland, Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, the US and New Zealand. In most cases, the Muslim percentages here are low. The US

Deporting Muslims is not doable, so the countries with Muslim problems above should simply stop importing them and hope their birth rate slows down. The Muslim nations of Albania, Bosnia, Tunisia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan already have below replacement birth rates. 1

The “Benefits” of Deregulated Capitalism

Repost from the old site.

Lack of regulation in capitalism leads to the ability to roll up huge gains in wealth for those at the top of the food chain, and also leads to huge economic disasters on a national scale such as we are experiencing now in the US.

The italicized portion of the previous sentence is precisely why business, the rich, the media and the plutocratic political parties in the US (originally the Republican Party, but now both parties), support the deregulation of the capitalist system in the US and all over the world.

The verdict is in on the deregulation of capitalism that has been the rage all over the world for the past 30 years. Almost everywhere it has been tried, it has caused massive discrepancies in wealth distribution. The top 2

That’s why Latin America has been voting in leaders who have campaigned on platforms that can be roughly translated as, “The Hell with neoliberalism”. Far from being Leftists or Communists, most of the new Latin American Left is simply objecting to the observable failure of 20-30 years of neoliberalism in Latin America and trying to fashion some sort of social democratic alternative.

Even honest proponents of neoliberalism in the US media like Fareed Zakaria have admitted that neoliberalism in Latin America has failed. The usual lie has been, “It hasn’t had enough time to work yet.”

This is a lie.

Neoliberalism in Latin America is working exactly as planned.

It was designed to enrich the top 2

Read about the history of the US economy in the late 1800’s as it lurched from one panic to another, with wild run-ups in wealth for the rich in between.

Unregulated capitalism is like a cocaine addict with a trust fund. He can have a real wild blast as long as the money lasts, get high as a damned kite and soar to the skies. There’s almost no limit to how high he can get. When the crash comes, he’s going to be pounded physically and psychologically, and his trust will be drained. Freemarketeers argue that it’s worth it for the fun of the run.

Regulated capitalism is like a middle-aged man who drinks a couple of glasses of wine a night. He’s not able to get rip-roaring drunk like he did in his youth, nor is he able to drink his troubles away, but the hangovers are nonexistent, and he’s not committing slow suicide anymore either.

Regulation is like a fog layer on the coast in a Mediterranean climate. It takes the extreme heat and cold out of a climate and leaves it at a moderate, some would say boring, middle.

During the Roaring 20’s, people forget 8

The Great Depression was directly caused by unregulated capitalism in the US, despite the desperate efforts of rightwing economist Chicago School professional liars to lie their way out of the facts. In the 1930’s, a huge regulatory structure was put into place in part to prevent a second Great Depression from occurring.

It’s worked well, but now a lot of the regulations that were put in post-Depression have been whittled away, such as the Glass-Segall Act, that attempted to build a wall between commercial and investment banking. That way, if high-risk investment banking goes under (as it is prone to) it doesn’t take down the commercial banking sector (where Mrs. Jones has her nest egg) with it.

Deregulated capitalism quickly leads to a state of affairs where you have wild economic growth and bubbles followed by bubble deflations and panics.

It’s no way to run an economy, but this is the way every capitalist on Earth wants it.

Every capitalist on Earth is like a gambler in a casino with a credit card with no limits. Sensible nations do not listen to what the capitalists want – they never want anything good for the nation in the long run. The capitalist perennial children need to be continuously regulated on a short leash by regulatory adults in government in order to have any semblance of a decent society under capitalism.

Since 1980 and the beginnings of massive deregulation, the wages of 8

Before anyone screams race, this is the way unregulated capitalism works in any society – even an all-White one. The bottom 8

A regulated capitalism would look a lot like what we had in the US in the 1950’s and especially 1960’s and 1970’s. It works pretty well for a capitalist system. It’s true that it tends to stifle massive wealth run-ups and bubbles (almost always caused by massive fraud anyway) but it also makes for a smoother ride and much fewer crashes, panics, recessions and depressions.

The Taoists discuss the Middle Way. So it is in capitalist economics as in the rest of life. “Live fast, die young and leave a pretty corpse,” sounds romantic at 18, but a 50-yr-old who makes such a statement is a moron. Our economy has been run by 18-yr-olds for decades now. As long as we have a capitalist economy, it’s time for some adult supervision.

More on Laissez Faire Economics

Repost from the old site.

In the comments section, James Schipper makes some interesting comments about laissez faire economics and libertarianism in general. His comments are in italics, mine are follow in normal font.

JS: Laissez-faire usually means short-term gain for a small minority and short-term pain for a large majority, medium-term gain for a larger minority and medium-term pain for a smaller majority and only long-term gain for the majority.

RL: I don’t agree with this at all. The case of neoliberalism seems to show us that the gains never do filter down to anyone below the top 2

Of course not. Things just seem to get worse and worse. Neoliberalism only accomplishes massive wealth transfers from the bottom 8

JS: The Chicago boys are actually right in that speculative bubbles are only possible if the government engages in massive monetary expansion or allows the banks to do so. This means that the most essential part of government regulation in a modern economy is the regulation of credit and the currency. Too much money and credit = inflation and speculation.

RL: The problem here is that these Chicago Boys characters have been cheering on every single speculative bubble that ever existed, and they created quite a few of them themselves. Their libertarian project in Chile ended in massive failure such that even Pinochet had to step in with major government intervention to save the economy. Huge intervention by the state was the only thing that saved the economy.

In Russia, the Boys succeeded in looting the nation, transferring the money out of the country, engineering a Depression 3.5 times worse than the US Depression and killing 15 million Russians. The Chicago Boys and their acolytes were behind the Asian Flu crashes in the late 1990’s too.

The only way to prevent speculative bubbles is through government regulation of an economy, and the Chicago Boys apparently oppose all such. The business sector, whom the Chicago Boys represent, always supports a loose money policy during the good times in order to facilitate the cheap money necessary for economic expansion and of course speculation.

Furthermore, the US capitalist class, nor any other capitalist class, would never support the Chicago Boys’ apparent prescription here – getting rid of the Fed’s regulation of the money supply. Business loves and needs the Fed, despite all of its rants against socialism. Anyway, the role of a central bank is overestimated. Even in a state without a strong central bank regulating money, you can still get massive speculative inflows. This was the case with the nations harmed by the Asian Flu.

The Fed itself is run by economists who are themselves working hand in hand with Big Business and are generally followers of Chicago School Economics. The only thing the rich care about is inflation, and business everywhere on Earth has cheered on every speculative bubble that ever existed. They can’t get enough of them.

To blame these bubbles on a reactionary government institution called the Fed, implying the Fed is some kind of socialist institution (though its recent actions have indeed been socialist) is beyond perverse.

What’s deadly to business and the rich is inflation. The rich hate inflation because it cuts into their incomes. Most rich people don’t even work at all. They just kick back and live off rents and equities. Nothing cuts into their lazy money more than inflation. Further, inflation engenders demands for wage increases, which is why business hates it so much. It also increases costs for supplies, which they may or may not be able to pass on.

In order to stop inflation from hurting the rich and business, the Fed fights inflation by throwing millions of Americans out of work, since inflation and unemployment are two ends of a scale. As unemployment gets “too low”, workers start getting “uppity” and demanding wage increases. This is deadly to capitalism, so the Fed responds by deliberately increasing unemployment and throwing millions out of work.

If you take a university course in capitalist economics, they will tell you that capitalism operates on the premise of “the benefits of mass unemployment”. The benefits lie in the disciplining of the worker. The notion that mass unemployment has any benefits at all is enough to turn my stomach against capitalism.

Further, I’m not enamored of any Austrian economist.

JS: Too much money and credit = inflation and speculation.

RL: Problem here probably being that the Fed cares little about speculation (although it does worry about it a bit – witness Alan Greenspan’s famous “irrational exuberance” comments a while back) but cares a lot about inflation.

Speculation does not necessarily lead to increases in core inflation, but it surely runs up some prices. Housing market, oil and dot com stock speculation surely created bubbles in those sectors, but in the case of housing and dot com’s, did not effect core inflation.

JS: As to the New Deal, it was a colossal failure.

RL: I can’t comment on this. The general analysis here in the US is that the New Deal saved US capitalism from Revolution, hence it was painful but worth it. This analysis comes from the more enlightened among capitalist sectors themselves.

Of course Western Europe and the Asian Tigers were not built on laissez faire. Even today that Japan, Singapore and Korea have extreme government intervention in the economy in terms of state planning of the economy. That’s often termed corporatism.

It’s not like Gosplan where the social economy is planned down to the # of eggs you will eat in a year. Instead this sort of economic guidance actually works. Government works with firms to help them compete against foreign sectors, goosing some sectors while letting others wilt.

No country with a mostly private education system and a poor public education system has ever produced any kind of an educated population.

Up here in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, we have many roads that are private. The country never got around to making them county roads. Without exception, they are horrible. In many cases, there are expensive homes and properties lining these roads. The homes sell for about ~$300,000+ now. Most people living there have some money and they are not poor at all.

Thing is, everyone would have to get together to pitch in to fix the road and maintain it. People, even well to do folks, can never seem to get together to do that, so you have a horrific road. It’s really strange to try to drive down a nightmarish road while looking at very nice, fancy houses with new cars on either side.

This Asshole Wrote a Book?

Repost from the old site.

And Verso, of all houses, stooped to publish it? The subject itself is reasonable; I just think that Dickie.

Here’s his blog. It’s popular and gets about 2,100 visitors a day. We get 3,200.

He’s actually really smart and writes well, but you can say that about a lot of assholes. He hates me and has banned from his stupid blog. He banned me for anti-Semitism, but I really didn’t say much. You don’t have to say much over there. Just say the word “Jew” with the wrong inflection and you’re pretty much done.

Dickie says that I am actually an anti-Semitic rightwing racist provocateur who has infiltrated the Left in order to try to taint the Left with racism. Or something. Whatever, dude. He’s also banned at least one of my commenters too.

Wrecking Social Security a Long Term Obama Goal

It is important to note that Obama came into office determined to wreck these three programs. He called a “budget summit” early in the Administration in which the Dean of Austerity, billionaire hedge fund manager and bankster Pete Peterson was scheduled to be the keynote speaker.

There was so much uproar over this that Obama had to cancel. Republicans were furious. David Brooks, reactionary New York Times journalist, was so alarmed that he called the Administration on the phone. The Obama folks assured him that Obama was determined to wreck Social Security.

The Right breathed a sigh of relief. Afterward, Obama appointed the Cat Food Commission, the purpose of which was to deal with the fake debt crisis by wrecking the three programs described.

They also prescribed many tax hikes on working class and middle class Americans in addition to cuts the savage cuts. It was a dual edged dagger aimed at the hearts of working class and middle class Americans. Not only would the programs they rely on be gashed, they would see their tax rates go up considerably to help pay for their own rape and ruin. The rich and corporations would be largely unscathed by the Commission’s recommendations.

Obama deliberately stacked the Commission with Social Security haters like Clintonite reactionary Erskine Bowles and the bloodthirsty Republican former Senator Alan Simpson.

Mary Bottari, “ALEC Exposed: Milton Friedman’s Little Shop of Horrors”

Here.

A great article from the Huffington Post that redeems my faith in the online publication. Ariana Huffington recently sold out to a slimy corporation, so I figured that the Left content would be destroyed by the corporate censors, but strangely enough, that has not yet happened.

This article discusses Milton Friedman, who was supposedly a Libertarian, but in practice, was actually a fascist because he supported the Chilean Pinochet dictatorship. Friedman famously said that no citizenry would ever vote in his Libertarian society for the corporations and the rich, so it would have to be put in via a dictatorship. This is why he praised the Chilean model. As an anti-democratic, far right individual, we arrive at the disturbing conclusion that Milton Friedman was a fascist.

Friedman was also a great believer in Disaster Capitalism, that is, the use of periodic crises to push through radical far rightwing and austerity measures to devastate state spending, tax revenues and state regulation of business. In addition, it could be used to facilitate huge wealth transfers from the poor and the middle class to the upper middle class, the rich and the corporations. Wrecking the union sector was also part of the game. In addition, the crises would force the state to sell off much of its property and land to the private sector. Friedman on the benefits of a crisis:

Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real changes. When the crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.

Many governments in Latin America followed Friedman’s advice in the past 30 years. The result was the devastation of the public sector and public spending and the crushing of unions and dissenters. There was huge wealth transfer from the bottom 8

Widespread economic destruction followed as it always does. Even Time Magazine agreed that neoliberalism had utterly failed in Latin America. This crap went on for 20-30 years before the Latin Americans said they had enough. The result was the voting in of Left politicians such as Hugo Chavez who opposed the failed neoliberal model .

Now the very same Shock Doctrine is being used to drive the same radical neoliberal changes in the US as failed so utterly in Latin America. The crisis was caused by lack of regulation in the financial and real estate sector. Deregulation is part of the Friedman agenda, so Friedmanism really caused the economic collapse in the first place. The economic collapse compounded with decades of insane supply side economics caused a collapse in tax revenues at all levels of government, which starved government of revenue and resulted in huge budget deficits.

Republicans used these deficits to push through radical changes, including even more tax cuts to further deprive the state of revenues and make the deficits even worse, constitutional amendments to prevent the raising of revenues needed for any kind of budget sanity, the destruction of critical social services, union busting and the privatization of virtually every state function, including the public schools. Mass privatization, especially of the public schools, had long been a Friedman prerogative.

At the state level, this mad slash and burn agenda is led by a gang of corporate fascists called American Legislative Exchange Council or ALEC.

The website Alecexposed unveils the corporate fascist agenda of ALEC for all to see.

I would like to point out that the Democrats are no angels in this regard. In fact, Barack Obama and his buddy, Rahm Emmanuel, are both radical Friedmanites. Emmanuel has long been a proponent of using crises to push through radical austerity measures to destroy public spending and grant huge tax breaks to the rich and corporations. He famously said in this regard, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”

Barack Obama is also a radical Friedmanite who believes in Disaster Capitalism. About the recent economic crisis, he said it was a “great opportunity” to begin the destruction of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid that Obama has longed for since the day he entered office.

Corporate America as a Fascist Movement and Entity

There is a legitimate argument that freedom of speech is simply not possible in a corporate media system. Freedom of the press belongs to anyone who owns one (a printing press) and all that. The Internet promised to change all of that. After all, on the Net, even an obscure blogger can theoretically access as many readers as the Wall Street Journal. On the other hand, if I try to publish a magazine or newspaper or run my own radio or TV station, I am going to run into a lot of problems. In fact, it would be impossible for me to do any of these things.

So the Internet was the great leveler and potentially the greatest force for the democratization of media in many decades. It was similar to the early days of the newspaper in the US with the proliferation of often citizen-published broadsheets, mostly on the East Coast ~200 years ago. Any man could be a publisher, and often was.

The corporate scum are very worried about this state of affairs, in which a Leftist like Robert Lindsay could theoretically garner a large audience and break the corporate monopoly on the media, hence the battle over Network Neutrality, in which the corporations want to put little guys like me in the Internet “slow lane” unless I fork over a ton of money to corporate Net tool booths. In addition, our corporate feudal masters reserve the right to completely ban connections to sites like Robert Lindsay on the grounds that they don’t like what I am saying.

In other words, corporate America is downright anti-democratic. They wish to control 10

From Bernie Sanders – No to Austerity!

Bernie Sanders on the latest debt ceiling talks.

Republican leaders talk about three or four trillion dollars in spending cuts over the next ten years, with no new taxes on the wealthy and large corporations and unless we turn the tide NOW, they will get pretty much what they want.

Please understand what they mean.  While no specific proposals have been adopted as of this date, here are some of the ideas which have been discussed.

SOCIAL SECURITY:  Revising the formula which determines cost of living increases (COLAs) so that in ten years, a 75-year-old will receive $560 a year less in benefits and in 20 years an 85-year-old will receive $1,000 a year less.  Further, another provision which would require that Social Security always be solvent for 75 years would likely mean even larger cuts in benefits.  All of this would take place despite the fact that Social Security has not contributed one penny to the deficit and has a $2.6 trillion surplus today.  This new formula would also cut back on the pensions of veterans. Why cut Social Security?

MEDICARE:  Raising the eligibility age from 65 to 67 and/or cutting benefits by $250 billion over ten years.  Now you tell me, how are 66 year old Americans with modest means going to afford health insurance with a private company – especially if they have medical problems?  It’s not going to happen.  They are going to suffer.  Some will unnecessarily die. Why cut Medicare?

MEDICAID:  At a time when 50 million Americans already have no health insurance, Republicans and some Democrats are proposing to cut hundreds of billions from Medicaid which means that many men, women and children will lose the health insurance they have.  According to a Harvard University study, some 45,000 Americans die each year because they don’t get to a doctor when they should.  How many more will die if Medicaid is slashed?  How many children will be thrown off of the Children’s Health Insurance Program? Why cut Medicaid when it’s already been slashed to the bone?

EDUCATION:  Today, childcare and college education are already unaffordable for millions of working families and Head Start has long waiting lists.  If Republicans and some Democrats get their way, Pell grants and other educational programs will be deeply slashed.  Affordable childcare and a college education will no longer be possible for many families in our country. Why cut childcare and college education anymore than they’ve already been slashed?

ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AND INFRASTRUCTURE:  Forget about the government having the ability to protect the people from corporations who want to evade regulations within the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act.  With massive cuts in the EPA, the resources will not be there.  Forget about this country having the investment capability to transform our energy system to energy efficiency and sustainable energy.  Forget about creating millions of jobs rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and improving our public transportation system.

Why cut environmental protection at all? Forget it. Why cut funds to infrastructure when your nation’s infrastructure is collapsing?

At a time of growing hunger in America there will be massive cuts to nutrition programs.  We have a crisis in homelessness, and there will be cuts to affordable housing.  While we need more funds for research and development in disease prevention and other areas, fewer funds will be available.  And on and on it goes.  Why cut hunger programs at a time of rising hunger? Why cut housing funds when we have a homelessness crisis? Why cut funds for R & D in medicine and science?

Thomas Ferguson, “The Story Behind Obama’s Remarks on FDR”

Here.

This is an excellent article that shows just how far gone Barack Obama really is. When Obama came into office, he said that we needed to do something right now and not wait 6 months like Roosevelt had done. The notion that Roosevelt waited 6 months before he did anything about the Depression is a lie that conservatives started at the time and have been hammering away at ever since. It’s even made into official histories of the era. There’s no truth to it at all. What’s alarming is that Obama has apparently bought into reactionary lies about the New Deal.

The truth is that when Roosevelt first came in, he was under tremendous pressure by the plutocrats, the corporations and banksters to go backwards, not forwards. If he would have listened to them, the Depression may have gone on forever. The banksters wanted Roosevelt to continue on the Gold Standard and do participate in the London Economic Conference. This would have meant continuing austerity and no fundamental reform which was necessary.

Hoover had been pursuing a politics of savage austerity since the Depression started that had only made things catastrophically worse. Bizarrely, this economic wrecking politics had the support of the banksters, which shows you that banksters will sink any economy if they have the chance and then throw concrete blocks in the sinking ship to keep it from being towed to shore.

FDR told the banksters to take a hike, and the economy was saved with the New Deal. If we include government work programs in unemployment figures which almost no one does, unemployment was as low as

Obama did the opposite. He followed the banksters’ advice for continuing and actually radically deeper austerity. If Obama’s debt ceiling bill passes, I assume that we may have up to 10 years of recession to depression. The immediate effect of slashing trillions from the US budget will have an effect on the economy similar to that of an atomic bomb on a city.

In addition, Obama will be effectively nuking any possible chance of re-election we will be virtually assured of having a Republican President in 2012. I don’t understand this guy. He’s either on a suicide mission or he’s lost his mind.

Response by the Pete Peterson Foundation to My Article

I received this from the Pete Peterson Foundation in response my article cited below. I didn’t realize that I was so important, but at 5,200 hits/day, I guess I mean something to somebody.

I think Peterson is wrong in many ways. Peterson started yelling about this 30 years ago when our debt was much lower than today. The bit about “declining investor confidence” is deficit hawk nonsense.

According to deficit hawks, the reason the economy is in the tank right now is because of the deficit. The deficit has led to poor investor confidence, using Peterson’s own words. The private sector will not invest as long as the debt is so high. This argument is transparently ridiculous, and I won’t even go into it.

At 9

I agree that deficits at 20

Another bugaboo is rising interests rates. High deficits supposedly cause high interest rates and inflation. It’s true that these are risks of high deficits. However, there is no inflation in sight, so there is nothing to worry about. Further, interest rates are at zero, so there is nothing to worry about there either.

The Peterson Foundation is lying about strengthening and preserving what they call “entitlement programs.” Those programs are all self-funded. Social Security is funded until 2037. Medicare is presently fully funded. Neither of these programs add one red cent to the deficit at the moment. It’s all a big bugaboo.

Peterson doesn’t want to strengthen these programs, he wants to kill them, just like his Republican Tea Party pals. All Republicans who want to kill these programs say they are trying to save them. Save them by destroying them! Some Orwellian language there.

Peterson is a billionaire hedge fund manager. He represents the banksters, finance capital. The reason he wants to slash government spending is because he wants the private sector, the banksters, to put that money into the economy instead of the state. When the state puts that money into the economy, it doesn’t charge interest. When the banksters put that money into the economy, they want to charge interest on it. We are talking trillions here. Are the banksters going to charge interest on those trillions or not? See how this works?

Peterson wants to privatize Social Security so Wall Street can get their hands on all that money. He wants to privatize Medicare so all that money going to the state instead goes to his buddies in the insurance industry and on Wall Street. See how the game works?

The deficit is a fake, a lie, a charade, for a game by which our feudal lords and masters, of which Peterson is one, plan to put us all into debt bondage for our entire lifetimes. It’s neo-feudalism, the rentier class (Peterson’s class) seeking to reinstate its feudal role over us that was usurped centuries ago by the overthrow of finance capital by industrial capital.

Every economy taken over by oligarchs (and Peterson is an oligarch) is destroyed by them. Oligarchs always work for the interests of short term profits at the expense of the real economy. This is why the 3rd World lies in ruins. The rich destroy every society they run. The only functional societies are those run more or less democratically, by the people and labor, where the rapacious desires of the rich are held in check by the people exercising their democratic imperative.

I am writing in response to your article, “Galbraith: There is no Debt Crisis.” In the article, you suggest that “deficit hawks are all liars and fakes.” This story does not fairly represent Pete’s views. I would refer you to our website(http://pgpf.org/Issues/Fiscal-Outlook/2011/06/QA-with-Peter-Peterson.aspx), in which Pete states in response to a question about those who think that a future fiscal crisis is overblown:

I wish they were right, but the facts say otherwise. Economists generally believe that a debt level of 6

We currently have a staggering $10 trillion national debt—that’s about 6

If we don’t change our current policies, this debt is projected to double in the 2020s and triple in the 2030s, threatening the nation’s long-term economic prosperity and saddling future generations with an unthinkable burden.

I see two potential crises in the future: a near-term financial crisis rooted in declining investor confidence that leads to sharp rises in interest rates and forces sudden, draconian changes in the federal budget; and a longer-term economic crisis that would result from diverting more and more of our national resources to servicing debt instead of investing in areas that are essential to long-term growth.

These crises are made all the more likely by the fact that growing debts aren’t just an American problem. Projections show that, by 2035, the world’s advanced economies could face debts approaching 20

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office regularly warns that our nation’s fiscal situation is unsustainable. Recently, our Foundation commissioned public opinion research among senior economic officials from the last eight presidential administrations and congressional leaders from the past 30 years.

One hundred percent of participants “strongly agreed” that our nation is on an unsustainable long-term fiscal path. I used to work in market research, and I have never before seen such a consensus. Our fiscal challenges are undeniable.

Pete believes that our nation’s fiscal challenges must be addressed in a compassionate way that maintains a strong safety net. He has said repeatedly that entitlement programs must be preserved and protected. One of our foundation’s goals is to ensure that these programs are strong, solvent and secure for future generations—particularly for America’s most vulnerable populations.

Normal, Happy Guy with Irresistible Urge to Kill People

Seeks female with same desires for fun, games and who knows what else.

Just kidding.

But that’s the title of a post on AskReddit.

Full title: I’m a Relatively Normal, Happy Guy. I Have an Almost Irresistible Urge to Kill People. What’s Wrong with Me?

Well, it’s certainly an interesting question! One of the top-voted responses links an article of mine in which I discuss something called Harm OCD, in which people have unwanted thoughts, urges and feelings about wanting to kill or harm other people. They never act on the feelings to my knowledge anyway, though some say there have been a few cases. I have talked to some of these folks online, and I’m not the slightest bit worried about them. I would go on an overnight trip with any of them no problem. They’re simply not dangerous at all, which is very interesting right there.

The woman who makes this comment says that she has Harm OCD herself, and it’s a nasty illness. It does involve a lot of avoidance as folks sequester themselves away to avoid hurting others.

In my opinion, this guy does not have Harm O. He seems to very much enjoy these feelings, and he doesn’t want to get rid of them or try to stop them. Trying to stop them in particular is pathognomic of Harm O. On the other hand, I don’t think he’s a psychopath either.

He does say that he has gone so far as to plan out these murders in detail in his mind and he has taken careful note of people’s schedules as part of these plans. That is, he knows where certain will be, given their schedules,  most any day or time. The thing that prevents him from doing these murders is mostly the harm to his self-image that would come if he were to be a murderer. He’s not particularly concerned about the fate of his victims, nor is he concerned about the legal implications.

This guys seems like a case of narcissism. I see a lot of narcissism shining through this guy’s post. Other than that, I refuse to give him any kind of an overused DSM diagnosis, mostly because I think it’s ridiculous to pathologize a whole nation or planet. Are his preoccupations healthy? I don’t think so, but we are dealing here with more or a moral question than a case of psychopathology.

I wish we would deal more in terms of good and bad and less in terms of crazy or sane. A lot of so called crazies aren’t crazy at all, they’re just bad. A lot of so called scumbags aren’t really bad at all, they’re just nuts.

What’s going on is more of a case of what I would call bad karma. It’s bad karma to sit around devising ways or murdering innocent people, regardless of whether or not you believe in reincarnation. It’s bad vibes, bad for your mind, a bad idea if you want to have a proper and healthy mind.

Should folks like this guy be imprisoned? Of course not. Unfortunately, you have to wait until someone does something bad before you arrest or imprison them. You can’t lock people up on preemptive charges of dangerousness. Down that way lies totalitarianism.

I did see one case online of a guy who was imprisoned as a danger to others as a potential serial killer, but he was mentally ill anyway, had written down extensive plans for killing his victims, singled out a variety of victims and formed long dossiers on them, gathered a great deal of murder and getaway tools to carry out his plans, and said he was going to start killing people. He was hospitalized for 1 1/2 years, treated, and released. Upon release, he was healthy and free of his fantasies.

The really sick ones won’t even show up for treatment. This guy was cured because he was just healthy enough to show up for treatment about his out of control urges. Serial killers cannot be cured not for some biological reason, but because in general they simply do not want to get better.

I have a sneaky suspicion that guys like this are everywhere. I figure for every serial killer who gets caught, 100 or 1000 fantasize about such things but never do it. Why not? Because they have enough behavioral controls that they are able to keep these urges intact without acting on them. I think most don’t do it either for moral reasons (they think it’s wrong) or due to fear of getting caught.

I read a post online by a woman who had sexual fantasies of being murdered. She posted them online and was deluged by offers from young men to “murder” her, apparently just pretend kill her but who knows? She ran it by some male friends and many of them also offered to “kill” her.

She finally acted it out with a male friend, and the guy said he got so carried away during the games that he had to physically control himself so as not to kill her for real. His mind just went nuts and wanted to kill her, and he had to reign himself back in. It was amazing that so many young men apparently have fantasies of such things.

One reason we seem to have fewer serial killers now than we did in the 1970’s is due to the progression of police forensics, especially DNA. Those serial killers now operating are mostly preying on street prostitutes, drug users, runaways and other throwaway types. Some of these types are so isolated from mainstream society that years, even over a decade, may go by before they are even declared missing. On the other hand, killing ordinary people like you and me for fun is going to be a Hell of a lot harder.

Bottom line:

Who wants to kill people for fun? Lots of people!

Who really does it? Thankfully, not so many!

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Neoslavonic Website

Here.

Neoslavonic is a new constructed language, or conlang. These languages have a history of not being very successful for some odd reason, but they are definitely a good idea. For instance, in Esperanto it takes about 1 year to get to a fluency level that it takes one 8 years to get to in English.

Neoslavonic was created from mixing together the major Slavic languages, presumably Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, Bulgarian, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian and Macedonian. These languages are fairly similar anyway and there is a fair amount of intelligibility between them. The notion of a Pan-Slavic language is a good idea.

The website is very well done and there seems to be some time and money behind it. Seems to be run out Czechoslovakia.

Volatility, “Freakshow: Deficits, Taxes, Austerity”

From here. The left blog Volatility is absolutely excellent, if heterodox in its outlook. It is extremely well written. Here is a recent post on the fake deficit crisis. I don’t agree with his no taxes idea, but it’s definitely very radical. I believe he’s actually sort of an anarchist, but I don’t hate anarchists. They hate me, but not vice versa. At least their heads are in the right place.

He makes a lot of excellent points.

The problem is that it plays into an anti-government directive that is then used by the elites to attack the notion that the state should do anything at all for the common good or especially for the non-rich. It’s also clear that there is little difference between Republicans and Democrats on these issues. They both work for the rich and attack the non-rich.

Obama, in particular, works for the rich, he’s their servant. His role is to serve as General in the Calls War of the rich against the non-rich. He plays that role very well. I think that future historians will properly show that Obama is a corporatist, and a very rightwing one at that. Obama’s purpose appears to be to destroy the Democratic Party once and for all.

I think he also wants to go down on history as the man who began the destruction of the New Deal. It’s obvious that he hates the New Deal and wants to wipe it off the face of the Earth. If he gets elected to a 2nd term, Obama will do just that – he will kill the New Deal and Great Society once and for all. This is what Obama wants his place in history to be, and this is what it will be. After he does that, the Democratic Party will be a dead, rotting corpse, gone forever.

I think Obama also wanted the Democrats to lose in the 2010 elections so what he calls “my Republican friends” could win the election. Then he would be “forced” to begin the destruction of the New Deal and Great Society, which has been itching to do ever since he came into office. Democrats running for office in 2010 were told by Obama and Rahm Emmanuel to “go Blue dog.” A Blue Dog is a DINO, a Democrat who is really just nothing but a Republican.

During the campaign, White House used and urged other Democrats to use the very slogan that internal polling would work worst for Democrats and best for Republicans. Obama wanted the Democrats to lose! I keep telling you, Obama is a Manchurian Candidate, selected by the elites to kill the Democratic Party.

The only thing that happened was that all the blue dogs got killed in the election. I haven’t been closely following the latest magic show in Washington. I’m aware of the same old maelstrom of lies, fake struggle, phony digressions, dire predictions.

The truths are clear: The deficit and the debt are not real issues. No one within the system who claims to care about them actually cares about them, and there’s no reality-based reason anyone should care about them. There’s no difference between Democrats and Republicans on this, although each pretends there is. Of course, if Obama wanted the political/media discussion to be about job creation and not about deficits, that’s what the discussion would be.

But just as much as the Reps, he’s focused only on austerity for the people. This is a kleptocratic imperative.

Meanwhile we have digressive, misdirectional nonsense like debates over the legality and/or constitutionality of the debt ceiling, philosophical hand-wringing over the very concept, speculation over how Obama can/ought to do end runs around the law and constitution (thus the liberals get a whack at aggrandizing the imperial presidency).

All this is absurd since this government recognizes no “law” in the first place. If it wants to borrow, it’ll borrow. If it wants to print, it’ll print. It’ll deal with this law the same way it deals with every other law, acknowledging its authority or flouting it (brazenly or clandestinely) based purely on what brings the outcome most congenial to kleptocracy.

Of course the US government is hardly unique in this. It’s cute the way European governments, none of whom, including the Germans and French, adhered to the debt-to-GDP requirements of the Eurozone, are pretending to agonize over this latest example of US banana republicanism. I think there’s plenty of bananas to go around.)

The point of the foregoing was to describe how this is a completely phony debate. As always, the government will do exactly what it wants to do, regardless of the law.

What about the alleged substance of the issue – are deficits and debts really a problem? MMT says no. In an economy this depressed, government can and should run deficits as long as the spending is on constructive things. The current political reality is a funhouse mirror image of this.

Everyone in Washington, all elites, agree that the government can and should borrow and spend infinitely on corporate welfare. (And this is without reference to the economy’s operation relative to capacity. No political/media elite thinks corporate welfare should be cut even if the dreaded inflation monster did show itself.)

Somehow, deficits are only an issue, and the fear of inflation is only an issue, where it comes to public interest spending. This really means that it’s not deficits or inflation which is the real issue, but the public interest itself. Today’s elites are dedicated to destroying government as something which benefits the people in any way, while maintaining it (in an extremely big, aggressive form) as the machine of corporate tyranny and looting.

This leads us to taxation. Like austerians elsewhere, Obama keeps intoning that we must have “shared sacrifice”, which is of course code for 10

Part of this demanded sacrifice is raising taxes on the non-rich, even as government abdicates all responsibilities to us, once and for all. On the contrary, we’re to be taxed to fund bureaucratic and police assaults on us, and to facilitate the “privatization”, that is robbery, of our public property.

It’s clear that whether or not taxation on the non-rich ever had any legitimacy in the past, it no longer does. Philosophically, we do not have a legitimate government. This is a kleptocracy which recognizes only the rich and big corporations as citizens, as persons at all. It does nothing other than for their benefit. From the point of view of the actual citizens, people who actually do work, this government is nothing but a parasite and a predator.

It will never inaugurate a new public interest program, but only continue to destroy the ones which still exist. To the extent any still exist, this is only out of inertia and political duress.

(As for entitlements, these aren’t legitimately part of any discussion involving deficits and debt, because we the people already paid for them with dedicated taxes. We must refuse to allow that they’re touchable even in principle. We must reject immediately anyone who participated in embezzling those funds for other spending (or who supported such embezzlers) and who now wants to turn around and claim those programs are debt-drivers that need to be cut.)

As a practical matter, people who are struggling, people who face even more severe economic tyranny further down the road, and especially people who are fighting to relocalize their economies and rebuild their communities, need every cent we can get, and we can use that cent far more effectively if we do it directly by ourselves than if it’s “trickled back down” to us by alleged good government, and if we do it now rather than at some indeterminate time in the future. For both of these reasons any taxation upon us robs us of precious resources we can’t afford to lose.

And then there’s the fact that the money taken from us isn’t merely handed over to the corporations and the rich to be thrown down a rathole never to be seen again. That would be bad enough. But much of it is then used by these predators as a weapon against us. This is war, and ammunition stolen from us and handed over to the enemy will then be used to shoot at us.

That’s the effect of the government policy of redistributing wealth upward. That’s the effect of all taxation. To the extent that taxation touches the non-rich at all, it is regressive by definition. Viciously so.

That’s why it’s stupid to still argue about “making the tax code more progressive”. One, kleptocracy would never do that. Two, even if this system ever did make the income tax, and even payroll taxes, nominally more progressive, that would make no difference. The rich would continue to evade these taxes, and anything taken from them in taxes would be handed right back to them anyway, since the government’s policy is to benefit them in any way it can. (“Trickle down” really would work for the rich.)

So we’ve disposed of taxation as such, and of the progressive-vs.-regressive misdirection ploy. We’re left with a clear, stark position:

No Taxes on the Non-Rich.

We must furiously resist any tax increases upon us (any hike in existing taxes, any new taxes like a VAT), and fight to have existing taxes removed. Every cent we redeem for our own use in this way is a pure gain. Under this system we’ll never do any better with the diminishing money we have.

(Previous posts on my No Taxes position include No Taxes on the Non-Rich and End All Taxation.)

There’s no point fearing that without taxation the criminals will have a pretext to gut Social Security and Medicare. They already want to do that and will do so whenever it’s politically possible. The presence or absence of any given level of tax revenue won’t change that. No, here we must make another stark demand:

Total Austerity for the Criminals, Not One Cent More From the People.

Including the rock that SS and Medicare are untouchable. Absolutely no cuts to them. (On the contrary, we should be demanding Medicare expansion, Medicare For All, single payer. We should always take the offensive.) They’re perfectly solvent. They’re not part of the deficit. We the people already paid for them. To even suggest compromising them is to advocate robbery plain and simple.

So there’s the clear, simple position: No taxes, no cuts in anything but corporate welfare.

Alt Left: India: Hell on Earth

Here is an excellent piece about India that I got from an internet site. The author is unknown, but he may be a Dalit or low caste Indian. It sums up why India is such a Hellhole – Indians created it that way.

We had a commenter on here called Dota, an Indian Muslim who hates India way more than I do. He fled to Canada. He recently said that India is Hell, and its people are the scum of humanity. That’s a hard-hitting thing to say, but is it true? He lived there for many years and I did not.

It does appear that Indian society and culture itself is at the core of India’s problems, and I can’t help but think that the religion of Hinduism is a big part of the country’s problems. As Dota says, of all religions, Hinduism cares about people the least. A shocking statement, but is it true?

In another comment, I talked about the hundreds of millions of people starving, diseased, shitting outdoors and living in the streets or fetid slums of India. According to Dota, Indian elites feel that the Indian poor living and dying in Hell that is India deserve everything they get up to and including death. That’s why there’s so little effort to fix up the mess – the poor deserve their fate. They even deserve to die. A frightening remark again, but what if it is true?

And once again, this belief seems to circle back around to Hinduism once again. The Hindu religion seems to be at the very heart and core of India’s Hell on Earth.

Why Do 1 Million Indians Flee India Every Year?

Any crackdowns on illegal immigrants or restricting quotas abroad to Indians are a major concern to India’s politicians. The latest statistics from the US Department of Homeland Security shows that the number of Indian illegal migrants jumped 12

Here are some Indian facts:

Poverty Graph

According to the WFP, India accounts around 5

Around six out of 10 Indians live in the countryside, where abject poverty is widespread. 34.

The Current Account Balance of India

A major area of vulnerability for us is the high consolidated public-debt to GDP ratio of over 7

says the Governor of Reserve Bank of India (RBI), Mr. Yaga Venugopal Reddy.

According to the CIA World Factbook, the current account balance of India is -$375.1 trillion (minus) while China is the wealthiest country in the world with $426.1 trillion (plus). India listed at 182 and China at 1 [CIA: The World Factbook].

Human Development vs GDP growth

The Human Development Report for 2009 released by the UNDP ranked India 134 out of 182 countries based on measures of life expectancy, education, and income. India has an emigration rate of 0.

Population

According to the Indian census of 2001, the total population was 1.028 billion. Hindus numbered 827 million or 80.

Thus the caste system leaves lower caste Hindus as an oppressed majority in India’s power structure. Going by figures quoted by the Backward Classes Commission, Brahmins alone (

The 2004 World Development Report mentions that more than 2

Living Conditions of Indians

8

According to National Family Health Survey data (2005-06), only 4

Education

India has over 3

About 40 million primary school-age children in India are not in school. More than 9

While Japan has 4,000 universities for its 127 million people, and the US has 3,650 universities for its 301 million, India has only 348 universities for its 1.2 billion people. In the prestigious Academic Ranking of World Universities by Institute of Higher Education published by Shanghai Jiao Tong, only two Indian Universities are included.

Even the two much-ballyhooed IIT’s in India found only a lower worldwide slot (203 and 304) in the 2007 report. Although Indian universities churn out three million graduates a year, only 1

Health

India today allocates lower than

107,000 leprosy patients live in India. 15.

There are only 585 rural hospitals compared to 985 urban hospitals in the country. Out of the 6,39,729 doctors registered in India, only 67,576 are in the public sector, and the rest are either in the private sector or abroad. According to a survey by NSSO (National Sample Survey Organization), 4

Tuberculosis (TB) is a major public health problem in India. India accounts for one-fifth of the global TB incident cases. Each year about 1.8 million people in India develop TB, of which 0.8 million are infectious cases. It is estimated that  330,000 Indians die from TB every year [WHO India].

Economy under Siege by Elite Hindus

In India, the wealth of 36 families amounts to $191 billion, which is one fourth of India’s GDP. In other words, 35 elite Hindu families own one quarter of India’s GDP by leaving 8

The dominant group of Hindu nationalists come from the three upper castes (Brahmins, Kshatriyas and Vaishyas) that constitute only 1

India is also one of the most under-banked major markets in the world, with only 6 bank branches per 1,000 sq. kms., according to the World Bank, and less than 3

Corruption

According to TI, 2

Corruption is a large tax on Indian growth; it delays execution, raises costs, and destroys the moral fiber

says Prof. Rama Murthi. Transparency International estimates that Indian truckers pay something in the neighborhood of $5 billion annually in bribes to keep freight flowing. According to Rahul Gandhi, only

Discrimination Against Dalits

Crime against Dalits occur every 20 minutes in India. Every day three Dalit women are raped, two Dalits are murdered, and two Dalit houses are burnt down! These figures represent only a fraction of the actual number of incidents, since many Dalits do not register cases for fear of retaliation by the police and upper caste Hindus.

Official figures show that there are still 343 million manual scavengers in India from the Dalit community. More than 165 million Dalits in India are abused by their Hindu upper castes due to their birth [HRW Report 2007].

Human Rights

When it comes to human rights issues in India, it has not ratified the UN Convention against Torture, and its citizens do not have the opportunity to find recourse in remedies that are available under international law. The victims are trapped in the local Hindu caste system, which in every aspect militates against their rights.

India has a very poor record of protecting the privacy of its citizens, according to the latest report from Privacy International (PI). India scored 1.9 points, which makes it an ‘extensive surveillance society’. A score between 4.1 and 5.0 (the highest score) would mean a country consistently upholds human rights standards. PI is a watchdog on surveillance and privacy invasions by governments and corporations.

Fake encounter killings are rampant in India. These extrajudicial killings are inspired by the theological texts of the Brahmins such as Artha Shastra and Manusmriti which teach espionage and torture methods. Every such killing of an innocent person branded a terrorist has encouraged the killer cops to target socially excluded communities like Dalits, tribals, and minorities.

India’s intelligence agencies like IB, RAW, etc. seem to be thoroughly infiltrated by foreign secret services which support powerful weapon-producing nations. Formed in 1947, IB is engaged in wiretapping, spying on political opponents, and sometimes indicting people on false criminal charges. The IB also has files on numerous authors, bloggers, and media persons.

According to the National Human Rights Commission, as of 30th June 2004, there were 3,320,112 prisoners in Indian jails, out of which 2,390,146 were awaiting trial. More than 7

The bar association in India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh, has refused to represent 13 Muslim suspects accused of bombing courthouses in 2005. A large percentage of Indian police officers, attorneys, and judges appear regularly at events organized by notorious Hindu militant groups.

India is a parliamentary democracy, but nevertheless, it is not exactly a fully free society. The human rights group Freedom House ranks India as a 2 (on a scale of 1 to 7, with 1 the highest) for political rights and 3 for civil liberties. Elections are generally free, but, notes Freedom House,

Government effectiveness and accountability are also undermined by pervasive criminality in politics, decrepit state institutions, and widespread corruption.

The State Department observes:

There were numerous reports that the government and its agents committed arbitrary or unlawful killings, including extrajudicial killings of suspected criminals and insurgents, or staged encounter deaths.

Minorities

About 2

According to Mr. Tahir Mahmood, an Indian Muslim journalist,

The 2.

Discrimination Against Minority Muslims

Recently, Justice Rajinder Sachar Committee report admitted that 138 million Muslims across India are severely underrepresented in government employment, including Public Sector Units. Ironically, West Bengal, a communist-ruled state, reported no Muslims in higher positions in its PSU’s! The share of Muslims in government  and the lower judiciary in any state simply does not come anywhere close to their population share.

The only place where Muslims can claim a share in proportion to their population is in prison! Muslims represent 19.

A Muslim child attends school for three years and four months, compared to the national average of four years. Less than

There is a need to re-orient official strategies for ensuring better access of Muslim children to schooling outside the madrassas which cater to only

Discrimination in Media

Hindu upper caste men, who constitute just

The Hindu Other Backward Class groups, who are 3

Discrimination in the Judiciary

India’s subordinate courts have a backlog of over 22 million cases, while the 21 high courts and the Supreme Court have 3.5 million and 32,000 pending cases (2006) respectively. In subordinate courts, over 15 million cases are filed and an equal number disposed of annually by about 14,000 judges! Every year a million or more cases are added to the arrears. At the current speed, the lower courts will need 124 years to clear the backlog. There are only 13 judges for every million people.

Recently a parliamentary committee blamed the judiciary for keeping out competent persons of downtrodden communities “through a shrewd process of manipulation.” Between 1950 to 2000, 4

Dalits and Indian aborigines make up less than 20 out of 610 judges working in Supreme Court and state high courts.

This nexus and manipulative judicial appointments have to be broken

the report urged. [Parliamentary Standing Committee Report on Constitutional Review, Sudarshan Nachiappan]. Among 12 states with high Muslim populations, Muslim representation in the judicial sector was limited to 7.

According to the National Crime Records Bureau, only 3

Discrimination Against Children

According to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, India has the highest number of street children in the world. There are no exact numbers, but conservative estimates suggest that about 18 million children live and labor in the streets of India’s urban centers. Mumbai, Delhi and Calcutta each have an estimated street children population of over 100,000. The total number of child laborers in India is estimated to be 60 million.

The level of child malnutrition in India is among the highest in the world, higher than some countries in sub-Saharan Africa, says the report Extent of Chronic Hunger and Malnutrition in India by the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. While around 2

A quarter of all neonatal deaths in the world (2.1 million) occurred in India, says the UNICEF Report 2007. More than one in five children in the world who die within four weeks of birth is an Indian. Nearly 5

Discrimination Against Women

According to the 2001 census, female literacy in India is 54.1

There are an estimated 40 million Hindu widows in India, and the least fortunate of them are shunned and stripped of the life they lived when they were married. It’s believed that 15,000 widows live on the streets of Vrindavan, a Hindu holy city of about 55,000 population in northern India.

Many widows – at least 4

Nearly 9 out of 10 pregnant women suffer from malnutrition, about half of all children (4

Nearly 2

On average, one Indian woman commits suicide every four hours over a dowry dispute. In an Indian marriage, the woman should bring jewelry, cash, and even consumer durables as part of dowry to the in-laws. If they fail bring enough valuables, the victims are burnt to death – doused in kerosene and set on fire. The in-laws routinely claim that the death happened due to an accident.

Rape is the fastest growing crime in India. Every hour, Indian women suffer two rapes, two kidnappings, four sexual assaults, and seven incidents of husband- and relative-instigated cruelty [National Crime Records Bureau Report 2006].

Fetus Killing

The female to male birth ratio was feared to reach 20:80 by the year 2020 as female fetus killing is rampant. Ten million girls have been killed by their parents in India in the past 20 years, either just before they were born or immediately after, the Indian Minister for Women and Child Development Renuka Chowdhury related to Reuters.

According to the 2001 census, the national sex ratio was 933 girls to 1,000 boys, while in the worst-affected northern state of Punjab, it was 798 girls to 1,000 boys. The availability of ultrasound sex determination tests leads to mass abortions in India.

Around 11 million abortions are carried out in India every year, and nearly 80,000 women die during the process, says a report from the Federation of Obstetrics and Gynecological Societies of India (FOGSI).

Human Trafficking

Out of the 593 districts in India, 378 or 62.

9

Of the total women who are involved in sex work in the country, 6

India has 4 million prostitutes nationwide, and 6

High Crime Rate and Communal Riots

India reported 32,481 murders, 36,617 molestation cases 19,348 rapes, and 7,618 dowry deaths in 2006. NCRB found that Madhya Pradesh recorded the highest number of crimes (1,940,711), followed by Maharashtra (1,910,788), Andhra Pradesh (1,730,909), Tamil Nadu (1,480,972), and Rajasthan (1,410,992) during 2006. According to the National Crime Records Bureau, there were 1,822,602 riots in 2005 alone [Incidence Of Cognizable Crimes (IPC) Under Different Crime Heads,  Page 2, NCRB website].

On average there are more than 2,000 kidnappings per year in India. Under India’s notorious caste system, upper caste Hindus inherit key positions and control all the governmental branches. Violent crime goes largely goes unpunished due to the support of upper caste crooks.

Economic Crimes

Economic crime continues to be pervasive threat for Indian companies, with 3

* Corruption and bribery continue to be the most common types of fraud, reported by 2 * The average direct financial loss to companies was INR 60 Million (US $1.5 million) during the two year period. In addition, the average cost to deal with economic crime in India is INR 40 Million (US $1 Million), which is close to double that of the global and Asia Pacific average. * In 3 * In 5

Armed Conflicts in India

Almost every state has separatist movements, many of them armed.

A large number of Muslims were killed in the past few years across the country, and the numbers are on a steady rise.

On top of that, India has become a pariah for its neighbors. None of its neighbors appreciate their closeness to India, and they all blame it for meddling in their affairs.

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According to an Indian official report, 165 of India’s 602 districts – mostly in Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, Bihar, Orissa, West Bengal, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh – are badly affected by tribal and Dalit violence, which the government terms “Maoist terror”.

India’s military spending was recorded at US $21.7 billion in 2006, and it planned to spend $26.5 billion during 2008/09 financial year. 8

India experienced a rapid increase in demand for security in the period following the Mumbai attacks, thanks to the world’s weapon industry! India is now one of the world’s most terror-prone countries, with a death toll second only to Iraq, says a report from the National Counterterrorism Center in Washington.

India’s crime rates, already some of the highest in the world, are also rising, as is the incidence of corporate espionage. Approximately 5.5 million private security guards are employed by about 15,000 security companies in India. As an industry, it is now the country’s largest corporate taxpayer [CAPSI report].

In 2005, Business Week reported that India became the largest importer of Israeli weapons, accounting for about half of the $3.6 billion in weapons exported by the Jewish state.

Do remember that 34 years ago, NSG was created by Americans? Hence it has been their onus to convince the group to grant the waiver to India to carry out the multi-billion dollar business as India is a large market,

said former Atomic Energy Commission chairman, Mr P. K. Iyengar.

The Booming Industry of Terrorism Experts and Security Research Institutes in India

With the emergence of Hindutva fascist forces and their alliance with neocons and Zionists, India witnessed a sharp increase in the number of research institutes, media houses, and lobbying groups. According to a study by the Think Tanks & Civil Societies Program at the University of Pennsylvania, India has 422 think tanks, second only to the US, which has over 2,000 such institutions.

Out of 422 recognized Indian think tanks, around 63 are engaged in security research and foreign policy matters, which are heavily funded by global weapons industry. India’s retired spies, police officers, military personnel, diplomats, and journalists are hired by these national security and foreign policy research institutes which get enormous funds from the global weapons industry.

These institutions in fact have a hidden agenda. Behind the veil, they work as the public relations arm of weapon industry. With the help of their media and intelligence wings, they create fake terror stories and exaggerated crime waves the areas of tribal, Dalit, and minority areas in order to get public acceptance for weapon contracts.

By creating conflicts in this India, Brahmin spin masters get huge commissions from the sale of weapons to government forces. To these corrupt bureaucrats, India’s ‘national interest‘ simply means ‘their self interest’. Their lobbying power bring more wealth to their families via lucrative jobs, citizenship in rich countries, and educational opportunities abroad.

India is one of the world’s largest weapons importers. Between 2000 and 2007, India was ranked the world’s second largest arms importer, accounting for 7.

Over 1,130 companies in 98 countries manufacture arms, ammunition, and components. 9

The Defense Offset Facilitation Agency estimated that India will spend $100 billion importing weapons in the next five years. At least 38 court cases relating to arms agreements are still pending against bureaucrats and military officers. Hindu fascist forces currently enjoy the upper hand in the media, civil service, judiciary, defense, and education of Indian society.

Sooner or later, the 25,000-strong democratic institutions in India will collapse, and the country will be transformed into a limited democracy under the rule of a security regime like Turkey or Israel. The Hindutvas’ security-centric nationalism was never capable of bringing peace and protection to ordinary citizens.

According to Global Peace Index, India is currently ranked near the bottom (122 with 2.422 score). Interestingly, India’s top weapons supplier, Israel, is among the world’s worst performers when it comes to peace ranking (141). It remains a simple fact that peace cannot be attained by a sophisticated security apparatus.

Furthermore, India topped Asian Risk Prospects 2009 with the highest political and social risk, scoring 6.87, mainly because of internal and external instability (PERC).

Suicides of Farmers and the Collapse of the Agricultural Sector

In the last two years, more than 218,000 people across India committed suicide, mainly due to poverty, family feuds, strained relationships with loved ones, dowry harassment, and health problems. In research by the Indian National Crime Records Bureau, there were 118,112 and 100,000+ suicides in 2005 and 2006 respectively. Aside from farmers, women also have a high suicide rate.

Most of those who committed suicide were farmers, and the victims took their lives either by hanging or ingesting poison. Since 1998, about 25,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide because they could not repay their debts. These debts, however, have largely accumulated because these farmers were severely overcharged by moneylenders, who demand up to 3

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Unemployment

Retail trade employs

Call centers and other outsourced businesses such as software coding, medical transcription, and back-office tasks employ more than 1.6 million people in India, mostly in their 20s and 30s. Heart disease is projected to account for 3

Internal Migration and Influx to the Cities

There are 5 million living on the streets of Mumbai every night, covered only in newspaper

says Dr. Werner Fornos, president of the Global Population Education think tank and the former head of the Population Institute in Washington, D.C.

India is spending more than $400 million (£200m) to polish Delhi’s image as a first-rate capital, a difficult task for a city that seems to exist between the First and Third worlds. A third of the capital’s 14 million-plus people live in teeming slums. According to crime statistics, in 2006, Delhi continued to be the undisputed crime capital of the country, a position it held for the previous 5 years in a row. 35 mega-cities in India collectively reported a total of 3,26,363 crimes in 2006, an increase of 3.

For the third year in a row, Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore together accounted for more than one-third of all crimes reported in Indian cities of over 1 million population.

India, a Closed Country

India’s share of the world tourism map has hovered between .3

Indian immigration policies do not welcome tourists. On VISA requirement and T&T index scales for how hard it is to visit a country, India ranked 106 while Malaysia ranked 15. VOA facilities are not available to anyone. The easiest entry to India is typically limited to countries with considerable Hindu populations like Mauritius or Nepal.

The Hindu elite leaders of the country are always more concerned about India’s physical boundaries and its holy cows rather than the life of its poor, 8

Indian Embassies are rated as the worst on Earth. They are notorious for red tape and “corruption- friendly service,” a complaint repeatedly made even by Non Resident Indians themselves. 9

Global Warming Effects on India

Water tables are dropping in those regions where farmers are lucky enough to have wells, and rainfall has become increasingly unpredictable. Economic losses due to global warming in India are projected at between 9-2

The frequency and intensity of tropical cyclones in the Bay of Bengal will increase. Cases of malaria will increase to the point where it will become endemic in many more states. There will be a 2

India got the most foreign aid for natural disaster relief in two decades, obtaining 43 such loans totaling $8.257 billion from World Bank alone, beating even Bangladesh, and now has the 2nd highest World Bank loan figure in the world.

Transportation

Despite the much-touted economic boom, only .

China has built over 34,000 km of expressways compared to less than 8,000 km in India.

According to Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry (ASSOCHAM), nearly 42 million man-hours are lost every month by the delays from 7 million-odd working population of Delhi and NRC who take the public transport to travel to work because of traffic congestion during the peak morning and evening hours.

Road Safety

India accounts for about 1

An estimated 1,275,000 persons are badly hurt on the road every year. The Government of India’s Planning Commission has estimated there are 15 hospitalized injuries and 70 minor injuries for every road death.

According to NATPAC, the number of accidents per 1,000 vehicles in India is as high as 35, while the figure ranges from 4 to 10 in developed countries. An estimated 270 people die each day from road accidents, and specialists predict that will increase by roughly

According to World Bank forecasts, India’s road death rate will continue to rise until 2042 if no remedial action is taken. In contrast, the number of road accidents in China dropped by an annual average 10.

Doing Business in India

It takes 50 days to register a property in India compared to less than 30 days in China and less than 10 in the United States and Thailand. The average cost of a business start-up is over 6

India has the highest cost of electricity among major industrialized and emerging economies ($.8 per kwh for industry as against $.1 kwh in China), or in other words, a quarter of the gross electricity output, the result being the highest transmission and distribution losses in the world.

Transport costs are very high in India. They account for 2

Foreign Remittance from Non Resident Indians

In 2006, India received $27 million in remittances national overseas workers, the highest amount globally. Around $20 billion of this came from the Gulf expatriate workforce. Together, GCC countries are the largest trading partner of India, and home to 5 million members of India’s overseas workforce.

Nearly three million people in Africa are of Indian ancestry. The top three countries with the largest populations of Indians in that region are South Africa, Mauritius, and the Reunion Islands. Indians also have a sizable presence in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania in the East Africa and Nigeria in West Africa.

Foreigners Living in India

Historically, about 7

Under the current scenario, potential migrants or ‘invaders’ to India include a few ‘hired or weird’ Pakistani bombers, villagers from around India’s border with Bangladesh, Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka, and prostitutes from Nepal. The 92 year old Indian painter Maqbool Fida Hussain lives in Dubai after receiving death threats from Hindu militants.

According to Hindu extremists, Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin has passed all the tests for Indian citizenship. On the other hand, Italian-born Sonia Gandhi, the Christian widow of Rajiv Gandhi, is still considered to be a foreigner, while Pakistan-born Hindu Lal Krishna Advani is ‘legally and morally fit’ to become India’s next Prime Minister.

Leave India!

Sixty years ago Indians asked the British to get out of India. Now they are doing it themselves. To live with dignity and enjoy relative freedom, one has to leave India! With this massive exodus, what will be left behind will be a violently charged and polarized society.

The Hindutvadis’ Fake National Pride in India

A 2006 opinion poll by Outlook-AC Nielsen indicated that 4

Even Parliament members of the Hindutva party are involved in human trafficking from India. Recently, police arrested Babubhai Katara, a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP, who was part of such a racket. He received $20,000 per person to move his victims to the US.

When Indians are fleeing India to anywhere else in the world just to find a job, how can these Hindutva idiots claim any “National Pride of India”?

India is the World Bank’s largest borrower. In June 2007, it provided $3.7 billion in new loans to India. According to figures provided by Britain’s aid agency, the total aid to India from all sources is only $1.50 a head, compared with an average of $17 per head for low-income countries [Financial Times]. Due to the fake ‘Shining India’ propaganda launched by Hindutva idiots, foreign donors are reluctant to help the poor people in this country.

Gridlocked in corruption, greed, inhumanity, and absolute inequality of class, caste, wealth, and religion: this is the real India. Hindutva idiots, your false pride and antics embarrass us.

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"We'll Get You Pie Before You Die," by Alpha Unit

The fruits of their labor built America’s cities and homes, historians say, and made some people very rich. Nowadays we call them loggers. Once upon a time they were lumberjacks. Or “timber beasts,” if you really didn’t like them. Life was rough and frequently cut short when you did this kind of work. At the beginning of the twentieth century when serious efforts were made to unionize the logging industry, most workers in the country were virtual slaves, called “wage slaves” by organizers, according to journalists John C. Hughes and Ryan Teague Beckwith. In their book On the Harbor: From Black Friday to Nirvana, they chronicle unionization efforts for loggers in the Pacific Northwest, and go into detail about their working conditions. Record-keeping wasn’t very good in those days, but a man’s life expectancy as a logger was said to be about seven years, they say.

Seldom a week went by without a buddy killed or maimed by a rolling log, a falling tree, a giant splinter run through him, or a whipping cable slicing him in two.

From the time he got out of bed in the morning, a logger never knew if he’d make it back to the bunkhouse in one piece, as one writer put it. Hughes and Beckwith continue:

Sawmill workers and shingle weavers lost fingers so routinely that it was practically a rite of passage. Hands and arms went flying, too, in geysers of blood, as the saws shrieked.

None of this made much of a difference to the employers. None of what many workers take for granted today existed then in this industry – no safety regulations, no inspections of gear or practices, and certainly no health insurance or rehabilitation programs. According to Hughes and Beckwith:

When a logger was crippled or killed, the bosses often said it was his own damn fault. He was too careless, or a greenhorn. Maybe just unlucky. “Joe’s number was up. We’re burnin’ daylight. Let’s get the lead out!”

These workers were easy to take advantage of. They were typically single young men, often recent immigrants. Many were migrants who followed timber jobs as they became available. But conditions in lumber camps were so bad that, by one estimate, the annual turnover rate was as high as 600 percent. Employers didn’t seem to care. They weren’t moved in the slightest to do anything to ameliorate the conditions that were creating this astronomical turnover. Conditions like overcrowded, lice-infested bunkhouses. Another author, John E. Haynes, described some of the logging camps in Minnesota.

Bunkhouses were ventilated only by doors at each end and one or two small skylights in the roof. One or perhaps two iron stoves, kept fired all night, provided heat. The poor ventilation compounded sanitary problems. The men worked 11-hour days in the cold Minnesota winter and generally wore two or three sets of underwear in addition to their outer garments. The combination of wet snow and hard labor soaked the jacks’ clothes every day, but the men were without washing facilities either for themselves or what they wore…layers of sets of wet-from-sweat clothes hung near the stove every night to dry for the next day. The steam from the clothes joined the stench of tightly-packed, unwashed bodies in the bunkhouses, prompting one Wobbly to comment that “the bunkhouses in which the lumberjacks sleep are enough to gag a skunk.”

Toilet facilities were primitive in the extreme, says Haynes. Privies were simply shallow, open pits with a roof and some poles for seats. The privies were rarely treated with lime or even covered with dirt. To the men who hired the workers, all of this was perfectly okay. If you were a worker who didn’t think it was okay, your option was to quit. A perfectly fine arrangement, correct? Not so, said union organizers, specifically the IWW, or Industrial Workers of the World – also known as the Wobblies. It was workers just like these loggers that the Wobblies focused their energies on. Any wage earner could be a Wobbly, says labor historian Gibbs M. Smith. It didn’t matter what your occupation, race, creed, or sex was. You could be Black or White or Asian, American or foreign-born, skilled or unskilled. This openness toward unskilled workers is what set the IWW apart from the American Federation of Labor. The AFL adhered to a craft union philosophy and were too conservative for the Wobblies. Consisting mainly of skilled workers, the AFL refused to organize the unskilled. “Big Bill” Haywood led the IWW. He favored industrial unionism over craft unionism, stating:

We are going to go down into the gutter to get at the mass of workers and bring them up to a decent plane of living.

Machinery and advancing technology were progressively eliminating the need for skilled craftsmen, Smith writes. The IWW believed that since the employers had united into great combinations of capital to maintain supremacy, it was necessary to organize all workers, skilled and unskilled, into industrial unions “to wage effective war on the integrated power of modern industry.” In their efforts to organize loggers, it wasn’t just conditions in the camps that the IWW protested. They strongly objected to the “job sharks” who supplied laborers to the mills and logging camps. Because working conditions were so awful, employers hired agents to snare fresh bodies, as Hughes and Beckwith put it. In the winter of 1911-12, the IWW took a stand against the logging companies and their job agents in Aberdeen, Washington. Off-duty laborers would pass by and congregate near the Sailors’ Union Hall in downtown Aberdeen, where IWW organizers had begun their outreach efforts. The favored spot was near a saloon owned by a city councilman. The City Council didn’t like the IWW, seeing them as subversives, so it passed an ordinance prohibiting street speaking in the locality. But the City Council chose to look the other way for one group in particular, another group that was interested in the laborers, or at least in their souls – the Salvation Army. The Wobblies didn’t like this one bit. Joe Hill, an immigrant from Sweden who had worked his way across the country as a laborer in factories and mines, and on farms and waterfronts, had joined the IWW once he made it to California. He mocked the “Starvation Army” in a song that parodied their hymn “In the Sweet Bye and Bye”:

Long-haired preachers come out every night, Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right; But when asked how ’bout something to eat They will answer with voices so sweet: You will eat, bye and bye, In that glorious land above the sky; Work and pray, live on hay, You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.

The IWW kept up their protests of the Aberdeen ordinance, suffering vigilante violence in the process. In January of 1912, the City Council passed another ordinance – this time outlawing all street speaking. The Salvation Army, too, had to lie low. But the IWW wasn’t contented. This was about the principle of free speech as well as organizing workers. They staged another protest, complete with singing, soap boxing, a boycott of local merchants, and a lot of bad publicity. Eager to avoid the kind of destructive conflict that had gripped Spokane a couple of years earlier during IWW-led protests, the city of Aberdeen reached a settlement with the Wobblies. They consented, finally, to street speaking. The Wobblies moved the free-speech fight on to other cities, and organized a massive strike that closed every wood-working plant on Grays Harbor. The timber industry eventually met many IWW demands, such as clean bedding and the 8-hour workday, during World War I. According to Hughes and Beckwith:

Frightened of paralyzing strikes that could harm logging of spruce for military planes, the U.S. Army created a special Spruce Production Division. With military efficiency the “Spruce Army” improved conditions more than the Wobblies ever had.

The Wobblies didn’t get everything they set out to get as an organization. They wanted all workers united into “One Big Union.” It hasn’t happened. They wanted workers to unite to overthrow capitalism. Capitalism is still here, a hundred years later (and so are the Wobblies). But the city fathers in Aberdeen became afraid of them. Lumber company owners were afraid of them, and so were Chamber of Commerce managers. The U.S. Army became afraid of them. That’s quite a feat.

References

Haynes, John E. 1971. Revolt of the “Timber Beasts”: IWW Lumber Strike in Minnesota. St Paul: Minnesota Historical Society.
Hughes, John C. and Beckwith, Ryan Teague, eds. 2005. On the Harbor: From Black Friday to Nirvana. Las Vegas: Stephens Press.
Smith, Gibbs M. 1969. Joe Hill. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
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