“Kipling On the Front Lines,” by Alpha Unit

Mowgli, the little boy raised by wolves and befriended by Baloo the bear and Bagheera the panther, first came to life during a winter in Vermont in the imagination of Rudyard Kipling.

Kipling was in Vermont because that’s where his wife’s family lived; the couple had taken up residence there and started their own family. It was American hubris, however, that soured Kipling on living in the United States.

The focus of all the dissension was British Guiana, which was in a border dispute with Venezuela. Richard Olney, the American Secretary of State, declared that the United States had a right to mediate all disputes in the Western Hemisphere. Because of the Monroe Doctrine, you know.

In other words, the United States ruled the Western Hemisphere.

This didn’t sit well with the British, including Kipling. Anti-British sentiment in America, followed by family troubles, sent him back to England.

It was a period when both Britain and the United States were settling their weight upon all kinds of native peoples around the world. Someone observing the actions of both nations might have been amused by Kipling’s distaste for American interference in Britain’s interference in South America.

“If anybody’s going to be interfering in South America, it’s going to be us,” Secretary Olney would have told him.

Kipling, who actually memorialized the imperialist ambitions of both nations, remains a figure of contradictions.

He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1907, though other writers have mocked his abilities, particularly as a poet. People still argue about whether he was pro- or anti-imperialist. Many know of his poem The White Man’s Burden, for which he has been denounced – and celebrated, as a satirist.

Does anyone concerned with world affairs today, particularly heads of state, really care what Kipling may or may not have advised his fellow Whites roughly a century ago?

I’m guessing that the answer to this question is “No.” The fact that people still debate Kipling’s views is a testament to two things: the power of art, in this case literature; and the power of the idea of race.

Kipling is long gone, but there are people who seem to have some kind of stake in whether or not his views on race and empire were justified. It reminds me of the debate we have had from time to time in America over whether kids should read some of the works of Mark Twain.

Kipling’s Kim has been compared to Huckleberry Finn, in fact. Both novels tell the coming-to-maturity tale of a “loose” boy with father issues, traveling with a beloved adult male. Both novels have come under scrutiny for alleged racism – which informs the question of their appropriateness for developing minds.

School children should be taught literature. Adults wrangle over which works are to be presented to them, and how they are to be presented, because adults supervise the indoctrination of children.

They wrangle for another reason, though. The issue of race is intimately wrapped up in another issue: self-esteem.

When I say self-esteem, I mean the popular concept of having a healthy, positive self-image. Who doesn’t want kids to have a healthy, positive self-image – especially “minority” kids, those long deemed to be most in need of it?

So for quite some time, at least here in the US, we’ve been giving historical figures – be they Presidents or novelists – the PC litmus test. If someone reads anything by Kipling other than The Jungle Book (both parts), will he be contaminated by White Supremacist ideology?

We’ve decided we must be very careful about that sort of thing going into the heads of young people.

And so educators and other interested parties have put long-dead authors such as Kipling onto the front lines of their ideology wars.

White American Decline: A Confession

I have a confession to make.

Part of me wants to retain White culture as the dominant American culture.

Problem is that US Whites are unspeakably rightwing. So with White decline in the US should come to the decline of this horrible White US conservatism. White decline should lead to a more liberal America, which I support in most ways.

The US non-Whites are very liberal. The young CA Hispanics are almost Communists or socialists. A non-White America could finally give us a shot at a socialist America, like the socialist states in much of the world. So my preferences for White culture clash with my politics. This crap could all be avoided if US Whites would just be sensible and vote liberal. But they won’t. As it is, it’s pretty much a wash, and a strong part of me wants White decline due to the political benefits.

I like White culture, but I hate this ridiculous conservatism, so out of step with civilized humanity. Non-Whites oppose this nonsense much more than Whites do. Looking for someone to blame because your Senator or Representative is a conservative dinosaur? Look no further than the White

I like liberalism and socialism, but I’m not wild about Black and Hispanic culture. But increasingly, non-White areas are just developing the “multiculture” instead of some explicitly Black, Hispanic or otherwise culture. The multicult is hard to describe, but it’s not White culture, at least politically, and it doesn’t dive into the depths of Black or Hispanic culture. It’s common among civilized Blacks and 2nd generation people of all ethnicities, not just Hispanics.

As you can see, I’m torn. At this point, it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other. I live in a non-White town in a non-White state, and it’s not exactly the end of the world. I figure we are going to transition towards a Latin American model with a White elite anyway. I’m White. What’s not to like?

He Said He Would Lend Her an Ear

But this not what he meant.

A truly bizarre story. What in the Hell is with this chick anyway? The White nationalists are going nuts over this story as proof of Black depravity. True, Blacks can be depraved, but this is not an example of such. If anything, this chick appears to be not right at all in the head. This is about a crazy person more than anything else.

She only got 60 days? Damn.

She apologized profusely? Well, that’s nice, but you still need to do the time. She’s apparently dangerous, and 60 days ain’t long enough to let her think it over.

She lost her junior high school teaching job? This chick was a teacher? Jeez.

Pretty nice looking chick though. Too bad she’s a fuckin cannibal.

Alt Left: The Myth of Male Heterosexual HIV

Update: The comments section on this article is now closed. Continue your comments at the new thread.

We have a reactionary commenter in the comments section who is posting the usual scare stuff about the risks of males in the US getting HIV from a woman. In truth, the risks are very low. To the extent that they exist at all, they exist in the form of regular sex with a woman who has HIV. I mean regular sex. Like hundreds of times, preferably over years. That’s how a male gets HIV from a woman in the US.

Your chances rise slightly with every encounter with an HIV positive partner, so if you are having sex 100’s of times with an HIV positive woman, you risk starts going up. Your risk from a one time or casual encounter with even a known HIV positive female is nearly zero. Your risk from a woman with unknown status is even lower.

These folks like our commenter like to go on an on about how condoms don’t prevent HIV. Well, technically it is true. There were some studies in which serodisocordant couples (one had HIV, the other did not) were followed for ~5 years. Some used condoms all the time, others sometimes, others never. There was significant risk to the females in the never use category, some risk to the females in the occasional category, and low risk to the females in the always category.

There was no risk to the males who used condoms. Of the males who never used condoms with their HIV positive partners, only 2

If condoms were such a big risk to women nevertheless, we would expect to see some women in porn getting HIV from men using condoms. Not one case has yet been reported.

If HIV is such a risk to men from having sex with women, we should be seeing some infections in porn. Not one man has caught HIV from a woman in porn yet, even though for decades, most scenes did not use condoms and to this day, many still do not.

It’s so hard to get HIV from a woman in the US that most guys should not waste time worrying about it. If you regularly have sex with women who shoot dope, you have more to worry about. If you have a regular partner, you might want her to get tested if you don’t know her status, as regular sex with an HIV positive woman over 100’s of acts is somewhat risky.

It’s always nice to know people’s status. I know mine. It’s negative. I’ve been tested. A few times.

Males get HIV infection in three ways.

  1. Gay sex. Usually receptive anal sex. Other acts and positions are much less risky.
  2. Sharing needles with illegal drug users. Don’t do it.
  3. Heterosexual sex. The number of cases is so small that I would almost say don’t worry about it, but not quite.

All these Black and Hispanic guys with HIV who are giving it to women in their communities are getting it by gay sex and sharing needles. With the Black guys, there is a lot of down low gay sex and some needle sharing. With the Hispanic guys, it’s almost all needle sharing.

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American High School Girl Beaten to Death in Mexico

Elizabeth Mandala, an 18-year old high school girl from Sugar Land, Texas, went with two Mexican men, age 38 and 43, old enough to be her father, on a trip to Mexico to learn how to be a coyote and smuggle illegal aliens into the US. Smuggling illegals is a very good paying business. At the time, she was also working as a stripper in a local strip club. She was said to be “smartest girl in her class.”

Elzabeth Mandala, 18 year old US high school girl, beaten to death in Mexico.

I guess not too smart though.

She and the two men were found near the small town of Mina in a Toyota pickup truck that had crashed into the back of another truck. All three had been beaten to death. The killers then apparently staged the car accident. There was a cement block on the gas pedal of the crashed vehicle.

The two Mexican men were Dante Ruiz Siller, 38, and Luis Ángel Estrella Mondragón, 44.

Siller, a merchant, and Mondragon, a cab driver, were from a small town near Mexico City.

Comments are wide-ranging, many asking why Texas allows 18 year old girls to be strippers (All US states allow this). Many others asked why her mother allowed her to be a stripper and to go off to Mexico to learn how to smuggle illegals. I would say that she’s an adult and she can do whatever she wants, but that’s just me.

Her classmates at Kempner High School were shocked.

There is a lot of commentary about this on the White nationalist sites, much of it retarded, of course. Much of it is centered on the WN’s notion that Elizabeth was a mestiza, not White. However, the last name Mandala is Sicilian:

Mandala Name Meaning and History1. occupational name for a seller of scarves, from Greek mandilas.

2. altered form of Mannalà, a name of Arabic origin, derived from mann Allah ‘grace of Allah’. The surname is characteristic of the Palermo region and eastern Sicily.

Looks like Arabic -> Greek -> Sicilian language. The Sicilian language has a ton of Greek and Arabic words in it.

A number of Mandalas moved from Sicily to Houston, Texas around 75-125 years ago. All came from the same small village of 919 people in Sicily. Santa Cristina Gela is actually an Arbëreshë village in Sicily near Palermo. The Elizabeth is from Sugar Land, which is near Houston. She is plausibly related to this CBS photo gallery.

Furthermore, on her Facebook page, she has several friends with the same last name Mandala, quite possibly relatives. These Mandalas are all Italians living in Italy right now. The second one seems to be some sort of a Greek-Sicilian, which is possible, as there are Greek-speaking communities in Sicily. Furthermore, she is a fan of a Facebook group that is entirely in the Italian language, so it’s possible that she speaks Italian.

Faisal Shahzad, Pakistani, Arrested in Failed New York City Car Bomb Attack

If you’ve been following the media, you would have heard of the failed car bomb attack on Time Square in New York City. Street vendors saw smoke coming out of a car in Times Square on Saturday, May Day, 2010. The device was very poorly and amateurishly made. A video captured a man in an alleyway who seemed to have recently vacated the bomb vehicle.

A fingerprint ID’d Shahzad, originally of the Malakand Region of Northwest Pakistan, who was naturalized in 2009. A manhunt was soon underway. He was arrested today as he tried to board a flight out of the US to an unknown location.

The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack in response to the recent killing of two top Iraqi Al Qaeda leaders in Iraq in Tikrit. US forces surrounded the house and as they closed in, a bomb blast, apparently a from a suicide bomb vest, was heard inside. A US helicopter circling the site crashed, resulting in two US casualties.

Despite denials by Juan Cole and some of the antiwar crowd, the Pakistani Taliban now has deep ties to Al Qaeda, ties which deepen the more we stage drone attacks on them. In fact, it is the Pakistani Taliban who is harboring Al Qaeda in North and South Waziristan, Bajaur, Khyber, Mohmand and Dir in the northwest of Pakistan.

I doubt if this was an official Pakistani Taliban operation. They make way better bombs than this, and this was pretty much of a Rube Goldberg contraption. Seems like a Muslim version of the lone wolf phenomenon.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I’m sure the Republicans will play this as, “Obama failing to protect us from Muslim terror,” and the Moronican US public will probably buy it.

Recall that when George Bush failed to protect us from Muslim terror and 3,100 Americans were killed and one of our greatest landmarks destroyed, he was a national hero with 9

I don’t expect any kind of morality from Republican politicians, but it would be nice if their fanboys were not such a bunch of retards.

His Twitter page is here.

New Anti-Illegal Immigration Bill in Arizona

Arizona just passed a new anti-illegal immigration bill which has people freaked out all over the country.

There is really a lot less to it than either side recognizes. All it does is make Arizona law the same as federal law, so it ought to be immune to court challenges. It also stipulates that cops can only check for immigration status after they stop someone for a legitimate reason, for example, for a traffic stop or if they are a suspect in some other crime. So there are not going to be any roundups or stops on the basis of someone looking Hispanic or speaking Spanish.

The Left has gone nuts over this bill, and the Obama Administration has registered their disapproval. That bills like this are being passed at all reveals frustration over the Feds’ refusal to enforce immigration law. So the solution, says everyone, is some crap called “comprehensive immigration reform.” Every time you see that word “comprehensive” with regard to immigration, start running away. That word is code for “amnesty.” Comprehensive = amnesty. It’s that simple.

It’s actually much worse than that.

The pro-illegal crowd not only wants amnesty for 12 million illegals, they also want to end “the militarization of the border.” What that means is that they want the Border Patrol pulled off the border.

They also want “an end to the raids.” What that means is that after we do amnesty, all of the new illegals will get a free pass into the country.

There won’t be any Border Patrol at the border, so the illegals will just walk across. Once the illegals are in the country, there won’t be any more raids, so they will get to stay here as long as they like. Until the next amnesty, that is. In other words, Open Borders.

The Democrats are trying to sell this “comprehensive immigration reform” stink bomb on this basis: We will legalize the 12 million already here, and then we won’t let one more illegal stay in this country. After we give them all amnesty, we are going to massively beef up border security and finally get control over the borders. They we will bust all the employers hiring the illegals, and we will make constant raids on any new illegals. The line is, “Sure, we are doing this amnesty once, but after that, there will never be another one.”

Forget it. Ain’t gonna happen. The US is never going to get control over its border because it doesn’t want to. The Republicans want the illegals to flood over for cheap labor, and the Democrats want them pouring over because that’s what their traitor Hispanic constituency wants.

The US is never going to bust all the employers. Ain’t gonna happen. There is already a workable program called E-Verify that can easily determine if any employee is an illegal or not. The Democrats have killed mandatory E-Verify and will continue to kill it forever.

The raids necessary to remove all of the illegals are never going to happen either.

Keep in mind that this was how they sold us that last treasonous amnesty in 1986 under Reagan. First it was only supposed to be for 500,000 illegals. It ended up legalizing 3 million of them. Back then, they said the same thing. We will give them amnesty this once, then we will get control over the border, crack down on the employers and remove all the illegals already here. None of these things happened because the powers that be want these millions of illegals here.

Furthermore, there will not just be 12 million illegals legalized. There will be another 30-40 million of their relatives coming in subsequent decades under family reunification, a much abused immigration law that needs a serious working over.

Let’s get this straight. Comprehensive immigration reform means not just amnesty for 12 million illegals and adding their 40 million relatives. It also means Open Borders. Because the pro-amnesty stance is essentially an Open Borders stance. Comprehensive immigration reform = amnesty = Open Borders.

I am going to tentatively support this law until we see how it actually works out. Supposedly, this makes me a fascist and a conservative. Fine, I’m a conservative and a fascist then, no problem.

Arizona has also done two other cool things.

They passed a law banning all ethnic studies programs at K-12 schools. There are Chicano Studies programs in many Arizona high schools, and they’re terrible. They are all being taught by Reconquista Aztlan MECHA and La Raza Hispanic traitors. This curriculum is furiously anti-White and openly treasonous. It has no place in US K-12 schools.

It’s lamentable that it exists at universities too, but all sorts of nonsense is taught at university level, and you can’t much get rid of it without running the risk of censoring higher education, which I don’t want to do.

Arizona also passed a law mandating that all English teachers in Arizona K-12 schools must be fluent in English and speak without a strong accent.

One wonders why such a law was needed.

Here is what happened. A while back, Arizona had bilingual education, which I actually support, since I have a Masters in Linguistics, and I know bilingual ed works for those who need it. Opposition to bilingual ed is not pedagogically sound or proper.

Eight years ago, Arizona got rid of all bilingual ed, a very bad idea. The schools had hired all these Hispanic bilingual ed teachers for their bilingual program, many of them from Latin America. Many of these folks spoke English only as a 2nd language and were not native English speakers.

After the state got rid of bilingual ed, the schools shifted the bilingual ed teachers to other subjects, mostly to teaching English. This bill is an attempt to deal with that problem. The bill is pedagogically sound. Indeed, only native English speakers should be teaching English in the US, where English is the de facto national language.

More states are going to pass such laws. Utah and Texas have introduced copies of Arizona’s bill. This will be nice because the more states that pass these bills, the harder it’s going to be for the pro-illegals to pull off their, “We are going to boycott this state!” threat. It’s fairly easy to boycott one state, but when it gets to two, three and more states, it’s going to be harder and harder to boycott so many states.

Lots of New Sick and Evil Videos Up on the Old Site

We have pretty much removed the sicko flicks from here because WordPress doesn’t want them, but we are continuing to post them over at the old site.

Traffic really plunged there. At the peak, it was up to 68,000 hits/day. Now it’s down to 3,500/day over there and 4,000/day here, for a combined total of 7,500/day for both sites. Traffic collapsed when the South Korean government banned my website! Everyone in South Korea has to go through some government server to get on the Net, so the government is able to ban sites pretty easily.

Anyway, for your twisted freaks on here:

Eating a Cooked Fish While Alive: The sickos in China think it’s cool to keep a fish alive until you cook it, then cook it in some weird way so it’s still alive, then consume the poor thing while it’s still alive! To be eaten alive! Good God, what a horrible punishment.

You know, the tribes of the SE US, from around Louisiana and the coast of Texas such as the extinct Karankawa, used to do this, . They would capture enemy warriors, tie them to a pole, then surround them with braves who would charge up to the poor sod with knives and slice off bits of his flesh, then eat them in front of him, just to freak him out even more. I assume at some point, they’ve eaten so much of the poor guy that he expires, but it’s sure a Helluva way to go. Gimme a heart attack any day. Hell, gimme cancer. Just not that.

Nick Berg Beheading Video: The original Iraqi Al Qaeda beheading video, released in 2003, with the poor, innocent but foolish Nick Berg meeting his end. The first time I watched this, I was shaking for hours afterward, and I was seriously freaked for a week or two. I watched it again and it was a little better, but not much. I’ve never watched it again – twice was enough! But it’s a classic as far as this shit goes. Includes a thorough writeup on the whole sad story behind the crime.

Man Electrocuted on Train in India: At a crowded train station in India, some idiot somehow finds himself on top of a train. He tries to get down several times, and people reach up to try to help him. Then he walks away and starts strolling down the roof of the train. Like a dumbass, at one point, he reaches up and touches a live electric wire. He is instantly electrocuted and killed. His body quickly catches fire, and he’s gone in a ball of flames in an instant. Electricity is a powerful motherfucker all right. I didn’t feel much sympathy while watching this because the guy’s such an idiot.

12 Year Old Pakistani Boy Beheads a Man: This has got to be about as evil is it gets. The Taliban bastards in North Waziristan capture a US spy, probably an ISI agent in the area, tie him up, and give the knife to a young kid so he can kill him. There are some other kids watching and holding the poor guy down, and maybe some girls watching too. It’s hard to tell. He takes forever to saw the guy’s head off, and reminds you of a butcher carving up an animal carcass. This is child abuse in its worst form. Don’t do this to kids.

Woman Electrocuted in China: Another idiot video. A middle aged woman, apparently mentally disturbed, climbs a utility pole in the middle of some seriously crowded Chinese city and won’t come down. The sheer mass of humanity below is breathtaking in itself. Rescuers are trying to get to her, but she’s just up there crying and won’t come down on the ladders.

There are power lines near her, and a few times, like a dumbass, she reaches up and grabs them, and of course gets electrocuted each time. But for some reason, possibly poor grounding, she gets off pretty easy. I’m told that she survived the ordeal with minimal injuries.

Worst Ankle Twist Ever: A soccer game is being performed, possibly somewhere in the Mediterranean or in the Southern Cone of South America – the players look like Med Whites of some sort. Anyway, soon some poor guy sustains a horrible injury to his ankle. People rush out, put him on a stretcher, and as he is being carried off, you see, incredibly, that his ankle appears to be twisted a full 90 degrees! I don’t know how that’s possible, or if there’s any way to fix it.

Arab Woman Stabs Guard at Israeli Checkpoint: A 21 year old Palestinian woman is getting ready to be searched before going through the Kalandia Checkpoint in Jerusalem. I do not understand the layout of this checkpoint, why it’s necessary, or where it goes to or from. Anyhow, the guards turn away from her, she reaches into her belt, pulls out a huge knife, rushes one of the male Israeli guards, and stabs him! Damn! He goes down, and other guards quickly pile on her and disarm her. The guard sustained minor injuries in the attack and survived.

Convicted Killer Tries to Grab Cop’s Gun in Court: A Black guy is on trial for the murder of his White wife and their son. Her family is in court. At some point, he rushes the bailiff and tries to grab his gun. Other cops, attorneys, all sorts of people, pile on the guy and handcuff him. Then they lead him out of court while the family of the dead woman he killed scream at him.

John Graziano Head Wound: Hulk Hogan’s son, age 17, borrows his Dad’s car and goes for a ride with his friend, Graziano. Possibly he’s drunk. At some point, he totals the car and nearly kills Graziano. Hogan’s son survives. The video shows this poor guy, Graziano, in the hospital afterwards. He seems to have lost a good part of the front of his forehead, that is, his brain! Somehow he’s still alive, but he’s a total vegetable. A lot of people were mad at the Hogans about this incident, and it’s apparently the source of a major lawsuit now. Really disturbing.

Photo of James Vance, Failed Shotgun Suicide: One of the really bad things about trying to kill yourself is that you might fail and actually survive afterward, but be so fucked up you wish you were dead. This is what happened to James Vance, a teenage boy from the US who was depressed and using drugs when he went to a playground and shot himself in the head. That night, he had been using drugs and listening to Judas Priest.

The case resulted in a lawsuit against the band for supposedly making this idiot try to kill himself, but the suit failed. There is a photo of Vance, plus a video interview with him. Even after much reconstructive surgery, he has one of the most fucked up faces on Earth. A few years after, he could not take it anymore, got some pills, and killed himself for good. I don’t blame him; I would have done the same if I looked like that.

Idiot Jumps Off Roof and Breaks His Leg: Stupid American teenagers are engaging in some weird sport called roof jumping, where you jump off a roof onto the lawn below. Something goes wrong, the kid lands wrong, and he breaks his leg. You can actually hear the bone snap on the video. Stupidity can be painful!

Nighttime Mobs Attack Cars in Oakland: This is the latest fad in some US Black ghettos. Crowds of young people gather on major street late at night, around 10 or 11 PM, on a weekend nite. Then they start attacking random cars as they drive by. Sometimes they try to pull the doors open to rob or assault drivers. Drivers fight back, hit them, try to run them over, etc. A good time is had by all, or many, or at least the attackers.

Mostly young Oakland Blacks here, but strangely, there are some young White girls there hanging out with the Blacks and attacking cars themselves.

If these fuckers did that to my car, I might try to hit them with my vehicle! I’ve already done so in a similar situation, and the dude went flying after I nailed him with my accelerating car! Don’t ever try this with me, punks!

Man Assaulted in New York Deli: A older White guy is ordering a meal in a New York deli with some young Black guy standing next him. Suddenly, at one point, the Black turns around and cold cocks the White guy, knocking him to the floor! Then he runs out of the building. No further info on where or why this happened, details on the crime, fate of the victim or results of the investigation.

Also lots of older stuff in foreign languages, but most of you won’t be interested in that.

Have fun, sickos!

“Caucasian Law Enforcement Defends Minority Rights,” by Alpha Unit

Harris County, Texas, is the site of the latest push for civil rights in America. The minority in question are Caucasians.

In Harris County, sheriff’s deputies seeking solidarity with like-minded others have their pick of civil rights “flavors” – the Mexican-American Sheriff’s Organization, the Afro-American Sheriff’s Deputy League, and, now, the Caucasian Law Enforcement Association.

Its founder, deputy Daniel McCool, is concerned, he says, with hiring practices of Sheriff Adrian Garcia, who was elected a couple of years ago as the county’s first Hispanic sheriff.

McCool doesn’t claim to have evidence of hiring malfeasance, but he believes that hiring is now based not on merit but on that old standard of “who you know” or on some kind of commitment to affirmative action. He and his fellow White officers are now, according to him, feeling the sting of discrimination that is coming from people “we used to call minorities.”

Mark Warren, whose article brought all of this to my attention, has a local’s take on the situation:

I’m from a little town in east Harris County called Highlands, and I can attest to the fact that there has always been a Caucasian Law Enforcement Association standing up for the rights of Whites. It’s called the “Harris County Sheriff’s Department.”

The “Western Blacks Act Bad Because They Are Stupid” Nonsense

A commenter disagrees with me when I said that I don’t think there is anything to this “Blacks act bad because they’re dumb” argument.

Nevertheless, I would say that easily 10

Only one problem: it is complete nonsense.

Whatever causes Blacks to engage in pathological behavior to an excessive degree, being dumb can’t possibly have anything to do it, at least not with Blacks in the US and the UK.

Race realists typically bandy about the “Blacks act bad because they’re stupid” thing.

Well, if you’re intelligent, you would *think* before you act. You wouldn’t pull a knife or gun out on someone simply because you lost a basketball game or an argument. Plus, you would be far less likely to engage in impulsive behavior and have a greater ability to delay gratification. What do blacks do when they get their welfare checks? Spend it on a perm or a weave.

Yes, but there are quite a few populations all over the world that have IQ’s in that range where people do not behave that way at all. They are not idiotically impulsive in behavior or spending, they save their money, they are calm and emotionally controlled, crime rates are very low, violent crime is almost nonexistent, family life is stable, pathological behavior is rare, and society generally hums along pretty well.

Costa Rica   89
Laos         89
Samoa        88
Azerbaijan   87
East Timor   87
Indonesia    87
Myanmar      87
Tajikistan   87
Turkmenistan 87
Uzbekistan   87
US Black    86.8
Kuwait       86
UK Black    86
Cuba         85
Yemen        85
Iran         84
Jordan       84
Morocco      84
Saudi Arabia 84
UAE          84
Algeria      83
Bahrain      83
Libya        83
Oman         83
Syria        83
Tunisia      83

Granted, there’s some political violence in a few of those places, but there’s political violence everywhere. I don’t think political violence automatically means you have a nation full of morons, or Germany and Japan would end up two of the most retarded nations on Earth.

This argument about Western Blacks makes no sense at all.

Populations with the exact same IQ’s of US and UK Blacks do not engage in ridiculous impulsive violent and spendthrift behaviors. They are able to delay gratification and plan for the future quite well.

Granted, there’s a case that Blacks have difficulty in planning for the future, delaying gratification, engaging in impulsive criminal, violent or prodigal behaviors, but IQ can’t possibly have anything to do it, since there are many populations with the exact same IQ which don’t behave this way at all. Obviously something is causing it, but lack of brains can’t have anything to it.

It is here that we may enter into the realm of race and personality.

But the argument in the title deserves to be thrown on the trash heap once and for all. I’m tired of it.

Linguistic Map of Latin America

Map of the major languages of Latin America

This is an interesting map, though on first thought it seems unnecessary.

First of all, it makes quite clear how Brazil stands out as the Portuguese speaking state in Latin America. One could argue that this makes them odd man out, but if we look in terms of population, Latin America has a population of 570 million. 192 million of those are Brazilians. So 3

All the Spanish-speaking countries can communicate well with each other, and there is a “neutral Spanish” that any educated person can use when conversing with any other educated person from Hispanophone Latin America. As long as you are doing this, you will both be understood.

Getting down to regional dialects, things do get complicated. I understand that Chilean soap operas, spoken in the rich dialect of the Chilean street, are dubbed in the rest of South America because other South Americans can’t understand Chilean street Spanish. But they are  probably well understood in Argentina. There does seem to be a “Southern Cone Street Spanish” that is harder to pick up as the latitudes move northward.

Bolivian Spanish sounds strange, but it’s probably intelligible in South America. It heavily inflected with Indian languages.

There is a general Caribbean Spanish that can be hard to understand.

The language of the Colombian Caribbean coast can be hard for even other Colombians to understand.

Dominican Spanish is notorious for being hard to understand. First of all, it seems to be based on Canarian Spanish of the Canary Islands, which is a very strange form of Spanish. Into this base went a ton of African words, much more than in the rest of Latin America. Further, it is spoken very fast. Dominican Spanish is pretty baffling to other Spanish speakers, at least for a while. Nevertheless, there is a more neutral form of Dominican Spanish that is widely intelligible to other Hispanophones.

On the streets of Mexico City, a very hardcore slang has emerged, sort of a Mexico City Street Spanish, that is pretty hard to figure out outside of Mexico.

Latin America is interesting in that the rest of the world seems to be learning “English as the universal language,” while Latin America is lagging behind.

I know quite a few educated Latin Americans who barely speak a lick of English. Latin Americans live not so much  in the society of the Western Hemisphere, but more particularly in the society of Latin America. And Latin America is extremely Hispanophone. Everywhere you go, most everyone speaks Spanish. Spanish is a very highly developed modern language with words for everything. Why bother to learn English? What for? To talk to gringos?

However, at advanced university levels, such as Master’s Degree and particularly doctorate level, increasingly there are requirements to learn English.

One would think that Mexicans at least would be required to take some English in school, right? Forget it. First of all, Mexican schools are crap, and they are broke. The elite and upper middle class steal all the money in the country, and the Libertarian/Republican dream minimal state/free market economy hosts horribly defunded and decrepit schools. It’s not uncommon to meet 20 year old Mexicans who dropped out in the 2nd grade.

English is typically not offered in Mexican public schools. It’s only offered in private schools, which is of course where the moneyed class above sends their kids, which is why they won’t pay for public schools (They don’t use ’em), which is why the public schools are crap. I’m sure many more non-Hispanic Americans in the US are taking Spanish than Latin Americans are studying English.

Hispanophones also often do not bother to learn Portuguese. Some of the educated ones claim they can understand it without studying it, but I doubt it.

A lot of Brazilians say they can understand Spanish pretty well (I think they study Spanish more than Hispanophone Latins study Portuguese), but when you start talking to them in Spanish (which I do on a regular basis) it doesn’t seem to work very well. Want to talk to a Brazilian? Learn Portuguese!

As we can see on the map, both French Guyana and Haiti speak French.

I was talking about Haiti with my liberal Democrat Mom once. The general conversation was along the lines that Haiti was all screwed up. She said, “Well, they’re all Black, they’re dirt poor, and worst of all, they’re in the Western Hemisphere, but they all speak French!” Indeed. What do these funny Frencophones think they’re doing in our Anglophone, Hispanophone and Lusophone Hemisphere anyway?

Further, the language of Haiti is not really intelligible to French speakers. It makes about as much sense as hardcore Jamaican English does to us. However, the Haitian elite often speaks good French. They also say they understand Spanish, but I’ve tried to talk to them in Spanish, and it didn’t go anywhere. Often they don’t understand much English either. Want to talk a member of the Haitian upper class? Learn French!

So the Haitians are rather isolated in this Hemisphere, but I’m not sure if your average dirt poor Haitian cares. I suppose they could always talk to the Quebecois, but no one understands Quebecois either.

French Guyana is also a French speaking country. It’s still a colony, and it has a very nice standard of living. Nowadays, colonies don’t even want to go free anymore, as it means a standard of living crash.

As you can see, British Honduras speaks English. There are some other English speaking islands in the Caribbean and some French speaking islands too, but none are marked on the map.

Dutch has pretty much died out in the Western Hemisphere, but it used to be spoken widely in Suriname and the Dutch Caribbean.

The main language of Guyana is probably some English creole, but it’s not shown on the map.

Indian languages are still very widely spoken in Peru (Quechua), Bolivia (Aymara) and Paraguay (Guarani).

Does Dumb Population = Dumb Government?

A new commenter, Portland Bus Driver, suggests that the IQ of a general population is reflected in the IQ of its top state officials. I beg to disagree. He also points to some behavioral differences between his Hispanic and Black passengers and suggests that it’s not all IQ. In fact he’s correct. Illegals probably have lower IQ’s than Blacks. Race realists typically bandy about the “Blacks act bad because they’re stupid” thing. In the case of US and UK Blacks anyway, I’d just as soon chuck this theory.

There is most definitely a causal relationship between higher IQ and a potential economic situation. Look at predominately East Asian and white countries compared to any black country, and South Africa does not count. Brazil is 5

The point is that the commanding heights of the economy and government must be in the hands of higher IQ people. Once the lower IQ masses take over –See: Haiti, Rhodesia, the US after George Bush 🙂 — the country declines.

That being said, environment and culture and all of that can still play a role.

In my experience Hispanics ride the bus to work early in the morning with lunchboxes, they show me respect and pay their fare (or have counterfeit fare). Blacks start getting on later in the afternoon in comfy workout style clothes to go “chill”. Then the Hispanics come home from work.

Later that night the blacks get back on in expensive clothes and jewelry and watches and flash their bus pass which is right next to their food stamp card, they give me a dirty look and use obscene language right next to children. I could go on, my point is that it is not just IQ, Hispanics may have some other trait that predisposes them to work. Every black run society, with a few exceptions that are easily explained, is economically “disadvantaged.”

I would say it is the IQ of the population that matters. Yet South Africa was able to work pretty well as long as the high-IQ Whites were running the state. S. African White IQ = 94.

But I bet that in the present South African government, at the highest positions, you have folks with high IQ’s. Same in Latin America, South Asia, SE Asia, Arabia, North Africa, the Caribbean. Even though the general population may be dumb as rocks, the folks at the top of government are typically well-educated and bright.

So I don’t think low IQ country = low IQ idiots in government. I just don’t buy it. Besides, past a certain point, IQ just does not matter. It’s “high enough.”

More than the state, it is the IQ of the general population that matters in terms of how the society functions. Let’s not place too much emphasis on government here! In Haiti, I imagine that those at the stop of the state are bright folks. I have met some of the Haitian elite, and they were not stupid at all. I’ve also met some of the African elite, and they were not dumb either. I have met very bright Africans from all over Sub-Saharan Africa. Surely there are enough bright folks to form a competent state at the highest levels.

You may start running into problems at the local levels, but I still say that it’s the composition of society, not the state, that matters. If your society has an IQ of 67 or 72, I am sorry, but chances are you are going to have lots of problems functioning in the modern world no matter how bright your officials are. This is what is really going on here when we compare say Africa with East Asia and the US.

The “Obama is in charge so dumb Blacks rule” thing is a fallacy. I don’t know Obama’s IQ, but it has to be higher than George Bush’s. Obama’s administration is full of bright folks of all different races. They are certainly intelligent enough to run a modern state well. He is conflating a relatively lower Black IQ with “Obama” and his admin. But Obama is very smart, and so is his Cabinet and his aides.

The IQ of Mexican immigrants is probably ~85. The IQ of US Blacks is 86.8. The illegals are less intelligent than the Blacks. But look at the behavioral difference. Let us not place too much weight on IQ.

Also, let us not conflate US and UK Black IQ = 86.8 and 86, with African IQ = 67. The IQ’s of US and UK Blacks are about 20 points higher. That alone almost makes them a separate race.

There are many societies that function quite well and have IQ’s of 86-87. US and UK Black IQ is certainly adequate to function in modern society. That they don’t seem to do too well has its reasons I’m sure, but IQ can’t possibly be one of them.

He suggests that every Black society is economically disadvantaged. However, there are some Black nations in the Caribbean and even in Africa that are doing quite well.  Equatorial Guinea and Gabon have per capita incomes of ~$20,000/yr.

“Lansford Hastings and His California Dream,” by Alpha Unit

With visions of Manifest Destiny in his head, Lansford Hastings, a young attorney from Mount Vernon, Ohio, set out for Oregon. It was 1842. He had met a Dr. Elijah White, who had come through Knox County with a group of emigrants on their way to Oregon. Hastings saw opportunity and became a member of their party.

White’s party was being led by Thomas Fitzpatrick, a frontiersman who had, in 1841, led the Bidwell party on an unsuccessful attempt to bring a wagon train into the Mexican territory of California. Circumstances eventually put Hastings in charge.

He was an ambitious young man whose ambitions expanded after going West. His focus soon turned from Oregon to Alta California – that same province of Mexico that other White men saw as a land of opportunity. In 1843 he led a small party to Sutter’s Fort in the Sacramento Valley of California. It had been founded by John Sutter, a Swiss immigrant who had gotten a land grant from the Mexican government. Sutter and Hastings became friends.

Both men believed that a British or French takeover of California was a distinct possibility, and preferred to see California in American hands. What they envisioned was Americans heading West to populate California, rid it of Mexican rule, and create an independent republic.

With this in mind, Hastings wrote The Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California, for the purpose of persuading Americans to uproot and head to California.

In the book Hastings mentioned a possible shortcut along the California Trail. The search for shortcuts, or “cutoffs,” was well-established; Hastings wasn’t the only guide who was proposing one.

The exact route to California depended on a number of factors: starting point, final destination, the time of year one traveled, the state of relations with Indian tribes, and, most importantly, water and grass availability. Travelers and their animals needed water and grass, which is why emigrants sought to travel along river valleys.

The trip typically began in April or May, when grass was growing and trails were dry enough to support wagons. It was set to be completed before the first snow out West.

The overland route to California began – as the Oregon Trail did – in towns along the Missouri River. It would diverge from the Oregon Trail in either Idaho, Wyoming, or Utah to take trails leading to the Humboldt River valley of northern Nevada. The Humboldt River provided a pathway across the Great Basin desert as it headed West.

The river would disappear into what is called the Humboldt Sink – an alkali-laden lake. One of the worst sections of the California Trail would then appear: the so-called Forty Mile Desert. Travelers would be crossing an area with no usable water.

It was at this point that travelers had to figure out how to get beyond the desert and over the Sierra Nevada mountains. The Trail split into two major branches here: the Truckee Trail and the Carson Trail. The Truckee and Carson Rivers drained the Sierra Nevada, flowing eastward. So travelers followed the rivers westward to get across the mountains.

In 1844, members of the Stephens party, some of whom were experienced mountain men, met with a Paiute Indian chief who gave them directions over the mountains. As the story goes, he told them to follow the Truckee River to a pass over the Sierra Nevada. It was the Stephens party that completed the opening of the first overland wagon route to California.

Lansford Hastings had eagerly anticipated the arrival of emigrants to California, and he himself led small parties of emigrants. In April of 1846 he left California and headed east to meet the year’s emigration, sending a message to them by way of an eastbound traveler: if they met him at Fort Bridger (in Wyoming), he would lead them on a new, faster route to California.

Sixty to seventy-five wagons traveled with him on this cutoff and made it safely to California. The Donner party, led by brothers George and Jacob Donner and James Reed, were on the trail after this successful trek.

The Hastings Cutoff, which the Donners had also chosen to take, involved difficulties such as a dangerous descent down Weber Canyon (in Utah), a drive across the Great Salt Lake Desert, and a long detour around the Ruby Mountains of Nevada.

The Donner party – consisting of families with their wagons and draft animals – made it to the mouth of Weber Canyon, which sits in the Wasatch Mountain range. Hastings left them a message that the road ahead was impassable, telling them to send someone ahead for new instructions. James Reed and two others set out.

What they had to do was build a road through the Wasatch Mountains. Creating this path set the Donners back a week. In late August they were able to set out across the Great Salt Lake Desert. Their water ran out, and some of their animals took off, so they spent another week at the base of Pilot Mountain trying to recover animals and prepare for the next leg of their trip. They finally got around the Ruby Mountains and arrived at the Humboldt River – and the regular trail.

The delays had cost them about three weeks.

The Donner party was the last emigrant group of 1846 to get to California. They made it to just east of the Sierra Nevada when an early snowfall began. They were stranded in the eastern Sierras.

The details of what the Donner party faced make for some of the most harrowing stuff I’ve ever read. What those families went through can only be described as a living Hell. The Donner party were men with their wives and children. A number of the children were quite young. Among them were infants.

Roughly half of them didn’t make it. Most of the dead were men.

It was in April of the following year that a rescue party – one of several – brought out the last member of the Donner party, a man named Louis Keseberg.

Some people who chronicle these events lay much of the blame for what happened to the Donners right at the feet of Lansford Hastings. They say he promoted that alternate route through the Wasatch Mountains without having traveled it himself.

It is also suggested that he may have actually taken the route but that he had been on horseback with other men – a far different scenario from being in a caravan of oxen-drawn wagons.

The same year the last member of the Donners was brought into California marked the end of hostilities in California involving the Mexican-American War. The war was concluded there by informal agreement, the Treaty of Cahuenga. The Californios (Californians of Mexican descent) agreed to lay down arms for the duration of the war and conform to the laws of the United States. In six months, U.S. naval forces had seized and “pacified” the entire area of what is today California.

Lansford Hastings had dreamed of holding high office in an independent Republic of California, but his aspirations were to go nowhere. The “Capitulation of Cahuenga” saw to that. The following year, Mexico formally gave up Alta California, among other territories, in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

Hastings wasn’t quite done with California, though. Pro-South during the Civil War, he favored a plan to separate California from the Union and unite it with the Confederacy. His plan came to nothing.

Some Commenters Just Don’t Get It

Some commenters are saying that the rightwing is not being racist or using racial rhetoric against Obama, or that anyway, even if they are, the Left does it anyway.

One commenter noted that I have used the phrase “feral Blacks” before, and that’s racist.

Well, I used that phrase to refer to a certain type of thuggish ghetto-type Blacks. Blacks themselves make similar comments all the time. If I implied that all Blacks, or Blacks in general, were feral, well, that would be racist.

But what the rightwingers are doing is saying the equivalent of “feral Blacks” and then tying that in with Obama and his supporters, implying that Obama and his supporters are some sort of gangsta thugs. It’s a lie, and that’s racism.

The difference is that they are using this racially charged language to attack Obama! Why? Because he’s Black? See? And that’s racist.

They aren’t just criticizing Blacks. That’s one thing. They are attacking Obama by playing into White racism, and that’s messed up. And yeah, that’s racist. See, when Clinton was in, we didn’t see all this racially charged language on the Right. Now that Obama is in, we see it, though Obama is just like Clinton really. Well, that’s the definition of racism.

Let’s look at the language bit by bit:

Rush Limbaugh: “We need segregated buses… In Obama’s America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, right on, right on, right on….”

Wow! Rush needs to start writing for American Renaissance! Segregated buses? Yeah, that’s racism all right.

Fox News’ Glenn Beck went a step further to declare that President Obama “has a deep seated hatred for white people, or the white culture…”

Obama does not hate Whites or White culture. There are Blacks who do, but this law professor – millionaire is not one of them. This is straight out of American Renaissance. The White nationalists are always screaming, “The Blacks are racists who hate us all!” Funny coming from them, since they are racists. Are they opposed to racism, or only when Black people do it? Obama hates White culture. He does? Like Hell he does. That’s racism.

Bill O’Reilly told his viewers that “the left sees white men as a problem” and sees putting women and minorities in power as the solution.

This is a lie when talking about Obama. The Left wingers who talk like that are PC Leftists. Obama is just a liberal Democrat. Liberal Democrats don’t go around talking like Sociology profs who say Whites are the enemy. O’Reilly is saying that Obama is Tim Wise. He’s not. And that’s racism.

Rightwing blogs still abound with charges that a campaign reference to his own grandmother as a “typical white person” reflected anti-white racism on Obama’s part.

It wasn’t racism. I say the same thing about White people all the time. Once again, Obama is not an anti-White racist. He’s more an Oreo who spent his whole life sucking up to the White man.

Accusing Obama himself of being a racist who is deliberately advancing policies that are meant to help people of color at the expense of white people, and foreigners at the expense of Americans is their biggest line of them all.

But it’s not true. There are Black racists, but Obama is not one of them. That’s racism.

Thus, when Jimmy Carter spoke the obvious truth that some of the hostility directed at the Obama presidency is a reflection of racism, the Right went nuts and demanded that Obama disavow these comments.

Denial of racism is one of the techniques that racists use to legitimate their racist bullshit. Denial one’s racism is racism.

Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” remarks were taken out of context to imply that she was some kind of ethnic supremacist, and Tancredo and Limbaugh called her a racist.

Sure, there are Hispanic racists, but she is not one of them. Calling Sotomayer an Hispanic racist is racism.

Ed Whelan, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, slammed another potential Obama judicial nominee, Deval Patrick, the African American governor of Massachusetts, as “a racialist extremist and judicial supremacist.”

Deval Patrick is some kind of dashiki-wearing Black nationalist? Give it up, man.

Glenn Beck, for example, has insisted that every single policy initiative that the Obama administration is trying to advance in Congress is grounded in the president’s supposed obsession with getting white Americans to pay reparations for slavery, or as Beck put it, “settling old racial scores.”

This is not true. Obama is opposed to reparations. Accusing Obama of pushing reparations is racism. Really, the whole reparations debate is shot through and through with White racism. There’s a non-racist way to oppose reparations, but they ain’t doing it.

When economist Robert Reich testified that stimulus funds should benefit not only white construction workers but also other groups of workers, some right-wing pundits like Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin wrongly suggested that the Obama administration was plotting to keep stimulus funds away from white construction workers altogether and have them sent instead to “[Rep. Charlie] Rangel’s pet constituents.”

See, that’s racism. They aren’t going to take money away from White construction workers and give it to inner city Black welfare layabouts. The implication was that all ethnic groups of workers should benefit from stimulus funds. Saying that Obama wants to fire White construction workers and take their paychecks and give them to Black ghetto leeches is racism.

At the recent How to Take Back America conference session on voter fraud and ACORN, Republican activist Kris Kobach, who is running to be Secretary of State in Kansas, asserted that in America nowadays no one is disenfranchised because of the color of their skin; it is now voters like those in the room who are disenfranchised when their votes are canceled out by the supposed voter fraud carried out by ACORN and its allies.

Yeah right! “Voter fraud” perpetrated by ACORN (ACORN Blacks that is) is disenfranchising Whites! First of all, there is no ACORN “voter fraud.” Many people have taken this apart long ago. ACORN paid people, often inner city Blacks, to register new voters. A lot of the registerers were not exactly model citizens. So they made up fake registrations to pad their numbers and collect more money from ACORN.

None of these Mickey Mouses or Donald Ducks are going to be registered to vote, and John Wayne is not going to show up at the voting booth on voting day. All these fake regs are going to be disqualified; none will result in fake new voters. What happened here was ACORN themselves were being ripped off by their own workers.

Saying that ACORN is engaging in voter fraud by falsely registering fake Blacks, or worse! To disenfranchise Whites the same way that Blacks were disenfranchised by poll taxes and whatnot, that’s racism. Straight up, 100 proof.

On right-wing pundit Michele Malkin’s blog, a commenter responding to her Obama is ACORN. ACORN is Obama diatribe, wrote, “Now as President B. Hussein Obama he has credibility as a Marxist, black nationalist and Chicago street hustler/organizer but little else. He could no more disown ACORN then he could Jeremiah Wright or his Typical White Grandmother.”

See, Obama is not a Black nationalist, he is not a Chicago “street hustler” – racist language falsely applied to Obama. Implying that Obama is, among other things, a sleazy Black “street hustler” (What’s that? A pimp?) from the gritty streets of Chicago when he’s not, well, that’s racism.

Investors Business Daily and Fox Nation teamed up to portray health care reform as “affirmative action on steroids” and to suggest that reform is actually a back-door way to implement reparations for slavery:

The racial grievance industry under health care reform could be calling the shots in the emergency room, the operating room, the medical room, even medical school. As Terence Jeffrey, editor at large of Human Events puts it, not only our wealth, but also our health will be redistributed.

See what they are doing? Health care reform is affirmative action in health care. Sick White workers will be tossed out of emergency rooms to make way for worthless inner city Black leeches. Saying that Obama will throw dying Whites out of emergency rooms to die to make way for worthless ghetto Blacks is racism.

At the recent How to Take Back America conference organized by far-right doyenne Phyllis Schlafly and her heir-apparent, right-wing radio host and activist Janet Folger Porter, a panelist attacked health care reform saying it would amount to a reenactment of slavery by our first black president, this time with doctors being enslaved.

But Obama is not re-enacting slavery, this time being a Black slavemaster who is enslaving White workers to supply his welfare Black plantation owners. Equating Obamacare with slavery, except this time it’s Black bums enslaving White workers. That’s racism.

Bishop Harry Jackson, the Religious Right’s favorite African American minister, has denounced health care reform proposals that he claims would divert health care resources from wealthier to poorer Americans as “reverse classism.”

See, this Black guy is playing into anti-Black racism here. He used the phrase “reverse classism” which is a play on reverse racism. Since Whites are wealthier and Blacks are poorer, health care reform is reverse racism, taking money from wealthier White workers and giving it to worthless poorer Black bums. That’s racist language.

Before the election, Bishop Harry Jackson and others suggested that voting for Obama would be voting against God.

Why is it voting against God? Because Black people are evil, the spawn of Satan, devil children. That’s the language of racism, straight out of White Nationalism. Whites have been calling Blacks satanic and evil forever.

But because America did elect Obama, the nation is now living under a curse, declares Janet Porter, and America must repent. Religious Right leaders insist that Obama’s election has put the nation under a “curse” and ask Black Christians to repent for putting “race over God.”

It’s under a curse like a voodoo curse, implying that Obama practices voodoo, a Black religion. He doesn’t. He’s a Christian. That’s racism.

The “birther” movement – the ongoing theory and ludicrous legal campaign alleging that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and therefore not a legitimate president – is all about portraying the president as an African usurper, not one of us.

See? That’s racist. Blacks are not one of us, they are not White people. Black people came from Africa, a foreign continent, you know, like Obama, from Africa. They are not Americans, they are Bantus. This line is straight out of American Renaissance.

Still another theme is the return of “states’ rights” on steroids, such as Texas Gov. Rick Perry earlier this year suggesting that Texas should consider seceding.

But the states rights thing was all about White racism and opposition to integration. For this guy to bring up states rights and secession in the context of a Black President, well, that racism, straight out of 1861.

On MSNBC, commentator Pat Buchanan suggested recently that white Americans are now suffering “exactly what was done to black folks.”

Yeah, right! Blacks are enslaving us, and putting us under some “liberal Jim Crow” regime. Come on! That’s racism.

Republican strategist and commentator Pat Buchanan has complained that presidential candidate John McCain didn’t “drape Jeremiah Wright around the neck of Barack Obama, as Lee Atwater draped Willie Horton around the neck of Michael Dukakis.”

Yeah but see, that Willie Horton thing was a blatantly racist tactic that Bush used to win the election.

“They’ve Come Undone,” by Alpha Unit

A lot of right-wing Americans are boiling over with fear and loathing over this “health care” bill that just got signed into law. I hear they’re smashing windows, making death threats against legislators and their kids, urging one another to lock and load (Why aren’t some of these people serving in Iraq and Afghanistan?). Listening to them, you’d think this is the first time in American history that “government” ever became synonymous with “tyranny.” It’s going to start making people do things against their will and everything.

They can’t be serious, can they?

Is this new law what it took to slap some sense into them? It seems they’ve never heard of government imposing itself on “the people” before. Or forcing you to do something – or buy something – against your will. That’s what governments do best, right wingers – force people to do stuff. You of all people should know that. Some of you have been telling us for years that government is force. And you are right. The only difference is what things you’re being forced to do by which governments.”

“Well, the government’s gonna force me to buy health insurance!” you protest. Is this the first time the government ever made you buy anything? The government makes people buy all kinds of things – infant car seats, low-flow toilets, car insurance, you name it. I don’t like it, either. But you didn’t notice until now that the government can order you to buy something? For your own good? (It’s always for your own good.)

The government insists on being notified if you want to add on to your house, for goodness’ sake. Your very own house that you own free and clear, that you ought to be able to do whatever you want with. You’ve got to notify them and you’ve got to make sure they approve of what you’re going to do and how you’re going to do it. Thinking of taking in a renter? There are laws about that. There are laws about how to get rid of him, too.

Were you consulted before you were forced to recycle? My local government makes me do it – which isn’t the worst thing it makes people do, okay – but it won’t do anything about the people who go through my bins confiscating whatever they want, making all kinds of racket and leaving stuff lying around for me (that is, for my husband) to pick up.

In fact, the government is very good at keeping honest, law-abiding types on a leash. It can’t do a damned thing with the others. Lawless types don’t care if the government says they can’t do something, but you’ve noticed that. And government doesn’t care. People who submit will always outnumber those who won’t. Right wingers submit as much as anyone else.

The government can order you to serve on a jury. It tells you that you must pay a minimum wage. It can order you to join the military. It would take forever to enumerate all the things the government makes you do, or forbids you to do. These people who are all up in arms about “government tyranny” are like someone who has been kidnapped and almost completely tied up – but suddenly complaining that his captor wants to handcuff him.

I don’t care what kind of government you live under. The question is, are you on a short leash or a long one? Is there a choke chain? Is your collar standard issue, or is it jewel-encrusted and really pretty?

"They've Come Undone," by Alpha Unit

A lot of right-wing Americans are boiling over with fear and loathing over this “health care” bill that just got signed into law. I hear they’re smashing windows, making death threats against legislators and their kids, urging one another to lock and load (Why aren’t some of these people serving in Iraq and Afghanistan?). Listening to them, you’d think this is the first time in American history that “government” ever became synonymous with “tyranny.” It’s going to start making people do things against their will and everything. They can’t be serious, can they? Is this new law what it took to slap some sense into them? It seems they’ve never heard of government imposing itself on “the people” before. Or forcing you to do something – or buy something – against your will. That’s what governments do best, right wingers – force people to do stuff. You of all people should know that. Some of you have been telling us for years that government is force. And you are right. The only difference is what things you’re being forced to do by which governments.” “Well, the government’s gonna force me to buy health insurance!” you protest. Is this the first time the government ever made you buy anything? The government makes people buy all kinds of things – infant car seats, low-flow toilets, car insurance, you name it. I don’t like it, either. But you didn’t notice until now that the government can order you to buy something? For your own good? (It’s always for your own good.) The government insists on being notified if you want to add on to your house, for goodness’ sake. Your very own house that you own free and clear, that you ought to be able to do whatever you want with. You’ve got to notify them and you’ve got to make sure they approve of what you’re going to do and how you’re going to do it. Thinking of taking in a renter? There are laws about that. There are laws about how to get rid of him, too. Were you consulted before you were forced to recycle? My local government makes me do it – which isn’t the worst thing it makes people do, okay – but it won’t do anything about the people who go through my bins confiscating whatever they want, making all kinds of racket and leaving stuff lying around for me (that is, for my husband) to pick up. In fact, the government is very good at keeping honest, law-abiding types on a leash. It can’t do a damned thing with the others. Lawless types don’t care if the government says they can’t do something, but you’ve noticed that. And government doesn’t care. People who submit will always outnumber those who won’t. Right wingers submit as much as anyone else. The government can order you to serve on a jury. It tells you that you must pay a minimum wage. It can order you to join the military. It would take forever to enumerate all the things the government makes you do, or forbids you to do. These people who are all up in arms about “government tyranny” are like someone who has been kidnapped and almost completely tied up – but suddenly complaining that his captor wants to handcuff him. I don’t care what kind of government you live under. The question is, are you on a short leash or a long one? Is there a choke chain? Is your collar standard issue, or is it jewel-encrusted and really pretty?

The “California Can’t Afford It” Bullshit

I would call this the “California is broke” bullshit, but really, only the state government is broke.

Is the state broke? Are you kidding?

Let’s look at the stats. California had a PCI of 39,626 in 2006. That is the most recent year that statistics were available. Using the year to year growth from 2000-2006 as a guideline, we can extrapolate from 2006 to 2009, and get a California PCI of $43,364. California was the 9th wealthiest state in the nation in 2006.

That means that if California was a nation, it would be the Robert LindsayPosted on Categories California, Social Problems, US37 Comments on The “California Can’t Afford It” Bullshit

The California Budget Disaster

Good article here.

The article tells you pretty much all you need to know about what is going on.

The insane 2/3 supermajority to raise taxes by put in by the disastrous Proposition 13 passed by Californians in 1978. I lived in California both before and after Prop 13, and the contrast is stark. The entire public sector of the state, especially the schools, has been nuked by Prop 13. The Whites voted for it and then their own communities got fucked, but hey, anything for lower taxes, right? Idiots.

This was really the start of the racialization of the state’s politics, with Whites constantly holding out against taxation that they see as disproportionately going to lazy and criminal Blacks and Hispanics. No one ever comes right out and says it, but that’s the reality of California politics in a nutshell for the past 30 years.

If you move to just about any majority-White community in California, you will find that it is majority Republican, with hard right Assemblymen, state senators and Congressional Representatives. It’s as true in wealthy Orange County as it is in the poor desert, Central Valley, Sierras or North Coast. So in this most progressive of US states, a frankly White racist politics holds sway and dominates state politics.

There is a good portrayal, historical and present, of the Central Valley in the article. That’s the part of California that I live in – the San Joaquin Valley. Jeff Denham is the asshole state senator from my district. The area right around here is 6

Slashing government services and spending in a recession or depression is about the stupidest thing you can do, but that’s what we are doing here in California. The article details some of the cuts, lately to university and even K-12 education. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who poses as some progressive Republican, is actually hard Right on the all-important fiscal questions.

The California Republican Party, instead of getting more progressive to evolve and attract new members, is now dominated by its most reactionary members. It’s now a permanent minority party, but it’s the party of White California. No one ever has the balls to say that, so I will right now.

This article astutely notes that it is the rightwing Whites in my region who are creating this monumental clusterfuck in the state.

There is an increasing movement afoot to amend Proposition 13 or at least get rid of the lunatic 2/3 majority, via a ballot proposition. It will no doubt be an uphill climb.

The Charleston Five

Here.

It’s hard to believe that this happened in the US in the year 2000, but this is the sort of thing that goes on in the rightwing capitalist “democracies” of the 3rd World that so many of you commenters love so much. Unions are attacked by police. The police are used as agents of the state to attack workers and their organizations and any and all other progressive organizations. In other words, the cops are used as an army of the ruling class and the capitalists to attack anyone who opposes their interests.

What’s interesting is that this is what happens just about everywhere you have capitalism, although in the more evolved varieties as in Europe and much of the Anglosphere, it doesn’t happen that much anymore. As such, it seems to be a feature, not a bug, of the capitalist system. If capitalism is so great, then why is using cops (and in many cases, the national army itself) against popular organizations seemingly an essential part of this system? Commenters please respond.

A friend of mine spent a couple years in Alabama 20 years ago. The US South has a nearly caste-like class structure, and the one thing they hate more than anything else down there are union organizers. The whole system is based on cheap labor and always has been. My friend said that the White capitalist class are “assholes,” who behave similar to a Latin American ruling class, exploit all workers savagely and do not socialize with the White working class.

They have used racism as a tool for dividing White and Black workers (as capitalists often do), and it’s worked great. My friend said that the White and Black workers at his plant hated each other and had nothing to do with each other. They worked in separate parts of the plant.

There was a Black side of  town and a White side of town, and each group pretty much kept to their own side of town. The only Blacks on the White side of town were very well-dressed and on very good behavior. If any more scruffly Blacks showed up on the White side of town, Whites would quickly confront them and they would be gone back to their own side.

Similarly though, the Whites would not go to the Black side of town either. It was regarded as dangerous to go there if you were White. My friend went there to eat at a soul food joint, but they were the only Whites in the area.

The line pitched to the poor and downtrodden racist Whites of the South has always been, “At least you’re not a nigger.” These Whites, who as victims deserve sympathy more than anything else, have always found solace in the fact that as low as they were, “At least I ain’t a nigger.” That is, they could always look down on and feel superior to the Blacks who were even lower on the pole than they were.

And via racism, the White workers have always voted for the parties of White racism (formerly Democrats, now Republicans) instead of supporting parties that worked for their class interests. So White workers voted for the parties that were viciously exploiting them in the workplace.

This sort of crap used to happen a lot in the US a while back, with the last major outbreak in the 1930’s when cops were called out to violently break up strikes, opening fire on and killing some workers.

The etiology of the riot is hard to put together, but it looks a police army was set up outside the union hall to prevent the workers from picketing the scabs being used to break a dockworkers strike at the port of Charleston. The dockworkers union is targeted in South Carolina because it is one of the only powerful unions in the state. This particular union represented Black dockworkers.

The city jail had been emptied the night before to prepare for the riot that the cops knew was going to happen, since the cops were going to create that very riot. Workers walked up to the police line and told police that they wanted to go picket the scabs at the dock. Each time they were driven back with batons. So you see the police army was preventing the workers from having their peaceful labor picket.

After this went on for a while, workers started fighting back, grabbing police batons. There was yelling and screaming and racist cries from the cops, “We’re going to beat the Hell out of these niggers!”

Workers picked up rocks and started throwing them at cops. Union leaders went to the line to separate the two groups and got savagely clubbed. Workers went nuts, overturned light poles and hit photographers. Cops charged the group with a police armored car and a Highway Patrol car drove straight at the crowd. The crowd rushed up and smashed out the windows on the cop car.

In other words, a police riot.

The prosecutor later charged 5 workers to make an example out of them, break the union, and as a blow against union activity in the state. . The governor himself said that it was the state’s “right to work” (terribly anti-union law) law that was at stake.

Charges were eventually dropped

We think we are so progressive here in the US, then something like this happens and it seems like we are back in 1934.

Map of the Romance Speaking World

Here is a very nice map of the parts of the world that speak a Romance language, in whole or in part. The main languages covered here are Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and Romanian.

Nice map of the Romance languages of the world. Click to enlarge.

The heavy Spanish speaking zone is Spain, Rio Muni, New Mexico and Latin America except for Brazil, the Guyanas, Haiti and some Caribbean islands that speak French. To a lesser extent, it is spoken Spanish Sahara and Belize. To a much lesser extent, it is spoken in  parts of the US and in the Philippines where it is a dying colonial language.

The heavy Portuguese speaking zone is Brazil, Portugal, Angola, Mozambique, other parts of Africa and East Timor. In the latter countries, it is a lingua franca.

French is heavily spoken in France, Quebec, French Guyana, French Polynesia, Belgium and Switzerland, less heavily in much of Africa, especially Congo, the Republic of Congo, Cameroon, Gabon, Central African Republic, Chad, Niger, Mali, Togo, Cote d’Ivorie, Burkino Faso, Senegal, West Africa, Central Africa, Djibouti and Madagascar, less in the rest of Canada, and even less in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Mauritania, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria and Louisiana, where it is a dying colonial language overtaken by national languages in Southeast Asia, Arabic in Northwest Africa and English in Louisiana

Italian is spoken heavily in Italy and less so in Libya and Albania.

Romanian is spoken heavily in Romania, Moldova and Serbia.

“Common Ground,” by Alpha Unit

Some of the most subversive characters to exist in this country could be found in the Deep South, beginning in the late 1950s. They were regular people doing what regular people weren’t supposed to do somehow: Black people and White people working together and hanging out together and carving out an exception to the system of Jim Crow.

Florence, Alabama – located in the northwestern corner of Alabama – was the original locus of this activity.

These untoward doings were centered right above the City Drug Store in Florence. Tom Stafford, who was directing it, was the son of the drugstore pharmacist. He loved music and enjoyed hanging out with some of the local young musicians, when he wasn’t managing a movie theater in town.

Some of the aspiring musicians he knew were Dan Penn, Billy Sherrill, Rick Hall, and Spooner Oldham.

Rick Hall had been trying to get into the music business in Nashville. He began his career playing fiddle for a local Alabama country group, but he soon found success as a songwriter in Nashville; he wrote “Aching Breaking Heart,” which became a hit for George Jones.

Later he became a songwriting partner with Billy Sherrill, who had played blues as a teenager in Alabama. As a songwriting team they had some success with a song they wrote for Roy Orbison.

The two formed a band that played rock and rhythm-and-blues; they called themselves The Fairlanes. They liked this music called rhythm-and-blues and knew that White people enjoyed it as much as Black people did. It gave Rick Hall the impetus to say good-bye to Nashville. That, along with his dissatisfaction with songwriting royalties.

He and Sherrill left Nashville and started pitching songs to James Joiner, the owner of Tune Records and Publishing Company in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. They were going to stick with rhythm-and-blues.

Muscle Shoals had been a local gateway of sorts to Nashville; anyone who could make an impression there stood a better chance of impressing people elsewhere in the music industry. Rick Hall and Billy Sherrill were ready to stake it all on Muscle Shoals instead.

It was James Joiner who put them in touch with Tom Stafford.

The three men – Stafford, Hall, and Sherrill – shared enthusiasm for the music and became business partners. It was their new publishing company – the Florence Alabama Music Enterprises (FAME) – that was located over the drug store.

The partnership was short-lived, though. Rick Hall separated from Sherrill and Stafford and opened his own recording studio – keeping the old name – on Wilson Dam Road in Muscle Shoals. Not long afterward he recorded the first hit record from the area, a song called “You Better Move On” by a local Black singer named Arthur Alexander.

With money he made from that record, Hall was able to move his studios to a new building on Avalon Avenue in Muscle Shoals. The second hit he recorded was also by a Black singer, Jimmy Hughes. Other Black singers were soon coming to FAME Studios, singers like Etta James and Joe Tex. Rick Hall was getting attention from Blacks and Whites alike. As his wife Linda tells it:

They’d just come by and see what was going on because this was the early sixties and that wasn’t the thing to do, Black people working with White people. But Rick did it anyway, and enjoyed it, and has always been able to relate well with Black people. It’s always been a good marriage.

It doesn’t surprise me that Rick Hall could relate well to Black people. His beginnings hadn’t been that different from those of many Blacks in Alabama during the same time.

Born in 1932, he grew up dirt poor with a single father after his mother left the family. His father moved to Ohio to take a job in a defense plant, with the intention of making enough money to buy land in Alabama. After the war, Rick and his family returned to Alabama where his father became a sharecropper.

If you were poor and living in rural Alabama during the period leading up to the Depression, you didn’t have that many options for survival. Sharecropping and tenant farming were life, whether you were White or Black.

Sharecropping was the system whereby you worked on someone else’s land and paid them with a portion of the crop. Generally, if all you brought to this deal was your labor and you depended on the landowner for the rest, you would get a third. If you had your own draft animals, equipment, and supplies, you could get half.

Typically, though, you were impoverished and perennially in debt. You had substandard housing (to put it mildly), poor sanitation, a lousy diet, and susceptibility to the kinds of health problems created by the aforementioned conditions. You were also socially isolated.

People usually associate tenant farming with the postbellum period in the South, but it had existed in Alabama prior to the Civil War – and all of the farmers had been White. After the war, there was a serious disruption in the agricultural system, since most labor had been performed by slaves. Many of the former slaves left the farms and plantations and moved into cities. Fields went uncultivated and land values depreciated.

The people who owned the land knew something had to be done. They saw newly freed Blacks as the best source of labor, so they encouraged Blacks to return to the plantations for wages.

The deal they had in mind was for Blacks to live in the old slave quarters and work in gangs as they had during slavery. Well, it didn’t go over that well. Freed Blacks didn’t really care to return to the old slave quarters. And they weren’t too crazy about working in gangs, either. So much for all that fondness Black people had for slavery.

Another problem, perhaps the main one, was that landowners had little money to pay laborers.

A system of cooperation had to exist in order for agriculture to work. So landowners, freed Blacks, and poor Whites all coexisted in this system. The White landowners dominated both the poor Blacks and the poor Whites.

In time, White sharecroppers in Alabama outnumbered Black, except in the Alabama “Black Belt.”

Poverty is one hell of an equalizer.

These were some of the ties that bound Whites and Blacks in Alabama when guys like Rick Hall, Billy Sherrill, and Tom Stafford were growing up there. And music created a significant bond. That’s what music seems to do; it penetrates all kinds of barriers people put up between one another. When it touches you, you can’t be untouched. The music producer Sam Phillips, who grew up near Florence the son of a cotton farmer, called this area a “melting pot of musical influences”:

When I was growing up, we heard it all. In the fields we heard the Black man’s blues, in the churches we heard Black spirituals and White gospel, and on the radio we heard the Grand Ole Opry and those glorious songs from Tin Pan Alley. Out of that we created a sound that’s hard to define, hard to pigeonhole…

All of these influences were a part of the background from which the music of Muscle Shoals emerged.

What brought Muscle Shoals to national prominence was the song known as its musical anthem:”When A Man Loves a Woman,” recorded by Percy Sledge. It was a different producer, Quin Ivy, who recorded Percy Sledge, but he sent the song to Rick Hall, who loved it. Hall then contacted Jerry Wexler of Atlantic Records in New York; Atlantic recognized a hit and released it. It was the first song recorded in Muscle Shoals that became an international success.

Jerry Wexler liked the idea of recording in Muscle Shoals. As he told it:

Rigor mortis had set in up north. I had spent a decade recording with written arrangements. The arrangers were out of ideas, the musicians were out of licks and we were out of our minds. I was reinvigorated by this Southern method of recording. Once I had a taste of it, I loved it. It was like a religious retreat.

Of the session musicians in Muscle Shoals, he said:

These were country boys. They weren’t hicks by any means, but they were good old boys who loved country music but hated playing it. They had taken a turn toward a little more sophisticated type of music, which was rhythm-and-blues. They shared common experiences with the Black artists they played with – they all walked with the same mud between their toes.

Jerry Wexler brought other talent to record in Muscle Shoals. (He also brought his own engineer, Tom Dowd, a move that didn’t really appeal to Rick Hall.) An artist who had a similar background to Rick Hall’s – sharecropping, dysfunction, a certain rebelliousness – was Wilson Pickett, who had had success at Stax. He recorded some of his biggest hits at FAME Studios.

Wexler also brought Aretha Franklin. The song that established her in the music industry, “I Never Loved A Man (The Way That I Loved You),” came out of Muscle Shoals.

The truth is, by the time Rick Hall began recording Black artists at FAME Studios, the slow dismantling of segregation was already underway in the South. The Civil Rights movement coincided with some of his greatest success.

But music was common ground for Black Americans and White Americans in the South before civil rights was expected or fashionable. Some things just seem to be stronger than Race.

References

Fuqua, Christopher S. 2005. Music Fell on Alabama: The Muscle Shoals Sound That Shook the World. Montgomery, AL: NewSouth Books.

"Common Ground," by Alpha Unit

Some of the most subversive characters to exist in this country could be found in the Deep South, beginning in the late 1950s. They were regular people doing what regular people weren’t supposed to do somehow: Black people and White people working together and hanging out together and carving out an exception to the system of Jim Crow. Florence, Alabama – located in the northwestern corner of Alabama – was the original locus of this activity. These untoward doings were centered right above the City Drug Store in Florence. Tom Stafford, who was directing it, was the son of the drugstore pharmacist. He loved music and enjoyed hanging out with some of the local young musicians, when he wasn’t managing a movie theater in town. Some of the aspiring musicians he knew were Dan Penn, Billy Sherrill, Rick Hall, and Spooner Oldham. Rick Hall had been trying to get into the music business in Nashville. He began his career playing fiddle for a local Alabama country group, but he soon found success as a songwriter in Nashville; he wrote “Aching Breaking Heart,” which became a hit for George Jones. Later he became a songwriting partner with Billy Sherrill, who had played blues as a teenager in Alabama. As a songwriting team they had some success with a song they wrote for Roy Orbison. The two formed a band that played rock and rhythm-and-blues; they called themselves The Fairlanes. They liked this music called rhythm-and-blues and knew that White people enjoyed it as much as Black people did. It gave Rick Hall the impetus to say good-bye to Nashville. That, along with his dissatisfaction with songwriting royalties. He and Sherrill left Nashville and started pitching songs to James Joiner, the owner of Tune Records and Publishing Company in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. They were going to stick with rhythm-and-blues. Muscle Shoals had been a local gateway of sorts to Nashville; anyone who could make an impression there stood a better chance of impressing people elsewhere in the music industry. Rick Hall and Billy Sherrill were ready to stake it all on Muscle Shoals instead. It was James Joiner who put them in touch with Tom Stafford. The three men – Stafford, Hall, and Sherrill – shared enthusiasm for the music and became business partners. It was their new publishing company – the Florence Alabama Music Enterprises (FAME) – that was located over the drug store. The partnership was short-lived, though. Rick Hall separated from Sherrill and Stafford and opened his own recording studio – keeping the old name – on Wilson Dam Road in Muscle Shoals. Not long afterward he recorded the first hit record from the area, a song called “You Better Move On” by a local Black singer named Arthur Alexander. With money he made from that record, Hall was able to move his studios to a new building on Avalon Avenue in Muscle Shoals. The second hit he recorded was also by a Black singer, Jimmy Hughes. Other Black singers were soon coming to FAME Studios, singers like Etta James and Joe Tex. Rick Hall was getting attention from Blacks and Whites alike. As his wife Linda tells it:

They’d just come by and see what was going on because this was the early sixties and that wasn’t the thing to do, Black people working with White people. But Rick did it anyway, and enjoyed it, and has always been able to relate well with Black people. It’s always been a good marriage.

It doesn’t surprise me that Rick Hall could relate well to Black people. His beginnings hadn’t been that different from those of many Blacks in Alabama during the same time. Born in 1932, he grew up dirt poor with a single father after his mother left the family. His father moved to Ohio to take a job in a defense plant, with the intention of making enough money to buy land in Alabama. After the war, Rick and his family returned to Alabama where his father became a sharecropper. If you were poor and living in rural Alabama during the period leading up to the Depression, you didn’t have that many options for survival. Sharecropping and tenant farming were life, whether you were White or Black. Sharecropping was the system whereby you worked on someone else’s land and paid them with a portion of the crop. Generally, if all you brought to this deal was your labor and you depended on the landowner for the rest, you would get a third. If you had your own draft animals, equipment, and supplies, you could get half. Typically, though, you were impoverished and perennially in debt. You had substandard housing (to put it mildly), poor sanitation, a lousy diet, and susceptibility to the kinds of health problems created by the aforementioned conditions. You were also socially isolated. People usually associate tenant farming with the postbellum period in the South, but it had existed in Alabama prior to the Civil War – and all of the farmers had been White. After the war, there was a serious disruption in the agricultural system, since most labor had been performed by slaves. Many of the former slaves left the farms and plantations and moved into cities. Fields went uncultivated and land values depreciated. The people who owned the land knew something had to be done. They saw newly freed Blacks as the best source of labor, so they encouraged Blacks to return to the plantations for wages. The deal they had in mind was for Blacks to live in the old slave quarters and work in gangs as they had during slavery. Well, it didn’t go over that well. Freed Blacks didn’t really care to return to the old slave quarters. And they weren’t too crazy about working in gangs, either. So much for all that fondness Black people had for slavery. Another problem, perhaps the main one, was that landowners had little money to pay laborers. A system of cooperation had to exist in order for agriculture to work. So landowners, freed Blacks, and poor Whites all coexisted in this system. The White landowners dominated both the poor Blacks and the poor Whites. In time, White sharecroppers in Alabama outnumbered Black, except in the Alabama “Black Belt.” Poverty is one hell of an equalizer. These were some of the ties that bound Whites and Blacks in Alabama when guys like Rick Hall, Billy Sherrill, and Tom Stafford were growing up there. And music created a significant bond. That’s what music seems to do; it penetrates all kinds of barriers people put up between one another. When it touches you, you can’t be untouched. The music producer Sam Phillips, who grew up near Florence the son of a cotton farmer, called this area a “melting pot of musical influences”:

When I was growing up, we heard it all. In the fields we heard the Black man’s blues, in the churches we heard Black spirituals and White gospel, and on the radio we heard the Grand Ole Opry and those glorious songs from Tin Pan Alley. Out of that we created a sound that’s hard to define, hard to pigeonhole…

All of these influences were a part of the background from which the music of Muscle Shoals emerged. What brought Muscle Shoals to national prominence was the song known as its musical anthem:”When A Man Loves a Woman,” recorded by Percy Sledge. It was a different producer, Quin Ivy, who recorded Percy Sledge, but he sent the song to Rick Hall, who loved it. Hall then contacted Jerry Wexler of Atlantic Records in New York; Atlantic recognized a hit and released it. It was the first song recorded in Muscle Shoals that became an international success. Jerry Wexler liked the idea of recording in Muscle Shoals. As he told it:

Rigor mortis had set in up north. I had spent a decade recording with written arrangements. The arrangers were out of ideas, the musicians were out of licks and we were out of our minds. I was reinvigorated by this Southern method of recording. Once I had a taste of it, I loved it. It was like a religious retreat.

Of the session musicians in Muscle Shoals, he said:

These were country boys. They weren’t hicks by any means, but they were good old boys who loved country music but hated playing it. They had taken a turn toward a little more sophisticated type of music, which was rhythm-and-blues. They shared common experiences with the Black artists they played with – they all walked with the same mud between their toes.

Jerry Wexler brought other talent to record in Muscle Shoals. (He also brought his own engineer, Tom Dowd, a move that didn’t really appeal to Rick Hall.) An artist who had a similar background to Rick Hall’s – sharecropping, dysfunction, a certain rebelliousness – was Wilson Pickett, who had had success at Stax. He recorded some of his biggest hits at FAME Studios. Wexler also brought Aretha Franklin. The song that established her in the music industry, “I Never Loved A Man (The Way That I Loved You),” came out of Muscle Shoals. The truth is, by the time Rick Hall began recording Black artists at FAME Studios, the slow dismantling of segregation was already underway in the South. The Civil Rights movement coincided with some of his greatest success. But music was common ground for Black Americans and White Americans in the South before civil rights was expected or fashionable. Some things just seem to be stronger than Race.

References

Fuqua, Christopher S. 2005. Music Fell on Alabama: The Muscle Shoals Sound That Shook the World. Montgomery, AL: NewSouth Books.

Homicidal Music

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Numk9kXDV1o]

Really, is there anything better than homicidal music? I don’t mean better than anything. Of course homicide itself is way more fun than just listening to songs about it, but unfortunately, most of us lead sheltered lives and can’t let our darkest fantasies run wild.

This is a great song, “If I Had a Gun” by a great new singer. Her name is Diana Jones, and she’s 45 years old. She has an interesting history. She was adopted and never knew her real parents. Moved around the Northeast a lot as a kid, ran away from home at 15 and lived on the streets for a while, then to dead-end jobs, and finally she got accepted at a major university.

She got a degree, then went into an MFA program at another university. Later she wandered around Europe, the whole time painting and playing folk songs trying to sound like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez.

Around 10 years ago, she decided to look up her birth parents. It was hard to do, but she finally found them in Tennessee. She went to visit them, and there they were, people who looked just like her, mountain people. Her grandfather took her to Great Smoky Mountains National Park where they have a redone old village.

There they bought an Alan Lomax album. Alan Lomax was an interesting guy. He was a professor at a university, a musicologist who wandered around recording “forgotten music,” especially folk music.

They were listening to the songs, called mountain music, on the way home, and to her surprise, her grandfather knew them all. Turns out he had been a mountain music musician. That got her interested in the genre, and she has been recording mountain music ever since. The phrase mountain music is hardly known, but this type of music is better known as “old-time music.”

This is is the original American folk music.

It goes back to the early 1800’s and possibly even prior. Its roots were generally in English, Scottish and Irish folk music, and you can hear some of that in this song. The banjo is an essential instrument in this genre, and it has an interesting history in the US.

Most of us think that the Black contribution to US music began at the latest in the early 1900’s with Ragtime. Not the case. The banjo in the US was originally a Black instrument, modeled after some sort of an instrument used in Africa.

In Appalachia, Black musicians introduced the banjo in the early 1800’s. There are not many Blacks in Appalachia now, but there were more back then. There were few if any slaves there, even though most of the Appalachian states were slave states. In the Appalachian parts of these states, there was no use for Black slaves.

Many Black slave runaways probably ended up there after taking off from plantations in Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee. Once you got into the mountains, probably nobody was going to find you anyway, and the mountain folk didn’t care about runaway slaves. These areas were very isolated. Many people never left their small Appalachian town in their lives, and most outsiders never went there.

Old-time music was biggest in Appalachia, but it was also present elsewhere, such as in New England, the Midwest, the South and the West. Since these other areas were less isolated, old-time music tended to go out as people were exposed to newer styles, but the remoteness of Appalachia allowed the music to continue on into the 20th Century relatively unchanged.

Old-time music is folk music, but it is not country or bluegrass music. But! Both country music and bluegrass music came out of old-time music. What’s fascinating is that we never think of all the all-White, redneck country and bluegrass music as being even remotely Black-influenced, but if they both came out of Black-influenced old-time music, there is even Black influence in the Whitest of American music.

I’m not too wild about folk proper, and a lot of bluegrass leaves me cold, but this song is killer! I’ve never heard a woman write a song about murdering her abusive husband before – what a great topic!

Her guitar? A 1967 Gibson. What else?

Further, it’s an excellent rejoinder to “Hey Joe,” the great song by Jimi Hendrix.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mBjG9chIFw]

Another great homicidal song is “Violence” by Mott the Hoople. Mott was only one of the greatest rock bands of all time, but almost no one has heard of them these days. They were a pretty big underground band in the 1970’s, and their albums Mott and The Hoople were pretty big hits, but then they broke up. Ian Hunter later went solo.

Viiiii-o-lence, viiiii-o-lence, it’s the only thing that’ll make you see sense!

Well, of course. Once you’ve experienced violence up close and personal, you will respect if for the rest of your life. That’s how it makes you see sense.

I’m a missing link, poolroom stink, I can’t talk (Well that’s too bad) What’s going on, something’s wrong, I can’t work Can’t go to school, the teacher’s a fool, the preacher’s a jerk (Well that’s such a drag) Got nothing to do, street-corner blues, and nowhere to walk Violence, violence It’s the only thing that’ll make you see sense Gotta fight, nothing’s right, livin’ nowhere (That’s so sad) Watch out for the gun, snake on the run, hide in my hair You keep your mouth shut, or you’ll get cut. Haha – I like to scare (Bet you’re so mad) I’m a battery louse, a superstar mouse, I don’t care Get off my back or I’ll attack, ‘n I don’t owe you nothin’ (OK) Head for your hole, you’re sick and you’re old ‘N I’m here to tell you something Violence, violence It’s the only thing that’ll make you see sense

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2LbujFtaUQ]

From the punk era, there was “Homicide” by 999. Great song!

I believe…in homicide!

Resign to it…

Yo!

Sorry for this morbid post, but I was in a killer mood tonite and I could not resist.

The Pig Farm Murders

Warning: Adverse reactions – vomiting – have occurred from watching the video and even from reading this post. Please read or watch with caution.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnBU7FXUgSg]

I’m not sure I had ever heard of this case before, but it’s really bizarre! Robert Pickton and his equally bizarre brother owned a pig farm in British Colombia. They had a building built next to it for “charity events” hosted by the “Piggy Palace Good Times Society.” These events were actually wild booze-fueled bacchanals with up to 1,800 partiers and “entertainment” by plenty of prostitutes from Vancouver’s raunchy and drug-ridden Downtown Eastside district.

The Downtown Eastside has one of the West’s most concentrated populations of drug addicts, mostly using crack and heroin, but increasingly also meth. Most of the female addicts there support their habits by prostituting themselves. There are an estimated 5-10,000 drug addicts living there at any given time. Despite a vigorous needle exchange program that hands out 2-4 million of free needles a year, the population has one of the West’s highest HIV rates: 1/3 of the population and 8

Around 1983, three years before the Olympics, prostitutes started disappearing from the area. They continued to disappear until Pickton’s arrest in 2002. In 2007, Pickton was tried and convicted of six homicides, all Downtown Eastside prostitutes. He was charged with 21 more homicides of more Downtown Eastside prostitutes, but he may never be tried for those deaths.

He is also implicated in another five homicides of young British Colombian women. He claims 49 murders. He really wanted to hit 50, but he says he got careless and got caught. He really regrets not hitting the big 5-0.

Some of the testimony coming out of the case is outrageous:

The star witness in the trial of accused Canadian serial killer Robert Pickton testified on Monday that she walked into the barn at his suburban pig farm to find him covered in blood and a woman’s body hanging from a chain.

“There was blood everywhere,” Lynn Ellingsen told the court.

“He told me if I was to say anything, I would be right beside her.”

Good Lord! Ellingsen, a prostitute and crack addict, lived on Pickton’s property for a month. Earlier on the same night when she saw the horrible sight, she and Pickton had gone to Eastside Downtown to pick up crack and a prostitute. They went back to Pickton’s place and smoked crack.

Ellingsen had fallen asleep when she heard a noise. She went into the barn and saw Pickton, covered in blood, with a woman hanging from the same chains he used to hang up his pigs when he slaughtered them. The woman on the chain was the prostitute they had picked up earlier than night. Pickton was skinning the woman when she walked in.

The arrest was not his first brush with the law. Five years earlier, in 1997, a young woman had barely escaped with her life. A drug-addicted prostitute named Wendy Eistetter was handcuffed and stabbed by Pickton. In a wild melee, she somehow got out of her cuffs, disarmed him and stabbed him before escaping. A motorist found her by the side of the road at 1:30 AM, wearing only a coat, with multiple stab wounds and took her to the hospital. Charges were mysteriously dropped.

While the investigation into the charges was going on, an acquaintance came forward and fingered Pickton as a suspect. His description of Pickton was riveting. Pickton spent most of his time downtown picking up whores. His farm was a bizarre and creepy place, patrolled by vicious dogs who roamed the property with a 700 pound boar. The dogs and the boar would all attack you if you came onto the property. Good God. Then there was Pickton’s trailer. What were all those women’s pursues and ID cards doing in there anyway?

Pickton’s brother, David, was also a strange guy. In 1992, he was arrested on sexual assault charges. He had attacked a woman in his trailer at the pig farm, but she managed to escape. He was given a slap on the wrist. He looks menacing in his photo.

Police found all sorts of horrible things in their investigation. Women’s heads were found in the freezer, sawed in half vertically. Female hands and feet had been stuffed inside the severed heads. The body parts were sharing freezer space with unsold pork.

Female remains were found in a wood chipper. Women had apparently been chopped in the machine and the meat was fed to the pigs on the farm! In 2004, it was revealed that some of the women were ground up and their flesh was mixed with pig meat from the farm. Thankfully, it was not distributed commercially.

A .22 pistol with a dildo on the end was found, apparently a murder a weapon. The dildo was used as a makeshift silencer. Blood-stained clothing was found in the trailer where Pickton lived. A woman’s remains were found in a trash bag at the bottom of a trash can on the property. A woman’s jawbone and teeth were found near the slaughterhouse on the property, where more than pigs were slaughtered. Another jawbone was found in the mud of one of the pigpens.

Night-vision goggles, Spanish fly, fur gloves, .357 ammo, and a syringe with blue windshield wiper fluid inside were also found. Pickton had injected some of the women with windshield washer fluid to kill them. Pickton had told a friend that women were stripped, handcuffed, gagged and taken to a bed where he had sex with them doggy-style. Afterward, he strangled them on bed using a looped wire. Then they were bled and gutted with the main body parts being fed to the pigs and the rest mixed up with pork offal and taken to a rendering plant to be disposed of.

Prostitutes and other guests were invited to the farm. There Pickton cooked for his guests, offered them drugs and hosted wild, never-ending parties. It now appears that some of the food he was cooking for them involved pork mixed with ground up female victims.

He had taken the remains of some of the women, mixed them with pork offal, and taken them in barrels to a rendering plant, where the rendering machines like this one were used to grind up his victims’ remains.

After a huge investigation involving 54 anthropologists and huge earth-moving machines, the DNA of 30 different women (some say the figure is now up to 80), was found at the site. 27 were identified, all prostitutes.

It now appears that Pickton, aged 52 when arrested, had been killing women for at least 11 years before he was caught. His first known victim disappeared in 1991, when he was 41 years old. However, as early as 1988 and 1989, he was already regarded as dangerous to women. In 1988, women were warning other women to watch themselves around him. In 1989, people were warning women not to go home with him, admonishing them with terrifying tales.

He had apparently grown to hate prostitutes, whom he had been using for years, after as he put it, they infected him with Hepatitis C, attacked him with a knife, stole from him and used him. His rage at prostitutes did not develop until relatively late in life, which is why he did not start killing until age 41, which is quite late to begin a serial killer career.

There are other unconfirmed aspects of the case, with Ellingsen accusing Pickton of having sex with a dead woman’s corpse. Ellingsen and other drug addict-prostitute, Dinah Taylor, lived with Pickton for a while and helped him to pick up prostitutes and bring them to the farm. There is also a possibility that Taylor may have been involved in some of the killings, but she has never been charged. Pickton told his brother David that Taylor had killed some of the girls.

Good overview of the case here.

Interesting Take on the Outrageous Supreme Court Decision

When these clowns Roberts and Alito came up for nomination for the Supreme Court under ultra-rightwing George Bush’s Administration, the few of us who are sane were saying all along that these guys were a nightmare in waiting. Almost none of my “liberal” friends believed me. After all, I’m Chicken Little. The Democratic Party completely caved in to the ultraright radicals that Bush nominated, saying in effect that they were just fine. Alito in particular was outrageous, lying for days on the stand.

Now we’ve come full circle and as usual, Chicken Little me was right and my liberal friends and the idiot Democratic Party were dead wrong. Perhaps you have heard of the Citizens United vs. FEC case (full court brief)that was decided on January 21, 2010. First of all, the case is the most egregious case of judicial activism. Based on in stare decesis, the Court is supposed to allow lower court rulings to stand, in this case an appellate court ruling. Further, the finding that the court ruled on was one that the plaintiffs had already agreed to drop in lower court.

In order to overrule the lower court, there must be a clear, present and immediate public need involved. What is the clear and present public need in overturning all of our campaign financing laws?

It’s much worse than that. We are now not allowed to put any limits whatsoever on campaign contributions by the corporations and the rich. Medical lobbies spent $1.5 million/day during the Heath Care Reform debate to kill progressive reform. There are now estimates that we could see lobbies spending up to 30-50 times as much as they are currently spending. That’s a tsunami of campaign cash.

Those of you who don’t live in the US don’t know what it’s like. Especially during election season, you are bombarded with an endless barrage of big-money and corporate commercials on the TV. Turn on the radio and it’s similar. Open your mailbox and and an avalanche of corporate brochures piles into your lap. Open a newspaper and there are huge big money and corporate full page ads all through our biggest papers.

Never mind that nearly all of the TV and radio stations, large newspapers and newsmagazines are already more or less exact mouthpieces of these same corporate and big money interests.

In every way that makes sense, America is now an oligarchy. Like similar oligarchical shitholes scattered all of over the ruined Third World, the class interests are foreordained. On my Maoist list, a Maoist recently said that it is the position of the moneyed classes everywhere on Earth to be ultraright.

This is their logical position. They can’t be blamed for it anymore than a shark can be blamed for attacking a swimmer. In the ruined Third World, the rich and the upper middle classes and sadly often the entire business class always lines up with the most ferociously reactionary wing of the oligarchy.

Tragically, much of the middle class often does the same. Recall that Marx said that the middle classes always ally themselves with the rich. In the US, typically once anyone gets any money at all, they usually move into this ultra-right position. This is particularly true if they make their fat cash working for a corporation.

So this is what we’ve become. A wealthy version of a Third World oligarchical ultra-right shithole. The stolen elections are already here. The oligarchs have a death grip on the media. Civil liberties are winding down. So what’s next?

In the event of any profound Left uprising, even unarmed such as Guatemala 1954, El Salvador 1980, Aristide in Haiti, Chavez in Venezuela, Allende in Chile, Morales in Bolivia, Correa in Ecuador, Dominican Republic 1965 or Brazil 1964, I would assume the US would quickly witness military coups, death squads and possibly even armed guerrillas on the Left as a response. If a Left regime came to power, we may well see armed contras, probably funded by the rich and the corporations.

The law shreds 100 years of laws by state and federal governments that attempted to limit campaign contributions. David Souter dourly noted this in his dissent.

The following is an interesting argument from a website I’m a member of suggesting that the decision was treason. Reason being that the court refused to say that foreigners could not also spend as much as they wanted to influence US issues and elections. This means that the only way to stop foreigners from flooding our political debates and campaigns with cash to buy their way to control over our nation is for the Congress to stop them by passing a law.

But such a law can never be passed because an openly treasonous party, the Republican Party, will never pass any law limiting foreigners right to spend whatever they can to influence our debates and elections. So we’re screwed.

Many are suggesting an Amendment of the Constitution. This will not work. We need 67 votes in the Senate, and we don’t have them. Then we need 7

By any fair legal definition, the decision yesterday by The Supreme Court 5 constitutes nothing less than an act of treason against the people of the United States. Having read and analyzed the entire 183 page decision and all of its concurring and dissenting opinions ourselves, we are fully prepared to support this accusatory conclusion.

Having so grossly abused its jurisdiction by presuming to decide a question expressly waived by the petitioner in the Court below (p 12), this rogue Supreme Court ruled for the first time that no corporation can be constrained from unlimited influence over our elections.

And even assuming that the Court intended the decision to only apply to American corporations, the Court expressly declined (pp 46-47) to reach the question of whether foreign ownership stakes in American corporations should likewise be given carte blanche to put their thumbs on the scales of our democracy.

Thus, until Congress further acts (and it must, though it could not have escaped the attention of The Supreme Court 5 that the current Republican minority has vowed to obstruct anything of consequence that Congress might try to pass), there is now nothing to constrain foreign nationals, even our most sworn enemies, from usurping what even the most die hard Tea Bagger takes as an article of faith, that the rights of citizenship of this country are only for Americans.

This must be construed, within the four corners of our Constitution, as deliberately and knowingly exposing the United States of America to harm in the interim, by giving “aid and comfort” to our enemies (Constitution Article 3, section 3), should our enemies now wish to take advantage of this unprecedented and rash decision. In simple constitutional terms . . . treason!!

The fact is that we now live in a world of giant transnational corporations, with allegiance to no sovereign government, let alone our own, sworn only to exploit the most vulnerable and desperate workers they can find in any country of the world. How does The Supreme Court 5 propose parsing which of these extra-national legal artificialities should be allowed to corrupt our democratic election process? Apparently in their minds, all of them.

So what is it that we can and must do? The first and most prominent proposal we heard yesterday, and which we of course support, was to amend the Constitution to clarify that corporations have no such rights as people (which is to say U.S. citizens).

While this certainly could not hurt, and would obviously help (assuming such an proposed amendment could garner 67 votes in a Senate already stalemated by obstructionism, let alone be ratified by 3/4 of the states, including many “red” ones), what we must first assert is that there is nothing wrong with our Constitution, and demand that Congress do whatever it can to protect it.

Because just as importantly, we are on ominous and clear notice that there is no further outrage these 5 gangsters in black robes are not gleefully and arrogantly capable of. Indeed, in his dissenting opinion (that the majority did not go far enough), Clarence Thomas characterized the decision as only a “first step” (Thomas opinion p. 1).

It is worth nothing that the authorship of the majority opinion is claimed by Anthony M. Kennedy, heretofore generally considered the least wing nutty of the 5. Therefore, the immediate and unavoidably necessary recourse must be impeachment for all five, treason already being a high crime, otherwise the horrors yet to issue from their treacherous minds is too terrible to contemplate.

“The Kindness of Gentlemen,” by Alpha Unit

It was early 1933. Mahatma Gandhi was in prison, fasting. Beer was made legal in the United States, eight months before the final repeal of Prohibition. Diego Rivera began a controversial mural at Rockefeller Center that included a portrait of Lenin.

And in April, Elizabeth Bacon Custer died at the ripe old age of 90.

It had been her life’s mission to redeem the reputation of her husband, who had died in battle in 1876. The memory of George Armstrong Custer was not to be tarnished by the events at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

“Libbie” Custer had actually followed her husband on his military assignments. Biographers of Custer speak of how devoted they were to each other, although their relationship began under difficulty. Libbie’s father had not been that impressed with Custer; he didn’t come from a good enough family.

It was his military successes that brought her father around. After being commissioned a second lieutenant, he took part in the First Battle of Bull Run (or, First Battle of Manassas, for the Southerners). He moved up the ranks of the Army throughout his early Civil War campaigns, and after becoming brevet General (a temporary rank) Libbie Bacon’s father relented and approved of their marriage.

Toward the war’s end, Custer distinguished himself with two separate defeats of Confederate armies led by Lt. General Jubal Early. He pursued Robert E. Lee to Appomattox Court House, and was present when the Confederacy surrendered.

This was the high point of Custer’s military career. He went on to serve with distinction in the so-called Indian Wars – until June of 1876, near the Little Bighorn River in Montana Territory.

What happened during this battle, and why, has been studied and debated for over a hundred years. It was a defeat of the U.S. Army by Indian tribes. That was shocking enough for a lot of people. Custer’s 7th Cavalry was devastated. Custer – along with some of his male relatives – was dead.

But Libbie Custer was a part of the reason for some of the reticence about setting the record straight about the Battle of the Little Bighorn. She became her husband’s staunchest defender, becoming an author and lecturer to preserve his legacy as a great military man.

And the men who knew better let her do it.

There was plenty of information that would have shed much-needed light on the events of June 1876, much of it damning of Custer. But because she was a grieving and determined widow, men who had been there kept it to themselves. They let her go out and promulgate the image of her husband as a great military hero defending his position “to the last man.”

All along they indulged her, the way men tend to do with women. You might say they were men of their time – gentlemen who never would have publicly criticized the widow of an Army officer. But whether they were gentlemen or not, what they did took guts. And they resolved that as long as she was alive, they would remain silent.

The thing is, she outlived them. Just like a woman.

References

Elliott, Michael A. 2008. Custerology: The Enduring Legacy of the Indian Wars and George Armstrong Custer. University of Chicago Press.

More Diverse English Dialects

We have already gone over some strange English dialects on this site in past posts. One tiresome canard that is oft-repeated is that US English speakers have a hard time understanding other US English speakers. This is usually said by Europeans. This is a misunderstanding of the dialectal nature of US English. The most divergent dialects of US English have long ago merged in something called dialect convergence. We already discussed New York English on the site.

As I noted, a young Italian man from Queens came to the Sierra Nevada in California recently and enrolled at a local college. For 3 months, people could hardly understand him. He finally learned to speak California dialect and make himself understood. Really, what he did was drop his outrageous New York English dialect.

What was interesting was that the guy could not seem to accomodate the listeners very well. People would ask him to repeat, speak slower, etc. but nothing seemed to work. And after 3 months of regularly listening to him, most listeners hardly understood him better than on Day One.

To me, these are strong suggestions that we are dealing with a separate language (albeit a very closely related one) and not simply a dialect. Speakers of a separate language have a hard time adjustting their speech to make it understood better, and listeners of a separate language usually don’t understand it much better with time than on the first day. With dialects, things are different. Dialect speakers can modify speech and be understood and listeners of dialects can start to pick it up a lot better in a short period of time.

An example of a dialect of English would be South African English. I recently met a fellow speaking a very thick S.A. English dialect. I could understand him all right, every word in fact, but it was one Hell of a thick accent! To show you how these things go, the woman behind the counter couldn’t really understand the guy, and I had to interpret for him.

AAVE (Ebonics) is quite different, and I think it’s a separate language in its hard form. I recently spent a few hours with two young Black women speaking AAVE. I didn’t understand them any better at the end of 3 hours than at the start. And they may as well have been speaking Greek. They couldn’t really adjust their AAVE to make it better understood (I think they don’t want to be understood, really) but they could drop the AAVE at a moment’s notice and speak perfect English.

There is actually some support among linguists for splitting off AAVE into a separate language. It’s probably not happening for political reasons. Could you imagine the howls from the rightwingers and the gales of laughter from the anti-Black racists if they did? I can see it now: “Niggers speak a foreign language! LOL! I always thought so myself!”

My Mom recently heard a fisherman from the coast of Newfoundland on the radio for several minutes and she said she couldn’t understand a word. There are some Newfoundland English dialects that are quite hard to hear.

There is a Youtube video about continuing slavery in the US. I’m not sure what it’s all about, but it looks like work in return for room and board in the deepest Mississippi Delta. There are Blacks on that video speaking a very deep Mississippi Delta Black dialect that can scarcely be understood.

Mulungeon English (especially Monacan Indians) and West Virginia Appalachian English (hard forms) can be quite hard to understand.

We can understand almost all Australian and New Zealand English. It’s often one Hell of an English accent (especially with the Australians), but they can definitely be understood. However, on the radio I recently heard a speaker of a Tasmanian Australian English dialect. She was from a rural forested area and was protesting logging in her area. I had a hard time understanding that dialect.

I would be all for making West African English (at least the hard forms of it) separate languages. On US TV, African English from Kenya and Liberia gets subtitles.

We’ve already discussed the Scots language on this site before. That Scots is now judged a separate language and not an English dialect drives many English speakers into wild conniptions. You can Google the controversy on the Net and watch the wild, raging debates unfold over many pages. I’m not sure why it pisses speakers of a major language so much when divergent dialects are split off into separate languages. Maybe it’s a primal thing.

There’s only been one scientific study done, but it found 4

At this point it ought to be quite clear that Scots is more than one language. In the heart of Scotland, you go 20 miles in any direction and the other Scots speakers won’t understand you. I wonder if there is some kind of “Standard Scots” that could be spoken that would be understood everywhere?

I would like to start the debate off by proposing that Shetlandic Scots and Orcadian Scots be split off from Scots proper. It’s uncontroversial that these are the most wildly divergent Scots dialect, and they have poor intelligibility to speakers of the rest of Scots. Orcadian Scots is spoken on the Orkney Islands and Shetlandic Scots is spoken on the Shetlandic Islands.

Shetlandic and Orcadian Scots have Midlands English. I definitely get less than 9

Two of the most infernal English dialects have to be Geordie and Scouse. They are also quite famous.

Geordie is spoken in the far northeast of England near the Scottish border in and around Newcastle. Other dialects around that region like Cumbrian and Northumbrian are similar. Geordie is famous for being one of the hardest English accents to understand. There is actually some support among linguists for splitting it off to a separate language.

Scouse is the notorious, but delightful, dialect of Liverpool. In mild forms, it’s what comes out of the Beatles’ mouths in interviews. In hard form, it’s extremely difficult to understand. There is a report on the Net of a US English speaker who spent 7-8 years in Liverpool and never learned to understand Scouse very well. He said that young working class women were the worst. I’d be in favor of splitting this infernal dialect off into a separate language, but it’ll probably never happen. Can you imagine the shrieks?

Are Only Euro-Whites Capable of Peaceful Seccessionism?

In this modern era, one of the ultimate litmus tests for extreme liberalism or humanism is the completely selfless permission that a state grants when it allows a part of itself to secede without starting a bloodbath.

Since the Peace of Westphalia, Europe initiated the notion of the nation-state, a brand-new concept. Before, there had only been empires at most, if that in most places. The notion of the nation-state gradually grew until the present moment, when it is unfortunately the status quo. If empires disallowed succession, nevertheless it did occur quite a bit, since empires never had much legitimacy in the first place.

The problem with the nation-state is that it has built up a nonsensical and undeserved legitimacy, even among the most liberal folks. As soon as lines are drawn on a map, they are instantly there for all time, never to be redrawn.

Except that imperialist maggots like the US and the UK, while paying lip service to the inviolability of borders, nevertheless, scumbags that they are, cynically pursue seccessionism and border violability against any states that are deemed enemies.

Look at how quickly the world recognized the states that emerged out of the USSR. While the breakup itself was testament to the USSR’s ultimate morality, its internationalism, a moral spear that split the heavens while the capitalist world wallowed in nationalist mud, the new states were only recognized by the capitalist shits because they were so eager to disaggregate their old socialist foe.

At the moment, the US cynically promotes the breakup of Iran, Venezuela and Bolivia. In the past, the US supported seccessionism in China. Kurdish secessionism in Iraq was promoted by the US and then its suppression funded by the US, depending on the whims of the day. At the moment, the US funds Kurdish secessionism in Iran while funding its crushing by the Turkish state in Turkey.

The truth is that under capitalism, imperialist states like the US have no morals whatsoever, only interests. That 9

Anyway, let us take this as a litmus test of the ultimate in civilized behavior in 2009: a state that will peacefully allow parts of itself to secede, if they so choose.

Most states, being governed by uncivilized animals, react to secessionism with violence, often extreme violence. The legion of the primitives is vast: Russia, France, Spain, Turkey, Russia, India, China, Indonesia, Burma, Georgia, New Guinea.

No non-White state will ever allow peaceful secession. They are simply too primitive and uncivilized to allow such a thing. By White I mean European Caucasians. Caucasians outside of Europe are incapable of peaceful secession either, because they are still relatively uncivilized compared to Europeans.

Asians, despite their high IQ’s, are still primitive in some ways, and even NE Asians are incapable of dealing with peaceful seccessionism. The response of 105 IQ China is instructive. Secessionist movements in Taiwan, Turkestan and Tibet have been dealt with via repression that can only be called fascist, while similar movements in Inner Mongolia are never allowed to see the light of day.

Indonesia’s response to secessionism in East Timor, Aceh and West Papua, areas it has a weak, if any, claim to, have been characterized by horrific violence.

India has behaved criminally, even genocidally, in Kashmir. India has little legitimate claim on the entire Northeast, yet they will never let an inch of it go.

Burma has no legitimate claim on any of its territory at the moment, as a criminal state loses the legitimacy of its governance. Nevertheless it continues to commit genocide against its secessionist movements, as it has since 1947.

For the moment, Pakistan and Iran can be excused their backwardness in violently assaulting secessionism, as imperialism, Indian and US, is conspiring to break up both states.

No Black African nation will ever allow secessionism, though they may as well. Most all of them can’t even govern their own territory responsibly, so they don’t have much right to the land in the borders. Failed states revoke the right to inviolability of borders.

Sudan has reacted with typical extreme brutality to the legitimate demands of Darfur and Southern Sudan for secession. The response to secessionism, typical of Arabs, was genocide. Since independence, most Arab states have reacted to secessionist demands with genocides of varying degrees.

Somalia is the ultimate failed state. There is no government, and anarchy has held sway for 15 years. Obviously, in the case of the collapse of the state and the onset of anarchy, the inviolability of borders principle is revoked. After all, a state that no longer exists can hardly invoke inviolability of borders.

Two new states, Puntland, and Somaliland, have emerged, but no one will recognize them due to the inviolability of borders crap. This is sad because these new states seem to have their shit together more than Somalia (whatever that means) does.

The nation of Georgia had no legitimacy before its birth in 1991. The day it was born, its fake borders were deemed inviolable forevermore. South Ossetia and Abkhazia have already broken away, as was their right. Georgia will never allow this transgression. Abkhazia has been de facto independent since 1991, but almost no one on Earth will recognize it, all because Georgia is a pro-Western state.

In contrast, the moment Kosovo declared independence, the West showered it with recognition, since they were splitting from Serbia, whom the West hates.

As I said earlier, Western capitalist states have no morals.

Yugoslavia did allow itself to be broken up, but violence followed. Slovenia had little violence, and Macedonia and Montenegro had none.  The Turks are not really European Whites, and Turkey’s always been the sick man of Europe. Since Ataturk, it’s been a fascist state. That’s not changing anytime soon.

In Spain, there are secessionist movements, but the Spaniards have always been fascist and backwards, and they will never allow anyone to secede.

So who will? The UK and Canada. Those are the only two states that allow secession based on a simple vote. There are movements in Scotland and Quebec, but they don’t have majority support yet. Yet still it seems by this litmus test, the UK and Canada are the most civilized states on Earth.

Czechoslovakia broke itself up soon after the fall of Communism, a great moment in human progress. Yet this was only possible due to decades of Communist internationalism and anti-nationalist propaganda. Since, then, fascist-like nationalism has set in in both new states.

The USSR allowed itself to break up. In a number of cases, idiot nationalist violence followed the breakup, but most states left peacefully. Anyway, the state did allow itself to be broken up, something almost no other state will allow. This feat of ultimate civilization only occurred in the USSR due to 78 years of internationalism.

Some of the states that broke up were part-Caucasian, part Asian in stock (some of the Stans), so they seem to be an exception to our rule that only Euro Whites will allow a state to break up, but possibly USSR internationalism overrode the racial stock. The only Asiatic or part-Asiatic states that have allowed themselves to dissolve were socialist in character.

Historically, we can see that only Whites seem to be able to secede without massacring each other like wild animals.

For instance, 100 yrs ago, 99.

In 1920, a plebiscite was held in Schleswig in northern Germany. The area north of Flensburg, 8

It’s an open question whether non-Europeans will ever be civilized enough to allow secessionism without committing genocidal massacres in the name of some lines on a map. I don’t think it will happen in my lifetime.

In case you haven’t guessed, this is one more reason I think we European Whites are better than other people. We’re simply more civilized, and this is a prime example.

Nepal’s Former Ambassador to U.S.: What About a Military Takeover?

This is a very interesting article written by Nepal’s Ambassador to the US. What he’s doing here is throwing out a trial balloon of a rightwing military coup in Nepal to overthrow the civilian government, followed by the inevitable death squad terror that always follows in such cases. Note that towards the end he mentions Pinochet, Suharto and Chung Park Hee. All ran far rightwing anti-Communist military dictatorships, all three came to power via military coups at a time of a threat or reality of a Communist or Leftist takeover of the article.

This is what capitalism always does, and in a way, the Leninists have a point, which is that the capitalists never allow any substantial challenge to their power to come about legally. If it does or even threatens to, there’s usually a military overthrow of the state followed by years of death squad terror aimed at decimating the Left for decades to come. It happened in Haiti, Chile, El Salvador, Uruguay, Guatemala, Argentina, Peru and Indonesia. They tried it in Venezuela recently.

You can forget about the parts towards the end where he talks about how a fascist coup followed by a death squad regime is the only way to eradicate poverty and bring about prosperity and opportunities. Those are the last things this guy wants, and these rightwing coups never bring about any of that. Fact is, they’re designed to prevent just those sorts of things.

The coup would need the support of both the US and India. I’m sure it would be forthcoming from both places.

What happened in Nepal is that there was a negotiated settlement to the Civil War there. As part of the settlement, there were elections which the Maoists won with 4

It would be as if the Head of the US Joint Chiefs refused to obey the Commander in Chief, then refused to step down when the President fired him. It was for all intents and purposes a military coup. It seems that India was involved up to their mitts in this. Then the Maoist President simply resigned, as the rule of civilian control of the state was being violated.

As you can see below, the Ambassador chides the whole notion of “civilian rule.” Apparently he thinks it’s a bad idea. Since then, I’m not sure what’s been going on on the ground in Nepal, except the Maoists have been involved in a lot of protests up and down the country, and yes, they have recently declared a few new states.

All in all, this is a pretty ominous proposal the Ambassador is tossing out there.

The original appeared here. La Republica is apparently the voice of the rightwing and business community in Nepal, best as I can tell.

Getting Out Of The Quagmire

by Sukhdev Shah

(Shah is Nepal’s ambassador to the U.S. He worked for the International Monetary Fund for two decades and is a U.S. citizen.)

As things have evolved over the past three years, Nepal has become a fertile ground for a military takeover of the government, independently or under the shadow of a constitutional authority.

Such a possibility has been talked about in a limited circle but been forced open by a delegation of some Nepali Congress (NC) leaders who recently urged President Ram Baran Yadav to consider imposing President’s Rule to help restore peace and enable the Constituent Assembly (CA) to complete writing the constitution before the expiry of deadline in five months. This is not an incredible or inappropriate suggestion, considering the marathon obstructions staged by Maoists to prevent the CA to open for business and carry out its mandate.

Even after losing the control of government in May this year over the enigmatic issue of civilian supremacy, Maoists have not softened their stance on the president’s action that re-instated the ex-army chief after his firing by the then Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal. In order to further press on this issue, Maoists have announced formation of autonomous states in several parts of the country in defiance of the wishes of government, which also seems to challenge the constitution- making authority of CA.

By doing so – unilaterally deciding to divide up the country into ethnic enclaves – Maoists have started the process of a slow dissolution of the State which they eventually would turn into an all-powerful proletarian dictatorship, making the country a one-party State. This particular perception of Maoists’ ultimate objective and long-term planning is not based on fancy or conjecture but comes straight out of their public declarations that claim the virtues of `fusion’ of ideologies and role of peoples’ war – jana yudhha – as means to capturing the State power.

The Maoist strategy of declaring autonomous states is probably the shrewdest means adopted until now to undercut the legitimacy of Maoist-version of a bourgeoisie State and assert people’s power under its own leadership. And this strategy would be highly appealing for the grassroots, who have had no great admiration for all-powerful Kathmandu-based governments doing the dictates of generations of family dynasties and self-serving corrupt politicians.

With the promises of self-rule allowed to ethnic majorities under the autonomous state system, ordinary people can see the benefits of localization of government authority, with a chance of liberating themselves from the tyrannies of centrist authoritarian rule.

Facing the challenge

Needless to say, government is at a loss on how to face up to the Maoist new challenge. The easiest course of action will be to ignore it – let them disrupt house-sitting, demonstrate on the street, put-up road blocks, spread anarchy, and declare more autonomous states, which can be viewed as no more than a symbolic defiance. However, by ignoring such threats to its authority, the government in power is unlikely to generate confidence and win sympathies, or hope that current impasse is going to end quietly and uneventfully.

If Maoists continue with its present strategy of making the central government look irrelevant, indifferent, and detached from the basic functions of the State, there will be no need for them to make a forceful entry into the capital to capture power. This will come to them naturally and effortlessly – from the growing irrelevance of government at the center, aided by gradual shift of state functions to regional, autonomous states.

There should be nothing wrong with the slow dissolution and eventual disappearance of the traditional State and its replacement by a grassroots entity that is built-up from grounds up. Indeed, by forcing the dissolution of the State, Maoists would be making a bloodless coup, which would be entirely legitimate in an environment of deepening conflict, lack of direction, heightened uncertainty, and loss of control over critical government functions.

There is not much that the Maoist-less current coalition government can do to stop or even slowdown the country moving in this direction except if it chooses to force-stop the process by making a last-ditch effort and take one extreme measure, similar to the one advocated by NC leaders noted above – presidential rule backed by the army.

Given the limited options the current government has in outsmarting the Maoists, it may be attracted to do just that and the army would, most likely, choose to go along. The army’s willingness to comply with such an option can be argued in two ways, the first being that it never got to use its full force to suppress Maoist rebels during their decade-old insurgency.

Reportedly, the army was held back by palace orders, which had to come to think of Maoist challenge more as a counter to political parties than a threat to itself. Second, by making civilian supremacy a battle-cry, Maoists, once in power, will seek a quick dissolution of the army, which they view as the last hurdle on the road to complete victory.

Maoists have been in sort of an undeclared war with the army for sometime now but it is becoming increasingly certain that the army will not just sit back and surrender. Rather, it may be getting ready for a showdown and final war with the Maoists – an opportunity it was looking for during king’s regime but was repeatedly denied. Army’s willingness to face up to the Maoists will be strengthened if its actions are given the legitimacy of enforcing presidential rule, which is allowed under the constitution.

A discouraging outlook

There are many ways in which the current conflict can get resolved and the much-lauded peace effort moved towards its logical conclusion – which is to get an agreement on the constitution, hold broad-based election, and usher in an era of constitutional rule that upholds people’s sovereignty. However, the outlook for consensus building and restoration of normal conditions appear increasingly dim, even non-existent.

The main reason for pessimism is that communism generally, and Maoism in particular, is now a ground reality in the country, reflecting not as much the smartness of ideology Maoists have brought to bear upon the population but the utter incompetence, lack of vision, and unabashed dishonesty of the regimes that have governed Nepal for decades and centuries.

In particular, all of them have failed to create glue that binds people together, encourage them to pursue a common goal, and motivate them to work for a better future, for themselves and their children.

The Maoists have taken advantage of this vacuum by creating grassroots organizations to bring the people together, partly by the force of their ideology but mostly by aligning people against the hereditary and traditional interests.

Of course, the record of nine-month rule by Maoists has caused much disappointment and helped cool down enthusiasm for its long-term sustainability but they continue to remain in public consciousness as the last hope for people who consider themselves dispossessed and have not much to lose from serious anarchy and breakdown of the law and order. At least one half of the country’s population would fit this category who seem united backing up Maoists’ intention of winning over and destroying the bourgeoisie democracy.

Presidential rule or army takeover can eliminate some Maoists and subdue their backers but it will be incapable of winning the ideological war. At the same time, if the ideologically- hardened comrades in hundreds of thousands face up to the army onslaught and engage them in running battles, the situation can easily get out of hand and millions will flee to take shelter across the border in India.

It is difficult to predict how India will respond to the emergence of calamitous situation across its 800-kilometer open border with Nepal, but it is hard to think that it will do nothing. Most likely, it will commit itself actively to prevent the spread of violence, including the stationing of its own peace-keeping force to keep order. Of course, such a move will have unknown consequences for Nepal’s separate and independent existence.

There is little or nothing to take a bet on how the events are going to unfold over the coming months and years, but the present cat-and-mouse maneuverings by political parties and Maoists are likely to move the conflict to center-stage for a showdown. If this comes to pass, army will have a greater chance of claiming victory, provided that the conflict involves mostly the leadership on the top.

Another big uncertainty is if Nepal has the good fortune of some strongmen rising to the occasion – the likes of Korea’s Park Chung-Hee, Chile’s Pinochet, Indonesia’s Suharto – to take up the challenge of suppressing dissent and mobilizing the machinery of the State to focus on only one mission: Building a strong and prosperous nation.

With so many options tried over so many years to eradicate poverty and catch-up on the bandwagon of growth, opportunities and prosperity, this last option may just have a chance to succeed.

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