Even The New Republic Now Calls for a Party Purge of Corporate-owned "Centrists"

Even The New Republic Now Calls for a Party Purge of Corporate-owned “Centrists”, by Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald is one of top liberal bloggers. His site is Unclaimed Territory and gets tens of thousands of hits a day. He was formerly a constitutional law and civil rights attorney, but his blog has been so successful that apparently he has mortgaged it into a writing career and left his lawyer job. He’s authored three books in the past three years and now gets regular writing gigs. It’s hard to believe that he’s making more money writing than practicing law! Here is his former blog, now moved to Salon. The guy made the bigtime with a Blogspot blog! Incredible. I have not talked any about the health care debate, but I am sure that you know where I stand. Fully 7 The pubic option is much misunderstood. It just means that you will have a choice to buy into a government run health program, which I guess will be something like socialized medicine, i.e. Medicare, Medicaid and that horrible health program that every Congressman has. I really favor single payer, and it’s the best program out there, but I guess it doesn’t have the votes. The insurance-company run for-profit medicine system is shit. Michael Moore’s movie Sicko makes that quite clear. I don’t understand all these Whites yelling about how great health insurance is. I guess they have not yet gotten too sick or too hurt. After all, the shit insurance model is all based on making money off denying you care. The more care they deny, the more they make. The more care they approve, the less money they make. Now why would it be a good idea to be covered by private medical insurance, given that obvious capitalist reality? If and when you get too sick or hurt that your insurance plan dumps you (matter of time for most of us), you will have to burn through every nickel you have and every tangible asset you own until you are so damn poor that you can go on Medicaid. I guess conservatives think that’s cool? What’s so cool about that? I don’t have money or many tangible assets, but if I did, why should have to burn through all of them and go poor just because I get sick or hurt? Why would anyone with money or assets support such nonsense? Why not have the state pay for the care due to my injury or illness, and that way I get to keep all my money and stuff? Which is all conservatives care about anyway, money and stuff. One big lie is that the public option will drive out all the private insurance companies. Lord, I wish it were true that anything would put this gang of thieves and vipers out of business, but surely a government plan would not. Left unstated is why the public plan would theoretically put all the private folks out of business anyway. I mean, competition, right? If private insurance is so sucky that anyone with a brain would take off and go buy the public insurance instead, then according to market logic, the private entities deserve to die, right? That’s like Neoliberal Economics 101. Anyway, there’s nothing to worry about. All you fools who so love your evil private insurance needn’t worry your little heads one bit. My understanding is that in most every nation that has socialized medicine (other than Communist countries), you can still go buy private insurance if you are stupid or masochistic enough. But indeed, my understanding is that hardly anyone does. Once again, if it’s so wonderful, why does hardly anyone buy it in states that have socialized medicine? So with 7 You see, as Greenwald points out, this is really all about money. Both parties are controlled by corporate interests, just the Dems somewhat less so. You get a Liberal Corporate Party and a Conservative Corporate Party. Turning the Dems into a corporate party was the brainchild of the Democratic Leadership Committee. Rahm Emanuel is the DLC point man for Barack Obama. The idea was either Dems or Repubs take corporate money, and if we let the Republicans get the corporate money, they will win every time. If Dems take it too, then we at least get to win sometimes and can come in and kind of sort of maybe almost a little bit once in a while do piecemeal, half-assed reforms here and there. A health care plan with no public option is shit. There’s nothing in it for me or anyone that I care about. All it does it force everyone to buy the evil called health insurance. If you’re poor or low income, the government subsidizes you so you can buy the shit called health insurance. How is that good for anyone’s health? It’s not. Supposedly it’s good for taxpayers, because we fork over lots of dough to serve the uninsured in emergency rooms. This way they have to buy insurance so we save. Whoop-te-doo. What good is that? Everyone else is forced to buy this overpriced insurance poison, and many are going to go broke paying for it. If you don’t want to go broke, now the state will force you! Wow, such a wonderful plan. What it really is is the biggest piece of corporate welfare in the history of the US. So billions of working people’s ill-affordable dollars get shoveled to some of the most vile corporate slime in the country. Somebody show me the upside? Greenwald’s post is interesting. The New Republic is basically the liberal wing of the neoconservatives. The jerks who known as the Neocons, so prominent in the Bush Administration, are really just the rightwing of that movement. The liberal wing has similar roots as the conservative wing, coming out of the 1970’s, the aftermath of the Vietnam War and in particular the aftermath of the 7 Day War and 1973 Wars in Israel. The liberal neocons are as Jewish as the conservative ones. These guys are basically the same “Cold War Liberals” as the neocons, but they did not go as far to the Right as the rest of them. TNR spent most of the 1980’s fulminating against the USSR, welfare, liberalism and Arabs while supporting genocidal Latin American regimes like the Salvadorans and of course, Israel. I used to subscribe to this magazine, but finally I gave it up around 1983. I wasn’t hip to Jews yet, so the magazine mystified me. After it got taken over by uber Israel-firster Marty Peretz, he stacked it from top to bottom with liberal Jewish neocons. About half of every issue was about Jews, Jewry, Israel, Judaism, Judaica or whatever. Even the book reviews was usually some Jewish reviewer reviewing a book by a Jewish guy about Jews. The whole exercise was one of endless Jewish solipsism. I read all this stuff at the time, but the solipsism never made sense. Only when I figured out Jews did I understand the solipsism. Jews are probably the most solipsistic humans on Earth, part and parcel of their hyperethnocentrism. To Jews, it’s all about the Jews. What’s all about the Jews? Well, everything, pretty much. They just can’t get enough of themselves. Up until this year, TNR has continued to beat the drum for the Blue Dogs, the liberal neocons, the Democratic Centrists and other losers. Jew Lieberman or Joe Lieberman or whatever his name is is like God incarnate to TNR. SuperJew and Liberal Neocon Jonathan Chait is one of their top writers, and reading him gives you a good insight into the mindset of TNR. Well, finally, even TNR has had enough with the Rahm Emanuel  – Barack Obama Centrist corporate controlled Democratic Party. They’ve become even too Republican-like for the original Democratic Centrists. The about-face by TNR, among other things, shows there’s a liberal rebellion growing in the Democratic Party, and it’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen in a while. Let’s water it well and let it grow.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (1932-2009)

RIP Teddy Kennedy. He authored of the 1965 Immigration Act that got rid of quotas that mandated that 9 At the time, the nation was full of hatred for Eastern and Southern Europeans, who were regarded as grossly inferior to the Nordic founding stock of America (of which I am a member – 5/8 British, 1/4 German, 1/8 French). Even Jews were regarded as inferior. IQ tests were showing Italians and Jews with IQ gaps as large as that between Blacks and Whites. Italians in particular (and to some extent Jews) were associated with crime, social decay, gangs, ghettos, etc. the same way that Blacks and Mexicans are now. Considering all this, it’s interesting that these groups are now fully integrated into the US middle class. There is little to no evidence that they are inferior to Nordic Whites. The ghettos, squalor, crime and gangs are a memory. At the time, the nation was so nuts about these groups that a proposal was made to sterilize them and to put them into camps to deal with them later. The model was eugenics, the same theory that drove the Nazis to their mass murder. The camps could have conceivably been used to kill these White inferiors, though that would have been odd. The nation was so in thrall to eugenics at the time and so contemptuous of these so-called inferior Whites that the only reason the proposal was shot down was that it would cost too much and require too much outlaw in manpower and materials. When Calvin Coolidge signed the bill, he made a remark about how the US was a Nordic nation and commented on the necessity to keep out these European “inferiors.” So given the stupid Nordicism behind that bill, it’s a good thing that it finally did get amended. Supposedly, the quotas were changed so that 9 Anyway, according to White nationalists, this bill sealed the doom on White America. They may be correct, but I don’t really care that the US will eventually become a non-White country. I’m more concerned about the rate at which the non-Whites come here and the quality of the non-Whites and their assimilation potential. After all, I grew up in a California that was 20-3 On the other hand, I don’t even recognize my state anymore. Immigration is more a problem of too much, too soon and way too many low quality Third World peasants and urban poor types who offer no benefit to the US and lots of downside. On top of that, it’s true that Teddy was behind the latest Amnesty bill too, along with Juan McCain. This one failed, and it would have amnestied in 20 million illegals and then, via chain immigration, would have allowed 60-80 million more relatives in. This is the outrage that Obama is determined to pass. If this bill passes, America as we know it will be gone forever and we will have to decide which type of Latin American country we are going to be. Teddy was also involved in the Chappaquiddick outrage, where a drunken Teddy drove his car off a bridge into a river, then made his way out of the car to the shore while his young female passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, drowned. For this, amazingly, he apparently served no time at all. It was clearly a case of vehicular manslaughter. He delayed showing up at the police station until the booze had worn off. For this, he was hated forever by the Right, but you know if one of their heroes had done it, the Right would have supported him anyway and not trifled a second over it. Despite the Amnesty outrage and Chappaquiddick, I still don’t hate Teddy Kennedy. Maybe I should. But he was one of the greatest modern US liberal senators, always solid in his principles, and rarely selling out to the Right or Far Right the way so many of these fake liberals like Chris Dodd, Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama do. He was a real liberal, always great on health care, the environment, gay rights, civil rights, you name it. He always stood up for and fought for poor, low income and working class people. I suppose that his immigration craziness was just part and parcel of his liberal. There is an interview with Michael Levin in a recent issue of American Renaissance where he says something very sensible about liberals. Liberals are wrong on race, he says, but they mean well. They have good intentions, in contrast to conservatives who are just flat out mean. This is important to note. Liberals like Kennedy honestly do not think or realize that legalizing 20 million illegals followed by 80 million chain immigrants is bad for America. They still believe in the Emma Lazarus and Statue of Liberty myth – “Give me your tired, your poor. Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” They don’t do it because they are White self-haters or anything like that. A Teddy Kennedy Presidency would have been a very interesting one, but after Chappaquiddick it was doomed. Teddy may have even been so liberal as to scale back US imperialism, something no liberal US President has ever done. Kennedy was an inveterate womanizer and tales about him are legendary. Once in the Senate Dining Room, a young female dived under the table to service him, hidden by the draping tablecloths. He especially loved young women, even into middle age and possibly beyond. I don’t care about this, and I wish I could emulate him. Teddy was a heavy drinker too, an Irishman. You could see the damage the booze had done to him later in his puffy and reddened face. Nevertheless, he lived to age 77, and was finally killed by a brain tumor, not booze. He was ill in recent days, and last week, he took time off from the Senate for medical reasons. In less than a fortnight, he was gone, dead 11 PM PST last night. Teddy was well-liked by all of his fellow Congressmen, even his conservative enemies. He was part of their club. He apparently had a warm, charming, engaging and charismatic personality. Teddy was of course related to John F. Kennedy, assassinated US President and Robert F. Kennedy, assassinated US Presidential candidate front-runner. He was the Great Little Brother. RIP Teddy Kennedy.

Un Bisturi Una Cisti

[wpvideo lPymBw0E] This post has been translated into French as Un Bistouri Un Kyste (en Français). This is an Italian translation of the One Lance One Cyst video by Natalie of France, my finest translator. Enjoy. Questo video è veramente disgustoso ! Penso si tratti di un film medicale. Pare sia stato girato in un ambulatorio. Si vede semplicemente l’incisione di una cisti mostruosa, o un brufolo o qualcosa del genere. Dal suo aspetto sembra una cisti sebacea. Mi piace molto schiacciarmi i brufoli, pure alla mia età. Lo so che poi possono rimanere delle cicatrici, ma onestamente è difficile, soprattutto se le mani sono pulite, dopo la doccia e che i brufoli sono pronti a scoppiare. Questa cosa nel video è il « più terribile brufolo che si sia mai visto ». L’apparecchio aspira sempre di più, sembra che il brufolo sia dotato di una produzione di sebo eterna. Proprio quando si comincia a sperare che il dottore stia finendo, quel dannato brufolo ressuscita e combatte di nuovo. A tutti quelli che mi malediscono di aver pubblicato questa cazzata, il mio intento è di far progredire la scienza, ecco.

Un Bistouri Un Kyste

[wpvideo lPymBw0E] This post has been translated into Italian as Un Bisturi Una Cisti (traduzione in italiano). This is a French translation of the One Lance One Cyst video by Natalie of France, my finest translator. Enjoy. Cette vidéo est vraiment dégoutante! Je pense qu’il s’agit d’une vidéo médicale. Il semble qu’elle ait été tournée dans un cabinet médical. Elle montre tout simplement l’incision d’un horrible kyste, bouton ou furoncle où quelque chose de ce genre. Vu son aspect on dirait un kyste sébacé. J’aime beaucoup me presser les boutons, même à mon age (mûr). Je sais que ça peut laisser des cicatrices, mais honnêtement, c’est difficile, surtout si vos mains son propres, juste après une douche et que le boutons est prêt à exploser. Cette chose dans la vidéo est « Le bouton le plus diabolique jamais créé ». L’appareil aspire encore et encore, cette chose semble un puits sans fond. Juste quand on pense que le docteur a réussi 0 terminer, ce satané bouton resurgit et livre le combat une fois de plus. Pour tous ceux qui me maudissent d’avoir posté cette connerie, je tiens à vous faire savoir que je l’ai mise pour faire avancer la science, voilà.

I Have Very Bad Breath

I went to the doctor because of a longstanding case of halitosis. The doctor said it had something to do with my lips, specifically the nature of my lips. I don’t really understand that, but people, especially women, have always said I have really full lips. Nevertheless, though women love to have sex with me, they are often reluctant to kiss me. I’ve never really understood that. And after they do kiss me, they often make some phony excuse and go rinse their mouths out while giggling. I asked the doctor what he meant by my lips were causing bad breath and he started laughing. “Well, it’s because you have your head up your ass, you might say!” he cracked. What’s so funny about that? When I go to the doc, I want bedside manner for my insurance co-pay, not dirty cracks. I told him just that and he started laughing again. “Speaking of dirty cracks,” he said, “Go look in the mirror!” Now I was starting to get mad. He finally recommended tons of mouthwash. If that didn’t work, he said, I could always wear a jockstrap over my face, assuming that’s even allowed in public. I’m really pissed and I’m considering a malpractice suit, but I still don’t understand my halitosis. I think it’s possibly due to my halitosis, but people get really freaked out when I burp! Then turn on the fan or run to the window and open up the window and fan their noses. You know, that’s not funny at all. That really hurts my feelings. For Chrissake man, all I did was burp! Everyone burps, but you act like my burps are some kind of special super-stinky burps? Screw you! I have other issues with oral hygiene, but I’m embarrassed to discuss them. One problem I have is a lot of itching and burning around my mouth for some reason. I’ve tried chap stick, but it just doesn’t work. I finally got the nerve to ask the doctor and he stared at my mouth for a bit, then he almost fell out of his chair laughing. “Of course chap stick won’t work on your burning lips,” he cracked. “Maybe you should try Preparation H instead.” Then he let out this huge belly laugh. What a jerk! Like I’m going to put Preparation H on my mouth! Here is a lab photo of my mouth. If you have any medical knowledge, look it over and see if you can figure out what my problem is:

Though I'm White, I've always had full, Mick Jagger type lips. Lately they've become a social embarassment though. Please help, anyone!
Though I'm White, I've always had full, Mick Jagger type lips. Lately they've become a social embarassment though. Please help, anyone!
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Pakistan Adimst the Ruins

Note: Repost from the old blog. Pakistan amidst the ruins. Read those figures over and tell me that she does not need socialism, and socialism, now. If the word socialism gives you the shivers, how about at least the socialism of Sri Lanka, which has managed to produce spectacular figures in all areas that Pakistan has so lacked. How can anyone possibly look at these kind of figures and tell me that capitalism works at all in the 3rd World? They are just starting? Hell, they have had 60 years to practice. Enough already. Capitalism in South Asia is killing at least 8 million people every year, year and year out, no exceptions. That right there is an excellent reasons for Maoists across the subcontinent to take up arms to overthrow the existing system and put in whatever they choose. Anything that kills fewer than 8 million a year is better than the status quo, right? So why worry about killing a few here and there? Is it worth killing a few to save a million? Of course it is, always was, always will be. Let us see the red flag fly over South Asia, not just Nepal.

One Lance One Cyst

[wpvideo lPymBw0E] This post has been translated into Italian as Un Bisturi Una Cisti (traduzione in italiano) and into French as Un Bistouri Un Kyste (en Français). This video is really gross! I think it’s just a medical video. Looks like it was shot in a doctor’s office. It simply shows the lancing of some horrible cyst – boil – zit or whatever it is. From the looks of it, it appears to be a sebaceous cyst. I love to pop me a zit or two, even in middle age. I know it’s supposed to leave scars, but honestly, it hardly ever does, especially if your hands are clean, you’re just out of the shower,  and the zit is ready to blow. This thing in the movie is like the Most Evil Zit That Ever Was. The sucker just goes on and on and seems to have eternal life or something. Just when you think the doc’s finally got the last of it, this damn Zit Christ up and resurrects to fight once again. For all you who bitch about me posting this crap, I’m posting this in the furtherance of medical science, so there. If you think this website is valuable to you, please consider a contribution to support the continuation of the site.

How Does This Work?

PTSD May Nearly Double Dementia Risk How is it that mere PTSD actually doubles your risk of Alzheimer’s Disease? Doesn’t make sense to me. I am not aware that depression ups the risk, and I am fairly certain that anxiety disorders do not up the risk either. In fact, neurotics may even live longer than their extroverted brethren, due to the extreme caution of introverts (most neurotics are introverts) and the lack of caution displayed by those happy go lucky people people. I am not even aware that schizophrenia or manic depression ups Alzheimer’s risk. So what’s with PTSD? PTSD is one nasty illness. One thing is that these folks typically can’t sleep much at all. They sleep terribly, wake up all the time, they’re just miserable. It’s possible that just not getting a good night’s sleep damages your brain after a while. I have seen studies of PTSD folks who had reduced hippocampal volume. In a word, the PTSD had damaged their hippocampuses. The hippocampus is involved in memory. Ok, so how does that lead to Alzheimer’s? I don’t get it, but the data looks pretty good. On the plus side, you will forget that you have PTSD. Haha.

An Easy Way to Raise the IQ's of 100's of Millions

Repost from the old site. Get rid of iodine deficiency. Amazingly, even moderate iodine deficiency causes IQ declines of 10-15 points if it’s in a pregnant woman or an infant. It looks like Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, India, Ethiopia, Sudan, Guinea, Senegal and Sierra Leone all have moderate to severe deficiency. It would be interesting to see a better rundown of the severity of the deficiency in each place so we could figure out how much collective IQ could go up with iodine supplementation. In India, 500 million (5 Yet another failure of Indian capitalism to provide for the very basics in human needs in India, and one more reason I support the Maoist revolutionaries in that country. Many other nations have mild deficiencies. I don’t know what a mild deficiency does to your IQ, if anything. 1 International Council for the Control of Iodine Deficiency website.

Black Crime and Intelligence: An Intrepid Investigation

Repost from the old site. Note: This post has been accused of racism. See here for my position statement on racism. Black crime is a real thing; let’s not gloss it over, and the Black crime wave is a relatively recent occurrence, mostly since about 1960 or so, which just so happens to coincide with sky-high rates of Black illegitimacy, Black males being raised without fathers, etc. Around this time many Blacks moved from the South to the North. But many more Black females moved north than Black males. So there were more females than males. In such a situation, many males will tend not to marry and instead will just play the various women, father children, not support them, etc. In the opposite situation, more males than females, males will compete aggressively for females, quickly marry any available females and tend not to leave them. Since the 1960’s, there has been a massive loss of manufacturing jobs in the North. All of this has pretty much wreaked havoc on the Black family. It’s clear that those Black males frequently being raised by poorly socialized Black females, without fathers, have a higher rate of sociopathy. In fact, this formula may produce sociopathy in any race. Much of the analysis in the preceding three paragraphs comes from The Antisocial Personalities by David Lykken. While heavy on the psychological jargon, I found it a great read. It’s one of the best books ever written on sociopathy. Robert Hare, one of the world’s top experts on psychopaths, also has a great book on sociopathy, Without Conscience, The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us. Hare’s book is much easier to read and is a must for anyone interested in the subject. The recent explosion of Black crime shows that it is not just Black genes that cause Black crime, which itself is real: Blacks have a 9 times higher crime rate than Whites. I admit that the town I just moved to has a reputation for a fairly low crime rate. The reason given to me in whispers is that, while heavily Hispanic, the town also has few Blacks. Hence less crime. Demographics trumps all for many Americans when deciding on a place to live, or especially to buy a house. For decades now, Whites have been fleeing areas, particularly inner cities and exurbs, as they turned Black. Now they are fleeing Hispanics, and in towns in the South San Fransisco Bay Area, namely Cupertino, they are even fleeing Asians! There, White parents complain about heavily Asian schools where the Asians out-compete their kids, where sports, arts and music and either poorly funded or simply not supported at all, where all the emphasis is on math and science. For their part, Asian parents have decried the over 9 The Whites flee and flee and run and run. One gets the impression that at some point there will be nowhere left to run. Yet we now have something called “Black Flight.” To understand this, first realize that Black society has become two-tiered with the liberation Blacks experienced since the 1960’s. Increasingly, a Black professional, middle and upper class reaps the fruits of American society, while a Black underclass continues to fester in the worst pathology. In places like northeastern New Orleans, middle and upper middle class Blacks are fleeing the pathology of the Black Inner City in New Orleans to create a relatively upscale Black neighborhood, which undoubtedly has less pathology than the danger zone they are fleeing. Labeling middle class Blacks with the problems of the Black underclass is immoral, irrational, rude and just stupid. Yet this is what the Hal Turners do. Nor should we decry all “flight” from blighted neighborhoods as “racist,” as the Left is wont to do. Since Blacks themselves are engaging in “flight” from blighted Black neighborhoods, it seems silly to regard flight from blight as a racist move. Even with that reality of high Black crime, why be racist? Any given individual Black person may quite possibly, and often does, possess the moral character and decency that one wants in a friend or acquaintance. Therefore, Blacks in general should be treated respectfully as individuals as long as one feels they are good people and lacks evidence that they are not. The White racists also say that Blacks are stupid. There is a White-Black variance in IQ that has lasted for some time now. I will not go into the debate around that variance except to say that I think it is real. But it is not so devastating as one thinks. First of all, we are not taking into account the Flynn Effect, whereby the IQ’s of all people in the Western World have been rising for decades now. A couple of recent studies have also found the Flynn Effect in Belo Horizonte, Brazil and rural Kenya, of all places. There is much debate about the cause of the rise, but it is real, although there is evidence that it is petering out. Flynn is also the author a study showing young Blacks reducing the Black-White IQ gap in the US by about 5-6 points since 1970. Since IQ is always renormed around an average of 100 for Whites, the rise is not noticeable. That is, a 100 nowadays is a considerably higher score than a 100 a few decades ago, since IQ’s continue to climb while the scale is constantly renormed to mask the changes. So, Blacks have been getting smarter for decades now in America (and in Brazil and Kenya at least, also) along with other races. At some point, if the trend continues, we can hope for various groups in (at least) the West: brightest, brighter and bright. If different races compare differently along that scale, it should not be a tremendous matter. Further, as Black IQ continues to rise with every decade, it becomes more and more difficult to call Blacks “dumb” in the face of rising Black IQ. Nutrition is the main reason given for the Flynn Effect; technology, video games and an increasingly intellectually stimulating modern environment are others. Blacks probably still do not eat as good a diet in the West as Whites, so there is probably room for more improvement here. If Blacks follow Whites in enthusiasm for video games and personal computers, there is probably room for further improvement. As is, video games are probably played by Whites more than Blacks and many poorer Blacks still do not own a PC or have internet access. Furthermore, as IQ’s have risen for decades now, the rationale for setting mental retardation at 70 IQ becomes harder to sustain. After all, an 85 IQ today is higher than an 85 IQ 30 years ago. Racists conflate Black IQ with Black crime, and do the same with Hispanics. This argument is interesting and not entirely without merit. However, there are some problems with the analysis, yet, at the same time, if true, it offers some hope. First of all, as noted, Black IQ, along with all other IQ’s in the West, has been rising for decades. The low IQ-crime link is especially seen at the lower end of the IQ range, which is where the Flynn Effect is having its greatest effect. I.e., the average rise noted by Flynn is mainly accounted for by reduced numbers of scores in the lowest range of IQ’s. As the number of persons scoring at the lowest end of the scale becomes fewer and fewer, if there is a good IQ-crime link, then we would expect crime to fall in tandem. Looking at average crime rates between Blacks, Hispanics and Whites, we can see that more than IQ is accounting for the differences. Hispanics have a crime rate three times that of Whites, and Blacks, as noted, have a crime rate nine times as high. Average Black IQ is about 89.8, Hispanic IQ is about 92 and White IQ is 103. The IQ-crime link is quite imperfect. If IQ alone accounted for the differences (going by the White-Black spread), Hispanic crime would be 6-7 times the White rate, not 3 times higher. So Hispanics are committing crimes at a much lower rate than would be expected by IQ – 5 If we take the White-Hispanic IQ spread instead, the Black crime rate would be about 4-5 times the White rate, not 9 times higher. So Blacks are committing crimes at double the rate expected by IQ. Something about Blacks besides IQ, possibly Black culture, is inflating the Black crime rate. Clearly, while there is some IQ-crime correlation among groups, there is a heck of a lot more going on with crime than merely IQ. It is here that we probably enter into the wilds of a place called culture. Racists like to say that Black pathology is due to Black genes, and as such is hopeless. Blacks are stupid and crime-prone, it is in their genes, and nothing can be done about it. It is important to take this on in a logical manner instead of just hurling the racist moniker at those voicing this argument. Let us look at Cuba for instance. Cuba is a state that is about 6 A fascinating look at the variety of lineages visible in the Cuban people is here – it seems they have every possible mixture you could think of. Considering the 6 What do we see instead? In Latin America, Cubans have the second longest life expectancy, are the best educated, have the lowest infant mortality, and have the highest standardized test scores in the region. Cuba, with They have the highest percentage of agronomists per capita of any country on Earth and the highest doctor-patient ratio (1 doctor for every 169 patients). Cubans, far from starving as capitalist propaganda says, are among the top 5 nations in Latin America in terms of caloric and protein intake. The rate of malnutrition is so low – Further, the rate of street crime, especially violent crime, is quite low. Opponents of the regime quickly retort that “there is nothing to steal in Cuba.” Surely there is plenty to steal, and if not, there are always other humans to commit violent crimes against. Haiti is vastly poorer than Cuba, surely has much less in the way of stuff to steal, and has an out of control crime rate. Racists quickly point out that Haiti is all Black, hence ridden with crime. Yet Cuba is also majority Black and mulatto. Havana is often regarded as the safest large city in the Western Hemisphere, and Cuba is regarded by many travelers as one of the safest countries in Latin America. A majority-black and mulatto country and big city the safest in an entire hemisphere – imagine that! A typical rejoinder is that Cuba is a dictatorship and therefore there is little crime. Hey, if it takes a cop on every corner to control crime, I say go for it. Furthermore, the penalties for breaking the law are really far worse in other Latin American countries such as Venezuela, Peru, Brazil and Colombia, where the prisons are utterly Hellish and where police death squads roam the streets slaughtering petty criminals and street kids at an astonishing rate. Where there are a lot of Blacks, there is often quite a bit of social pathology, low educational achievement, crime, especially violent crime, etc. Some racists have also implied an association between Blacks and rape. The more Blacks, the more rape. All of these statistics are interesting, but taken to their racist logic, lead to discrimination. For instance, many Blacks are upstanding folks who play no role in any of this pathology or crime. By associating them with their brethren who do, and discriminating against them, you commit an immoral act. Further, as the Cuban example shows, majority-Black and mulatto nations are capable of amazing achievements, in the Cuban case beating many majority Mestizo and even some majority White nations on a variety of metrics. One way of ameliorating of the problems of Black pathology laid out above could involve looking at those nations and locales that seem to have the highest rates of Black achievement and the lowest rates of Black pathology. This could be seen as an environment to “bring out the best in Blacks”. The Cuban example shows that Black genes are not destiny and there is a way forward, out of the cave of genetic determinism.

Joseph Stalin, World's Greatest Humanitarian?

Repost from the old blog. This post aroused a lot of controversy, mostly from the deliberately outrageous title. Here at Robert Lindsay, we are getting sick and tired of endlessly refuting this the “murderous Jewish Communism” line, not to mention the “murderous Communism” line. The real killing system is called capitalism. Under the Soviet Communists, life expectancy, as McNally implies below, increased from 32 in 1913 to 63 in 1956. That set a world record for the quickest doubling of life expectancy by any nation in history. Most of that increase in life expectancy occurred under Stalin. By that standard, incredible as it sounds, Stalin was one of the greatest humanitarians of all time. He was also a mass murderer. And this is the paradox. Progress continued even with the incredible loss of 27 million Soviet citizens by the Nazi aggression of the Great War Against Fascism. Interestingly, all progress in life expectancy in the Soviet Union ended by about 1960-1965, about 10 years after Stalin’s death. This gives the lie to the notion that life expectancy increases were inevitable at this time no matter what the system. Arguments are made that even without the October Revolution, Russia would have seen an equivalent increase in life expectancy as that accomplished by the USSR. This notion is questioned by data showing life expectancy at 35 in Albania and 32 in China in 1949. Given the savagery and callousness of Russian elites, there is no reason to think that Russia would have been any different. The end of progress soon after Stalin’s death suggests frighteningly that hardline Communists who protest post-Stalin “revisionism” may have been onto something. Russians lived far longer under Gorbachev (when Soviet repression was hardly killing anyone anymore) than they do now. The collapse of life expectancy from the mid-sixties in the early 1960’s to 56 under Russian capitalism has led to 15 million excess deaths since 1989. Stalin killed 2.5 million people during peacetime. That figure does not include various wartime deaths, especially the deaths during the population transfers in WW2. I believe it also does not include executions during WW2 But evidence, based on my calculations after reading the data here and here (warning – the latter link is actually a 275 page book), indicates that Stalin saved 39 million lives (the evidence shows 36.5 million, but to arrive at that, we must subtract the 2.5 million he killed), or around 1.5 million per year during his tenure. This is why Russian opinion polls show 3 There were 900,000 executions (mostly in the Great Terror) and 1.6 million premature deaths in the camps and in forced relocations. The figures are somewhat controversial and the true figures may be higher, but that is the best I can come up with, and I studied the issue in depth. That adds up to 2.5 million. Regarding the Holodomor, the truth is, the Ukrainian resisters tried to starve an entire nation. They destroyed much or most of their grain crops by setting them on fire or leaving them to rot and refused to sow many other acres. They also decimated the supply of horses, cows ,pigs, sheep and goats in the USSR. In 1928, there were 34 million horses, 70 million cows, 150 million sheep and goats, and 26 million pigs in the USSR. By 1932, the resisters had killed 5 As a result, the resisters were out of food. I guess they expected the state to feed them or something after that stunt. I guess they were wrong. There was also armed struggle going at this time, with continuous armed attacks by resisters against collective farms in the area; in early 1930, resisters were staging an average of 23 attacks a day. They destroyed farms, crops, and livestock, and killed lots of people, including thousands of party activists. The USSR took up arms to fight them, and counterinsurgencies are not pretty. There was an all-out war going on between Stalin’s regime and 6 million Kulaks. In Ukraine, due to generations of brainwashing by the Catholic Church and the landlords, many middle and poor peasants took the side of the Kulaks, even though they had been exploited viciously by these Kulaks for generations. Many of the other 114 million Soviet peasants overwhelmingly backed the fight against the Kulaks. Those peasants had been savagely abused by the feudal system, including the Kulaks, for centuries. About 5,000 resisters were executed. All had engaged in armed actions against the state. The famine of 1932 had several causes: First, the resister destruction of livestock mentioned above, combined with several years of destruction of grain crops and refusal to seed new fields. Second, there were three years of drought from 1930-32. In 1932, drought also affected other regions of the USSR. There were also a variety of other poor weather conditions . Third, there was an epidemic of typhoid and other water-borne diseases in the still-primitive region. Fourth and probably most importantly, an epidemic of wheat rust spread through the region. Fifth, the Kholkoz, or new collective farms, had been organized chaotically, and were not yet producing well. As a result of all of the above, the harvest of 1932 simply failed. People died of hunger and especially related diseases all over the USSR. 1 million died of these causes in Siberia. The ethnic Russian area of the Lower Volga was hit by mass deaths just as hard as the Ukrainians were. So much for “the Ukrainians were targeted.” It’s true that the deaths were worse in the Ukraine. That’s because the harvest failure was worst of all there. There was no Holodomor or man-made deliberate famine. It simply never happened. The state was forced into the horrible choice of feeding the cities or the villages. Cities were prioritized. In particular, the army had to be fed. At this time, people started fleeing the famine-struck regions, hoping to find areas with more food. At one point, the state tried to stop people from moving around the country because they needed them in the harvest zones the harvest the crops the next year, else there would be yet another famine. All of the above combined to create the perfect storm of a famine in which possibly 5.5 million died in 1932. There was also famine in the Volga and Caucasus in that year, which showed that it was a regional problem. The next year, 1933, there was an excellent harvest. The USSR had a desperate manpower shortage at this time. That they would deliberately exterminate millions of healthy workers is absurd. It is interesting that soon after the Western powers intervened on the side of the Whites in the Russian Civil War, there was a huge famine in the USSR in which 9 million people died in 1921-22. Why is it that these deaths, (mostly attributed to an outpouring of weaponry to the Whites from the West), not to mention the 27 million Soviets killed by the Nazis invasion in World War 2, are never discussed, while “Stalin’s Ukrainian famine” is discussed to the point of tedium? Soon as the famine started, the USSR started sending food to the Ukraine, but famines are funny. Once they start, they reach a point where they are already in motion and it is hard to stop them. Most victims of the Holodomor died not of starvation but of disease. At the time, there were massive shortages of medicines in the USSR, and in much of the rest of the world for that matter, to deal with these epidemics. The Kulaks had savagely exploited the peasants in that region for centuries, as that 32 year life expectancy attests. It is interesting that these deaths from Kulak exploitation never enter into anyone’s figures. Yes, 5.5 million Soviets died. But the resisters were trying to starve an entire nation. McNally also goes into some great details about the “Jewish Communism” business, a canard that led to WW2, the Holocaust of 7 In truth, in 1917, 7 I think it is interesting that at some point, most hardcore anti-Semites decide that: 1. Jews killed Jesus (Deicide) 2. Jews are responsible for Communism (Judeo-Bolshevism) 3. The Holocaust didn’t really happen the way the Jews say it did (Holocaust Denial) To me, this indicates that hardcore anti-Semitism looks like some kind of mental illness, with specific, DSM-like features all its own. McNally’s comments posted below come from the Commenter: Under Communist rule, the Soviet people suffered for decades, eventually leading to the deaths of anywhere from 20 to 100 million people, depending on which sources you believe. Patrick McNally: That’s a Cold War invention from beginning to end. Nothing in any of the demographic studies which have been assembled from the archives since 1991 or any of the records of the GULAG supports such absurd myths. They clearly show that the expected life-span of the average Russian gradually grew as the Soviet economy was developed. Even when one takes into account the hundreds of thousands of executions which occurred in 1937-8 and the one million or so who died in the GULAG during the 1930s, there is nothing which can rationally allow one to conclude that anything resembling 20 million died who would somehow have lived under either the old Czarist government or a White government. The mortality rate in 1937 actually was already significantly reduced from 1913 and it would go down much further by the 1950s. Given the total rejection of the Whites by the ordinary Russian, the most one can really say is that the revolution might have been healthier if more Gentile intellectuals had committed themselves to revolutionary aims in advance of 1914. Among the educated people who were seeking to investigate some type of revolutionary solution prior to World War I there was certainly a disproportionate share of Jews, as educated Gentiles tended to buy into the established social order more easily. But that’s the most any knowledgeable person can say. The revolution which spread chaotically all across Russia in 1917 was definitely not something brought about by a small cabal of any ethnic type. The question from that time onward was what organized party of intellectuals would be able to place themselves at the head of it and give direction. The Constitutional Democrats proved to be almost totally out of touch, and the more conservative parties were completely removed from any connection with the main Russian populace. The only real political rivals which the Bolsheviks ever had were the Mensheviks (which had a high percentage of Jews in its leadership, and was potentially able to attract support among the Russian labor force) and the Social Revolutionaries (who had a base of support among the peasantry). These parties were unable to take charge of anything because they had not developed an organizational apparatus for the seizure of power as the Bolsheviks had. That automatically meant that political authority among those forces opposed to the Bolsheviks in the civil war went to the commanders of the ‘Volunteer Army’ and these people lacked any bridge of contact to the ordinary Russian (which the Bolsheviks were often able to make). That’s why the Reds won. It’s amazing how people who clearly have never studied the Russian Civil War draw up extravagant theories without being acquainted with the facts.

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Final Katrina Death Toll at 4,081

Repost from the old blog. I received a lot of criticism for this, but this is still probably the best death toll for direct and indirect deaths for Hurricane Katrina out there. I used my own total of 1,723 direct deaths combined with testimony about a study done after the hurricane that showed a huge increase in excess deaths in the period after the hurricane was over. The resulting total of 4,081 is probably the most accurate total out there for direct and indirect deaths from the storm so far, unless someone has added in some more indirect deaths. This figure came under some criticism, but it is based on the solid epidemiological theory of excess mortality. My official death toll of 1,723, representing deaths due to immediate and direct effects of the storm, has not changed since August 22, 2006. However, we now have a fascinating document that comes from testimony delivered to Congress, which has caused me to raise the total deaths from Katrina due to direct and immediate plus delayed effects to 4,081. For those who are interested, a list of 1,195 people who were killed in the hurricane is available here. The testimony was part of a hearing titled Post Katrina Health Care: Continuing Concerns and Immediate Needs in the New Orleans Region given before the House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations on March 13, 2007. The list of speakers is here. Of particular interest in terms of the Katrina death toll was the testimony given by a physician, Dr. Kevin Stephens, Sr., Director pf the New Orleans Health Department. In his testimony (pdf), Stephens points out that New Orleans already had serious public health problems before the hurricane, including large numbers of poor and uninsured people. The number of doctors has been reduced by 7 In some areas such as the Lower Ninth Ward and New Orleans East in Orleans Parish and Chalmette and other places in St. Bernard Parish, residents have no access to health care whatsoever. Mental health is another serious problem: even last year, 2 Yet the number of mental health inpatient beds has been reduced by 8 These anecdotal reports caused Stephens and a team to undertake a study to count the number of death notices in the New Orleans Times-Picayune and compare it to a reference year which would serve as a baseline. 2003 was chosen as a reference year. The data can be seen on page nine of the testimony linked above. In the first six months of 2003, 5,544 deaths were counted. In the first six months of 2006, 7,902 were counted, an increase of 2,358 deaths over baseline in the post-Katrina period. Based on this, we will assign 2,358 deaths as caused by the accelerated death rates that occurred in New Orleans even long after the storm. Although the population of New Orleans is only 1/2 what it was prior to the storm, the obituaries covered not only New Orleans but also included many of the refugees tossed about to various parts of the country. Based on this new information, we can add the previous toll of 1,723 to the new post-Katrina figure of 2,358 to posit a new unofficial death toll of 4,081. Possible causes of the excess deaths in 2006 include stress, suicide, pollution, contamination, impoverishment and the devastation of the heath sector after Katrina. For instance, the suicide rate tripled in the first 10 months after Katrina. Thanks to Ezra Boyd of Louisiana State University for sending me this information.

Louisiana 20061: Tue., Mar. 13, 2007: 2,358
Louisiana:       Mon., Aug. 2, 2006:  1,464
Mississippi:     Tue., Jan. 24, 2006:   238
Florida:         Mon., Jan. 9, 2006:     14
Georgia:         Mon., Jan. 9, 2006:      2
Alabama:         Mon., Jan. 9, 2006:      2
Ohio2:           Wed., Aug. 31, 2005:     2
Kentucky3:       Wed., Aug. 31, 2005:     1
Total:                                4,081

Footnoted totals are controversial. Explanations for controversial totals follows: 1The explanation for the 2,358 excess deaths in the first six months of 2006 as compared to the baseline of the first six months of 2003, presumably due to various effects of Hurricane Katrina, is above. This total reflects deaths due to delayed effects, whereas the other figures all represent more immediate and direct effects of the storm. 2The two Ohio victims are Cassondra Ground, 19, of Monroeville, Ohio, and Thelma Niedzinski, 84, of Norwalk, Ohio. Both were killed in a car accident near Monroeville, Ohio on August 30, 2005. The Ohio State Highway Patrol felt that a wet road caused by Hurricane Katrina caused the car accident. See Ohioans Focus on Helping Katrina Victims, Jay Cohen, Associated Press, August 31, 2005. 3The Kentucky victim was Deanna Petsch, 10, of Hopkinsville, Kentucky. On August 29, 2005, she fell into a Hurricane Katrina-swollen ditch in Hopkinsville and drowned. See Storm Surge: State Gets Soaked, City Avoids Major Flooding, Homes, Life Lost in Hopkinsville, Sheldon S. Shafer and James Malone, The Louisville (Kentucky) Courier-Journal, August 31, 2005. Update: This post has been linked on the always-excellent blog Majikthise and criticized in the comments there. The comments question how the 2,368 excess deaths after Katrina can possibly be attributed to Hurricane Katrina. Answer: They cannot. But using that number is perfectly in accord with the Theory of Excess Mortality. That theory is widely used by epidemiologists, and was used by Les Roberts’ team to come up with the figure of 655,000 excess deaths in Iraq since the US invasion. Dr. Gideon Polya has done a lot of work in the area of excess mortality and avoidable mortality, some of which has been published in peer-reviewed journals. Examples of his work are here, here and here. Can we prove that anything in particular is causing excess mortality in any particular place, absent disaster or war? Nope. But something is killing people in various places at various times at an excessive rate. Anecdotal evidence indicated that many more people than normal were dying in New Orleans in the three to nine months post-Hurricane Katrina. Something was killing them. They just didn’t up and decide that 2006 was a nice year for dying. Barring other reasonable factors, we may assume that Hurricane Katrina had something to do with the excess deaths in New Orleans. The theory and methodology used in my Katrina excess deaths post in no less rigorous than that used by Roberts, Polya and epidemiologists everywhere. This comment in the same thread on Majikthise backs up my comments quite well. This research takes a lot of time, and I do not get paid anything for it. If you think this website is valuable to you, please consider a a contribution to support more of this valuable research.

Final Katrina Direct Death Toll At 1,723

Repost from the old blog. This is my tally of the final death toll from Hurricane Katrina from a number of sources. I am not sure if it differs a bit from the official toll, but if it does, I am confident that my total if the better one. It was quoted as the official toll on Wikipedia for a long time. Update: The indirect Katrina death toll has risen from 1,723 to 4,098 as of March 13, 2007. See my post, Final Katrina Death Toll at 4,081 for details. A list of 1,195 people who were killed in Hurricane Katrina is available on this website here. For what it’s worth, Seth Abramson, an attorney/poet blogger, has been hammering away at the discrepancies in Mississippi’s death toll for some time now, making various allegations that Haley Barbour is hiding the real death toll in Mississippi. It is true that the suicide rate in New Orleans went up after Hurricane Katrina for a number of months, but the only figures available are per 1000,000 population figures, and until we can determine the population of New Orleans month by month post-Katrina, there is no way to figure out what that number is. It is helpful to look at a couple of overviews of what Hurricane Katrina actually was. First, a timeline, and then a fact sheet (both the timeline and the fact sheet are from the producers of Surviving Katrina, a promising documentary directed by Phil Craig and produced by the Discovery Channel. This film will be showing on August 27 at 9 PM across the US:

Timeline

Tuesday, August 23, 2005 Hurricane Katrina starts forming over the Bahamas and is identified by the National Hurricane Centre at 5 PM as Tropical Depression 12. Wednesday, August 24 Tropical Depression 12 strengthens into a tropical storm and is named Katrina. Thursday, August 25 Katrina strikes Florida as a Category 1 hurricane with winds of 80 MPH. Long-range forecasting predicts Katrina will make landfall in the Florida Panhandle, well to the East of New Orleans. It is expected that Katrina will move immediately in a northward direction. Friday, August 26 At 5 PM, Hurricane Katrina moves into the Gulf of Mexico and quickly grows into a category 2 hurricane with 100 MPH winds. As Hurricane Katrina enters the Gulf of Mexico conditions are perfect for a hurricane to rapidly intensify: 1) Warm ocean temperatures 2) Moist atmospheric conditions 3) A lack of wind sheer (winds that disrupt the motion of a storm) High pressures over the Gulf drive Katrina further west. Katrina is moving in a westerly direction and the National Hurricane Center forecast track shifts towards New Orleans. The Florida Panhandle is no longer in Katrina’s sights and landfall is now expected somewhere in Mississippi or Louisiana. Saturday, August 27 At 4 AM, Katrina is now a Category 3 storm and continues to move in a westerly direction. Katrina also continues to rapidly intensify due to the sustained conditions for hurricane growth in the Gulf of Mexico. The hurricane forecast track has Katrina moving northwest over the next 24 hours towards New Orleans at a speed of 7 MPH. Katrina is roughly 435 miles south of the Mississippi River. A Category 5 hurricane is a very rare occurrence; typically we only see one every two years in the Atlantic. Conditions in recent years, however, have been ideal for the fueling of massive Category 5 hurricanes. Sunday, August 28 At 1 AM, Katrina is upgraded to a Category 4 hurricane with winds of 145 MPH. Six hours later, Katrina is upgraded to a Category 5 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 160 MPH. The National Weather Service issues this Advisory at 7 AM:

A Hurricane Warning is in effect for the north central gulf coast from Morgan City, Louisiana eastward to the Alabama/Florida border – including the City of New Orleans and Lake Pontchartrain – preparations to protect life and property should be rushed to completion.

At 4 PM, the National Weather Service continues to update on the potential threat to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast from storm surge:

Coastal storm surge flooding of 18 to 22 feet above normal tide levels – locally as high as 28 feet – along with large and dangerous battering waves – can be expected near and to the east of where the center makes landfall. Some levees in New Orleans area could be overtopped. Significant storm surge will occur elsewhere along the central and northeastern Gulf of Mexico Coast.

Monday, August 29 In the early hours of Monday morning, Katrina begins to weaken and by 2 AM is already classed by the National Weather Service as a Category 4 storm. At 5 AM, one hour before Katrina’s first landfall, Katrina’s associated storm surge begins to cross Lake Borgne from the Gulf of Mexico and starts to batter the eastern flood defenses of Greater New Orleans. The storm surge is also carried towards the city’s Industrial Canal and Lake Pontchartrain along the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway. Storm surge heights at landfall peaked at around 25 feet as they came ashore – the largest recorded in U.S. history – breaking the previous record set by Hurricane Camille in 1969. Storm surges can be the most devastating part of a hurricane and in Katrina’s case, the storm surges proved much more destructive than the hurricane winds. Hurricane Katrina makes landfall over the Mississippi Delta as a near Category 4 storm and then makes another landfall on the Mississippi-Louisiana border as a Category 3 hurricane. Hurricane Katrina’s core winds hit the Mississippi Coast and New Orleans experiences the weaker winds on the western side of Katrina. These winds, moving from the North to the South, create a second storm surge on Lake Pontchartrain – about 11 feet high – which races towards the northern flood defenses of the city, ultimately leading to the breaches in the 17th Street and London Avenue drainage canals that flood Metropolitan New Orleans. By 2 PM Katrina has weakened to a Category 2 storm as it continues to move inland. By Tuesday, Katrina weakens to a tropical depression.

Hurricane Katrina Fact Sheet

Hurricane Katrina was one of the deadliest hurricanes in the history of the United States, killing over 1,700 people.

  • The confirmed death toll (total of direct and indirect deaths) stood at 1,723, mainly from Louisiana (1,464) and Mississippi (238). However, 135 people remain categorized as missing in Louisiana, so this number is not final. Many of the deaths are indirect. It is almost impossible to determine the exact cause of some of the fatalities.
  • Katrina was the largest hurricane of its strength to approach the United States in recorded history; its sheer size caused devastation over 100 miles (160 km) from the center. The storm surge caused major or catastrophic damage along the coastlines of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, including the cities of Mobile, Alabama, Biloxi and Gulfport, Mississippi, and Slidell, Louisiana.
  • Katrina was the eleventh named storm, the fifth hurricane, the third major hurricane, and the second category 5 hurricane of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season. It was also the sixth strongest hurricane ever recorded, and the third strongest landfalling U.S. hurricane ever recorded.
  • New Orleans’ levee failures were found to be primarily the result of system design flaws, combined with the lack of adequate maintenance. According to an investigation by the National Science Foundation, those responsible for the conception, design, construction, and maintenance of the region’s flood-control system apparently failed to pay sufficient attention to public safety.
  • Hurricane Katrina was the costliest hurricane in U.S. history, with estimated damages resulting in $75 billion (in 2005 US dollars).
  • > As of April 2006, the Bush Administration has sought $105 billion for repairs and reconstruction in the region. This does not account for damage to the economy caused by potential interruption of the oil supply and exports of commodities such as grain.
  • More than seventy countries pledged monetary donations or other assistance. Kuwait made the largest single pledge, $500 million; other large donations were made by Qatar ($100 million), India, China (both $5 million), Pakistan ($1.5 million), and Bangladesh ($1 million).
  • The total shut-in oil production from the Gulf of Mexico in the six-month period following the hurricane was approximately 2
  • The forestry industry in Mississippi was also affected, as 1.3 million acres of forest lands were destroyed. The total loss to the forestry industry due to Katrina is calculated to rise to about $5 billion.
  • Hundreds of thousands of local residents were left unemployed, which will have a trickle-down effect as lower taxes are paid to local governments. Before the hurricane, the region supported approximately one million non-farm jobs, with 600,000 of them in New Orleans. It is estimated that the total economic impact in Louisiana and Mississippi may exceed $150 billion.
  • The American Red Cross, Salvation Army, Habitat for Humanity, Common Ground Collective, Emergency Communities, and many other charitable organizations provided housing, food, and water to victims of the storm. These organizations also provided an infrastructure for shelters throughout Louisiana and other states that held thousands of refugees.
Louisiana:   Mon., Aug. 2, 2006:   1,464
Mississippi: Tue., Jan. 24, 2006:  238
Florida:     Mon., Jan. 9, 2006:   14
Georgia:     Mon., Jan. 9, 2006:   2
Alabama:     Mon., Jan. 9, 2006:   2
Ohio1:       Wed., Aug. 31, 2005:  2
Kentucky2:   Wed., Aug. 31, 2005:  1
Total:                             1,723

Footnoted totals are controversial. Explanations for controversial totals follows: 1The two Ohio victims are Cassondra Ground, 19, of Monroeville, Ohio, and Thelma Niedzinski, 84, of Norwalk, Ohio. Both were killed in a car accident near Monroeville, Ohio on August 30, 2005. The Ohio State Highway Patrol felt that a wet road caused by Hurricane Katrina caused the car accident. See Ohioans Focus on Helping Katrina Victims, Jay Cohen, Associated Press, August 31, 2005. 2The Kentucky victim was Deanna Petsch, 10, of Hopkinsville, Kentucky. On August 29, 2005, she fell into a Hurricane Katrina-swollen ditch in Hopkinsville and drowned. See Storm Surge: State Gets Soaked, City Avoids Major Flooding, Homes, Life Lost in Hopkinsville, Sheldon S. Shafer and James Malone, The Louisville (Kentucky) Courier-Journal, August 31, 2005. This research takes a lot of time, and I do not get paid anything for it. If you think this website is valuable to you, please consider a a contribution to support more of this valuable research.

List of Hurricane Katrina Victims

Repost from the old blog. This is to the best of my knowledge, the best and most up to date list of the victims of Hurricane Katrina that available. It was very hard to find, hidden in an obscure corner of the Net, and soon after I grabbed it, the professor who put it up there took it down. To my knowledge, he has not reposted it. If there is a better one out there, let me know. Finally, at long last, we have an accessible list of victims of Hurricane Katrina. It’s not complete at all, as it only lists 1,195 victims, but it’s a start anyway. The Louisiana Health Department has released a list of 828 victims, but I don’t know where to find that list, and it’s incomplete anyway. Listing of victims has been quite haphazard. Mississippi listed those directly killed by the storm, while Louisiana chose to list indirect deaths. John Mutter, a professor of geophysics at Colombia University’s Earth Institute, was frustrated by the seeming lack of an accurate death toll, so he decided to try to tally up his own. Mutter wants a complete list of everyone killed by the storm, directly and indirectly. His list is now pretty much hidden and very hard to find, but in March 2007 I did manage to track it down to an obscure website on Mutter’s homepage. However, he has now removed the list and is not responding to emails about it. I have placed the file here. The file is an Excel spreadsheet and you need to have a program capable of reading Excel spreadsheets in order to read the document. I also have a large and detailed report in pdf that breaks the deaths down into all sorts of categories. It is available here. The list has 1,195 victims listed on it, with a few facts about each victim included in their entry. Mutter’s list is dated October 26, 2006 and there does not seem to be a more updated list. Mutter’s list contains names that are not on the official state tallies. Here is the website for Mutter’s project at Colombia. You can also send him data on any hurricane deaths that may not appear on the list from a form on the site. As this article makes clear, it seems there are storm victims who have not made it onto either list. Some are well-known, such as Sgt. Paul Accardo of the New Orleans Police Department, who committed suicide a mere six days after the storm. Others include Jerome “Slim Rome” Spears and his fiance Rachel Harris. Spears shot Harris to death and then killed himself in a rental home in Atlanta, where they had moved as unemployed refugees after the storm. Some are elderly, such as Dorothy and Sam Cerniglia and Yvonne Aubry. All three saw their health begin a rapid slide to death after the storm hit, dying of conditions that previously had been well-managed. If you think this website is valuable to you, please consider a contribution to support the continuation of the site.

Photos of Smithfield Foods' Granjas Carrol Site in La Gloria, Mexico

Dead pigs left out in the heat to rot. Scavengers have been feeding on these pigs.
Dead pigs left out in the heat to rot. Scavengers have been feeding on these pigs.
Dead pigs in a cart left out in the heat. It's not known if these pigs are supposed to be disposed of or made into food.
Dead pigs in a cart left out in the heat. It's not known if these pigs are supposed to be disposed of or made into food.
Dead pigs rotting away in the pig waste lagoon. The lagoon is filled with pig shit, pig piss, dead pigs, pig afterbirths, dead piglets stomped to death by their parents, on and on.
Dead pigs rotting away in the pig waste lagoon. The lagoon is filled with pig shit, pig piss, dead pigs, pig afterbirths, dead piglets stomped to death by their parents, on and on.
The famous pig shit lakes that bred the Swine Flu. The lakes are full of pig blood, pig shit, rotting dead pigs and other charming and delectable items. Note broken pipe. The smell from these lakes is so horrible that workers are sometimes overcome, pass out, and fall into the pig shit lake. Those who dive in to save them almost always die too. It sometimes takes weeks to fish the bodies out.
The famous pig shit lakes that bred the Swine Flu. The lakes are full of pig blood, pig shit, rotting dead pigs and other charming and delectable items. Note broken pipe. The smell from these lakes is so horrible that workers are sometimes overcome, pass out, and fall into the pig shit lake. Those who dive in to save them almost always die too. It sometimes takes weeks to fish the bodies out.
Aren’t these pig shit lakes just wonderful? Go capitalism go! Hat tip Cogitamus. From the Veracruz investigative reporting paper Enlace Veracruz 212. Of course, as is always the case in corrupt Third World capitalist hellholes, many of the people who complained about this mess have been harassed, detained, arrested, threatened, etc. by government officials whored out to the multinational. There doesn’t seem to be any getting away from this. All 3rd World capitalist states do this and there is no avoiding it. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. It looks increasingly like this facility is where the Swine Flu was birthed. It’s not true that the company cleared its operation of guilt; this is just a corporate lie being shopped around by the whored out corporate media. Whored out medias in bed with monopoly capital are quite common in most capitalist states, and the US is no exception. There doesn’t seem to be any getting away from away from it. The papers are always run by corporations themselves, and they usually back up their corporate brethren. Once again, it’s not a bug, it’s a feature, and it’s unavoidable under capitalism. Much is being made of the fact that the Swine Flu turned out to be a fake scare, but it’s strange that it did kill many very healthy people, over 200 at last count. This is unusual for the flu, which usually kills the very sick and elderly, and it makes this flu all the more tragic.

Capitalism Starves 9 Million People Every Year

Every day in this world, capitalism kills 25,000 people either from hunger or diseases related to hunger. In other words, capitalism starves to death 25,000 people every day. In a year, capitalism kills 9.125 million people from hunger and hunger-related diseases alone. Capitalism starves to death one kid every five seconds. But when it comes to killing kids, capitalism doesn’t just use starvation. Like a murderous Felix the Cat, Killer Capitalism has plenty more deadly tools in its Bag of Tricks. All in all, capitalism kills 10 million kids every year. Eat that, market fetishists. Wow, if this is the successful system, I almost want to say, let me check out the failed system. instead. Or this failed system. Compared to being starved to death by the successful system, I think I’ll go with the failed systems and see if I can get enough to eat at least? It’s clear that Communism and to a lesser extent socialism has some problems with production and running a rational and functioning economy. But what’s more important, some macro economic growth bullshit or the question of life and death?

Capitalism Kills 10 Million Kids a Year

Repost from the old site: I’ve had it up to here with this “100 million killed by Communism”, “Stalin and Mao, the biggest murderers of all time”. No Communist except Pol Pot ever held a candle to what capitalist serial killers and mass murderers do year in and out without fail. As you can see, 200 million kids around the world don’t have access to any kind of basic health care (I would argue that that figure is way too low), which kills 10 million of them ( And if you are going to start bitching about overpopulation? Number 1, why are you are capitalist? Capitalism mandates and demands an endlessly expanding population. Capitalism says a declining or even steady population is going to be a catastrophe for the capitalist economy. Number 2, if the world is overpopulated and 10 million dead kids is great news, maybe it’s time to shut up about “Commie mass murderers”. Can’t have it both ways. I would like to point out that capitalism has absolutely no project whatsoever to do anything about this situation, a tragedy that has been ongoing for decades. Anyone in the Third World who comes into power and tries to do something about this mass murder gets called a Communist and the CIA tries to take them out, or they get country-destroying sanctions put them, or the US invades their country, or the IMF – World Bank – Wall Street declare war on them, or the US starts up a reactionary Contra terrorist army to go around burning schools and health clinics to the ground and murdering the doctors and teachers. Further, the entire world media – at least the US branch – including TV, radio, newspaper and newsmagazines, is 10 Anyone trying to remedy this situation is said be implementing a “failed solution” = socialism. Well, if trying to save 10 million kids a year ends up saving even a few of them, I don’t care what the model is, it doesn’t sound like a failure to me. I would like to point out that just about every corporation on Earth and every national business sector would fight to the teeth anyone trying to save these kids’ lives. Some might say that 10 million dead kids means that there is not enough capitalism in some places, or there is too much cronyism, or we need different ways of doing capitalism, or “it’s not capitalism – it’s greed”, or this or that dodge. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Capitalism is working perfectly as designed. 10 million dead kids a year is the way capitalism unrestrained by socialism is supposed to work. This is where I’m actually with the Maoists sometimes. For instance, capitalism is killing a good 4 million people a year in India minimum. Well, that’s a five-alarm fire right there, say the Maoists, and we don’t care if it’s a democracy or dictatorship killing all those people. We need to take up arms right now to stop the killing, they say. In some places, they’ve actually got a point, sorry to say. You guys wonder why I hate capitalism so much. Read my lips. 10 million dead kids, no end in sight. Update: This post actually got linked with positive feedback by the Democratic Underground. Unbelievable!

Red Meat Kills

But we knew that. So quit eating it already. I have, pretty much. How much to eat? No more than one or two hamburgers or equivalent per week. No more than one steak per week. And the abominable hot dog? Do not poison your innards with such a beast more often than once every six weeks. I gladly substitute chicken, pork, turkey, or veggie fake meat for all of these things. Chicken, turkey or veggie burgers are great. I think there are even chicken and turkey dogs if you must do the Oscar Meyer thing. I hardly ever eat a steak? Why should I?

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Statement on Smithfield's Pig Factories

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s statement published in the Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper in Poland in October, 2003. It kind of goes on and on, but you get the picture. Modern US neoliberal capitalism really is a pile of steaming pig shit, is it not? those capitalist apologists who say, “The problem is corruption” need to answer some questions. Why almost 10 n most capitalist countries, even the most advanced, and certainly in the less advanced, it is completely impossible to regulate Smithfield’s factory farms. As the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Freedom would note, to regulate Smithfield’s sickening factory farms is de facto if not de jure anti-capitalist. It’s bad for capitalism and it’s bad for he economy. Truth is that it simply cannot be done in most cases. Apologists for capitalism need to address the issue of why under most forms of capitalism it is simply impossible if not unthinkable to regulate Smithfield. Why is this? Capitalist apologists say it’s a bug, not a feature. It’s the other way around. Capitalism’s inability to regulate Smithfield is a feature, not a bug. You can also see by reading this that capitalism is completely destroying Poland. Fuck off Solidarnosc. Fuck off Lech Walesa. The article also lays bare the oft-repeated lie that Communism destroyed Poland’s environment. The opposite is true. Compared to capitalist West Europe, Poland’s environment is in excellent shape. 9 Storks have been almost exterminated in Europe, especially West Europe. There are only several pairs left in all of Denmark. The waters of capitalist West Europe are so polluted that the fish have been so poisoned that it has killed off all the storks. Relatively unpolluted Poland has a full 2 Communist Poland left us with the horrible legacy of Europe’s last clean-flowing rivers. The horrors! Poland has the cleanest soil in all of Europe. The horrors of Communism! It leaves nations with clean rivers, pure soil and lots of fish and birds! It’s clearly a failed system. Whatever the problems of Communist Poland, horrible pollution was clearly not one of them. Whatever the Veblenesque conspicuously consumable delights of modern Polish capitalism, a whored, corrupted and bought and paid for elite of politician-sluts was not one of them. ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. ON SMITHFIELD FOODS CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR: I am President of Waterkeeper Alliance, an environmental group and a leader of a national coalition of family farmers, fishermen, environmental and animal welfare organizations, religious and civic associations, and food safety advocates who are fighting Smithfield Foods in the United States. During the past eighteen months, I have come to Poland twice to alert the Polish people about the dangers of allowing Smithfield a foothold in this country, most recently at the request of the Animal Welfare Institute. Smithfield is one of a handful of large multinationals who are transforming global meat production from a traditional farm enterprise to factory style industrial production. Smithfield is the largest hog producer in the world and controls almost 3 Smithfield and its cronies have driven tens of thousands of family farmers off the land, shattered rural communities, poisoned thousands of miles of American waterways, killed billions of fish, put thousands of fishermen out of work, sickened rural residents and treated hundreds of millions of farm animals with unspeakable and unnecessary cruelty. Four years ago, in 1999, Smithfield began buying slaughterhouses and state farms in Poland. On July 22nd of this year, I sat in the crowded Senate Conference Room in the Polish Republic’s Senate Building in Warsaw listening as Smithfield’s Vice President Gregg Schmidt promised the senate agricultural committee that Smithfield will “modernize” Polish agriculture and bring prosperity and jobs to rural communities. For the past two decades, Smithfield Foods and its allies have made identical promises to the people of North Carolina, one of America’s rural states. After listening to these promises, the state Senate passed laws to make it much easier for Smithfield to do business in North Carolina. With encouragement from these politicians, Smithfield built the largest slaughterhouse in the world in Bladen County, North Carolina. The plant butchers 30,000 pigs each day. By building this pig slaughter plant, Smithfield set off explosive growth of a new way of producing hogs in North Carolina — factory-style production.

Factory Farms

Although Smithfield, a Virginia-based meat packer, never before owned a farm, its CEO, Joe Luter, began buying up farms so that the company could control, as he likes to boast, all aspects of pork production “from piglets to pork chops.” Luter who describes himself as “a tough man in a tough business” lives in a $17 million Park Avenue mansion in New York. He is known for a ruthless style that maximizes profits by industrializing agriculture and eliminating both animal husbandry and the family farm. Smithfield builds football field-sized warehouses in which the company crams thousands of genetically manipulated hogs into tiny metal boxes where they are deprived of sunlight, exercise, straw bedding, rooting, and social opportunities. A hog is as smart and sensitive as a dog. Under these crowded stressful conditions, they must be kept alive by constant doses of antibiotics, and heavy metals. Antibiotic resistant bacteria and residues of these additives naturally end up in their waste.

Industrial Style Pollution

Since a hog produces ten times the amount of waste as a human, a single hog factory can generate more fecal waste than Warsaw. One of Smithfield’s factories in Utah houses 850,000 hogs and produces more fecal waste than New York City’s 8.5 million people. Hog waste falls through slatted floors into a basement where it is periodically flushed into giant outdoor pits called lagoons. While cities must treat sewage before discharging it, Smithfield’s meat factories dump their liquid manure untreated onto fields which quickly become saturated. The manure then percolates into groundwater or is carried by rain into nearby streams or lakes. Waste from industrial pork factories contains a witch’s brew of nearly 400 dangerous substances, including heavy metals, antibiotics, hormones, deadly biocides, pesticides, and dozens of disease-causing viruses and microbes. Antibiotic residues in this lethal soup foster the growth of deadly “super bugs” — disease organisms that are immune to human antibiotics.

Polluted Water Supplies

Millions of tons of fecal stew produced by the meat factories has poisoned groundwaters in 34 states with deadly nitrates that can kill infants and cause severe mental retardation in children. Disease epidemics caused by meat factories have sickened and killed thousands of Americans. In 1993, for example, a meat operation’s microbes were suspected to have tainted a water supply sickened 400,000 people in Milwaukee (half the population!) and killed 114 individuals.

Sick Rivers

Fifteen years ago, the state of North Carolina had some of the purest waters in the United States. Today, it has some of the most polluted waters. A spill from one hog lagoon killed one billion fish in the Neuse River in 1995. North Carolina had to use bulldozers to plow the fish onto the shores of Pamlico and Albemarle Sounds. Today, as a result of Smithfield’s invasion in North Carolina, hog industry pollution has poisoned the Neuse so badly that a hundred million fish die every year die in that river.

Pfiesteria; the “Cell from Hell”

Hog factory contaminants have also fostered outbreaks of a previously unknown microbe, Pfiesteria piscicida, in America’s coastal waters. Pfiesteria kills billions of fish and causes open sores that won’t heal, severe respiratory illness and brain damage in humans who handle fish or swim in the water. Pustulating sores cover the bodies of fishermen from the Neuse River. Some of them have trouble recalling basic information like the route home due to brain damage from Pfiesteria. Pfiesteria has appeared in Maryland where my sister, until recently, was Lieutenant Governor. The state had to close the famous rivers of the Chesapeake Bay to protect public health.

Bad Odors

Hog factory stenches defy description. Neighboring farmers choke, vomit and faint from the fetid gases as they ride their tractors or work their fields. The smell cannot be removed from skin or clothing — even with the strongest soap. Food eaten even a mile downwind of a hog factory can take on the odor and flavor of hog waste. Neighbors can no longer sit on their porches in the summer, open their windows, hang their laundry or enjoy their meals. Factory odors can be so strong that they nauseate people flying in airplanes as high as 3,000 feet above these facilities!

Dangerous Gases

The fumes inside hog buildings are so strong that when the twenty-four hour ventilation systems fail, all pigs inside quickly die from asphyxiation. Hydrogen sulfide, methane and ammonia gases emanating from these factories also harm human health. Numerous studies show that factory farm workers and downwind neighbors contract lung disease, nausea, eye infections, nosebleeds, gastrointestinal illness, depression and even brain damage. Every year, hog factory workers become seriously ill and die from deadly gases emanating from liquid manure pits. Recent scientific papers by the U.S. government indicate that toxic air discharges from hog factories are so poisonous that they violate the federal health and environmental laws and endanger the health of neighbors. One study shows that millions of antibiotic resistant bacteria move by air from hog factories every day, threatening public health and neighboring herds. Another study shows that some meat factories emit seven times the particulate matter allowed under American Clear Air laws. Particulates can cause asthma attacks.

The End of the American Family Farm

Each hog factory puts ten family farmers out of business, replacing high quality agricultural jobs with three or four hourly wage workers in degrading jobs that are among the lowest paying and most dangerous in America. Because animals are given almost no husbandry, as few as two workers may tend a factory of 10,000 hogs! Conditions are so miserable that employees seldom endure these jobs more than a few months. Major slaughterhouses, including Smithfield’s, have a 100 The situation in North Carolina, America’s second largest hog producer, is typical. Two decades ago there were 27,000 family hog farmers in North Carolina. Today, there are almost none. North Carolina’s hog farmers have been replaced by 2,200 hog factories; 1,600 owned or indentured to a single multinational — Smithfield Foods. Smithfield now controls 7 As a result of factory farms, Iowa lost 45,000 independent hog farmers in recent years with half of the remaining 10,000 already controlled by Smithfield and a few other large corporations. Joe Luter told the Washington Post that Smithfield will turn “Poland into the Iowa of Europe.”

Contract Farmers; How to Become a Serf on Your Own Land

As I listened, Mr. Schmidt told the Polish Senate that Smithfield would bring employment to Polish farmers by giving them contracts to produce hogs. I can tell you that any farmer who signs a contract with Smithfield will become a serf on his own land. Here’s how Smithfield took over the family farms in America. Smithfield signed a few contracts with large producers to produce tens of thousands of hogs for its slaughterhouse. Then it swallowed those producers who had to take Smithfield’s price for their farms because they had nowhere else to slaughter their hogs. Once Smithfield owned these large farms the company began overproducing hogs so that the price of pork dropped from 60 cents per pound to 8 cents per pound. Since it costs 36 cents per pound for a farmer to raise a pig, most pig farmers had to go out of business except the ones that Smithfield signed contracts with. The contracts are never negotiated. The desperate farmers will sign the contract the way Smithfield writes it. Typically the contract requires the farmer to use his farm for security and borrow approximately $200,000 to build a warehouse according to Smithfield’s specifications. The company promises him approximately $20,000 per year. The farmer owns the warehouse and pays the insurance and interest to the bank. Under the contract, Smithfield owns the feed and the pigs, but the farmer owns the manure. Smithfield does not pay him enough to legally dispose of the manure. That’s his problem and soon it will be the problem of his community as he pollutes the air and water with the excess manure. Smithfield’s contract is typically good for only one-year even though it’s going to take the farmer twenty years to pay off the mortgage. When it is in Smithfield’s interest to buy more land, the company has the power to make future contracts so burdensome that the farmer goes bankrupt. Smithfield can then buy his hog house and land from the bank for pennies on the dollar. Since the farm is valueless without a Smithfield contract, there are no other bidders. It was in this way that Smithfield came to control pork production in North Carolina. The company is already using the same practices in Poland. Any farmer who signs such a contract will be a slave on his own farm. Now when the price of pork drops to 8 cents per pound, Smithfield continues to make money because the price the consumer pays for bacon at the grocery store stays the same. Since Smithfield owns the slaughterhouse, it can still make money while it squeezes the farmer until it has a monopoly or farm production. This is one of the reasons that the United States Senate today is considering national legislation, and many states as well, that will ban the ownership of farms by slaughterhouses. Smithfield’s “integration” system puts the farmer at a catastrophic disadvantage.

Economic Impacts

There are many studies that show that factory farms have a devastating impact on rural economies and quality of life. There is not a single empirical study showing net benefits to rural communities. Studies show that property values in counties hosting pork factories fall, on average by 3 If you drive through America’s rural communities, you will see bankrupted hardware and feed stores (factory farms don’t buy locally), boarded up main streets and closed banks, churches and schools. America’s heartland and historic landscapes are being emptied of rural Americans and occupied by large corporations.

Political Corruption

Hog factories produce far more manure than is needed to fertilize fields around them. The costs of properly treating and disposing this waste would make meat factories uncompetitive with traditional farms unless they violate numerous environmental laws. Traditional farms are exempt from these laws since manure, for them, is not a waste product but a valuable fertilizer spread on fields to grow crops. Because factory meat producers must break the law in order to survive, the industry’s business plan relies on the assumption that pork factories will be able to evade prosecution by improperly influencing government enforcement officials. Smithfield uses its wealth to buy politicians, paralyze regulatory agencies and break health and environmental laws with impunity. In North Carolina, Smithfield made business partnerships with both powerful state senator Wendell Murphy and powerful United States Senator Launch Faircloth, who protected the company’s interests in local and federal legislatures. Using adept campaign contributions and such cunning alliances, the hog industry has been able to corrupt and control the North Carolina State Senate. The state’s largest newspaper, Raleigh News and Observer, won the Pulitzer Prize for its five-part investigative report disclosing how the factory hog industry had captured and corrupted the state senate. Politicians who oppose the hog barons are punished. When North Carolina’s Duplin County State Assemblywoman Cynthia Watson began speaking out against Smithfield’s impact on her farm community, the hog industry launched a savage multimillion dollar attack, spending as much as $10,000 a week for two years to destroy her reputation. As a result, she lost her election and the hog barons sent a message to all the senators in North Carolina that if you speak out against this industry or this company, we will punish you! Citizens who protest get the same treatment. Typically, the industry launches its occupation by removing the democratic rights of local communities who refuse to site these facilities in their communities. In Iowa, North Carolina, Michigan and many other states and Canadian provinces, public officials have stripped local governments of their decision making powers over these facilities. Similarly, we have seen that in Poland, local officials who opposed Smithfield’s facilities have been overruled by national authorities. The industry routinely uses bullying lawyers and illegal intimidation, threats, harassment, and violence to terrorize and silence its critics including its own workers. A group of Nebraska citizens who made comments during a public hearing on a hog factory permit were sued by Nebraska’s largest livestock producer. Neighboring farmers are routinely sued for participating in public hearings or speaking out against the hog industry. Contempt for our laws and bullying are part of industry culture.

Criminal Behavior

Smithfield’s own records show that it has committed tens of thousands of violations of state and federal environmental laws. Indeed, recent court decisions indicate that hundreds of Smithfield’s facilities around the country are in almost daily violation of federal environmental laws. In 1997, a federal judge ordered Smithfield to pay $12 million dollars, one of the largest Clean Water Act penalties in history. The court determined that a single Smithfield plant had violated the Clean Water Act over 6,000 times and that company officials had intentionally lied to federal regulators to cover up its violations. In 2000, a National Labor Relations Board Judge found Smithfield guilty of serious labor law violations. The judge found that that Smithfield managers conspired with local police to physically intimidate and assault union supporters. He also found that Smithfield attorneys suborned perjury and that company witnesses lied under oath. Again in 2002, Smithfield was found guilty of significant labor law violations, this time by a federal court, which ordered the company to pay $755,000 in damages to workers who the company had wrongfully imprisoned.

Smithfield Invades Poland

In 1999, Smithfield announced its plans to move into Poland and began purchasing slaughterhouses that year. Animal Welfare Institute (AWI), one of our allies in the battle against Smithfield, brought a delegation of Poles over to tour the farm landscapes of America to see what they were in for. AWI took the Poles to Missouri where you can drive 50 kilometers without leaving company land and then to Duplin County, North Carolina, where they were enveloped in an unbearable stench. During this trip, one lady in North Carolina, Mrs. Carr, pleaded with the visiting Poles, “I’ve never been to Poland, but for God’s sake, don’t let them do to you what they’ve done to us.” The Polish delegation promised that this would never happen in Poland. Unfortunately it is happening now. Just as Smithfield used North Carolina to launch its takeover of American pork production in 1980, Poland is Smithfield’s platform for launching its bid for monopoly control of pork production in Europe. In 1999, Smithfield purchased Animex, the state-owned conglomerate of giant communist-era farms and nine slaughterhouses that export Polish sausage and ham to the United States. The deal was a bargain, Luter paid only $55 million just after Animex, at state expense, made extensive renovations. For example, the government’s Constar plant brought ultra modern equipment from the U.S. just before the Smithfield takeover. Estimated value of the company following these improvements was $500 million. Luter boasted that he paid, “only 10 cents on the dollar.” Gaining monopoly control of the country’s slaughterhouse capacity is more difficult in Poland because there are over 4,000 slaughterhouses in this country. Smithfield’s strategy was to get the government to do its dirty work by closing down the competition. At Smithfield’s request, the Polish government began closing hundreds of small slaughterhouses after Joe Luter had a three-hour meeting with President Buzek. Buzek’s Minister of Agriculture promulgated regulations that would put up to 5 The government justified these new rules under the fraudulent pretense that small slaughterhouses must be shut down to comply with the EU regulations. However, EU regulations clearly state that small slaughterhouses may be kept open to serve regional markets. In fact, Germany, France and Sweden fought to keep their small slaughterhouse and milk plants open and even subsidize them knowing that those are the core of local markets and food distribution. Once the small slaughterhouses disappear, local markets quickly follow. Furthermore, large high-tech slaughterhouses do no make a safer food supply. In the U.S. and in England, the closure of small slaughterhouses actually coincided with an increase of meat-borne disease by 30 This is because large centralized slaughterhouses force pork production onto factory farms where disease is rampant and because of long transport distances, stress the animals and spread disease. Furthermore, technologies that increase line speed inside the slaughterhouse multiply worker errors and make proper inspections impossible. (Now the big slaughterhouses are insisting on the controversial technology of irradiation in order to solve their problems of diseases vectors.) The Polish government took a number of other steps to facilitate Smithfield’s takeover of Polish agriculture. For example, the government legalized liquid manure and tried to dismantle the Animal Welfare Act. The government allowed Smithfield to buy and lease farms in Poland despite official policies forbidding foreigners to purchase agricultural land. In addition, the government gave large pork export subsides to Smithfield amounting to 55 cents per kilo. These subsidies are intended to benefit Polish farmers but since Smithfield imports both its pigs and the feed, there is not much benefit to Poland. With this help, Smithfield has converted as many as thirty-five state farms to hog factories. One of these, in Nielep, West Pomerania, already houses 30,000 hogs. To circumvent Polish laws, some of these are owned by front companies wholly owned by Smithfield. Typically Smithfield has only one of several directors in each but the company charter requires unanimous votes. Prima Farms, for example, is officially owned by two Poles but every important decision must be signed by Mr. Griffith of Smithfield. In this way, Smithfield can capture subsidies from the EU intended for Polish farmers.

Polish agriculture

In mid-July, I spent a week touring the agricultural areas of northern Poland. I learned that you have in Poland something that we’ve lost in the United States and something we miss very much. Poland is an oasis of traditional farming in a world dominated by agribusiness multinationals. Poland has over two million farmers — as many as the half of Europe put together. About 1 In Poland, you don’t see the vast monocultures of row crops that we are now accustomed to in the United States. Polish farmers rotate a variety of crops, in the traditional way that fosters healthy soils. I was thrilled that many farmhouses had occupied stork nests on their roofs. Poland hosts 2 Poland has large stands of timber and Europe’s last clean flowing rivers. Poland has purer soils than anywhere else in Europe. Its land is uncontaminated by pesticide and fertilizer residue, and according to Professor Andrzej Mocek, Dean of the faculty of agronomy in Poznan, an astounding 9

Polish Foods

One morning, we ate breakfast with the Kornilo-Jarzyna family at their farm near the village of Nowodwory. Agrotourism is a growing business in Poland, where farmers take in tourists who come to fish, hike, pick berries, or just eat great food. Great slabs of traditional Polish sausage and meats, open jugs of homemade honey of acacia or linden smothered our breakfast table. We slapped pork fat onto plum rolls like butter and ate pierogis filled with buckwheat, homemade cheese and  mint and sweetened with berries and spices. My favorite was bigos stew which Polish hunters invented by adding various meats to a perpetual pot of boiling cabbage — delicious! This farm family makes their own butter and cans their own jelly. The house is surrounded by hives, orchards of cherries, apples, pears, and plums with understories of black currants, raspberries, blueberries and strawberries. I was full as a tick! It’s no wonder that people from Lublin and Warsaw and all over Europe come here to indulge in chemical-free foods with real farm flavor. I thought about the poor taste of food in the United States where there has been a dramatic decline in meat quality due to factory farming of pigs and poultry. Many American chefs, food writers and home cooks have entirely abandoned cooking pork raised by industrial meat companies like Smithfield because they find it dry and flavorless. These deficiencies are apparently due to the manner in which confinement pork is bred and raised. Millions of years of natural selection have endowed hogs with back fat to regulate body temperature. But Smithfield gets more money from meat than from fat so the company has bred its own strain of super-lean pigs born with almost no back fat. They are high strung and unable to survive normal outside temperatures. According to food professionals, this extreme leanness has dramatically diminished the eating quality of American pork. An article in the April/May Saveur Magazine describes the pigs of modern confinement agriculture as being so skinny that they looked “like dachshunds.” And an article in the May 4, 2003 New York Times Magazine applauded the old breeds and traditional farming methods of the kind used in Poland, pointing out that “the pork industry has managed to engineer a pig with almost no fat at all. And this is why most modern recipes for pork involve some kind of liquid — putting the meat in a marinade before cooking, basting it while cooking or braising it in broth. If you simply grill a mass-market pork chop, it becomes inedibly dry.” The Times then observes that free-range pork, in contrast, “is rich when sliced and sautéed, fine textured and robust in flavor. It needs nothing more than seasoning with salt.” The dryness and poor taste of confinement pork have gotten so bad that many major pork companies are now “enhancing” their pork — adding water, flavored liquids, or even stock to their tray-pack and prepared meats and using red food coloring to improve its drab appearance.

North Carolina Comes to Poland

Smithfield is already putting its trademark on Polish farms and rural communities. On July 19th, I visited the town of Wieckowice, a beautiful village with shrines and wooden and brick homes with tile roofs and long barns of brick and stone. We ran across several dozen local activists carrying signs outside a former state farm owned by Animex where Smithfield reportedly houses 17,000 hogs. The facility has permits for only 500 cows and 500 hogs. Governor Nowakowski of Poznan told me that all the local citizens are adamantly opposed to Smithfield Foods and that he refused to give the company permits when it bought the farm two years ago. But 6 months later the Environmental Ministry overrode him. The Animex farm is 40 yards from an elementary school where, according to the residents, children get sick and vomit from the hog odors. Among the protesters was a dignified woman, Irena Kowalak, who served as village mayor for 35 years. She told us she had resigned recently because of intimidation by Smithfield. Thanks to the governor, Smithfield is not able to get permits for liquid manure, so the farm uses straw bedding and has not yet devised a plan for disposing of its waste. Fields of wheat surround the hog barns but they are never harvested since Smithfield is not interested in agriculture. To Smithfield, these fields are a place to dump the notorious wastes of industrial meat production. A convoy of indignant Wieckowice residents drove me out to see the giant pile of hog manure. On the side of a 1,000 acre wheat field, I saw a mountain of hog waste 150 meters long, 12 feet high and 50 meters wide. “Seventeen thousand hogs for 6 months,” a young man said nodding at the pile. Local authorities have been ordering Smithfield to move the illegal pile for six months, but the company has refused. The night before my visit, Smithfield covered its pile with a giant black tarp, which was already inflated and writhing with the internal pressure of methane gas. Six hundred meters downhill from the pile, villagers had created a public beach on a 1,500 acre lake where umbrellas shaded dozens of families swimming and playing on a steamy 90ş day. Manure residues fester on the shores of a nearby embayment into which Smithfield’s waste pile drains. An old man with twinkling blue eyes sticks his hand into the water, smells his fingers and offers us a whiff. “Smithfield Foods!” he says. Governor Nowakowski told us that another Smithfield factory in Sedziny with 4,500 hogs only has a permit for 1,000 cows. The governor said his assistants were now inspecting the facility. “But,” he said, “the legislation is very difficult for the local government to enforce [without support of the state].” Unfortunately, the federal government is not supporting him. He is not the only local politician begging for federal help. Zofia Wilczynska, a member of Parliament, has complained to the government that a Smithfield operation in Polczyn Zdroj is endangering the village’s 400-year old health spa. Another health spa in Goldap is also threatened by pollution from a Smithfield facility. The following day, I met with the deputy of the Agriculture Committee of Parliament who told us that the Agricultural Ministry has recently conducted an investigation of sixteen Smithfield farms — fourteen owned by Smithfield and two farms owned by front groups controlled by Smithfield — and found that all Poland’s veterinary and health laws and construction standards had been broken at every one. Even when Smithfield lacks proper permits or breaks the law, the company gets laughable fines of a few hundred dollars for their lawbreaking. Not all local officials are opposed to Smithfield’s operations. One hundred sixty kilometers north of Wieckowice in western Pomerania, the mayor of another village, Wierzchowo, gave Smithfield permits for two enormous farms after Smithfield paid his wife approximately $4,000 to perform the Environmental Impact Assessment for the company. We witnessed firsthand not only Smithfield’s lawbreaking but the economic impacts of its production methods on local communities and markets. When Smithfield took over Animex, the company’s three principal farms in northeastern Poland, near Goldap, employed sixty workers. Now, following the farms’ conversion to automated hog factories, only seven workers remain. Smithfield says it wants to produce six million pigs per year in Poland. Polish peasants now produce 20 million pigs per year and a quarter of them will have to lose their jobs to make way for Smithfield. Smithfield is already squeezing the small farms. In Pomerania, we found that the small slaughterhouses had already been closed and that the remaining slaughterhouse, which was owned by Smithfield, would not slaughter hogs from the small farms. The rest of Poland will soon follow. Once Smithfield controls the slaughterhouses and has eliminated local markets from farmers, it will be able to control prices and it will soon control the farms.

The Tyranny of Monopoly Capitalism

When I told Polish audiences about Smithfield’s behavior in the Unites States, Poles were absolutely astounded that an American company could behave so badly. There is such an enduring faith in America and American capitalism and such a hunger for capital investment in a nation left behind after the Second World War when the rest of Europe was feasting on the Marshall Plan, German reparations and free market capitalism. The Polish people’s love for America and faith in our system made me doubly determined not to allow Smithfield to take advantage of them. POLES, DEFEND YOUR PIGS, DEFEND YOUR COUNTRY! (Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland October, 2003)

Photos of the Smithfield Foods Facility in Veracruz That Caused the Swine Flu

Follow the link to a translation of a Spanish language Veracruz paper with lots of photos of the wonderful Great Pig Shit Lakes, dead pigs floating in the glorious Great Pig Shit Lakes, dead pigs lying around everywhere decomposing in plain sight, carts loaded with rotting dead pigs, a winery with walls turned black due to being covered with flies, dead pig carcasses tossed in a biodigester to create energy (!). Whoa! That last one is almost like something out of Soylent Green. I would grab the photos and put them up here, but they are copyrighted, and I don’t steal stuff.

Swine Flu Is From Pigs Only, Not Birds and Humans

Although initial reports said the Swine Flu was a bizarre mixture of human, bird and swine flu strains, a mix that has never occurred before and gave rise to conspiracy theories about a bioengineered virus, new research shows that it is only a mix of two different swine flu strains. One strain is North American Swine Flu, first described in the 1930’s, and the other is the Eurasian Swine Flu, first described in 1979. Neither one has ever been contagious in humans before. What makes the flu odd is that like AIDS, it seems to have jumped species. Viruses do that sometimes, but not often. They are more likely to do that in cases of extreme environmental disruption, such as the pig shit lakes of La Gloria, Veracruz, where the virus originated. Swine and bird flu previously were in general found only in humans that had been in very close contact with either chickens or pigs. They got the virus from the animals. But this one jumped species and is now going human to human, like HIV. That’s what makes it alarming. The virus also contains a gene that has never been seen before in any human flu strain. Since no one has immunity to at least that gene, this flu has pandemic potential.

Corporate Pig Factories Produce Massive MRSA Outbreaks

One more reason these sickening pig factories suck. They’re leading the charge for the MRSA brigades. And the pig factory killed the main doctor who was complaining about it. From Nicholas Kristof, the take-home quote:

The larger question is whether we as a nation have moved to a model of agriculture that produces cheap bacon but risks the health of all of us. And the evidence, while far from conclusive, is growing that the answer is yes.

Exactly.

First US Death From Swine Flu

23 month old kid in Texas, a resident of Mexico visiting the US. There have been two deaths in California so far, one in Long Beach and another in La Mirada. I’m very familiar with both cities. The dead were two males, one 33 years old and the other 45. I’m guessing that they were Hispanics and possibly even Mexican citizens. The deaths are suspicious and the symptoms resembled Swine Flu, but there a dozen other diseases with similar symptoms. As of today, there are 91 confirmed cases in the US and many more suspected cases, including most of a school in New York where the students just came back from Mexico. I am afraid this thing is really going to take off. A friend of the family is a physician, smart as a whip, and he is stone worried about this Swine Flu. When the docs are worried sick, you know it’s not just paranoia. 10 more cases have just shown up in Spain, and 53 more are under investigation. Many Spaniards travel to Mexico. The WHO is debating whether to move the pandemic alert level from Stage 4 to Stage 5. There are six stages. Moving from 4 to 5 is a significant step up. United States, Canada, New Zealand, Israel, Britain, Spain and Germany have all confirmed cases of the flu. Germany is the latest, with two cases reported today. Naysayers are saying that 36,000 Americans die of the flu every year. Yes, but almost all of them are old or in poor health. It almost never kills young and healthy people. That’s what makes this flu so much different. Furthermore, even if it doesn’t kill you, this is one kickass flu. It’s likely you might be in bed for a week. What I mean is you pretty much cannot get out of bed period for a whole week. Now that’s one badass flu.

Word of the Day – CAFO

CAFO – confined animal feeding operation – is what caused the Swine Flu and is what has been causing hellacious problems since the project was initialized. It is possible for socialism to moderate the capitalist drive towards industrial livestock production. Scandinavia has made some strides.

No matter what you think of these things, the animals are confined in such small quarters (According to the glorious free hand of the market!) that their immune systems are pretty much shot. Upshot being that the continuously sick animals are pumped full of antibiotics day and night, result being worsening antibiotic resistance in humans.

If the animals were spaced far enough apart, there would be no need to prophylactically pump them with antibiotics 24-7.

But the dictates of the market (Keep in mind – this is the only system that works) mandate that the animals must be squeezed tighter than sardines with the result being mass sickness, shot immune systems, continuous antibiotic pumping, and, and the end of the day, meat-eaters like you and me and eating a dead sick animal with a shot immune system that’s been pumped til bursting with antibiotics.

In a capitalist outhouse called India, some of the worst industrial chicken farms on Earth are being nursed to ill health. It’s a perfect storm waiting to happen, and the sane Indians (not the capitalists!) have been warning about this for years to deaf ears. Money talks and bullshit walks.

Money and death is capitalism. Sanity and life is socialism. It’s not even a contest. Capitalist death beats socialist life hands down every time.

The whole thing is nuts. In any sane (not capitalist) world, there would be no such thing as CAFO’s. CAFO’s have been around for nearly 20 years, but no one seems to be able to stop them. The power of the dollar tends to get in the way of sanity.

In Mexico, there are the worst pig shit lakes ever made by man or pig, clouds of flies turning the blue sky black as far as you can see. Pig carcasses, too many to count, littering the outskirts of the CAFO’s, but no one cares! The cash is flooding in, so damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead. Capitalism ultimately makes about as much sense as a 1950’s Chicken Contest with hot rods.

US Corporation Smithfield Foods Caused Swine Flu

Look no further than Smithfield Foods Corporation, the world’s largest pork producer. Since US environmental laws are too severe (shocking if one goes to any US town ruined by a nearby pig factory) Smithfield set up shop in Mexico, a 3rd World capitalist country that only the Heritage Foundation could love where anything goes and it’s Profits Uber Alles. Pan to La Gloria, a town in Veracruz, near Oaxaca, in a region where due to NAFTA Smithfield has set up shop. La Gloria is where this latest super swine flu originated. Five miles north and upwind, in Xaltepec, there are 15,000 pigs crammed into 18 warehouses. Nearby is Perote, Veracruz, where Smithfield, via its Mexican outfit Granjas Carroll (website) raises an unbelievable 950,000 pigs. Sane people have been warning for decades that the industrial and capitalist superexploitation of pigs for the international pork market was making swine flu virus evolution go into overdrive, with unforeseen consequences. In capitalist societies, anyone saying anything that hurts profits gets shut down or ignored, so these folks have been ignored for decades. Now the proverbial caca has hit the fan. A new virus, a combination of swine, bird and human flu viruses, is on the loose. It’s dangerous, and it kills about This is a mystery. It is peculiar and makes no intuitive sense. One suggestion is that the elderly have already been exposed to many such viruses and already have immunity. Another theory is that a healthy immune system is more deadly in a flu pandemic, where it’s advantageous to have an aging and more decrepit immune system. A young and healthy immune system overreacts to the pandemic flu, producing far too many white blood cells that flood the lungs, and more or less overwhelm and drown them. Pretty much pneumonia in a word. In La Gloria, Veracruz, where the ultracapitalist pig factory is, over half of the 3,000 population have symptoms of swine flu. Edgar Hernandez Hernandez, age 5, is Patient Zero. Two more kids are dead. Over half the population there works most of the week in Mexico City. This is how the virus could have gotten to the capital. A perfect storm has been created with the ultracapitalist pig factories, similar to the gay bathhouses and mad promiscuity of US gay culture that spread AIDS like mad in the 1980’s. Problem is that Swine Flu is easily contagious to anyone, while HIV is mostly transmitted in the West only to IV drug users and gay males. Under “liberal” Bill Clinton, NAFTA was shoved through Congress in 1992. Soon after, thousands of farmers were shoved off their lands in Veracruz and had their lands stolen from under them. The land was to be given to huge US corporations like Smithfield. This is the true genesis of the Swine Flu Pandemic. It was caused by neoliberal capitalism! There is no way to avoid that conclusion. When you thought that the horrible pig manure lagoons of North Carolina could not possibly be surpassed, Smithfield’s super caca lakes in Veracruz seem to have taken the gold. These were some of the worst pig poop lakes ever created by modern capitalism. Swarms of flies, blocking the sun and the sky, hovered over these ponds, feasting on the oceans of pig manure. It appears that from these flies came the Swine Flu, as the Black Plague came from fleas biting rats feasting on human waste tossed from second floor chamberpots all over Europe. These flies appear to be the vector for Swine Flu. So, while capitalism claims to advance us into the modern world, instead it merely transports us to Europe circa 1350. Over half the town is sick. The residents, like villagers with pitchforks and torches, are demanding an investigation. The ultra-capitalist Mexican government has refused to even begin one. Excellent overview of Smithfield’s corporate crime career from Rolling Stone. From the UK Independent comments section. “Luter” below refers to Joseph W. Luter, III,  owner of Smithfield Farms, a particularly repellent fellow even by US corporate standards who regularly rails against vegetarians. Luter is one of the masterminds of the modern pig superfactory.

So… once again the epitome of Western Capitalism (the US), and their “Pig Barons”, steal land, evicting those who live on and work the land. They then, through factory farming and shoddy treatment of their livestock, cause half a town, perhaps more, to contract a contagious and potentially fatal disease (I say ‘potentially’, but remembering that many people have already died). So… of course, they are handsomely compensating these people? And they are providing and paying for the necessary medical care..? They are changing their farming methods? … …Surely? It strikes me that the people who live in these places need to take back their land, by force if necessary. And we should all support them. “Legal” means will not work, since the law is designed to protect capitalism, and its conceptions of property, even in the face of clear facts demonstrating the extent of harm caused by these pig-people. For all of you who are too caught up in the spectacle to engage in revolutionary activities: at least employ your pathetic “consumer ethics” and boycott Luter products. Solidarity with the people of La Gloria.

The Inevitable 20th Century Mass Life Expectancy Increase Myth

In the comments section, Uncle Milton disagrees that the tremendous strides that the USSR made in life expectancy were anything great, and suggests that they would have happened anyway even with a non-Communist government. This argument is regularly trotted out by rightwingers whenever we point out the tremendous achievements Communists made in the 20th Century in life expectancy. The argument is that such an increase would have happened anyway with a non-Communist government. In the case of Russia, I assume this would be a Czarist regime. First of all, I noted in response to Unc’s Czarist – Russian Orthodox Church propaganda about Ukraine being “the breadbox of Europe prior to WW1”: The Ukraine before WW1 had an incredibly low life expectancy. Life expectancy was only 35 years! Most people did not have enough food to eat, were often, sick, weak or injured, had no medical care, and died at an early age. Regular famines swept through the area, killing many. What good is “the breadbasket of Europe” if most of the people who live there are starving? To which Unc responded:

Substantial reforms were made in the early 20th centuries. Yes, I am sure during the era of serfdom which ended in 19th century there was hunger. My understanding is this was substantially reduced in immediate pre WWI period.Life expectancy was low in many countries at that time. It was skewed lower because of high infant mortality rates. I’ve seen your discussion of the comparison of China pre and post revolution regarding life expectancy and the Soviet Union but you should not compare between time periods within a country but to other similar countries over time. Taiwan had an even greater increase in life expectancy from the early 20th century to the modern era. For the Soviets I would compare life expectancy in Finland to life expectancy in the USSR.

Well, let us compare similar countries then. Russia with China, India and Albania. 1949 – life expectancy in India and China was 32. In Albania it was 35. Compare to Russia with life expectancy around 67. In particular, note the comparison of Russia with Albania. We also need to show how all progress in life expectancy pretty much ended by the early 1960’s in the USSR, and how life expectancy crashed with the return to capitalism in Russia. Clearly, endless advances in life expectancy are and were not inevitable in the 20th century at all. Russians had a longer life expectancy in the early 1960’s than they did in the 1990’s after the return to capitalism. Or we can compare Cuba to the rest of Latin America and clearly they do better with life expectancy. We can compare Kerala (run by Communists for over 20 years) with other Indian states and see that Kerala has better life expectancy. We can compare Nicaragua at the end of the Sandinista reign to the rest of Latin America and note the superior health figures. Bottom line is that capitalism seems to be bad for your health. A comparison with Finland is not ok because Finland also developed a very socialist system. Not as socialist as the USSR, but very socialist nonetheless. The freemarketeers and anti-Communists don’t like socialists much more than they like Communists, and they try to dismantle Finnish-style socialism everywhere it shows up. Taiwan did not break the records set for greatest increase in life expectancy set by Stalin and Mao. Further, Taiwan under US tutelage created a socialist-style regime after WW2. There was a huge land reform, once again needed for industrialization as in the USSR and China. And national health care, dental care and the essentials of a social democracy were installed. These socialist reforms were done by the US not out of some socialist goals but as a way to make Taiwan compare favorably on various indices when compared to China. Were there no Communist China to cynically compete with, the US would never have created Taiwanese social democracy. Further, Taiwan’s growth occurred due to a massive flood of aid from the US from 1945-1965. Even Cold Warriors like the publishers of Time-Life books, “China” in 1962 confessed that the Taiwan experiment was not reproducible in China due the huge population there and the fact that the equivalent money needed to match the Taiwan money pump in China simply was not available for donation either in the US or anyone in the world. Feeding the people of Taiwan was a difficult thing to do, but it was doable. This very rightwing book acknowledged that the main problem in China lay with feeding the population. This the Chinese Communists accomplished by the mid-1970’s. A better comparison is China and India. Both were very large countries at about the same level of development in 1949. The comparison since then has been stark. China’s shines in almost every way. Further, we can calculate that 100 million excess deaths occurred by 1979 in India as compared to China as a penalty for not following the Chinese model. In 1979, the excess deaths were continuing to occur at 4 million/year. Using basic math, we can calculate that at least 150 million and possibly up to or over 200 million excess deaths have occurred in India since 1949 by failure to follow the Chinese model.

Death Watch 2000

Well, here I am, staying at my Mom’s house for a while anyway. My father came home from the hospital. Turns out he was pretty much dying all along in there, but the hospital ghouls never really leveled with us and came out and said it. Instead we got happy faces and, “He’s going to recover just fine!” and then the next day, “So, do you want to pull the plug then?” or “We are setting up an appointment for you with the End of Life Specialist!” Cool! That’s just the person I want to meet after struggling to survive yet another day in 2009 America – the fucking End of Life Specialist! What kind of a job is that anyway? How do they sleep at night? I think gravedigging would be more pleasant. After we pieced it all together, it started to make sense. The inability to swallow, presented as a horrible development by the docs but never explained properly, makes sense now. He stopped swallowing not because of a damn tube down his throat for two weeks (the lie they told us) or because of having pneumonia (pneumonia doesn’t make you quit swallowing) but because he was starting to die. That’s one of the many fucked-up things that happens to you when you start dying. You quit swallowing. You just can’t do it anymore. On the next to last day in the hospital, he developed a golden staph infection of the blood. Probably MRSA. Blood infection means septicemia. Septicemia kills you. MRSA is one of the most evil superbugs on the face of the Earth, and it hearts US hospitals to the max. Every hospital in the US is infected to rock bottom with MRSA. It’s all over the community too, but most of us are too healthy to show any signs. I’m trying to figure out how to keep from becoming a carrier myself, but it seems that the MRSA is worse than the zombies in Night of the Living Dead. It’s worse than a Great White Shark in terms of being near-unkillable. It hearts soap and most antiseptics and the more you use them, the more superbug babies you breed. MRSA’s are really small but sometimes I think I see the fuckers flying around. Since they’re unkillable anyway and are also flyswatter-resistant, there’s nothing to do but hide behind the covers. Anyway, all of the relatives have been coming around, which is ok, since unlike most Americans, I actually like my relatives, even though many of them are actually crazy. But generally they’re not mean or nasty. So as long as they are nice and crazy, it’s cool. I’m kind of like that myself. So it’s Death Watch 2000, but you don’t to score any points for kids and little old ladies and there’s no winner at the end. The hospital released him to home with instructions, “No food.” Cool! Just what every human wants – starvation. Well, the hospital lied again and we got him to eat some semi-dissolved ice cream. He opens his eyes now and again and is able to say a few words once a day or so. Actually, it’s a good thing dying folks can’t talk much. Can you imagine the shit they would be saying? That would probably be even worse than dying. So the relatives all gather around this dying guy and everyone’s all smiling and happy and stuff (Why?!). They’re cheering him on with every word and swallow of ice cream. People walk out the door and shout, “Hang in there old guy,” but he’s passed out and can’t hear. I look at them like, “I can’t believe you said that.” His kidneys are failing – probably MRSA. Respiratory failure is ongoing. This is what I get to listen to all night while I try to sleep. I’ve always enjoyed heavy breathing, but not this kind. I’m drinking lots of wine. I’ll telling off all the morons who are ordering me to have a good day. This hospice guy came over. He was really cool but I don’t see how he does it. All does is the Dead and Dying Scene. Shit, he deserves $200K a year just for putting up with that and staying sane. He showed up, minced no words,  and recited the unhappy facts. There will no antibiotic treatment of the MRSA. He’s already gotten every antibiotic known to man and any more of them will just kill him from the antibiotics themselves. There’s lots of morphine around and we get to administer it sometimes. Dammit, give me some! I want some of that shit! Anyway, he will probably be headed out in less than a week. I get to get up in the night and check on the dying guy and make sure he’s not dead yet. This ensures a great night’s sleep. This should be driving me nuts, but I’m sort of handling it, which is testimony to my awesome psychological defenses. Speaking of the End of Life Specialist, don’t you think America needs to see one? I do!

Capitalism Will Soon Kill My Father

My father is 87 years old, and the hospital has given him 2 weeks to live. According to the vampires in the hospital, my father is a lost cause. They are washing their hands of him, and recommending hospice care. Hospice care is not available here (the beds are all full in the greatest health care system on Earth), so he is coming home to die, with the whole family around to witness the glorious spectacle. If he dies, which is possible, it’s clear that the US health care system, and US capitalism, will have killed him prematurely. We have already stated over and over on this blog that whatever the advantages of capitalism, bottom line is that capitalism kills, while conversely socialism saves lives. The more socialism, the more life, the more time on Earth, and the better your health while you are here. The more capitalism, the more death, the sooner and more premature death, the less time we have on Earth, and the sicker we are while we are here. In other words, capitalism is bad for your health. Not only that, but capitalism is dead serious deadly the same way that smoking and heavy drinking are. Socialism saves lives and prolongs life, the same way that cessation of smoking and moderate drinking do. It’s fascinating that public health authorities do not take note of this obvious fact. Our economic system is deadly in the same way as dope and cigs and cocktails. How come capitalism doesn’t come with a warning label attached? How come when you go to the doctor, you don’t get warned about the dangers of capitalism the same way you get lectured about a few extra pounds, the occasional joint, a few too many drinks, or the pack a day habit? Here is what happened: My father fell in the kitchen, home alone, while my mother was working. The injury quickly became badly infected. He went to the hospital and was discharged early (For capitalist economic reasons?) with a still-active infection, which got dramatically worse at home, so he had to be readmitted, where it got much better again and actually was cured. But in the hospital, he got pneumonia. Unbelievably, he was discharged early with “a touch of pneumonia”. He was sent home, and within a week the pneumonia had so accelerated that he nearly died at home in front of my eyes. He was readmitted to the ICU, where he spent two weeks on a respirator, and the pneumonia got better. It was eventually diagnosed as BOOP. It’s a very interesting illness and those interested in health may wish to read the link. The BOOP got better, he was put on steroids to treat it, and the ventilator was removed. A breathing tube was inserted in the nose, but this is better, because a ventilator is pretty much life support, and a tube is just like an emphysema patient who needs an oxygen tank. The oxygen began to be reduced on the breathing tube. He was also on a feeding tube. There were attempts to remove the feeding tube, but he was unable to swallow, probably from the Mother of All Sore Throats from having a breathing tube down his throat for 2 weeks. This was seen as a catastrophe and a death sentence by the vampires (I mean doctors!). They kept saying that he would never swallow again. I did research on dysphagia, and AFAICT this is utter nonsense. A tube down your throat probably causes temporary dysphagia, but no way is it permanent. Almost all long term dysphagia in the US is either in stroke victims (swallowing part of the brain is killed), Alzheimer’s (one more thing they can’t do), or the terminal end-stage dying (one more thing that shuts down). He’s not in any category. He got a blood clot in his leg, and it was treated with Coumadin, but eventually that caused gastric and rectal bleeding, so he had to be taken off of it. He got an atrial fibrillation from the pneumonia, but it went away. Problem is the BOOP is only slowly getting better, but that’s par for the course. Contrary to the executioners (Excuse me, the doctors!) this is rarely a fatal disease. In a recent review, only one patient was actually killed by the disease, and it took 1 1/2 years to kill them. A few others died, but from other stuff. The illness itself has a low fatality rate in the modern era, but it can take up to 6 months to 1 year to get better. The feeding tube is out because they are worried about aspiration pneumonia, and a gastric tube cannot be inserted due to gastric bleeding and an unwilling surgeon. He keeps pulling the tube out of his nose anyway. He’s not really headed out, except he can’t swallow and all the artificial feeding methods are being rejected. So he’s got 2 weeks max to figure out how to swallow or he’s history. Hospice care gravediggers will be hovering about the home for the next couple of weeks doing their gruesome whatevers. The hospital wants him out of there. It’s not a hospital really, it’s a fucking assembly line, and yeah it’s for profit, you better believe it man! Nursing home is out because Medicare won’t fork it over because according to them, he’s a lost cause. If you’re rich, you pay $4,700 anyway and get a bed. That’s just the beginning and as the months go by, the consumer-sodomizing by the nursing home capitalist scum never lets up. Nursing home care is a rich person’s luxury anymore. As you can tell, I think this whole thing is absurd and retarded. We all have to die sometime, but I don’t think it’s my father’s time quite yet. A month ago, he was reading a book a day, watching TV avidly and enthusiastically, and home alone all day caring for himself quite adequately, moving around no problem whatsoever. This is a Dead Man Walking? Please. He’s got a nasty acute illness that can kill you, and plus he’s quite old, but nasty acute illnesses can kill any of us. Underneath, he seems to have a pretty healthy body for someone his age. Anymore in the US, dying is a relatively long-term affair. People often die over a 1-2 year period of slow and ugly decline. There are often multiple events, one heart attack, another, a stroke, another stroke, yet a third stroke, pneumonia, pneumonia yet again, even a third pneumonia. It’s like watching someone slide down a snowy slope on their butt, going faster and faster, with no way to stop til they hit the bottom of the hill. Towards the end, things get ugly. They quit responding and move in and out of consciousness. The organs start shutting down, slowly, one after the other, another cascade. At some point, death in the near future is certain. This doesn’t seem to be the picture here, but what do I know? From the day he was admitted, the local necrophiliacs and graverobbers (I mean doctors and nurses!) were badgering the family. “So? Do you want to pull the plug or what?” This was what they really wanted to do from Day One. I guess he was hogging a bed or something. It’s hard to describe how angry this mentality made me. Kill the patient, clear the bed, keep the assembly line moving. GMAB. Hell yeah I’m pissed.

Pneumonia, the Old Man's Friend

If you want to know why I’m not posting, in part it’s about my father, but also I’ve been working on the German language post. Lately I have been working often 11 hours a day on that post alone. So, though I’m not employed, I am certainly working! I don’t know why I’m not writing other blog posts. My father’s condition has improved, but he is still in critical condition. I assume that ICU means critical condition. He had a crisis on Tuesday and had to be intubated and placed in the ICU, otherwise he was going to stop breathing. They didn’t think he was going to make it there for a bit. But he got better and his condition improved. An attempt was made to take him off the ventilator yesterday but he could not breathe without it for even five minutes. The ventilator sort of pushes on your lungs in addition to giving you oxygen and his lungs just don’t seem to be able to do the exercise on their own. People asked how you get pneumonia in the hospital. Well, in part it is because hospitals these days are full of some very nasty germs, including superbugs. Now, I have been exposed to those very same pneumonia bugs from my father. However, I am younger and healthier, so I am not going to get pneumonia. Another problem is that you are lying in the hospital on the bed and you can’t get up. They are pumping you full of fluids all day and night. Imagine your body is like a sponge and the fluids are like water. This is like putting a sponge on the counter and pouring water on it. Your body has a mechanism for “wringing out the sponge.” It does this by moving around. If you are not moving around, the fluids are just going to pile up in your body. That’s a recipe for pneumonia, especially in an older person with a weak immune system. He fell and injured his leg and the leg quickly became infected, possibly due to age and a weakened immune system. The infection was horrible and he was hospitalized. He was released from the hospital before it was cured, went home and it got worse. He had to be rehospitalized and upon rehospitalization, he got pneumonia. He was released from the hospital with a bit of pneumonia in one lung and after about a week at home, it progressed to the point where on Monday morning a week ago, he was turning blue and near death. So he was hospitalized a third time. Do you see a pattern here? Hospitals in the US, all for-profit of course, release patients before they are even well or able to really make it on their own. What’s it all about? I guess it’s about saving money, but maybe there are some other reasons. It’s clear to me that operating most US hospitals on a for-profit basis is completely insane, not to mention immoral. If there’s a litmus test for a socialist out there, this ought to be one. So yes, most hospitals ought to be non-profit. Should there be for-profit hospitals? Possibly, as an alternative for those who don’t want the nonprofits. I admit that I am confused about health care reform, so anyone who has anything to offer, go ahead. The upshot of a for-profit hospital system and hospitals filled with bugs and superbugs is that in my opinion, these places are death traps. Nice to visit, but if you enter them as a patient, watch out. Going to the hospital in and of itself, as a patient, is surely enough to make you worse and probably even kill you. Message: Do yourself a favor – stay out of hospitals! Last Sunday he was experiencing tremendous anxiety and he was shaking a lot. What’s that all about? Is he terrified he is dying? No. He has pneumonia. I’ve never had it, but the experience of pneumonia is one of drowning and being unable to breathe. Imagine feeling like you are drowning underwater. That’s what it feels like. Pretty damn scary. Someone suggested that he knew he was dying and he had a poor reaction to death, that reaction being anxiety. I’m not sure what reaction you have towards death really matters as long as it’s on its way anyway. If you are dying, you can be peaceful, angry, depressed, anxious, or ecstatic, and let’s face it, you are going to die one way or the other anyway. What difference does it make what attitude you take towards it? I think most of the time, the dying do not even know that they are dying. They probably just think that they are ill, and the thought of whether they are dying or not does not occur to them. We are naturally optimistic (or at least I am). If I were really ill or injured, my thoughts and dreams would probably just be about being sick or hurt and that experience. You don’t really know you’re dying unless someone tells you, like a doctor. Otherwise, you just know you are hurting physically and you are just thinking about that. People who are informed that they are indeed dying take many different reactions to it defending on the characteristic defenses and stress symptoms displayed in healthy life. Those who reacted to stress with an anxiety reaction tend to get a lot of anxiety. Those who reacted with a depressive reaction tend to get depressed. Pneumonia was a disease known even to the ancients. This was noted by the earliest Greek physicians. It has been referred to as “the old man’s friend”, but I don’t think drowning to death sounds very friendly to me. I would not my friends to drown me, would you? Like predators in an ecosystem, nevertheless, the pneumonia top level predator serves to cull the human herd of the very old, the very young, the weak and the sick. It’s not unusual for a cancer patient, for instance, to be finally killed not by the cancer but by pneumonia. This happened to my aunt, who tragically died at age 32 of breast cancer.

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