Four False Ideas about Overpopulation

Steve is a left-leaning commenter who posted a video with a deceptive title that nevertheless has some interesting things to say about overpopulation – namely, the global birth rate is at replacement, all nations are trending downwards, and many 3rd World countries are trending towards replacement level also. Global population, instead of growing exponentially,  will instead hit 11 million around the year 2100 and will level off after that. However, I disagree with the scientist who made this video that world overpopulation is therefore no big deal. This is simply a Pollyanna view of things.

This is in HD and the real title is ‘don’t panic- the truth about population’. http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x175qup_bbc-this-world-don-t-panic-the-truth-about-population-h264-1280×720-aac-rmac_news

There are two sources of some very crazy views about overpopulation, one from the Right and one from the Left. A third view held by elites and even US liberals, is not much nuts as it is just wrong. The fourth view, which is portrayed in the Steve kindly linked to, is the most rational anti-overpopulation view of all. While certainly positive and hopeful, this view founders on the shoals of blind optimism. . Hard rightwing economic liberals or Libertarians who believe that in order for capitalism to succeed, you need a population that grows forever. These nuts, one of whom is named Simon (some Jew, figures), offer the Netherlands as an example. As if the whole world could be as overpopulated as the Netherlands and still function! The other nutcases are on the Left. These loons hate all talk of overpopulation because it shuns aside the causes of poverty, instead blaming poverty on poor people “having too many kids!” This is true to some extent, but it glosses over the fact that overpopulation is indeed a horrific problem in the Third World for many reasons, not least of which is the destruction of ecosystems, species and whatnot. And many 3rd World countries are not the slightest bit overpopulated. For instance, Bolivia is not the slightest bit overpopulated. If anything, they are underpopulated. Bolivia is one of the most underpopulated places on Earth. Why are they so poor? Because income is distributed so poorly. Others have high incomes but distribute wealth very poorly. For instance, Mexico, with a PCI of $15,000/yr, is a relatively wealthy country. Many nations with PCI’s like that are nice, modern and pleasant places to live. Not 3rd World at all. In fact, $15,000/yr is approaching 1st World incomes. Yet recently up to 5 Mexico City’s slums are horrifying. There is so much shitting outside going on that there are tiny bits of toilet paper and shit floating around in the air of Mexico Shitty all the time. I call this phenomenon “shit air,” and I assume Mexico Shitty is not the only place where even the very air you breathe is literally full of shit. The argument here is, “Mexico has too many people!” Actually they do not. California is more crowded than Mexico. Anyway, at $15,000 PCI there should be plenty to go around. There is a third false view about the overpopulation problem. This view is not so much crazy as it is simply self-serving and false. One group (often Democratic Party liberals and liberal or elite types in other nations) likes to put all the blame for 3rd World poverty on poor people having too many babies. If you mention that Bolivia is actually underpopulated, you get a wild argument that, “They have too many kids!” Yet with such an underpopulated country, even a fairly high birthrate should not be a major problem. They do not wish to discuss distribution problems because presumably they don’t really support redistribution of income. The other group (the Leftists) says that overpopulation is not a problem and anyway, saying 3rd Worlders have too many babies is racist. They also say that focusing on overpopulation takes away focus on income maldistribution, which is true. The third group is simply insane. High birth rates? No problem, good for growth. Overpopulated countries? Cool, the better to grow your economy with, my dear. The whole world can easily be as overpopulated as the Netherlands with no issues whatsoever. This argument is so insane that there is no use refuting it. These arguments are a bit circular. Poor people tend to have lots of kids. Telling them to stop making kids doesn’t really work. They rely on kids for labor and social security when they get old because the state has no elderly pension program. Until you distribute income better, you will never get low population growth. And as you stabilize incomes the way the loony Leftists want, the population naturally stabilizes anyway as women who have stable lives prefer not to have lots of children. Really all four of these groups are just wrong.

  1. The whole world cannot live like the Netherlands. Explosive birth and growth rates are hardly good for growth. Look at Latin America, the Philippines, India and sub-Saharan Africa. Babies popping out all over the place. See any growth there? Of course not. Exploding population growth seems to coincide with mass poverty.
  2. Overpopulation is indeed a problem in many ways. If you are a blind Leftist and can’t see that, there’s no hope for you. You are simply an irrational ideologue.
  3. Maldistribution is indeed a problem and it needs to be fixed, whether you liberals like it or not. Income inequality is a terrible thing, and it causes a whole witches brew of problems in and of itself.
  4. It is very positive and hopeful that the world’s birth rate is at replacement level, the birth rate is trending down in most nations, and even 3rd World countries are now at or near replacement birth rates. Nevertheless, this rose colored glasses view glosses over the problem that 7.2 billion people is already far too many for our carrying capacity and is causing many problems in the world in and of itself to both human and nonhuman life and environments. If 7.2 billion is already disastrous, one can imagine how much worse 11 billion is going to be. This false view seems to be that “a positive trend equals a positive result.” That is very tempting thinking, but the more you think about it, the more you realize its fallacious nature.

What I Would Give to See This Clock Run Backwards

The only three clocks on that page that are important are the clocks showing

  • World Population Growth
  • Population Growth Today
  • Population Growth This Year

The only clocks I like to see going up are:

  • Deaths Today
  • Deaths This Year

Births Today  and Births This Year clocks will increase in numbers no matter what the world’s population is like. New babies are born every day and every year no matter what, no getting around that. That World Population Growth clock is one of the most terrifying things I have seen in a long time. I am actually glad that I have maybe a few more decades here before I shuffle off this mortal coil. I don’t want to be around for the inevitable genocidal “correction” (similar to a stock market “correction”). Malthus was right, and Malthusianism is a hard and fast rule as good Newton’s or any other physical law. At some point, human population will simply grow too large and then mass war, starvation or disease will correct the numbers. It works precisely this way in Nature, and humans are nothing if not animals ourselves. Always remember, not only can’t you fool Mother Nature, but: Mother Nature Always Bats Last.

Right Wing Corporate Lie: Environmentalists Won't Let Us Build New Oil Refineries!

Woodchucker writes:

Oil sands are refined here and the product sold to – eyup the US. What isn’t refined is shipped in various levels of refinement. Costs to build new refineries at current Environmental standards are too much of a hit on the profit margins. Better to export to an old grandfathered refinery ( out of Country even better ), plus the by products become someone else’s “asset”.

Unless Woodchucker is speaking of Canada about which I have no information, it is just not true that oil refineries are a net loss. Here is the sleazy, slimy lying game that the dirty oil companies and their oily backers in the Republican Party play: The oil companies and their Republican whores are always yelling that environmentalists are keeping us from building new oil refineries. Every time there is a spike in gas prices, these scums all start screaming and yelling that we need to get rid of all the regulations on oil refineries so it will be profitable to build new refineries. Here is the truth. The regulations are no problem at all for building new refineries. They have built new ones in recent years and most of the older ones meet current emissions standards. Oil refineries make money. They are a good investment. The reason oil companies have built so many oil refineries is because they make a lot of money off the refined oil from these refineries which they then market all over the world. The truth is that the oil companies could build new refineries any time they want to, but they have chosen not to build any new ones for quite some time now. The reason that they have deliberately chosen not to build new refineries is because the oil companies want a permanent refinery shortage. With a permanent refinery shortage, there are frequent bottlenecks in supply that cause prices to be artificially high. So they maintain as few refineries as possible in order to keep prices as high as possible. If they built more refineries, they would still make money, just not as much. But they hate those regulations that they have to go by because it costs a lot of money to install new anti-pollution equipment. So in order to try to get rid of these regulations, they lie and say that the regulations are what is causing your gas prices to be so high and if it weren’t for those evil environmentalists, your gas would be a lot cheaper. The corporate media generally goes along with those disgusting charade. For many years, I thought that environmental regulations kept us from building new plants. There are only a few scattered voices in the media who actually tell the truth about the oil industry. The rest of the media are bought off corrupted whores are 10

Keystone XL Pipeline: The Truth

This is an excellent piece by a new guest writer on here, Juliette Zephyr, a young woman from Maryland who, believe it or not, is only 22 years old. I was very impressed with the writing in this piece.

Juliette Zephyr.
Juliette Zephyr. Born and raised north of Baltimore, Juliette works in tourism and is involved in environmental activism. She enjoys networking, reading, and performing concerts.
  People really need to read up on this Keystone Pipeline. It’s a very, very bad idea.

Keystone XL Pipeline: The Truth

By Juliette Zephyr

The proposed Keystone XL Pipeline project is slated to transport oil sands straight down the middle of the country, all the way from Canada to Nebraska, where it will then connect to an existing leg of the pipeline that was already constructed. In its path is the Ogallala Aquifer, home to a variety of native species such as the sage grouse, as well as being one of the most important sources of drinking water in the U.S. The pipeline will also cut across North Dakota’s Bakken Shale basin, where crude oils will be extracted using a well-known and very dirty drilling technique called hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” The EPA knows that fracking is a risky business for the surrounding communities in which it is implemented. EPA scientists have confirmed that the water in many areas where this is occurring is indeed contaminated with drilling chemicals, heavy metals, and stray oils, with alarming pictures appearing all over the internet depicting people’s well water catching on fire. With massive expansion of fracking all over the country, especially in compromised areas where citizens rely on groundwater near drill sites, we have a national problem only made worse by policymakers motivated by corporate interests, attempting to hawk it as a so-called “boost” to our economy, and claiming that it won’t have any long-term negative implications for us environmentally. The fact of the matter is that the majority of the oil transported by Keystone are eventually destined for export to other countries in Europe and South America. Furthermore, it is expected that just fifty permanent jobs will be created, and there’s currently no substantiated evidence that the pipeline will lower oil prices for American citizens. Instead, current research paints a bleaker picture. Recent investigations uncovered that the leak detection systems in place for the pipeline are faulty – nineteen out of twenty spills are undetected. What’s further alarming is that spills involving tar sands oil are much more damaging to the environment than traditional crude oil. They don’t biodegrade easily at all, and sink in the water. It is extremely difficult to undo the damage once an sand oil spill has happened, it and costs a lot to clean up. People can and already have been developing asthma and lung issues from the bad air quality in areas immediately surrounding the Keystone Pipeline. Methane is considered one of the primary concerns of the greenhouse gas emissions produced in these areas. Keystone is clearly not in the public’s best interest, but let’s take a more in-depth look at the exact environmental impact it would have: It will significantly add to carbon pollution, locking in high-carbon infrastructure for half a century. It is estimated to reach $128 billion in climate costs. The FSEIS found it could contribute $1.43 billion in accumulated incremental tons of greenhouse gas emissions to our atmosphere over the next fifty years. Considering that tar sands oil is much more carbon-intensive than conventional oil, these incremental emissions are equivalent to adding 5.7 million cars to the road for fifty years. The controversy of what this pipeline would entail highlights a larger problem: our dependency on fossil fuels. Instead of funding tests to pioneer cleaner energy sources, Big Oil chooses to put all their eggs in one basket, to the detriment of our ecosystems.

RIP Black Rhinoceros

From the link:

At some point in the next five or ten years, all sub-species of black rhinos will go extinct in the wild. He writes at one point that in order for Namibia’s black rhinos to survive, it isn’t necessary for local tribesmen to like the animals – it’s only necessary that they not hate them. But as long as there exists a black market in Africa, those tribesmen need only hate their own poverty (or feel a touch of a human emotion called greed) to keep going out into the scrubland and shooting rhinos. The more the Namibian government clamps down on poaching, the more money the black market will offer for every dead animal. This would be bad enough if there were ten thousand black rhinos in the world, but there are very likely fewer than a thousand. There’s no way the animals can win.

Conservatives like this? They think this is ok, all right, no big deal, not a problem? I don’t get it. But I will say, “Screw conservatives,” just for that one crap view right there. On another note, primitive people of any type, African Blacks in particular, simply cannot be relied upon to preserve any wild animal of any type. To preserve wildlife goes against the human tendency to solipsism and short-term profit at the expense, and I think in the modern era, it requires a relatively high IQ. The Black African IQ, at 67 or 75 or whatever it is, is simply too low to preserve any wild animal. “What’s in it for me?” They will ask. “Nothing,” will be the answer. Don’t give me the poverty argument. Georgia and Moldova are just as poor and they are not exterminating any animals on their land, though they could easily do so, particularly with the hated wolves. The Blacks were never able to complete their goal of exterminating  everything wild in Africa but the cockroaches and flies not because they were nice people but because they had primitive weapons. When modern weapons showed up, the Blacks were all colonized, and the Europeans, believe it or not, kept the Blacks from exterminating all the animals, and even made parks to protect the creatures. With decolonization in the mid-1960’s, the Africans quickly went about exterminating all non-human non-domesticated animals. After all, now they not only had guns, but they even had automatic weapons. Giving a 67 IQ human an AK-47 can never be a good idea. At the same time, they also went about exterminating a lot of their fellow humans. The extermination of wildlife was so extreme (painfully recorded in the great Italian film Africa Addio) that the Europeans, who had just been tossed out, were quickly called back in by some decent-minded Africans to serve as quasi-colonists to protect the animals from the Africans and the Africans from themselves. European paternalism is the only reason that there are large numbers of wild animals left on the continent. I am still convinced that Africans are in need of some paternalism.

70,000 Reindeer Die of Starvation in Russia's North

Global warming. Although idiots say that the extremely cold, rainy and snowy winter and spring in the region does not fit in with global warming, actually it does because global warming is supposed to make the world’s climate more chaotic. Most regions will warm up, but some will actually get colder, snowier, more rainy, etc. If you think this website is valuable to you, please consider a contribution to support the continuation of the site.

World Population Clock

Here. Great website. Watch the world’s population climb inexorably upwards! You can set it to see the whole world’s population (a truly terrifying clock that increases seemingly about 3 human beings per second), or you can set it per nation. The nation clocks generally do not climb very fast, in fact, most of them climb so slowly that you can’t even watch them go up in the time a normal patient person would logically sit in front of the clock. The number of nations that grow by more than one human being per minute is not large at all. And it is true that a number of nations (including some that would really surprise you) are either hardly growing at all, are basically flat or are even losing population. Many nations in Europe, especially in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, are actually losing population. Nations in Western Europe tend to be gaining population but at a much slower rate, probably almost all due to immigration. Among the West European nations, Italy is losing population. It is claimed that Communism caused East Europe and the former USSR to lose population, but as far as I can tell, the population losses happened after the move to capitalism and not before. At any rate, if Communism causes negative population growth, I would say that that is one thing in its favor! In Latin America, Cuba is actually losing population. Rightwing liars claim that this is because so many young people leave the island, but that’s not true. It’s because it is developing the population structure typical of a 1st world country. First world countries tend to develop negative population growth after a bit. Cuba’s population is aging in a typical First World trend. This is due to great medical care and general high quality of life. Not that many young people leave Cuba in the first place, and when they do, they almost all go to the US. It is fascinating that Cubans only want to go to the US. For some reason, they shun the capitalist workers’ paradises of Latin America. Now why is that? Also, a huge number of the young of Mexico and even Central America leave their countries (also to come to the US just like the Cubans do), but their populations continue to grow. So obviously, Cubans aging population and negative population growth are not caused by the propaganda lie of “all the young people are leaving.” When your survival and whatnot is pretty much assured and women are educated, women get smart and don’t have many kids. Many 3rd World nations lack social security (even Communist China to their discredit), so people have lots of kids to take care of them in their old age. Others have lots of kids to have free labor to help on their small farm plots. Women are not educated in many 3rd world countries and birth control is not widely available. Many such nations are under oppressive macho patriarchy in which men feel that having more kids makes them more masculine. Check out the clocks of India and China if you really want to scare yourself.

"No Rainwater in Tokelau," by Alpha Unit

There’s not enough water in Texas. There’s not enough in East Africa and some other places, too. Climate change is being blamed for some of it. La Niña, specifically, is being blamed for what’s happening in Texas – and for what’s happening in the South Pacific. Several island nations in the region are having water shortages and trying to fend off a crisis. Tuvalu and parts of Samoa have begun water rationing. And the tiny nation of Tokelau, a territory of New Zealand, has only a week’s worth of fresh drinking water left. The people who live there collect rainwater for drinking, but because of La Niña, there hasn’t been much rain. New Zealand is now in a joint humanitarian effort with the US government. A US Coast Guard vessel stationed in Honolulu met up with a New Zealand Defence Force aircraft on American Samoa to get water to Tokelau. The US Coast Guard cutter Walnut has used its onboard desalination plant to produce 136,000 liters of drinking water. International seagoing vessels typically have onboard desalination plants. Naval vessels, cruise ships, and privately owned vessels have them. Most US Navy ships use reverse osmosis (RO) desalination plants. In the RO process, pressurized seawater is filtered through a specialized semi-permeable membrane, which can remove about 9 By the way, governments and private concerns have been examining the prospect of offshore desalination vessels for years. (Everything’s on the table. There’s a lot of people – and people use a lot of water.) There’s much to consider, cost (including energy costs) and what to do with that brine you get from desalination being major questions. But there are people figuring it out.

Hilary Clinton, Tea Partier

This is what Hilary Clinton said recently. Discussing global warming, she said that global warming will be a great thing because the arctic ice will melt enough so that ships will be able to cruise through the Arctic very easily without having to worry about ice. I guess the Nome to Oslo route will be nice and quick.

Hilary Clinton was a good liberal President’s wife under Bill Clinton in the 1990’s. If you read her work, she’s always been a good liberal. But something happens to US liberals once they get into office. They morph into rightwingers.

It’s interesting to ponder why this might be so.

The truth is that the US government is owned completely by the US rich, the corporations, the bankers and Wall Street. With Citizens United, this is more true than ever. Even Democrats have to take the cash from the corporations and the rich if they want to get into office. Note the recent $45,000 a plate dinner for “liberal” Barack Obama. These are the people who put Obama into office. These are the people who own him. He’s beholden to them, not to us. When he gets into office, they give him his marching orders.

Once a President of either party gets into office, they realize that they are controlled by the rich and the corporations who really run the country. Republicans realize this anyway, and they only work for the moneyed classes and corporations anyway, so they don’t care. But no matter how liberal a Democrat is, this is the reality that hits them in the face the day they walk into office. Reading Barack Obama’s published work before 2008, he seems to be the typical liberal university professor type. But once he got into office, that all changed, and he’s spent most of his time trying to out-Reagan Ronald Reagan.

The truth is that the same thing probably happened to both Hilary and Obama. Once you get in office, you realize who really calls the shots in the US – the rich and the corporations. They run the country, the run both parties, the entire US media – TV, newsmagazine, newspapers, the Pentagon, the US military – in short, they run this entire country as their personal feudal fiefdom. You can’t go against them. On domestic policy, you must obey your rich and corporate feudal masters. On foreign policy, the agenda is US imperialism. You must obey the dictates of your lords and masters or you will be destroyed and run out of office.

This is probably as good an explanation as any of why there is no US Left, why there is no opposition press in the US, why we have two rightwing parties – the radical rightwing Republicans and the moderate rightwing Democrats, and why the future of America is the same as the future of all countries controlled by the Right – hopeless and progressive Third Worldization.

The Stupid Party

The Republican Party has been anti-science for a long time now, since Reagan in 1980 at least. Part of the problem is due to capitalism. Capitalists simply reject science when it gets in the way their profits. That’s why the state always has to run science research. Science is too important to let smarmy capitalist liars get their mitts all over it. Science run by capitalists, when it was done at all, would come up with exactly those findings that the capitalists running the science would want to come up with.

Note I said when it was done at all. Much basic science simply would not be run by the private sector. The private sector would only fund science that they thought they could make a buck off of, or else they would fund fraudulent science designed to protect their profits from regulators.

The Republican Party has been getting more anti-science since 1980. In fact, recent studies have shown that watching Fox News actually makes you stupid, in a dose response fashion. The more Fox News you watch, the stupider you get. That’s because Fox News lies to you about the truth all the time. There are many truths that Fox News will not admit because they are ideologically bad for the Right. And there are many lies that it continues to peddle because those lies are good for the Right.

Fortunately, the Left in the US, or what’s left of it, doesn’t have the same problem.

New information has just come out that proves that a majority of Republican voters, at least in Iowa, may well be retarded. Of Iowa Republicans:

7

6

Rick Perry has chimed in. He doesn’t believe in evolution either, but he believes in fucking beautiful young men, in quantities even. Rick Perry doesn’t believe in global warming either, but he believes in fucking scores of hot young hookers, stripper and call girls, often while doing lines of cocaine.

Perry has a particularly bizarre theory about global warming. He says that there is a gigantic conspiracy on the part of tens of thousands of climate scientists all over the world to cook the books and make up this fake scientific theory. Why are they all lying like this? For the money, he says. To keep the dollars rolling into their projects. Amazing, and not one scientist has blown the whistle about this.

Never mind that 97.

Mitt Romney has chimed in idiotically, saying that he is not sure if the planet is warming or if humans are to blame. Way to have it both ways, Mittens.

Stop the House Interior Funding Bill

A mail I got from the Defenders of Wildlife, a group I support. I don’t really understand why environmentalists vote Republican. If you’re an environmentalist who votes Republican, why don’t you tell us what’s going through your head. The Republican Party is a viciously, savagely, brutally anti-environmental party, and they have been for 30 years now, since Reagan.

If you like to fish and hunt, why vote Republican? I don’t get it. Fishing and hunting depends on open, clean and wild areas for the fish and animals to live in. Republicans destroy rivers and lakes and wreck any wild land that they can find.

Now, if you’re an anti-environmentalist and vote rightwing, I respect that. You are a man of principles, and you are sticking to them. But a fisherman, a hunter, and environmentalist, who votes rightwing? You need to have your head examined.

Denham, the guy who wants to kill the restoration of the salmon run in the San Joaquin River, is my congressman. He’s as reactionary as they come; he’s more or less a Tea Partier. People don’t understand California. The Whites here (and some of the others) are very rightwing. The only liberals are on the coast. Inland, in the Central Valley, the Inland Empire, the Great Basin, the North Coast, the Sierra Nevada and the Cascades is very White and very, very rightwing. By the way, all of this slashing and cutting is being done under the rubric of deficit reduction.

The House of Representatives has left town for their summer recess, but not before unveiling a barrage of new anti-wildlife provisions in the Interior spending bill.

These provisions threaten wild Mexican gray wolves and endangered Kemp’s Ridley sea turtles with extinction and pose a significant threat of increased injury and death for gentle manatees.

We must stop them.

Some in Congress seem bound and determined to unravel basic protections for some of our most vulnerable wildlife…

* Extinct Mexican gray wolves. Republican Representative Steve Pearce (NM) has introduced an amendment to end lobo recovery efforts, essentially dooming the 50 remaining Mexican gray wolves in the wild to extinction. * Crushed sea turtles. Republican Representative Blake Farenthold (TX) has proposed blocking efforts to reduce the speed limits on beaches where threatened and endangered sea turtles – already reeling from the effects of last year’s BP oil disaster – nest. * Wounded manatees. Boat strikes are one of the leading causes of death for Florida’s threatened manatees, but Republican Representative Richard Nugent (FL) wants to block a Fish and Wildlife Service rule to prevent boat collisions and end the hazing of these gentle sea cows. * Dead salmon. Representative Republican Jeff Denham (CA) has introduced an amendment to block restoration of salmon in the San Joaquin River. * A path to extinction for lesser prairie chickens and dunes sagebrush lizards. Republican Representatives Pearce (NM) and Randy Neugebauer (TX) are fighting to prohibit vital Endangered Species Act protections for these highly vulnerable animals. * A lawless border zone. Republican Representatives Paul Gosar (AZ) and Rob Bishop (UT) have proposed amendments that would exempt the border patrol from laws and regulations that protect imperiled wildlife and federal conservation lands like our national parks and wildlife refuges.

But that’s not all. The bill also proposes deep cuts in funding for our National Wildlife Refuges and key conservation programs to keep our imperiled wildlife and wild lands safe.

"The Indifference of Polar Bears," by Alpha Unit

Svalbard is the northernmost part of Norway. This archipelago lies midway between mainland Norway and the North Pole. About 6 Polar bears are a symbol of Svalbard. They are one of the main tourist attractions, in fact. Anyone traveling outside the settlements is required to carry a rifle at all times. Tourists are warned about the danger and unpredictability of these animals. You can forget about outrunning a polar bear. A 17-year-old British boy is dead this weekend after a group he was camping with on Spitsbergen Island was attacked by a polar bear. He was part of an expedition run by the British Schools Exploring Society. The group, most of them between the ages of 16 and 23, were hunting for fossils, taking part in environmental experiments, and clearing beaches of debris. They split into smaller groups to head out to more remote areas. The boy was in a group of 13 people who were attacked. Others were lucky enough to survive it, at least so far. Some of them are in the hospital with severe injuries. The polar bear is dead, too. One of the campers shot it. There are people just as outraged over the death of the bear as they are over the death of the boy. They point out that the polar bear is endangered. People shouldn’t be invading this animal’s habitat and then killing it when it acts on instinct. These expeditions need to stop. I don’t know if the expeditions will stop. They are clearly of value to many people. But I do know that conservationists around the world, including here in the U.S., are acting to protect the habitat of polar bears, filing lawsuits when they deem it necessary, to stop any kind of interference with the habitat of polar bears. The polar bears will go on doing whatever polar bears do to survive, including killing humans who come into their habitat when the bears are looking for food – and those humans are the only food available. Is there any such thing as peaceful coexistence when polar bears and humans are in the same space? Something or someone is probably going to die. If people die, as this 17-year-old did, it’s a tragedy. It’s no less a tragedy if bears die, some insist. It’s only humans that can care either way. The bears are indifferent to human suffering. They don’t care much about the survival of their species, either.

“The Indifference of Polar Bears,” by Alpha Unit

Svalbard is the northernmost part of Norway. This archipelago lies midway between mainland Norway and the North Pole. About 6

Polar bears are a symbol of Svalbard. They are one of the main tourist attractions, in fact. Anyone traveling outside the settlements is required to carry a rifle at all times. Tourists are warned about the danger and unpredictability of these animals. You can forget about outrunning a polar bear.

A 17-year-old British boy is dead this weekend after a group he was camping with on Spitsbergen Island was attacked by a polar bear. He was part of an expedition run by the British Schools Exploring Society.

The group, most of them between the ages of 16 and 23, were hunting for fossils, taking part in environmental experiments, and clearing beaches of debris. They split into smaller groups to head out to more remote areas. The boy was in a group of 13 people who were attacked. Others were lucky enough to survive it, at least so far. Some of them are in the hospital with severe injuries.

The polar bear is dead, too. One of the campers shot it. There are people just as outraged over the death of the bear as they are over the death of the boy. They point out that the polar bear is endangered. People shouldn’t be invading this animal’s habitat and then killing it when it acts on instinct. These expeditions need to stop.

I don’t know if the expeditions will stop. They are clearly of value to many people. But I do know that conservationists around the world, including here in the U.S., are acting to protect the habitat of polar bears, filing lawsuits when they deem it necessary, to stop any kind of interference with the habitat of polar bears.

The polar bears will go on doing whatever polar bears do to survive, including killing humans who come into their habitat when the bears are looking for food – and those humans are the only food available.

Is there any such thing as peaceful coexistence when polar bears and humans are in the same space? Something or someone is probably going to die. If people die, as this 17-year-old did, it’s a tragedy. It’s no less a tragedy if bears die, some insist.

It’s only humans that can care either way. The bears are indifferent to human suffering. They don’t care much about the survival of their species, either.

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?

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.

6

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

7

7

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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Romney Leading Obama in the Polls

This is extremely bad news, and it shows just how fanatically rightwing the reactionary American people are.

You wonder just how stupid Americans are. Romney is leading Obama, 49-46, in the latest ABC poll.

Romney is no moderate. This is what the joke is. Romney is seen as some kind of a moderate Republican. If this is what a moderate Republican is, we are in for some very deep trouble.

For instance, Romney has come out in full support of the Ryan Plan. The Ryan Plan would wipe Medicare off the face of the Earth, forcing the elderly to purchase their own medical insurance. It would also gut Medicaid by approximately 5

The rest of the Ryan Plan involves such deep cuts to the discretionary spending that it would end or seriously curtail most government programs outside of defense. The EPA, Food Stamps, the Department of Education and the Department of Energy would be wiped off the Earth.

Mitt Romney supports wiping out Medicare, Food Stamps, the EPA, the Department of Energy and the Department of Education. He would cut Medicaid in half. He  would seriously curtail much of the rest of government.

Mitt Romney also supports the repeal of Obamacare, even though his own Romneycare plan as governor of Massachusetts was the same thing as Obamacare. He now says he doesn’t even support his own plan.

Mitt Romney supports jailing doctors give women abortions. Wow! Kook alert!

Mitt Romney actually believes in anthropogenic global warming, which must make him the only Republican who does so. He also says we need to cut our emissions. Good for him.

But it’s all nothing but lies because he supports the work of a discredited scholar who says that the best way to deal with global warming is to do absolutely nothing to try to stop it and just let it take its course. He says that the implications of it will be very mild and in many cases will even be positive. He says that we can muddle through global warming just fine with few to no problems. Further, he says he should not lower emissions one bit because AGW is no big deal. This is the real Mitt Romney: Complain about AGW, but do nothing whatsoever.

Mitt Romney made his money as a corporate shark, raiding and destroying perfectly good companies. He engaged in leveraged buyouts in which would buy good companies, fire all the workers, sell off everything that could be sold, and then turn a profit. He made many millions of dollars this way and he destroyed tens of thousands of jobs and maybe more. He also destroyed many fine US companies. Bizarrely, Romney claims that he created many jobs.

The truth is that Mitt Romney is an ultra-rightwing Republican fanatic loon. There’s nothing moderate about him. If you can find anything moderate about him, show me.

Romney is running against Obama’s handling of the economy. However, Romney’s own plan only involves massive cuts to government spending along with serious cuts to taxes on rich people and corporations. None of this is going to create one job. This is the same failed supply side economics that’s been ruining America for the last 30 years. It won’t even do much to touch the deficit, since the tax cuts should wipe out most of the savings.

The Republican Party has thwarted any stimulus spending that could hope to get this economy off the ground. Whether that’s due to calculation or ideology, the fact is that the Republican Party is deliberately running the economy into the ground in order to defeat Obama on the basis of a bad economy.

All sane people agree that the Ryan Plan would cause a new recession, if not a full depression. I’m not sure if Republicans realize this. The cuts that the Republicans are demanding are only going to sink the economy in the short term. The thinking is that the Republicans are willing to deliberately wreck the economy in order to defeat Barack Obama.

Ian Welsh "The Kabuki Congress"

Here. I used to think that the Left, represented by guys like this, was insane or at least utterly unrealistic. Now it looks like the liberal/Left are the only sane people left in America. Want to preserve Social Security no further cuts? Only the liberal/Left supports this. Want to preserve Medicaid with no further cuts? Only the liberal/Left supports this? Want to preserve Medicare from further cuts? Only the liberal/Left supports this. Believe that polluting industries should be regulated? Only the liberal/Left supports this. Support the endangered species act and believe their preservation should be prioritized? Only the liberal/Left supports this. Believe that the US should pressure Israel to settle with the Palestinians and that the US should stop supporting the KKK-Jews in Israel unconditionally? Only the liberal/Left supports this. Opposed to the thorough corruption of US politics by corporations and big money? Only the liberal/Left supports this. Support the working class and middle class of America at the expense of the rich and the corporations? Only the liberal/Left supports this. Believe in labor rights and a government that fights for labor against corporate and business power? Only the liberal/Left supports this. Believe that free trade globalization is a catastrophe for the US worker? Only the liberal/Left supports this. Believe that neoliberalism, supply side economics and small government philosophy has failed US society for 40 years now and continues to destroy the US state and society? Only the liberal/Left supports this. Want to completely pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan? Only the liberal/Left supports this. Welsh points out that Barack Obama is a moderate Republican. He always has been. From day one. Once you finally figure that out, everything starts to make sense. My enviornmental organizations have been telling me about Barack Obama’s catastrophic failure to protect endangered species. This never made sense to me. Obama’s a liberal, right? So why isn’t he supporting endangered species? I don’t get it. He’ll start any day now, I kept saying. WTF is with Obama, I kept asking. No he won’t. Obama’s going to get worse and worse on endangered species until he ends up as bad as George Bush. Why? Obama’s neoliberal DNC Democrat who’s even more rightwing than Bill Clinton, and Clinton was horrific on endangered species. Clintonite Third Way corporatist DNC Democrats think preserving endangered species is bad for the economy. When it comes down to business vs environment, they always side with business. Now it all makes sense. Of course Obama wants to kill off all the endangered species and probably all the rest of non-human life too. That’s the DNC position. I also never understand why Obama supported Ken Salazar as Interior Secretary. Salazar is a rightwing ranching and logging destroy the environment Democrat from Colorado. Why did Obama appoint him as Interior Secretary? WTF is with Obama? I kept asking myself. Now it makes sense. Salazar is Obama. They are both committed to destroying our nation’s environment in the name of the business community. Why won’t Obama ratify the Kyoto Accords? WTF is with Obama, I kept asking. But Obama is a rightwing DNC Democrat. He believes that curbing global warming is bad for the economy, so he is going to throw the whole economy of the world under the bus for the business pigs. Sure, it makes sense. Why won’t Obama push card check, a major goal of unions? WTF is with Obama, I kept asking. Obama’s a liberal, right? He’s pro-union. But he isn’t. Obama hates unions, and he hates workers. He’s a zillionaire limousine liberal, a member of the tiny upper class of America. Obama’s always going to wage class warfare for his rich class against workers and the poor, every day of the week. It makes sense. Why does Barack Obama run around the world negotiating shitty neoliberal NAFTA trade agreements that cost US workers 20 jobs for every job they give us? WTF is with Obama, I kept asking. He’s a liberal, right? He’s for the workers, right? But he isn’t. He’s for business, and he hates workers. He’s out to screw the workers on behalf of his ultra-wealthy class every chance he gets. Obama’s also bought into the neoliberal lies that NAFTA agreements are the way to get the economy going. Why does Obama keep cutting taxes and then screaming about the deficit? WTF is with Obama, I kept asking. He’s a liberal, right? He knows that tax cuts and then deficit screaming is a plot to destroy government by deliberately starving it of funds to create a debt crisis, and then use the fake crisis to destroy government. Turns out Obama knows that full well. He’s actually one of the plotters. Obama’s goal is to deliberately devastate the state through endless crazy tax cuts, then fake scream about the debt bomb that he deliberately caused, then use that the ax the safety cut that he despises so much. Why does Obama hate the safety net? Not sure. These rich Democrats like Obama don’t have to use those programs and they get taxed for them. They probably want to shred the safety net on those grounds alone.

If Obama wasn’t black, he’d be a “moderate” Republican.  He is not a progressive, not a liberal and neither is Harry Reid.  Pelosi would be liberal in a different world, but she will do what the President tells her to do, she’s a good soldier.

Exactly. Even the “liberals” in Congress act like moderate Republicans when Obama orders them to. They won’t disobey him if he told them all to jump off a cliff.

Another Catastrophic Sellout from Obama

This time on the environment. Obama’s getting tired of throwing people under the bus, so this time, he’s throwing the planet under the bus. Obama: Change we can believe in. Air we can’t breathe in. I don’t know much about Obama and the environment. Has he done anything good on the environment at all? Can someone clue me in? All I can think of are bad things he has done on the environment. I guess that figures if he’s been a rightwing Democrat all along. Obama caves in on new environmental regulations for polluting industries.

The Obama administration is retreating on long-delayed environmental regulations — new rules governing smog and toxic emissions from industrial boilers. The move to delay the rules, announced this week by the Environmental Protection Agency, will leave in place policies set by President George W. Bush. President Obama ran for office promising tougher standards, and the new rules were set to take effect over the next several weeks.

In other words, Obama = George Bush, right? I always hated it when people said that, but increasingly, it seems to be true. Obama. You traitorous bastard. You piece of shit. From the tone of the article, the New York Times seems very happy with these changes. The EPA says it “needs more time to make its decision.” But they said that 3 months ago.

But in a striking turnabout, the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Petroleum Institute — which have been anything but friendly to Mr. Obama — are praising his administration.

Isn’t that wonderful? Obama’s new best friends are Fox News, the NAM, the Republican Party and the Wall Street Journal. Hey, you never have too many friends, right, Obama?

“We also hope EPA will now reconsider other costly and unworkable proposals,” such as a planned rule to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, said Howard Feldman, API’s director of regulatory and scientific affairs.

The American Petroleum Institute wants to “friend” you too, Obama. Just click yes on your Facebook page to be friends with the API! What’s he doing? Trying to get votes? There are no votes in opposing the environment. It’s a solid vote-getter. I don’t get it, unless Obama’s been anti-environment from the very start, like Clinton. That’s the only thing that makes sense.

Barack OHoover Says, "I'm a Blue Dog Democrat"

Two weeks ago, this traitor said that. Blue Dog Democrats are rightwing Democrats who vote with the Republicans at least half the time. They’re no good. In the last election, people were so sick and tired of them that half of their sickening Caucus got voted out of office. Republicans think they are socialists and Democrats think they are DINO’s. They have no friends. This is the friendless loser Caucus that Barack is lining up with. Way to go, chump! On the campaign trail, Barack repeatedly said that Ronald Reagan was his hero. That means he’s a Reaganite? In the Senate, he quickly ran right up to Jew Lieberman and made Lieberman his mentor. This may explain his puzzling behavior. Barack’s been a rightwing Democrat, a blue dog Democrat, all along. He’s a DINO. Otherwise his behavior doesn’t seem to make much sense. Of course he’s not a socialist or a Communist. He’s not even a liberal. Hell, he’s not even a moderate. He’s a rightwing DINO like Jew Lieberman. It is only in light of this analysis that his strange Republican like behavior makes sense. Barack’s been a secret Republican all along! That explains why he quickly packed his office with bankster and Wall Street holdovers from Bush. That’s why he made reactionary neoclassical economist Larry Summers his economic advisor. That’s why neoliberal Bernanke is on his economic team. That’s why he goes to India, shakes hand with the Indian Enemy, and says he’s saving the US economy. That’s why he negotiates another horrible free trade deal with South Korea and says he’s saying the economy. This is standard neoclassical economics. Barack’s apparently a disciple of Milton Friedman. This is why Barack was such a disaster on the Gulf oil spill. He’s a corporatist who loves BP and all oil corporations. This is why his record on the environment and endangered species has been so horrid. He’s a neoliberal who’s out to destroy the environment like all neoliberals. Either that, or he’s Black and hates or could care less about the wild and wild things like most Blacks. When you look at Barack as a rightwing Reagan Democrat, everything starts falling into place.

An Examination of the Frog Extinction Epidemic

Repost from the old site. Although many factors are involved in this epidemic, one of the worst is the Chytrid fungus epidemic. It is being spread by Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), which causes chytridiomycosis. This fungal disease is devastating frog populations all over the world, but particularly in Australia, and North, Central and South America. The devastation in Central America has been particularly acute, with many species simply vanishing from the face of the Earth. Bd is just now spreading here in the US, with serious devastation of Sierra Mountain Yellow-Legged Frog populations in the Sierra Nevada. However, some populations are apparently surviving the epidemic with some some survivors intact and thereupon rebuilding their populations. A paper in Nature (Pounds 2006) made the case that the chytrid epidemic was being driven by global warming. They suggested that Bd had always been there but had only become pathogenic in the face of global warming. A new paper (Lips 2008) in the journal PLoS Biology challenged that theory with some interesting data. I did not read the Pounds paper, but the Lips paper was quite convincing. Their argument is rather simple. If Bd had always been there, it would not show a spread rate typical of a spreading disease epidemic. Instead, it would tend to erupt in all places at once. Lips’ team showed first of all that Bd had not always been in the environment, that is, it was not an endemic. It appears to have escaped from an Australian lab around 1970 and from there spread through Australia. From Australia, it made its way to the Americas. We can see several places where it seems to have been introduced, and we can plot the years of introduction on a map. So Bd is acting like an invasive alien species.

Bd appears in Costa Rica in 1987 and then heads south to Panama. It seems to be following mountain ranges there too. The number of species lost in Costa Rica is very large.
Bd spread in South America following two introductions, one in 1977 and one in 1980. The 1980 Ecuadorian introduction heads both north and south along the Andes. The 1977 Venezuelan introduction heads south along the Andes. For some reason, Bd in South America is sticking to the Andes.

This is precisely how we would expect an epidemic following an introduction by an alien species to operate – a geographical spread from a point of introduction with a rate of spread in miles per year. Furthermore, the testing of many specimens in museums failed to find Bd in any of them prior to 1977. This suggests strongly that Bd is an invasive alien fungus that was not present in the environment before. An alternative hypothesis was not tested but did occur to me: That even though Bd was an alien exotic invasive fungus spreading after accidental introduction, global warming had somehow made Bd much more lethal to frogs. I can’t figure out a way to test that hypothesis, and I guess none of the researchers are considering it. The Pounds team is sticking to their guns on this one, but I think that they are wrong. It’s a good mind exercise to read academic science journal articles that test scientific hypotheses against competing hypotheses. It’s hard to read that stuff, but if you can get through it somehow, personally I find these brain puzzles to be a lot of fun. If you see learning as virtually a sensual activity as I do, this kind of stuff is almost as fun as a vacation, sports, sex or any other other purely sensual activity. Learning and thinking is actually a blast, to me anyway. Try it sometime!

References

Lips, Karen R., Diffendorfer, Jay, Mendelson III, Joseph R., Sears, Michael W. 2008. Riding the Wave: Reconciling the Roles of Disease and Climate Change in Amphibian Declines. PLoS Biology 6:3. Pounds JA, Bustamante MR, Coloma LA, Consuegra JA, Fogden MPL, et al. 2006. Widespread amphibian extinctions from epidemic disease driven by global warming. Nature 39: 161–167.

Cow Farts Cause More Global Warming Than Humans?

Repost from the old site. The latest rightwing crap. I was on a rightwing blog a couple of years ago and decided to ask how many believed in global warming. The vast majority did not. A few said it was happening, but it was natural. One or two said it was happening, but no one knew what was causing it, and we needed to study it more. This blog has unfortunately become infested lately with some young White male 20-something reactionary-to-libertarian trolls who are lurking in the comments section. It’s quite simple to be a libertarian when you are young, dumb and full of cum. I voted Libertarian at age 22. I’d never do it again, but that’s how you learn. People that age just haven’t been fucked hard enough and enough times by life yet. By the time we are 40, most of us have had about a million horrible things happen to us, and narcissism is on sharp decline. That’s why age and wisdom are traditionally synonymous. They’re causing a lot of dissension, but echo chambers are boring. Comments rules forbid me from banning folks based on ideology, so for the moment, they are sticking around. It’s kind of interesting to have some pet rightwingers to play with, because like a lot of pets, they do a lot of stupid shit. Since rightwingers can talk unlike all other pets, rightwingers also say stupid shit. Debating rightwingers is like debating ultranationalist Jewish Zionists. Most of their arguments are absolute crap. The reason is because what they are arguing for is perfectly horrible to most folks. Hence I really admire Zionists like Samson Blinded who just tell it like it is. I admire libertarians like Entitled to an Opinion who just lay it out in all of libertarianism’s heartless nastiness. Plus TGGP and Obaidah Shoher and really bright guys, and I have to admire that, if they are pushing something pretty awful. Since conservatism and Zionism are unpalatable to most folks as they actually exist, conservatives and Zionists always have to lie to try to get decent people to go along with their programs, which most folks find repellent. Anyway, it looks like the rightwing has moved on on global warming. Only But the new line is that global warming exists, but it’s not caused by people, it’s caused by cow farts! Well, if that were so, as a totalitarian, I would just say fine, so kill all the cows, serve the whole world steak for a month and be done with it. If that’s too radical, make a beef hamburger at McDonald’s cost twice what a chicken or turkey hamburger does. Soon every fast food joint has beef and non-beef options and profits are blasting right along. This rightwing argument, like most of them, is ultimately devious. The rightwingers know that this hamburger-munching Americans will never tax their beloved burgers even one penny. So they throw up their hands and say nothing can be done, especially about reducing auto emissions, which is really what they have their butts smoking about anyway. How dare you order me to ride a bike! Cow farts cause global warming, so what business do we have trying to reduce car emissions? Let global warming continue apace. Problem is that they are playing games with figures. It is true that the cattle industry, in the totality of its effects, does account for 1 If cow burping and farting is only 1 One would think that any livestock or animal husbandry is as capable of producing this problem as any other. Not so. Cattle cause the overwhelming majority of the global warming from animal husbandry. Therefore, we could continue to eat meat, but just switch from beef to lamb, turkey, chicken, pork, goat, etc. I’d love to turn a lot of the cattle lands on the Great Plains back to buffalo and then harvest them for food. We had great herds of buffalo roaming our Midwest for thousands of years with no problems for the ecosystem and no global warming issues. I am told that rabbits are an excellent food. A great way to do this would just be to tax beef and probably even milk based on the amount of damage it does to the ecosystem. My brother (I won’t go near the place) informs me that hamburgers at McDonald’s cost from $1-4. Double the price. Make them cost $2-8 instead of $1-4, as I mentioned above. It’s probably politically impossible, but that’s why I have totalitarian tendencies. Cattle also cause a tremendous amount of other damage above and beyond global warming. I will just let the article summarize:

Livestock also produces more than 100 other polluting gases, including more than two-thirds of the world’s emissions of ammonia, one of the main causes of acid rain. Ranching, the report adds, is “the major driver of deforestation” worldwide, and overgrazing is turning a fifth of all pastures and ranges into desert. Cows also soak up vast amounts of water: it takes a staggering 990 litres of water to produce one litre of milk. Wastes from feedlots and fertilisers used to grow their feed overnourish water, causing weeds to choke all other life. And the pesticides, antibiotics and hormones used to treat them get into drinking water and endanger human health. The pollution washes down to the sea, killing coral reefs and creating “dead zones” devoid of life. One is up to 21,000 sq km, in the Gulf of Mexico, where much of the waste from US beef production is carried down the Mississippi. The report concludes that, unless drastic changes are made, the massive damage done by livestock will more than double by 2050, as demand for meat increases.

Human Races and Subspecies

Repost from the old site. A question that comes up all the time in race realist circles is whether or not the various races of man, however defined, can be considered to be subspecies. No reputable scientist considers the major human races to be separate subspecies of Homo Sapiens. At any rate, Homo sapiens himself is already a subspecies called Homo sapiens sapiens. There was H.s. neanderthalis , H.s. idaltu, probably H.s. rhodesiensis and finally, Homo sapiens sapiens. So a human subspecies would be look more like a Neandertal, with dramatic differences between them and modern humans. Even Khoisans and Pygmies are much closer to the rest of us than Neandertal or Idaltu Man was. This area is still quite controversial, but the only scientists and theorists who are suggesting that the differences between the races are great enough to constitute subspecies are racialists, many of whom are explicit racists. Almost all are associated with White nationalism and usually with Nordicism. Nordicists are best seen as Nazis. You must understand the differences between races and subspecies. For instance there is the California kingsnake . There are no subspecies of the California kingsnake. However, there are numerous races, many of which look radically different from the California kingsnake norm. They are simply called races of the California kingsnake. So races of humans and other animals are really a level even below that of the subspecies. They are not protected by the Endangered Species Act, and I’m not sure anyone cares about them all that much. They’re better seen as regional variants. Subspecies are a variant of a species that only occurs in one limited geographical area in which no other subspecies of that animal reside. Hence, each subspecies is geographically isolated from the others such that interbreeding is rare to nonexistent. At some point, subspecies’ territories may start overlapping. They begin to interbreed a lot, since subspecies of a type are readily capable of interbreeding. Once their territories overlap and interbreeding begins, we often stop calling two types separate subspecies and wrap them into a single entity. Subspecies were differentiated in the past based on a significant degree of anatomical difference. Nowadays, genetics is much more popular. The combination of significant anatomical and behavioral differences combined with significant genetic difference at some point is deemed great enough to warrant a subspecies split. These discussions are carried on very civilly in academic journals and after a bit of back and forth, a consensus of some sort is arrived at regarding whether or not two variants of a species differ enough to be called subspecies. At that point, the discussion typically dies. In addition, new genetic discoveries now show that some subspecies are so far apart genetically that a good case can be made that they are actually full species and not subspecies. This argument is also written up carefully in a journal, and usually seems to be accepted if the argument is well thought-out. In addition to splitting, there is lumping. Some variants of a species have in the past been divided into various subspecies. Some new analyses have shown that all of these subspecies definitions were in error, and in fact, the species is fairly uniform, with few to no subspecies instead of the 10-15 they had in the past. This argument also gets written up in a journal and passed around. Usually the new designation is accepted if the argument is well-crafted. The species/subspecies question is not as wildly controversial among scientists as laypeople think. Designations change back and forth, all are based on good, solid science, and science simply coalesces around the paradigmatic view of a species as it may change over time. Science, after all, is always a work in progress. The reasons that the California kingsnake races were not split into subspecies is because apparently the genetic differences were too small to warrant a split into subspecies. It is also possible that these races are widely distributed over the kingsnake’s territory, with no particular race holding sway in any certain locale. So probably all of these kingsnake races can not only interbreed like subspecies but they probably are actively interbreeding as they are probably not geographically segregated. At some point, it is discovered that two animals, previously thought to be separate species, have interlapping territories and the two species are observed readily interbreeding. Since separate species cannot interbreed, once two species start interbreeding easily, science often decides that they are not separate species after all and instead that they are subspecies of a single species At some level X, two living things are split into species. At some lesser level of genetic differentiation Y, a species is further split into subspecies. At some lesser level of differentiation Z, we can start talking about races. I believe that all of the various breeds of dogs and cats are races. “Race” and “subspecies” are two terms often conflated in speech, even by biologists, but strictly speaking, they do have different meanings. I do not know any reputable biologist who thinks that any of the various extant human races or subraces, however defined, need to be preserved on solely anthropological grounds in order to preserve their phenotype. The various human races have been changing all through time continuously. North Africans were once pure African, now they are mostly Caucasian. Northeast Asians looked like Aborigines until 9,000 YBP (years before present). South Indians looked like Aborigines until 8,000 YBP. Southeast Asians looked like Negritos and Melanesians until about 5,000 YBP. Over 10,000 years ago, Amerindians looked like Aborigines. Between 7,000-9,000 years ago, they looked something like the Ainu or Polynesians. Europeans looked like Arabs 10,000 YBP, like Northwestern US Amerindians 23,000 YBP and 30-40,000 YBP, they looked very strange, possibly resembling a Khoisan more than anything else. White skin only shows up 9,000 YBP in Europe. Polynesians and Micronesians only show up in the past 2,000 years. So all of the modern human races and subraces, however defined, have been continuously changing down through time. The notion that they are some kind of unique subspecies in need of conservation like Northern Spotted Owls is completely mistaken and has little basis in modern science.

Deep Ecology – An Overview

Repost from the old site. One thing people ought to know about this blog is that one of my philosophies is Deep Ecology. Click that link and you so you can try to figure out what it means. It was part of a debate in the environmentalist (especially radical environmental) movement that probably really got going in the 1990’s. It had several rivals, including Social Ecology, promoted by a fellow named Murray Bookchin . Deep Ecology was promoted by a guy named Edward Abbey of The Monkeywrench Gang fame, Dave Foreman, founder of is here. In general, Deep Ecologists were more anarchists and Social Ecologists were more traditional socialists. I recall a Social Ecologist saying that if an animal had to be driven extinct to keep poor humans from suffering, than so be it. They also opposed the idea of protecting animals like tigers that kill humans. If a tiger protection plan deepened the poverty of already poor humans, they would oppose that. This is pretty much the mentality of socialist states in the past 100 years, which in general have cared a lot more about the needs of humans than animals. Deep Ecologists had major roots in the Green Party and the worldwide Green Movement as a whole. They tend to support not just reduced population growth, but actual negative population growth and population declines within nations. This puts Deep Ecology on an oppositional status with almost all nationalists, especially ethnic nationalists. Ethnic nationalists in particular have always championed high birth rates. White nationalists are extremely pro-natalist for Whites only, and they go nuts over articles about White women having 18 kids. That would keep me out of such a movement right off the bat. Ominously, all fascists have also always been fiercely pro-natalist. Capitalism also, dependent on ever-increasing population for the insanity of ever-increasing economic growth, is very much pro-natalist. Capitalist theory holds that population declines will destroy the capitalist economy. That’s a great reason to reject neoliberal capitalism, or possibly capitalism itself, right there. One of Deep Ecology’s critiques of standard environmentalism is why we should preserve habitats and species. The standard line is that we must do this because these things can or may provide great benefit for human beings. Wilderness areas are preserved so humans can run around in them, birds are preserved so humans can look at them with binoculars, and rainforests and species are preserved because science can study them and figure out new medical or technological applications to benefit humans. Deep Ecologists say that this is anthropocentrism. Species and places should be preserved for their inherent value, regardless of whether or not humans can use them or exploit them for human benefit. That’s a major philosophical position that you might want to ponder. We had a big to-do over the California spotted owl (CASPO) in this part of the Sierra Nevada about 15 years ago. Bottom line is some mills closed, people lost their jobs, homes went into foreclosure, etc. About 10 As it turns out, the restrictions that the Forest Service put in are not even working to preserve the CASPO, and it surely needs to be listed at least as federally threatened. The crooked Fish and Wildlife Service won’t do so because that would mean further logging restrictions. At the time, I used to delight in infuriating people by saying that 1 spotted owl was worth about 20 humans. Hardly anyone seemed to go along with that. The species accounts on this blog are in the spirit of Deep Ecology. I’m an animal lover. I wish I could love human animals just as much, but it seems like non-human animals are in general nicer and more reliable. By the way, Dave Foreman’s Confessions of an Eco-Warrior (1991) is highly recommended as a primer in deep ecology.

On Spotted Owls

Repost from the old site. There are three subspecies of spotted owls in the US. The Northern Spotted Owl (NSO) ranged from Oregon and Washington down into the California coast ranges and over into the Siskiyous and Cascades. The California Spotted Owl (CASPO) lives in the Sierra Nevada, down into the Tehachapis and and into the mountain ranges of Southern California. The Southern California population is isolated in mountain ranges that are not connected and is projected to go extinct over at most 100-200 years. Before mass settlement of Southern California, CASPO may have moved from range to range via river corridors, but now that is not possible. The Techachapi CASPO is probably not sustainable either. CASPO also lives in the Coast Ranges south of San Fransisco. The Mexican Spotted Owl lives in the Southwest, mostly in Arizona and New Mexico. It was listed as threatened recently and recently had a huge amount of critical habitat set aside. It seems to be threatened by cattle grazing, but I forget how. Serious overgrazing in the Southwest seems to be devastating the grass and forb understory of the old growth pine forests. This overgrazing has promoted heavy stands of small trees that are susceptible to drought and fire. The truth is that the Southwest should not even be grazed in the first place; it’s too dry and cows just devastate arid regions. Cows evolved in cold, moist England and they are not well suited to arid regions. During the hot, dry months, they congregate in riparian areas, which they utterly devastate. The Eastern US is much moister, and cattle grazing causes few problems there. The NSO was declared a threatened species in 1990, setting off the timber wars in the Pacific Northwest. Clinton pushed through a crappy Northwest Forest Plan, which sold out way more to industry than was necessary. Logging in the region declined by 8 As one might expect, the new regulations did not save the NSO, and it has continued to decline at 3. In the far north, in northern Washington and British Colombia, the NSO is declining at about All spotted owls have selected for old growth forests. A new threat is the Barred Owl, which is a relative of the Spotted Owl, coming down from the north. The Barred Owl is much more tolerant of the open conditions created by massive clearcutting, and is displacing Spotted Owls in many places. In particular, it is interbreeding with them, creating a new hybrid type. Loggers claim that the Barred Owl invasion is the true cause of the NSO decline, but they are lying as usual. The Barred Owl invasion is due to the more open conditions created by out of control clearcutting for decades in the Northwest. The CASPO was petitioned twice for listing, in 2000 and 2004. I haven’t read the petitions, but I have read hundreds of pages of studies on the CASPO. The CASPO, last I heard, was declining at a greater rate than even the NSO. In 2006, the US Fish and Wildlife Service declined to list the CASPO as an endangered species. That strikes me as a wrong decision, but Bush is listing species at a rate even 8 Next to the immigrant hordes flooding our shores, our precious slice of American Gaia has no greater enemy than White Americans. What is curious about this is that White nationalists insist that only Whites are altruistic enough to care enough to be environmentalists in any way. It’s an interesting argument, but it’s sure not true in the US, and almost everyone making this odd argument is voting for the party of Nuke Gaia. Go figure.

"Roadkill!," by Jacob Bauthumley

Road killed meat is good, my friends. Between October and the end of April (remember our English North Sea Coast climate is cold…) I eat whatever I find dead on the road while out on the bicycle for a run: a Muntjac deer (once), rabbits, hares, pheasants (the most common Michelin bounty) and a chicken (once). Advantages of road killed meat: 1. It did not die by your own hand. If you buy meat, you had a hand in the animal’s suffering and death. There is no getting away from it. 2. It is generally organic, wild and free. 3. You are cleaning up the roads by eating it, and so it is Green and clean. 4. You may bless the dead animal as you eat and thus honour its life and gift to you. Make a point of this. 5. Scavenging thus is honorable as well as safe: I have been dining off the A11, the B1150, the A140, the A1151 and other Norfolk (UK) roads thus for more than 20 years, and never once has the meat thereof affected me adversely in any way. On the other hand, if you really hate meat then you will not touch roadkill, either! Veganism is really a lifestyle choice in my view: we must not pretend that it has any political significance, though it may well be of spiritual significance in a non-violent lifestyle. Vegetarianism, on the other hand, may well be the Tao of nutrition (Vegetarians live longer, etc), as well as politically highly significant (reducing CO2 emissions etc, reducing cruelty) and humane, and I would be a vegetarian… If it were not for my partiality to roadkill!

Obama Signals Move Towards Dipshittery

Idiot. A majority of Americans oppose efforts to let the rich keep their tax cuts. And in terms of deficits and the economy, it’s simply insane. It’s a political loser. I don’t know how the majority of Moronican assholes think about the climate bill, but it doesn’t matter. We need to push things like this through in order to survive to the next century at all or in any decent shape. I doubt if pushing a climate bill is going to kill Democrats at the polls. But get this! He will not compromise on gays on the military! That’s probably the least important of the three issues and the biggest loser. The smartest thing he could do would be to try to fix the economy any way he can. Of course, the Republicans will thwart him every step of the way because they don’t want an economy on the mend. They want an economy stuck in the mud so they can defeat Obama in 2012. That’s how shitty these Reptilican scum are. You can see that Obama is triangulating, just like Clinton did after 1994. It’s true that it helped him in that he won in 1996, but what did we win? We ended up with a Democratic President as who acted like a liberal Republican. Do you think these moves will help Obama or not? And if so, is it worth it?

The Bottom Line on Austrian Economics

You are right about most of these economic doomsayers being right wing populists. Have you ever visited LewRockwell.com? They’re pretty much the epitome of this kind of thinking, predicting apocalypse every other Tuesday or so. Im still waiting for the dollar to collapse. BTW, what do you think of Austrian Economics in general? That school of thought is popular on Stormfront and libertarian and Paleoconservative circles. It seems to have gained ground in recent years, especially since Peter Schiff successfully predicted the housing bubble collapse. Search Youtube for “Peter Schiff was right!”. He says it with a stone face, even as the host and guests burst out laughing at him. This is what got me interested in Lew Rockwell’s philosophy, I used to be a libertarian. If Austrian Economics is wrong or flawed, then how was one its main champions correct on the housing bubble, which nobody else predicted?

Being able to predict that a bad idea will fail at some point does not mean that one has a program that will work to accomplish anything, much less prevent the bad idea from failing. It merely means you have good skills of prediction. Good powers of prediction does not indicate a program for success. Think about it. Just means you’re good with a crystal ball. I’m not an expert on the Austrians, but let me try here. Problem is that it was Austrian economics, in a moderated form, that failed in the latest economic collapse. The countries that imposed the most “Austrian” type economics, moderated however, were the ones that were most destroyed in the latest economic crash. Check out Latvia and Iceland. Those that kept strong state controls over banking like Africa and China got off the easiest. The 3rd World is run on a moderated version of Austrian economics. Guess what? It doesn’t work. Those who say that it’s not the real Austrian deal, fine. The anarcho-capitalists are the real pure Austrians. Their favorite societies are the Old West, especially during the Gold Rush, and modern day Somalia. The Gold Rush! Somalia! Yeah! Anarcho-capitalism works great, huh? Austrian economics is bad for White workers, bottom line. White workers should not support an economics that is out to screw them. That said, Austrian economics doesn’t even make sense. It’s microeconomics. That means it is based on what actions you and I will take as a rational actor economically. But you can’t extrapolate microeconomics to macroeconomics, because masses of people do not behave in an economically rational way. The Austrians want to get rid of all regulation and let the market do whatever it wants. What happens then is you have regular blowups like the recent economic crash. Or witness the economics of the late 1800’s, wild booms and busts all the time. It’s just insane. Little to no government, no worker or consumer protections, no environmental or societal protections, business just runs amok. It’s like the 3rd World. It’s not compatible with a civilized society. Besides, it says nonsense. Austrians say that government caused the last economic crash. Government ruins the environment, not business. Government harms consumers, not business. Government hurts workers, not business. Government health care hurts sick people, not capitalist health care. Government schools create idiots, not expensive private schools so costly 8 Land reform doesn’t work and starves peasants; landless peasants are happy, healthy and have full bellies. Stimulus spending and deficit spending don’t work for getting a country out of a depression/recession; what works is gutting government spending. All government spending will eventually destroy economies that engage in mass state spending, that is, social democracy will destroy every economy given enough time. It’s all bunch of nonsense!

Transcript of Reason Radio Interview with Me on October 13, 2010

Since the sound quality was so poor, I decided to make a transcript of this interview available for you all. Enjoy it. Robert Stark: We’re going to be discussing California issues, how the states have changed, and how it affects trends facing the rest of the nation, but first of all, I came across this article on Robert’s site called Some Sensible Positions for Liberal Race Realists and White Advocates. Your first point is to amend the Constitution to get rid of the anchor baby thing. Very sensible position that most Americans would support. Robert Lindsay: I don’t know if they could get it through Congress and pass it as a Constitutional amendment, but all White advocates should be supporting this move. It is a very reasonable position to take. My position is that White advocates should not be taking crazy positions – almost all of them are taking these crazy, loony positions like “freedom of association” that are simply never going to fly. This move to amend the Constitution to get rid of the anchor baby thing is a reasonable position. Your average reasonable person, especially White person, says, “Sure, why not? Good idea.” The Left is trying to portray this as racism, but hey, let them scream! Because your average normal American, at least White people, and even some Black people, looks at this and says, “What? They’re calling these people racists? Because they want to amend the Constitution to get rid of these stupid anchor babies? That’s not racist, that’s just rational.” Robert Stark: I think that even liberal European countries don’t give out citizenship to anchor babies. Robert Lindsay: Some countries may allow it, but I think most of Europe has gotten rid of it. Ireland recently had birthright citizenship, but they just got rid of it. We’re one of the last countries around to have this. Robert Stark: Ireland has only been getting a lot of immigration recently because of their economy. Robert Lindsay: There has been a recent trend for at least White countries to get rid of birthright citizenship. As far as the rest of the world goes, I don’t know, but I would be surprised if there is much birthright citizenship. Most countries don’t agree with the concept. Why should you get birthright citizenship? If you’re born in some foreign country, you get citizenship of whatever country your parents are citizens of. Robert Stark: Yes, it should be based on the parents. Robert Lindsay: You’re still a citizen of some country! You have a right to be a citizen of some country in the world. If a female American citizen and I go over to…Peru and have a child there, why is that kid a Peruvian citizen? That kid is an American citizen. It’s born of American citizens. Despite the fact that we are living in Peru now, we are still just American citizens living in a foreign country. Robert Stark: What are your thoughts on dual citizenship? Robert Lindsay: I understand that there is a lot more dual citizenship going around than people think. I mean, the anti-Semites go on and on about US Jews being “dual citizens” of the US and Israel. But my understanding is that there’s a lot of dual citizenship going on here in the US and in other countries as well. Immigrants from many different countries the world over who are here in the US actually have dual citizenship – US citizenship and citizenship in their home country. So apparently it’s not just a thing with Jewish Americans having Israeli citizenship – they are not the only ones. Robert Stark: I think the Israeli issue is not so much the dual citizenship – a lot of immigrants have that – the main thing is that many people in positions of power in the government and politics are more likely to have dual Israeli-US citizenship. Robert Lindsay: The real concern is that, say, your average person who has Irish and US dual citizenship is not some sort of virtual agent working for the Irish government. Your average person with Israeli and US dual citizenship is practically an Israeli agent! And that’s the whole problem right there. That’s the whole problem with dual loyalty and the Jews. Robert Stark: Yes, the dual loyalty is a problem. And due to multiculturalism, it’s tolerated, when we really should not be tolerating dual loyalties. Robert Lindsay: Dual loyalty is a problem with Jews due to the nature of Judaism and the Jews. Most other ethnic groups are not so ethnocentric as the Jews so we don’t worry about dual loyalty much with them. But due to the nature of Judaism, Jews are loyal to the Jews first and their native land second if at all. That’s why this dual loyalty thing keeps cropping up with the Jews – it’s inherent in the Jews themselves. It’s not an anti-Semitic canard. Robert Stark: Yes, it’s just how they are. Robert Lindsay: With the Jews, dual loyalty isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. Robert Stark: Your next recommendation is to avoid overthrowing civil rights laws. Can you go into detail about what some of these civil rights laws are? Robert Lindsay: The White advocates want to get rid of all civil rights laws! Every White advocate I have heard of wants to get rid of every single civil rights law that we have on the books in this country. They hate the Civil Rights Act of 1964. They hate the Housing Rights Act, they hate the Voting Rights Act. They want to get rid of all of them and all anti-discrimination laws too. It’s true that Rand Paul is running for Senate now, and he agrees with that position, but nevertheless, that is a very fringe position to take. The day to get rid of civil rights laws has come and gone! The civil rights laws are here to stay! Robert Stark: So you think that would be a very difficult idea to sell to your average person. Robert Lindsay: Worse than that. It’s not going to happen! Those days are gone. That was maybe doable in say, 1980 or so… Robert Stark: I think the real big issue is immigration…You’re critical of people who want to get rid of non-White immigration. Instead, you are calling for IQ tests. Robert Lindsay: Yes, this would actually be a very interesting thing for White advocates to support. They were actually suggesting this in Germany. I don’t have any problem with that at all, but I don’t want it for spouses of citizens. If you marry someone from another country, they don’t need to take the test. But it’s a good idea, especially with these problematic immigrants. Some of these immigrants are a real problem. Robert Stark: What groups do you see as most problematic? Robert Lindsay: The Hispanic immigrants are a problem. Especially the ones from Mesoamerica. The ones from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras…And to some extent, those from the Dominican Republic. Robert Stark: Is it because they are coming here illegally? Or is it legal immigrants as well who are a problem? Robert Lindsay: I don’t think that all of the problem Hispanic immigrants are illegals. I would think that with Hispanics, the problem is IQ-related. If you said we are only taking Hispanics with an IQ of 98, which is the US average, therefore, all Hispanic immigrants, no matter how many you allow, are not going to cause an IQ decline in the country. I would imagine if you set it at 98 – your average Hispanic and their offspring who are causing problems – their IQ is below 98. The ones who are not causing problems, who are assimilating well, who act like you and me, their IQ’s are 98 and above. It’s a pretty good cutoff. It’s the dumber ones that are causing all the problems. Robert Stark: How would this plan deal with the numbers of immigrants coming into the US? Do you think there should be a cap per country? Because right now, we take in I think almost 2 million people a year legally. Robert Lindsay: Is it really 2 million? Robert Stark: I think it’s maybe 1.5 million, but anyway, it’s pretty high. Robert Lindsay: Sure, White advocates should advocate for a cap. 200,000, or 400,000…some kind of a reasonable cap. Robert Stark: Isn’t this what Pat Buchanan has been advocating? Robert Lindsay: I think that is a salable position. A lot of Americans might go along with that. And it really puts the pro-immigration, multicultural, PC crazies on the spot, because it forces them to say, “Terrible! They want to limit immigration to 400,000 a year! How awful! We need 2 million billion zillion a year instead!” Robert Stark: As opposed to advocating for zero immigration, they won’t be able to play the card saying you are racist. Robert Lindsay: Sure. You sound like some kind of a nativist nut if you say, “Yeah! We want zero immigration!” And it’s never going to happen anyway – zero immigration is not doable. Instead, you say, “Hey, we just want limits.” Then people have to stop and think, “Wow! 400,000? That’s a lot? How many do we actually let in every year, anyway? 2 million billion trillion zillion? Wow! Well, that’s way too many.” And it puts those idiots on the spot. They have to defend those insane high numbers as the only way to go, and they will have to say that those limiting immigration to say 400,000 a year are part of some evil racist plot, and that’s not going to work. Robert Stark: And focus on the overpopulation issue as well. That’s important to bring up. Robert Lindsay: Yes, I also wanted to say that in 1991, there was an amendment to the Civil Rights Act that dealt with something called “disparate impact.” And this, in contrast with the rest of the civil rights laws that need to stay, has got to go. Thing is, most people don’t even know what disparate impact is. No one’s heard of it, no one understands it. But for instance the Ricci case, the firefighters case in New Jersey, was a case of disparate impact. Disparate impact says that if you give tests to a bunch of applicants, and the Whites pass the test, but the Blacks flunk at a higher rate, then there must be something wrong with the test. And you have to go back and redo the test or dumb down the test. It says that every time you have a racially disparate impact in any outcome, it’s always due to racism or bias in the testing, and that’s not necessarily true. Maybe the Blacks just could not pass the test. Most people would be in favor of getting rid of disparate impact. And you would really put the PC idiots and the Black groups, etc. on the defensive because they would have to defend disparate impact and these crazy cases like the New Jersey firefighters, and most White people, and even a lot of Blacks, thought that case was an outrage. The goal is to push the PC-multicultural people into a corner and force them to defend things that sound really bad, and make us sound like the reasonable people. You see? Robert Stark: The next one is getting rid of US colonies. I don’t think we need to go into too much detail here. It’s pretty simple, but in a nutshell, the US colonies are places like Puerto Rico and American Samoa. And they are big sources of immigrants. And because they can’t really be screened like foreign immigrants, they can simply come in in large numbers. Robert Lindsay: Yes. They are unscreened immigrants, and they cause tons of problems. Our legal immigrants don’t really cause a lot of problems, to be honest, because we screen them really well. But the Puerto Ricans and the American Samoans can come here just like that. For them to come to the US is like you or me moving to Nevada. It’s like moving to another state. And it’s because they are unscreened that these groups cause so many problems. And there’s no reason to have colonies anyway! Robert Stark: It’s ridiculous. We should let them secede. It doesn’t make sense. Robert Lindsay: Why do we have colonies anyway? What are we, an imperialist country? Ok, we’re an imperialist country. Let’s have a conversation about this. Do Americans want to be an imperialist country? Let’s put these imperialists on the spot. Let’s force them to defend US colonialism! Robert Stark: I think that Puerto Rico is a product of the Spanish American War. And I think the same with Samoa. So in a sense it is imperialism. Robert Lindsay: I don’t know how we got Samoa. There’s also Micronesia, but Micronesia is not so much of a problem. But Micronesia is a colony too. We should not have any colonies. No country should have any colonies. And this is a Left position. Only the Left is totally principled on this position and says no nation should have any colonies. So by doing this, White advocates would be lining up with the hard Left, but that’s OK! Because the Hard Left takes a very principled anti-imperialist stand on this. Let’s force these elites to defend US imperialism! I want to see these guys on TV defending our imperialism and colonialism. You see, the Puerto Ricans and the Samoans and the rest don’t want to go – they don’t want independence. Robert Stark: They want it both ways. They don’t really view themselves as Americans, but they still want the benefits of being American at the same time. That’s the problem. Robert Lindsay: They like it the way it is. And if they become states, it is not going to be so good of a deal economically for them. But the way it is now, as colonies, it’s basically just a total scam for the colonies. But if they go on their own and become independent, they will probably just become ordinary 3rd World countries, and they will have a lot of problems as far as that goes. Why are we coddling these people? Robert Stark: Another issue that is very important is schools. You are talking about these White advocates who are so fixated on Brown vs. the Board of Education, that it’s basically a done deal, and they are wasting their time. Robert Lindsay: Brown vs. BOE is a done deal, right? Are they going to get rid of it? Even this crazy rightwing Supreme Court, are they actually going to get rid of Brown? It ain’t going to happen! Robert Stark: So your main focus is on busing and that kids should just have to go to their local schools. Robert Lindsay: Well, we shouldn’t say it’s evil or anything like that. “Oh! They’re busing Blacks into White schools! That’s terrible!” The main thing is that busing is just stupid. I mean, why are they doing it? Robert Stark: And it ruins good schools. Like the schools I went to in LA public schools – they used to be decent schools, but they got completely ruined. And both the middle school and high school I went to were in fairly wealthy parts of LA. But they’ve both basically turned into ghetto schools through the use of busing. Robert Lindsay: Well, sure, but I don’t want to say that because that sounds racist. Instead, I would just say that it’s a complete waste of money. And I would say that there is nothing wrong with a White school. They act like a White school is some sort of pathological thing. “Oh! Look at that school! It’s too White! Oh, we can’t have that! We need to make it half Black!” There is nothing wrong with a White school. It’s perfectly acceptable for a White school to be a White school and a Black school to be a Black school. Robert Stark: The multicultural and diversity types, they use diversity as a code word for non-White. For instance, true diversity would be a school where each ethnic group would be say 2 Robert Lindsay: It’s ridiculous! The diversity thing has become like a fetish. I’m an integrationist, but we don’t need diversity everywhere. If some town is naturally a White town just because a bunch of White people went and moved there and few non-White people decided to move there, well, that’s OK! We don’t have to go fix it up by say, importing 20,000 Black people. If some town is naturally Black, well, that’s OK! Maybe a bunch of Blacks wanted to move there, and maybe non-Blacks did not want to move there. There is nothing wrong with naturally segregated places, as long as it’s voluntary and we still have laws in place to ensure that anyone can go live anywhere they want to. And when you say that Blacks can’t learn in a Black school, and the only way that Black people can learn is if they’re around a bunch of White people, that’s very insulting to Black people. It really insults them. It says they’re inferior, and it’s a real burn on Black people. And I don’t know why Black people want to believe this insult about them. What’s wrong with a Black school? Robert Stark: You’re right, that’s what busing implies – that Blacks are inferior, and they need to be around White people in order to learn. And affirmative action implies the same thing. Most of your proposals are pretty reasonable, but saying we support affirmative action? California, which is a liberal state, actually voted to end affirmative action. I don’t see how saying we support affirmative action would appeal to most of the public if the majority of people are opposed to it. Robert Lindsay: Well, you could always say you support affirmative action but only if the non-Whites are just as qualified as the Whites. But the point is that that pretty much rules out most affirmative action right there! This was how affirmative action was supposed to be, but it’s never been that way. Robert Stark: But that still is reverse discrimination against Whites – if they are equally qualified, choosing the non-White. I think the best strategy would be to have economics based on economics or geography. It would benefit a lot of middle class Whites in middle America. If you look at the Ivy League universities, they are really dominated by the ultra-wealthy and then a few slots left over for affirmative action. And this is your last point – say we have no problems with well-behaved Blacks who wish to fully integrate into White communities. Robert Lindsay: Right, that’s a good idea, because almost all of these White advocate types are segregationists, and they push things like freedom of association. That’s what this Rand Paul is pushing. It’s not going to happen. You’re not going to get freedom of association back in where White communities can have housing covenants that say we don’t want any Black people, or we only want White people. Ain’t gonna happen. Ain’t gonna happen! Instead, we should say that if there are Black people out there who wish to move to our communities and are willing to assimilate to the values of our White communities and White culture – welcome to our city! Robert Stark: Then you say that this will force the PC crowd into the dubious role of defending Black culture. Robert Lindsay: Yes, because then they will say, “Oh! They only like White culture! Racists!” To that, we should respond, “We like White culture. We’re White, we like our culture. There’s good and bad about it, but we prefer our culture. And personally, we feel that a lot of Black people would be better off adopting White culture or assimilating to White culture than in getting into their own Black culture.” And then the PC crowd will scream, “They’re saying White culture is better than Black culture!” But your average person, especially your average White person, hears that and thinks, “Hm. You know what? White culture is better than Black culture!” Robert Stark: The one point that we left out is to support the immigration of White Hispanics into the US. So, how is that really practical? You’re saying our immigration policy would have to explicitly address race, and do you think that would be practical? Robert Lindsay: Well, White advocates are already saying that they only want White immigration coming into this country. Robert Stark: What are the White advocates’ position on White Hispanics? Robert Lindsay: They never discuss it. The only thing they say is that we will only accept immigration from Europe. And that’s never going to happen. We may as well branch out and say, “Well, we’d like the White Hispanics to come here.” Because then it would be a lot harder for the PC Left to accuse the White advocates of racism. “They hate Hispanics! They hate Hispanics!” And people would look at that and say, “Are you sure they’re racists? They don’t seem to mind the White Hispanics.” And then the PC Left will retort, “Sure! They like the White Hispanics, but they don’t like the non-White Hispanics!” Robert Stark: They would still be able to play the race card, but it would cause division among Hispanics. It’s interesting, because on our last show, we were covering the Rick Sanchez incident. Rick Sanchez is basically White, but because his family is from Latin America, he takes this view that he’s somehow a minority, and it’s sort of our own fault, because in Latin America, the Whites down there in many cases are fairly racist against the non-Whites down there. But we classify everyone from the region as effectively non-White, i.e., Hispanic. It’s ridiculous. Robert Lindsay: The White advocates in the US are almost all Nordicists. They don’t like the White Hispanics very much. They tend to label them as non-Whites. And the only Whites who they think are really White are from Northern Europe. Robert Stark: Well, the first immigration act in the 1920’s was a Nordicist thing because it favored northwestern Europeans. Robert Lindsay: It was, true. White racism in the US has always been Nordicist, but your average White person in this country is no longer a Nordicist. Robert Stark: I think this Nordicism thing has pretty much died out… Robert Lindsay: No, no, no… Robert Stark: Because if you look at these pro-White forums, there are Italians, Greeks, or Eastern European descent, but you are personally into that Pan-Aryanism philosophy. Robert Lindsay: It’s a good thing, Pan-Aryanism, because once you get into Pan-Aryanism, it gets harder and harder to call White advocates racists. Because the PC Left says, “Oh! They’re racist!” Sneer sneer. Then people say, “Hey, wait a minute. They like Moroccans, right?” Then the Left says, “Well, yeah, but they’re still racists!” Then people say, “Wait a minute. They like Syrians. They like Iraqis and Lebanese…” The Left says, “Doesn’t matter! They’re racists!” Sneer. Then people say, “Hey wait. But they like Turks. They like Armenians, Chechens, Iranians…” Robert Stark: David Duke is into that Pan-Aryanism stuff, because he visited Syria and Iran, and he pointed out that he saw people who were so called Aryans when he was there. Robert Lindsay: Well, we shouldn’t be saying that. We should instead be saying something like, “All Iranians are White.” We shouldn’t say, “Well, there’s a few of them who are real Aryans, but most aren’t.” Grumble grumble. Robert Stark: All of them? Do you consider Ahmadinejad White? Robert Lindsay: Yes! Absolutely. If you look at Iranians on a gene map, they’re right next to Norwegians, Danes and English. They’re White people! And if you look at them, they look White. The people I talk to are California racial liberals, but they almost all say, “Iranians? They’re White! They look like White people.” And if you talk to Iranians, they all claim White too. So this whole idea that Iranians are non-Whites is just kind of a fringe concept. It ain’t gonna fly. Robert Stark: People assume that all Middle Easterners look alike, but there are some big distinctions. Someone from Saudi Arabia is completely distinct from someone from Lebanon. Robert Lindsay: Well, yes, but I think Saudis are mostly White. Yet some of them, like Prince Bandar, he’s a pretty Black looking guy. Some of those Gulf types, they have so much Black in them that you can’t really call them White anymore. One thing I wanted to go back and talk about on my list here. We need to get serious about throwing seriously disruptive students out of school. Everybody wants to know, “What do we do about the schools?” For the whole White advocate crowd, and many ordinary Whites, the overarching racial question often is, “What about the schools?” The White advocates look at the mess in mixed schools and scream, “Re-segregate the schools! Black schools for Blacks! White schools for Whites! Get rid of Brown versus BOE!” Well, you know what? That ain’t gonna fly. Robert Stark: I agree. The way you deal with these kinds of racial issues is you go around the race aspect by just dealing with people based on their behavior. And the anti-racist types, they’re still going to call you racist because they make excuses for bad behavior. But screw them. All we need to do is to say that students who are continuously disruptive should be send them to separate schools. And if they get their behavior under control, then they can go back to the regular schools. But it’s unfair for students who want to learn to have to put up with that crap. Robert Lindsay: They’re destroying the schools. I hate to say it, but it’s especially true with the Blacks. There seems to be a tipping point of around 1 But once again, the PC crowd will be backed into a corner, and they will be forced to defend these students who act absolutely horrible, and just flat out destroy schools. They destroy Black schools, they destroy mixed schools, they destroy all kinds of schools. And in response to their charges of racism, we will say, “Well, it’s not just for Blacks. We will throw the bad Whites out. We’ll throw anybody out.” Robert Stark: Yes, anyone. You can’t call it racist, because it’s a colorblind solution. Robert Lindsay: And once again, we will force these PC characters to defend the worst acting, most horrible students in the whole country, total brats, that are destroying schools for everybody else. And that’s a terrible thing to defend. I want to see them defend that behavior. See, that’s a reasonable thing that’s actually doable. Getting rid of Brown versus BOE, getting rid of integration – those are not reasonable goals. Robert Stark: Yes, these people, they’re just living in a fantasy. Like on immigration, they want to shut it all down, but in reality, we will be very lucky if we can even stop amnesty. Robert Lindsay: Agreed. We probably can’t even stop amnesty. We can’t even throw these illegals out of here. Robert Stark: Yes, we can’t even throw out the illegals. Robert Lindsay: First things first. Robert Stark: Practical solutions that are doable… Robert Lindsay: I don’t think we can deal with legal immigration at all right now. First things first. First of all, we need to deal with illegal immigration, and we can’t even deal with that! These PC crazies want to legalize all the illegals, for Chrissake. Let’s deal with that first. Politics is the art of the possible. And these people, these White advocates, especially these White nationalists, they are advocating positions that are totally unreasonable. They are completely non-doable, fringe, ultra-radical positions. I doubt if these folks have the support of 5-1 Robert Stark: Well, if you look at the new A3P Party, most of their platform is pretty reasonable stuff that sounds similar to the stuff that you’re advocating here. Robert Lindsay: It’s a good idea! It’s a good idea to come across like a moderate. One of the goals of politics is to come across as reasonable and to force your opponent to take crazy positions and defend those crazy positions. Fine. Put crazy words in their mouth, and then make them defend them. Robert Stark: These issues all tie together, but originally I intended to discuss California, and we still have a decent amount of time. To start off, we are both from California, and we are both originally from the LA area, and both of us have moved up to Central California. And Robert, can you tell us, what are the changes that you have seen throughout your life and that have happened to our state and what are some of the biggest and most negative changes that you have seen? Robert Lindsay: Well, I’m not going to call for a return to White California. That’s an era that is done and gone. And I did not mind growing up in a multicultural California. When I was growing up in the 1970’s, California was about 70-8 I don’t have to live with all White people. We can have some non-Whites around. We grew up with the Mexicans. The Mexicans are a part of this state. They’ve been here from the very start. This state used to be a part of Mexico. The Mexicans – they’re part of the neighborhood! Robert Stark: But the problem is the sheer numbers. Because the PC, Open Borders types try to say, “Oh, you hate Mexicans. You’re scared of Mexicans.” But most White Californians are pretty used to being around Mexicans. They’re part of the landscape. It’s not really an issue that they are here. Instead, it’s an issue of numbers. Robert Lindsay: Yes, right. The Mexicans in this state assimilated really well back in the 1970’s. And now, there are a zillion of them, they’re not assimilating, and they’re causing tons of problems. And they were not causing tons of problems back in the 1970’s. Robert Stark: You wrote that Mexican-Americans are assimilating into low class White culture. Robert Lindsay: The assimilated Hispanics, the ones that are second and especially third generation, a lot of them are assimilating to a sort of a White trash culture. Like the lowest of the Whites, the worst of our people. Robert Stark: I saw that a lot at the Wallmarts in Fresno. Not so much in LA. Robert Lindsay: Yes, it’s not a good thing that a lot of them are assimilating to. One thing that I have noticed is that the Hispanics who have a deeper connection to Mexico – first generation immigrants and some of their children – now I don’t really like the illegals all that much, but we have a lot of them around here. But actually the ones that have a really deep and intense connection to Mexico, who are still into the Mexican culture, a lot of them tend to act pretty good. They have a tight-nit family structure. Robert Stark: Yes, I noticed that when I was in a public high school in LA, the recent immigrants minded their own business, but there were others who emulated the whole gangta rap culture. They wore baggy jeans and listened to rap. Robert Lindsay: Those are not the recent immigrants! Robert Stark: Yes, the gangbanger types are children of illegals or in some cases, even grandchildren of illegals. Robert Lindsay: Yes, they are the children of the illegals. And now we are getting into multigenerational gangbangers. But around here, the ones that are still deeply connected to Mexico, they generally act pretty good. They act like Mexicans, people from Mexico itself. They act like peasants. If you go down to Mexico – I used to go down there 25-40 years ago – your average Mexican generally acts pretty good. They are conservative, traditional people, they have a very tight-knit family structure, and they keep a close watch on the girls. And for instance, the traditional Mexican girls, they don’t try to sleep with every guy in town. It’s dishonorable to be a slut or to be a prostitute and sell your body. But I see these Mexican Americans who are assimilated, 3rd generation, and they start selling their bodies on the street and shooting heroin and just sleazing out to the max. And the ones around here that are deeply connected to Mexico, a good, proper Mexican girl, she won’t do that! To them, the worst thing on Earth is to be a whore. And, you know what? I’ve got to respect that. There is something valuable about that. The family is often very protective of the girls. They have good, strong role models. The male has a strong role model. The female has a strong role model. The Mexican women are very feminine, they’re very nice to men, they’re very friendly. I don’t really have anything against the peasant culture of Old Mexico. There’s a lot to be said for peasant cultures. In many ways, they are good, traditional. Robert Stark: You also said that you have seen the cultural decline of the White middle class. You wrote an article about that. Can you explain some of the things you have observed about the White middle class over time? They also seem to be assimilating into lower class culture and they seem to be getting less intellectual. Robert Lindsay: Part of what is going on is the wiggerization of White people. Things are just getting a lot trashier. Back in 1970’s, White culture, if you had tattoos, you were considered to be a sleaze. Especially a woman, if a woman had tattoos…we knew women who had tattoos, and people hated them and treated them like they were whores. The only people who had tattoos were people like bikers or maybe Marines. For a White middle class person, that would be considered a totally sleazy thing to do, to get a tattoo on your body. White people were supposed to be like these White bread, upper middle class, well-mannered types. Now, just about every White woman you see is decorated like a cannibal! They have all these piercings all over their bodies. I don’t want to put them down too much, but it seems sleazy to people from my generation. It seems as if there has been a trashification of our people. Robert Stark: That sort of thing used to be seen only in lower class Whites, but now it’s seen in middle class people too. It’s due to the TV. People don’t value intellect so much anymore. Robert Lindsay: Maybe, but White culture has always been anti-intellectual. You can go read Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life where all the way back in the 1950’s, he was talking about this sort of thing. I think that what’s going on is that White middle class people, especially young people, have decided it’s cool to look and act like a low class person. Robert Stark: We have been talking a lot about race and demographics, but I would like to talk about the issue of the environment in this state and the over development and urban sprawl that the state has been seeing, and how both liberals and conservatives deal with this issue. It’s fascinating because liberals are promoting all this immigration, and business interests go along with them, but the conservatives – they’re apologists for this urban sprawl and this horrible overdevelopment. Tom McClintock, who is this anti-immigration politician in the state…I knew this woman who was running for state assembly, and she was complaining about all of these tract homes going up in Ventura County, and his attitude was that they could do whatever they wanted to with their land. But I see that mentality as the same mentality as the people who are for Open Borders or defend job outsourcing. It’s really just as bad. Robert Lindsay: Well, you see, he’s just a typical Republican. I don’t get the Republicans or the capitalists’ point of view. For instance, on housing, their POV is that…we have to keep on building houses? What? Forever? How long are we going to be building these units called “housing starts?” That can’t go on forever. We have to keep building new houses, new houses. And in order to keep building new homes, you need an increasing population. This is the whole growth-based economic mentality. And I don’t think it’s sustainable – endless growth forever. You can’t. Robert Stark: So the immigration issue, it’s basically the same mentality. If you look at the places where the elites live like Marin Country or Malibu or Carmel, they’ve done a great job of conservation and low, sustainable growth with lots of open space there. They want to keep their own places beautiful. But if you look at the big money interests, they profit off an increasing population because that means more consumers. Some of these people are Democrats, some of them are Republicans, but it doesn’t matter. Instead, it’s just all about growth is good for making a profit. Robert Lindsay: Endless growth. But isn’t that kind of crazy? Isn’t there ever going to get to be a point where people have enough money, and we don’t need to keep on growing forever? Apparently, you can’t have this endless growth without having endlessly increasing population. And more and more houses. And more and more cities. And more and more roads. And more and more everything. Robert Stark: These neoliberal types, they say we need to keep bringing in more and more immigration as a way to grow our economy. It’s insane because it’s not sustainable, and you can’t have an economy that is based on that model. Robert Lindsay: What’s going to happen? At some point, the whole world is going to look like New York City. What are we going to do? Are we going to start building cities on top of cities? Are we going to start building cities underground, or on top of the ocean, or under the ocean, or up in the sky? And this endless growth thing, it can’t possibly be an environmental position. If you’re an environmentalist, you can’t take this endless growth position. Why do we always need new houses in the US? I don’t understand why. Obviously because our population is growing, right? Are we going to start building second homes? Why does everyone need a second home? Do people need third houses? Do they need fourth houses? Robert Stark: Or the size of the homes. They want these gigantic homes on one acre lots, and it’s wasteful of space. It’s not at all resourceful. And these same types – they claim to be fiscal conservatives and fiscally responsible. But this endless growth is not fiscally responsible because it’s very wasteful of natural resources. Robert Lindsay: Those huge lots are not so great. It would almost be better to pack people into cities and then have big open spaces. But people like those big lots. I was living on a one acre lot up in the Sierra foothills. It’s not bad, there are still a lot of wild animals out there with 1-5 acre lots in the country, with those rural ranchettes. Robert Stark: It’s fine if people have big lots up in rural areas or in nature, but the main problem is suburbia, which is a disaster. Robert Lindsay: There are no living things anymore in suburbia. The only animals are the humans and their pets. There are a few animals that are adapting to suburbia – the raccoons, the skunks and the opossums. In some of the suburbs now, you have some coyotes. Robert Stark: Thank you for being on, Robert. Robert Lindsay: Sure.

"Biofuels and Big Business," by Alpha Unit

For years now people have been writing about the decline of the timber industry in this country. All kinds of factors have been blamed: bad policies out of Washington, D.C., recession, outsourcing, deforestation (due to insects and invasive plants), and so on. Besides that, young people nowadays aren’t that interested in working in the timber business, insiders say. There is some concern over who will fill jobs in the future. But there is a bright spot of potential in this picture: the push for wood-derived biofuels. Woodlands in the U.S. produce about 370 million dry tons of woody biomass every year. This biomass includes:

  • diseased and infested trees
  • trees felled by extreme weather conditions like hurricanes
  • “slash” – branches, limbs, and stumps left after timber harvesting
  • understory – small-diameter trees, or “thinnings,” removed because they might serve as a “fire bridge” between forest floor and canopy
  • mill residues – sawdust, bark, and “black liquor” (what’s left after cellulose fibers are removed from the slurry that forms paper)
  • urban wood waste – discarded furniture, pallets, processed lumber, and yard and tree trimmings

Typically, a lot of this woody biomass is burned, left to rot, or put in landfills. But people in government and industry are seeing it as a great potential energy source. A lot of liquid fuel can come from woody biomass – things like ethanol, methanol, and bio-oil. The production of bio-oil, or bio-crude, occurs through the process of pyrolysis. What they do is heat the biomass in an oxygen-free environment. Because there’s no oxygen present, the material doesn’t burn; instead, it decomposes into bio-oil, char, and non-compressible gases. Bio-oil multiplies the energy yield of biomass by 12 to 15 times. It’s clean-burning and bio-friendly (carbon-neutral). The problem, though, is that it’s generally unstable and corrosive. So they still have to formulate upgrades for it that would overcome some of the problems with its transportation and storage. If you slow down the heating rate of pyrolysis, the major product is bio-char. Bio-char is also called torrefied wood (“TW”). TW eliminates some of the problems associated with bio-oil. TW is a charcoal-like solid that’s water-resistant, non-perishable, and energy-dense. It can be stored for long periods, so its transportation costs are lower than those of green wood chips. And it definitely has a higher BTU value per ton than green wood chips. Its energy content is said to be comparable to coal. When it’s used as a replacement for coal, it produces a lot less ash, and its sulfur emissions are low. It’s still going to be a long time before bioenergy is truly competitive with petroleum-based fuels. A few years ago, Chevron announced that it was joining forces with Weyerhaeuser, whose name means “Big Timber,” to research ways to make biofuels commercially viable. Their emphasis was on ethanol, the production of which has been controversial. Weyerhaeuser is also in partnership with Mitsubishi to explore bio-char production. I don’t think anyone is surprised that these giant corporations are co-opting the biofuels industry. Only the big energy companies can offer the economies of large-scale operations that will get bioenergy off the ground, they say.

100% of Senate Republican Candidates Deny Global Warming

Wow.

There’s crazy and there’s crazy. Then there’s Republicans. This headline is so weird that I find it hard to believe. 10

We have folks on this website who vote Republican. WTF is the matter with you? How cold you vote for anyone this nuts? Or are you global warming deniers too?

The global warming denier lunatics include then:

CA: Carly Fiorina KY: Rand Paul DE: Christine O’Donnell ND: John Hoeven IN: Dan Coats PA: Pat Toomey CO: Ken Buck NV: Sharron Angle WI: Ron Johnson IL: Mark Kirk WA: Dino Rossi NH: Kelly Ayotte MO: Roy Blunt OH: Rob Portman NC: Richard Burr FL: Marco Rubio

No way is California going to elect a pro-life, global warming denying Republican to the Senate. Ain’t going to happen!

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