Bigfoot News September 14, 2012

Olympic Project successful submissions to Dr. Melba Ketchum DNA project revealed. A source has informed me that the Olympic Project submitted ~103 hair samples to Ketchum’s project, and ~85 of them tested presumptive to Bigfoot by DNA. Another ~18 Olympic Project hair samples were apparently from either humans or known animals. Those 85 successful submissions represent anywhere from 5-13 separate creatures. Apparently all of the hair was gathered in the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state. This makes the Olympic Project the largest submitter to the project. Updated list of successful samples to Ketchum Project. Here it is: Rundown of samples in the Ketchum study. This will be updated every time it changes. Bigfoot samples submitted: Over 200 Presumptive for Bigfoot: Almost 100 # of Bigfoot individuals represented: 20-28 Details of successful Bigfoot samples: 5 hair samples from Golden Ears Provincial Park in British Columbia representing 3 separate creatures – a male, a female and a juvenile from a family unit who were observed together prior to collecting the samples – gathered in 2010 by Randy Brisson of the Erickson Project. 1 toenail from Larry Jenkins in the Grand Canyon area of Arizona. 1 blood sample from JC Johnson in the Four Corners area of New Mexico (skunk in a drainpipe sample). 1 blood and tissue sample of a female Bigfoot representing either “Matilda” or her mother from Crittenden, Kentucky, gathered by the Dennis Pfohl and Leila Hadj-Chikh of the Erickson Project. Sample was obtained by gluing glass shards on a feeding plate. 1 hair sample from David Paulides’ NABS known as the Ulibarri sample from Hoopa Valley, California. 1 hair sample from Larry Surface in Southern Ohio. Surface shot the controversial nighttime Bigfoot video that was pulled from the web a while back. 1 hair sample (possible Dogman) from Joe Black in the Great Smoky Mountains, Eastern Tennessee. 1 tissue (flesh including muscle and fat) sample in the form of a slice of Bigfoot flesh from Mount Haskell, California from the adult male Bigfoot shot dead on October 10, 2010 by Justin Smeja in the Sierra Kills incident. 1 large sample of saliva from the Olympic Peninsula, Washington, collected by the Olympic Project obtained via a Bigfoot licking a trail camera. 1 hair sample from SE Oklahoma collected by TEXLA Cryptozoological Research. 1 blood, tissue and hair sample from a nailboard trap at Snelgrove Lake, Ontario, Canada (presumably successful). ~85 hair samples from the Olympic Peninsula, Washington, collected by the Olympic Project representing 5-13 separate individuals. That is apparently all or nearly all of the nearly 100 successful Bigfoot samples. The other 100 samples are all apparently from either humans or known animals. Best Bigfoot samples: Smeja’s Bigfoot steak and JC Johnson’s skunk in a drainpipe Bigfoot blood sample. Who bailed out Adrian Erickson? Last fall, Erickson was in deep doodoo financially. He was working 6 days a week, 12 hours a day trying to keep his real estate business above water. He was being sued by several parties, including the buyers of his homes. He was under a lot of physical and psychological toll – basically a stress case. His numerous investors were getting upset. Erickson built a large real estate development in British Columbia called Ruby Ridge. He sold a number of lots but then became underwater with the US recession caused by radical neoliberal capitalism’s unregulated banking sector and massive bankster fraud. This neoliberalism-generated recession affected the whole world, including Canada. Erickson was having a hard time selling homes due to the downturn in the housing market. He had promised buyers are variety of amenities for their lots including phone and cell coverage, water, sewage lines and roads. With no more money coming in, he was unable to provide these amenities. Through no fault of Erickson’s, his lot buyers were left holding the bag. He also spent $3 million on his Bigfoot project, the Erickson Project, with no results to show for it yet. Things looked grim. The prospect of bankruptcy for the business and foreclosure on Erickson’s very nice home loomed. I’m not divulging too much personal information here as most of this has already been reported in the British Columbia press. Here it is, 9 months later, and everything has changed. Early in the year, Erickson apparently took his Bigfoot documentary to Hollywood where it was worked on with post-production editing. In the interim, Erickson’s financial problems seem to have evaporated or at least gotten much better. The word we have is that financially, things are going quite well. This does not make sense. The housing market in BC has not returned since last fall, so he’s not selling anymore homes than he was then. How did he get the money to send the doc to Hollywood to have it worked on? It makes no sense, because at the time it was down there, Erickson was flat broke. How did he get the huge amount of money needed to bail him out of the financial hole? He could not have made it selling lots. Someone must have bailed him out in some way. Erickson is now happy and calm and is no longer working all the time. He is back guiding hunts and again, and he’s going to Africa soon to hunt. He seems relaxed about the subject of Bigfoot and acts like it is out of his hands and his life. Whereas previously for a long time, he got angry anytime anyone brought up the subject. On numerous occasions, Erickson said he didn’t want to hear the word Bigfoot ever again. Furthermore, Erickson and Ketchum, who never got along, have now mysteriously become BFF’s. Logically, none of this makes any sense. The only way this could have happened is that an unknown person or persons with a lot of money stepped in and got Erickson out of his hole by sending a lot of money his way, either via gift or investment. I suspected that Wally Hersom gave Erickson the cash to get him out of the hole he was in and to send the documentary down to Hollywood. However, when I asked around, a source close to Hersom emphatically told me that he strongly doubted that Hersom had either bailed Erickson out or even given him the money to take his doc to Hollywood to have it worked on. There is suspicion that Ketchum is now the owner of Erickson’s footage, but it has been impossible to confirm. However, it does remain a hunch of mine for reasons I cannot divulge. The events surrounding Erickson and his movie in the last 9 months remain shrouded in mystery. Photos and video of Bigfoots exist that are better than the Patterson footage. Photos and video have been shot in the past 20 years that are said to be better than the Patterson footage. They are better than the Patterson footage in that it is clearer. At least a couple of them were shot in the Pacific Northwest. A source who has seen the footage says that there is no way it could have been hoaxed. In both cases, the persons who own the footage refuse to release it because of the Hellish notoriety of publicity that cascades down on anyone who releases purported Bigfoot footage. The crucifixion of Melissa Hovey over her photo is a good recent example.

"It Ended With a '53 Buick," by Alpha Unit

My husband almost bought a Woodie. It was about 25 years ago. He had a neighbor who had one in storage, and she wanted to get rid of it. All he can recall about it is that it was a 1940-something Dodge and that the wood was badly warped. Even though she was going to give him a great deal on it, he passed. Way too much hassle, he decided. The hassle of maintaining these cars is one reason people stopped wanting them. They look beautiful, but they can be high-maintenance divas.

A Nash Suburban “woodie.”
Woodies weren’t “Woodies” until some time in the 1950s, I found out. Before then they were just station wagons. Station wagons were a way of transporting people and their luggage from train stations to their final destinations. They were directly descended from horse-drawn express wagons. Before the 1930s the passenger compartment of a vehicle was normally made of hardwood. A station wagon had the typical wooden body – built by a local carpenter, probably – and was used in a privately-run shuttle service. The 1923 Star was the first wooden paneled station wagon sold commercially (made by Durant Motors). But the Ford Motor Company sold more wood-bodied cars than any other manufacturer, according to Art Daily, building its own bodies in a plant in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

Ford Motor Company was vertically integrated; the wood – kiln-dried maple and ash framing, with mahogany panels – was harvested from the company’s expansive Iron Mountain first-growth timber tracts. It was harvested, kiln-dried, and aged, all in one facility. Skilled craftsmen hand-built, assembled, and trimmed each car’s wooden body as they would fine furniture. Then it was shipped to a local Ford assembly plant to be mated to its engine and chassis.

General Motors didn’t sell as many wood-bodied wagons as Ford. Since it wouldn’t have been efficient for GM to produce the cars in small numbers, says Art Daily, a few respected suppliers hand-crafted Chevrolet, Olds, Pontiac, and Buick woodies. Packard, De Soto, and Nash also offered wood-bodied wagons. Chrysler came out with its Town & Country wood-bodied wagon in 1941 and eventually began making wood-bodied 4-door sedans and convertibles. The Town & Country, with an all-steel roof and a white ash and mahogany body, is designated a Classic. People really want to see them. And get their hands on them. Wood-bodied cars were undoubtedly complex and expensive to build and required special care.

Many pieces were made of rare bird’s-eye maple, resplendent with natural whorls and unique flowing patterns. Woodies were beautiful, but they were weather-sensitive and subject to an early demise. Manufacturers issued instructions with each wood-bodied car that instructed owners how to sand and re-varnish the body every year. No one would tolerate that frequency of maintenance today, but it was a different era. And Woodies were fragile. A fender-bender that’d simply dent a metal car body could reduce a hapless Woodie to matchsticks. Brutal Northeast winters meant that these were essentially three-season cars, at best.

People who restore Woodies say that most of the ones they see are in bad condition. They commonly see both dry rot and termites. Eric Johnson, who rebuilds these cars, spoke to John Katz of Hot Rod and Restoration about the difficulty of restoring original wood.

I’d love to have a car with original wood. I’d love to keep it all original. But when you start taking an old wooden body apart, it’s like opening a can of worms. You may have seen only a few rotted areas when it was all together. But when you take it apart you’ll find tenons that are rotted out from where water got into it.

He says that sometimes you have to build a whole new reproduction body – something Rick Mack specializes in. He estimates that less than 1 percent of Woodies have good, original wood. He builds about a dozen woodsets a year and ships them all over North America. As Jeff Layton describes it:

The process is meticulous and time-consuming. There can be upwards of 64 wood pieces on a vehicle. Very few are straight or square; most bend in two directions, and some have a twist. Mack uses a hand-crank press to laminate and shape replacement wood. He then uses jigs, patterns, and templates to dictate where to drill holes, round corners, and router interlocking pieces.

Pieces are accurate to the originals within 1/64th of an inch, he says. (Once varnished and installed, even judges at car shows can’t tell if the wood is original.) Because many woodies were kept in storage during winter months, some of them can be found in pretty good condition. But to a lot of owners, proper maintenance was not a priority. Manufacturers understood this. Some people say that the last great year for the Woodie was 1949. Postwar auto production made handcrafting complicated and maintenance-intensive wood frames and panels hard to justify, according to David Traver Adolphus. During the 1950s, car design, along with the tastes of people who drove cars, underwent radical changes, he says, and woodies fell from favor. The Chrysler Town & Country was discontinued in 1951. The 1953 Buick wagons were the last of the real woodies from a major American manufacturer. Rick Mack drives a 1950 Ford Woodie wagon, even though it’s not a great idea in the Pacific Northwest. “Driving in the rain can make the wood swell,” he confesses to Layton. But he drives it anyway. He loves Woodie wagons.

Tulio on Black Crime and Feminism and What to Do About Them

Tulio, a Black man in his 30’s, is a regular commenter on the site. It was nice to see him move out defensive mode on the subject and write a deep and heartfelt post about these matters which are so painfully dear to his heart. He said that he thinks about this stuff constantly, as he is a young Black man. That’s sad, but if you care, it’s understandable. Tulio notes that the problem is now so entrenched that it seems to be intractable. He also notes the corrosive effect of a lot of the new Black music. Even White prison gang members have remarked on how detrimental they feel this music has been to White youth in recent years. They say young White man come to prison after listening to hip hop for years and think they are tough badass gangsters going to live it up in paradise in a maximum security prison. And boy do they have another thing coming! I would like to thank Tulio for this post. Even if these problems seem intractable, we should at least be discussing them, as the human and societal damage is of epic proportions.

Black Crime

As for Black crime, it’s a confluence of a lot of different things and not an easy problem to solve. Single motherhood. You have a lot of fatherless homes and single mothers. While not all single mothers raise bad sons (I personally know great guys raised by single moms), most guys in prison never had a strong father in their life. Women’s role is nurture; men’s role is discipline. Boys aren’t afraid of their moms. They’re afraid of their dads. Boys need fathers first and foremost. I don’t know what the high cause of single motherhood is in the Black underclass. I truly have no idea, and I think about this stuff all the time since I’m a Black man. It wasn’t always like this. There was a time that Blacks were known for having strong families. The explosion seems to have happened in the 60s. I don’t think there’s anything genetic about it. This doesn’t seem to be the case in Africa, especially traditional African society. It seems to be something unique to Black Americans. I don’t know what it looks like amongst Black Latins or Caribbeans. But family in Africa seems pretty strong, so I know it’s not genetic. Dead zones. Secondly you have a large cultural vacuum in certain parts of the country. Do you ever read about how there are dead zones in the ocean? Certain areas where there is not enough oxygen and that part of the ocean is devoid of life? The inner cities of America are dead zones. They are islands of misery, hopelessness, broken schools, high unemployment, drugs, urban decay. There’s very little there to give people inspiration and hope. The church is often the only thing. The people living there have just enough so as not to revolt, yet not enough for them to be functional players in the economy. The origin of such ghettos can be traced back to segregation. Some of these communities thrived at a time and were fairly self-sufficient. The Black middle class fled these places. And all that was left behind were the poor and a crumbling society. The middle class Blacks might have served as role models to those less fortunate. The Whites didn’t care about them either. Everyone that could afford to get out, got out. So what can be done about it? I don’t know. The problem seems almost intractable. So I guess the only real solution here would be some sort of gentrification. Concentrated poverty is a very dangerous thing. As I’ve shown before, it can turn White people violent as well like it did in NYC tenements or as it currently does in Glasgow. Spreading the poor out a bit should help. And it should also make their behavior better through cultural osmosis. I can imagine no worse situation than being a Black kid raised by a poor single mother where the only male role models are thuggish rappers and drug dealers. They need to see other things and get out of that box. They need something positive to aspire to. High unemployment. When unemployment is high, it makes working in the dark side of the economy more seductive. I’m sure many of these kids coming up would like to be able to make a decent living and not have to worry about ending up in jail or getting gunned down. But the fewer jobs there are, the more it makes the risk of selling drugs seem worth it. Even fairly decent people will start acting shady if that’s the only way they have to survive. Well one major problem is that many blue collar jobs that Blacks used to do for a living wage either went to China or went to illegal aliens. It wasn’t uncommon to see Black carpenters, drywallers, construction workers, meatpackers, etc. Now these jobs are almost all entirely done by Mexicans illegally in the country. This was a huge issue in the rebuilding of New Orleans after Katrina. There were a lot of Blacks out of work that wanted those construction jobs, and they were livid that they were going to Mexicans who aren’t even citizens and don’t even have any roots in the city. How can anyone not feel their pain? The gutting of solid blue collar work has had a huge effect on Rust Belt White America but it has been an utter disaster for Black America. I see no easy solution here either. Music. I also thing the music is a problem. Now maybe it’s an issue of art imitating life, or it’s the other way around, I don’t know. But I do think it has something of a feedback loop effect. A lot or rap music, even if not explicitly advocating violence, tends to reinforce a lot of selfish attitudes, hyper-materialism, fast money, fast women, party hard, a lot of Machiavellianism. It’s pervasive, even in the more lukewarm hiphop music. Sometimes it’s just the attitude. The anger. One rarely sees rappers smiling or seeming happy unless surrounded by money, bling and sexy women. This stuff has to stop, and if I had a kid, I’d be very careful about what they listen to. That said, not all rap music is like that, a lot of it is positive and life affirming. Some of it is great to dance too or just enjoy in the background if you have the smarts to not get caught up in the Machiavellian stuff. It should also be noted that not all “Black music” is like this. The majority of Black music is not rap and does not contain violent lyrics. Unfortunately though, most of the music young Black males of the inner city listen to will be rap and often with terrible messages. What can anyone do about this? Not much, as long as there’s a first amendment, rappers can pretty much talk about whatever they want sell their music to whomever they want, most of which is bought by Whites anyway. Sorry I don’t have any easy solutions, but these are just a few things that contribute to the issue.

Feminism

As for feminism, and I assume we’re talking about feminism of the more militant variety, the Pandora’s Box is open on that one. I wish things had stayed with equity feminism, and we could’ve left it there. But it then evolved into an assault on gender roles and gender as some sort of social construct rather than biological reality. That’s what happens when people with PhD’s take over the movement. I know it’s not realistic for every American man to find a foreign woman, but for those that can, I think that’s the best solution. Foreign women are much more enjoyable to be around.

A Thought Experiment Regarding Detroit

People say economics ruined the city. The remaining Blacks (keep in mind that Detroit is 9 Others say like commenter Ishmael that Detroit has a Black problem. Many of Detroit’s problems flow directly from the fact that it is now a 9 Keep in mind that in the US, whenever any huge US city gets around 9 Let’s try a thought experiment: Suppose we had a Stalinist or Stalin-like dictator in the US dedicated to the common good and the greatest good for the greatest number. He would also be, like Stalin, utterly dedicated to the concept of what the right derisively calls “social engineering” on a mass scale. Detroit now is the same under this Stalin-type dictator. US Stalin has had it with Detroit as nothing seems to work. He decides to transform Detroit. Whereas now it’s 9 You still think it would be the same city? Would the 9 I do not think so.

Bigfoot News July 11, 2012

Dr. Melba Ketchum Bigfoot DNA paper passes peer review, now awaiting publication date. From sources inside the Ketchum camp, I strongly believe that Ketchum’s Bigfoot DNA paper has finally passed peer review with its endless requests for changes and revisions, major and minor. When did it pass review? I am not sure. At least by yesterday, June 10, 2012 and maybe earlier. When will it publish? I do not know. It depends how long journals wait from when they approve a paper until when they publish it. I know that at the end of May, Ketchum said that all revisions had been completed, and that the journal was only asking for some photo and video evidence to complete the paper, and the team was working to round that up. A recent post on Ketchum’s site stated:

Melba Ketchum: “Everyone keeps asking for posts. Just waiting with no control over timing so there is nothing to report! It is out of my hands at this time!!!!!”

Checking in with sources inside in the Ketchum camp, I was able to confirm from multiple persons that the paper is finished and has finally passed peer review. Now all Ketchum is waiting for is a publication date, and she has no idea when that is coming. This is great news! Excellent new video out by Facebook Find Bigfoot. This video shows a Bigfoot watching boys playing with go-carts in Northern Pennsylvania. There was a camera attached to the go-cart and video was shot while they were riding. After they went home and viewed the video, they saw the Bigfoot, but it only appeared for a few seconds. This video was sent in to Dr. Jeff Meldrum, and he thought it was interesting enough that he passed it along to FB/FB for analysis. They are correct. I believe that this is a Bigfoot. Also shows some excellent footage of a Bigfoot shot in Del Norte County, California in 2009. I am quite certain that this is a Bigfoot. I don’t want to tell you why. Hoaxers are extremely crafty and they are always trying to perfect their Bigfoot hoaxes, which are endless and continuous. The more information we give them about about what a real Bigfoot looks like, the more they will perfect their hoaxes and make them better and better. They are already good enough so it’s often hard to tell the hoaxes from the real thing, and it’s getting to the point where even the best photo on Earth of a Bigfoot, such as the Hovey photo, will be denounced by a loud majority as a confirmed hoax when it’s nothing of the sort. Video is here. Very nice Kansas Bigfoot photo posted by Facebook Find Bigfoot.

Two Bigfoots along a river in Kansas.
Taken by Greg Wood on February 5, 2012 in Sedgewick County, Kansas in a remote area along the Ninnescaw River near Lake Cheney southwest of Wichita. The Kansas Auburn Bigfoot video that made the rounds earlier was also shot in this county. The BFRO database has three sighting reports along this same river. The original photo is much further away, and the Bigfoots can barely be seen as tiny dots. What you see above is a dramatically blow up version of the same photo. These photos were originally discovered by the Crypto Crew, who found them on the photographer’s blog. In foreground is what I think is a female Bigfoot who is retreating from the cameraman. The large male Bigfoot is watching from behind the tree and covering for her as she retreats. There may be a baby somewhere in the photo, but I can’t see it. Great photo, and I do think it is real. The entire photo set is here. Nothing more to report, sorry! They’ve (Ketchum and her gang) killed off most of my sources, and it will be hard to get some new ones. Every time we get a new one, Ketchum and her gang kills them off pretty quickly. It’s endless cat and mouse, like espionage and counterespionage. Very tiresome. All this secrecy is surely not necessary.

Bigfoot News June 14, 2012

The Dr. Melba Ketchum Project – what do we know and how do we know it? People keep asking me to “put up or shut up” about my claims that some Bigfoot samples have been DNA proven Ketchum’s DNA project. What exactly are the rumors, and what are my sources for those rumors? At the moment, all we have are rumors, because there is no published paper. There will be nothing but rumors until there is a published paper. At first Ketchum was only testing the MtDNA, and it kept coming back human, so she thought there was nothing there. Then Richard Stubstad ran a few of the MtDNA sequences in GenBank and got an interesting result that spurred her on because it was so unusual. Stubstad showed her it was unusual and encouraged her to explore things further because she was ready to quit at that point. At this point she had some very strange MtDNA that was, to be honest, modern human, but just barely. This was when she was theorizing Bigfoots were a tribe of “feral humans.” Then at some point she ran the Nuclear DNA, but this was a very long process because the human primers did not work, so they had to keep making their own primers, and they had to keep making them over and over because they only worked for a while and then they had to make new ones. It was a great big mess. Finally they got some primers that worked well, and that is what they are using now, but it was a long involved mess of a journey to get there. Apparently at some point she finished a lot of the NuDNA, and she got a result that it was outside the human range, anywhere from 10-3 She figured this was “presumptive for Bigfoot” because it was coming back no known animal, unknown primate, and basically an unknown hominid somewhere between a human and a chimp. Out of 200 submissions, she now has almost 100 of these sequences, and she thinks she can prove the Bigfoots exist by DNA. The other 100+ submissions were apparently all known animals. In addition, in November 2011 she got permission to sequence the entire nuclear genome of the Bigfoot steak. It took about three weeks to do that. After that, she sequenced two other entire genomes, for a total of three so far. Other than the steak, I don’t know which other samples had their genomes sequenced. So that’s what she means by DNA proven – more like DNA proven “presumptive for Bigfoot” because there is no type specimen. But she has to prove it all in her paper, and before that, she has to get the paper published in the first place, a huge hurdle. A lot the information above comes from Richard Stubstad, and he had access to more information than just the early days of the project. The rest of it comes from submitters or people who talked to submitters, who I cannot name, but it includes some big names who you would recognize. They were all quoting Ketchum herself. The nuclear genome sequencing information comes from Bigfoot Forums, especially “Jodie.” As far as genetic markers, all I know about is the MC1R gene. They ran four copies of that gene. Two came back exactly the same, and two others came back different. Each one was off by one polymorphism out of ~400-500. So these Bigfoots are off from humans by say four polymorphisms or so, according to the preliminary data from the MC1R gene. None of those polymorphisms was within the human range (not found in humans). This means that the Bigfoot MC1R gene is essentially outside the human range. The source for MC1R gene information is Richard Stubstad. But he won’t give out the exact coding for the gene. Ketchum sent the samples out to various different labs, including some of the top private and university labs in the country. For instance, the Bigfoot steak from the Sierra Kills was sent out to eight different labs because they wanted to make sure what it was. The samples were all sent out blindly.  It kept coming back “no known animal, unknown primate.” And the primate was close to hominid if you looked closely. A lot of the labs were intrigued by the results, and their attitude was, “What the heck!? What the heck is this anyway!?” They thought the results were very strange. Some of the labs supposedly somehow figured out what they might be looking at. How they figured this out and if it effects results, I am not sure. But they just did their job, took the money and handed the results back in. So far out of 200 submissions, Ketchum has almost 100 presumptive for Bigfoot, and out of those, she has 20-28 discreet individuals. There are photos of many of the successful samples on Shawn’s Bigfoot Evidence site. Sources for information are people who know submitters, submitters and people on Bigfoot Forums, especially Jodie. Rundown of samples in the Ketchum study. Bigfoot samples submitted: Over 200 Presumptive for Bigfoot: Almost 100 # of Bigfoot individuals represented: 20-28 Details of successful Bigfoot samples: 5 hair samples from Golden Ears Provincial Park in British Colombia, representing 3 separate creatures, a male, a female and a juvenile from a family unit, gathered by Randy Brisson of the Erickson Project. 1 toenail from Larry Jenkins in the Grand Canyon area of Arizona. 1 blood sample from JC Johnson in the Four Corners area of New Mexico (skunk in a drainpipe sample). 1 blood sample from Crittenden, Kentucky, gathered by the Dennis Pfohl and Lelia Hadj-Chikh of the Erickson Project. Sample was obtained by gluing glass shards on a feeding plate. 1 hair sample from David Paulides’ NABS known as the Ulibarri sample from Hoopa Valley, California. 1 hair sample from Larry Surface in Southern Ohio. Surface shot the controversial nighttime Bigfoot video that was pulled from the web recently. 1 hair sample from Joe Black in the Great Smoky Mountains, Eastern Tennessee. 1 tissue sample in the form of a slice of Bigfoot flesh from Mount Haskell, California from the adult male Bigfoot shot dead by Justin Smeja in the Sierra Kills incident. 1 large sample of saliva from the Olympic Project obtained via a Bigfoot licking a camera. 1 hair sample from SE Oklahoma collected by TEXLA Cryptozoological Research. 1 blood, tissue and hair sample from a nailboard trap at Snelgrove Lake, Ontario, Canada (presumably successful). 1 Yeti sample from Josh Gates in Bhutan* That is only 15 of nearly 100 successful Bigfoot samples. I have no idea about the rest. Best Bigfoot samples: Smeja’s Bigfoot steak and JC Johnson’s skunk in a drainpipe Bigfoot sample. *The Yeti sample was tested only on a quick and dirty male-female peaks test, and the result was suggestive of a non-human hominid similar to Bigfoot. She used up the whole sample in the testing, and this sample will not be included in the paper. The Crypto Crew thinks that the Idaho video we showed the other day is of a mother bear and two cubs. However, later those who shot the video later released video footprint evidence that indicates it was a Bigfoot. Decide for yourself. Facebook Find Bigfoot releases photo of possible Bigfoot from an Ontario video. The photo is from a video of a guy investigating stick structures in Ontario. As he was investigating, a Bigfoot was apparently watching him from the top of a rocky outcropping. Looks pretty real in my opinion, but you never know. That is definitely what these things look like. Especially the deep set eyes looks like the Pennsylvania White Bigfoot.

Click to enlarge. Photo of a possible Bigfoot peeking over a ridge in Ontario. Looks pretty real to me.

Baby Porn – The Real Deal

Here. An Ohio couple, Felicia and Cody Beemer of Trumbull County, Ohio, is charged with molesting 2 of their four babies and filming the rapes and then keeping videos and photos on their cellphones. Whoa! Baby porn! Not fake stuff like this, but the real thing. It’s hard to believe that people are this evil. I don’t get it. What’s wrong with these people anyway? The woman is 21 years old, and she’s already had 4 kids! Each kid was immediately taken away from her right after it was born (but why?) but then she was allowed visits with the kids. One of the kids that was taken away from her in the past was given to a foster mother, Bonnie Pattison, who then murdered the kid! WTH? Why? Why did the foster mother murder the kid? The couple also had over 500 photos of the babies watching videos of bestiality. The photos also showed the babies somehow involved in bestiality anyway. One of the kids is a boy and the other is a girl. One is 1 1/2 years old  and the other is 1 year old. One wonders why the father was even allowed visits to the kids at all since he had  was convicted as a teenager of raping a 3 year old child! WTH? Good God, it doesn’t get any worse than this. The father, 23, will probably spend the rest of his life behind bars. How does one even go about raping a baby girl anyway. Penetrate her vagina with your fingers or with objects? Anything else. How the Hell do you rape a baby boy? I’m not even sure I want to know. One more thing for folks interested in the racial angle. Both of them are White people!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

“We’ll Get You Pie Before You Die,” by Alpha Unit

The fruits of their labor built America’s cities and homes, historians say, and made some people very rich. Nowadays we call them loggers.

Once upon a time they were lumberjacks. Or “timber beasts,” if you really didn’t like them.

Life was rough and frequently cut short when you did this kind of work. At the beginning of the twentieth century when serious efforts were made to unionize the logging industry, most workers in the country were virtual slaves, called “wage slaves” by organizers, according to journalists John C. Hughes and Ryan Teague Beckwith. In their book On the Harbor: From Black Friday to Nirvana, they chronicle unionization efforts for loggers in the Pacific Northwest, and go into detail about their working conditions.

Record-keeping wasn’t very good in those days, but a man’s life expectancy as a logger was said to be about seven years, they say.

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

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

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

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

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

These workers were easy to take advantage of. They were typically single young men, often recent immigrants. Many were migrants who followed timber jobs as they became available. But conditions in lumber camps were so bad that, by one estimate, the annual turnover rate was as high as 600 percent.

Employers didn’t seem to care. They weren’t moved in the slightest to do anything to ameliorate the conditions that were creating this astronomical turnover. Conditions like overcrowded, lice-infested bunkhouses. Another author, John E. Haynes, described some of the logging camps in Minnesota.

Bunkhouses were ventilated only by doors at each end and one or two small skylights in the roof. One or perhaps two iron stoves, kept fired all night, provided heat. The poor ventilation compounded sanitary problems.

The men worked 11-hour days in the cold Minnesota winter and generally wore two or three sets of underwear in addition to their outer garments. The combination of wet snow and hard labor soaked the jacks’ clothes every day, but the men were without washing facilities either for themselves or what they wore…layers of sets of wet-from-sweat clothes hung near the stove every night to dry for the next day.

The steam from the clothes joined the stench of tightly-packed, unwashed bodies in the bunkhouses, prompting one Wobbly to comment that “the bunkhouses in which the lumberjacks sleep are enough to gag a skunk.”

Toilet facilities were primitive in the extreme, says Haynes. Privies were simply shallow, open pits with a roof and some poles for seats. The privies were rarely treated with lime or even covered with dirt.

To the men who hired the workers, all of this was perfectly okay. If you were a worker who didn’t think it was okay, your option was to quit. A perfectly fine arrangement, correct?

Not so, said union organizers, specifically the IWW, or Industrial Workers of the World – also known as the Wobblies. It was workers just like these loggers that the Wobblies focused their energies on.

Any wage earner could be a Wobbly, says labor historian Gibbs M. Smith. It didn’t matter what your occupation, race, creed, or sex was. You could be Black or White or Asian, American or foreign-born, skilled or unskilled.

This openness toward unskilled workers is what set the IWW apart from the American Federation of Labor. The AFL adhered to a craft union philosophy and were too conservative for the Wobblies. Consisting mainly of skilled workers, the AFL refused to organize the unskilled.

“Big Bill” Haywood led the IWW. He favored industrial unionism over craft unionism, stating:

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

Machinery and advancing technology were progressively eliminating the need for skilled craftsmen, Smith writes. The IWW believed that since the employers had united into great combinations of capital to maintain supremacy, it was necessary to organize all workers, skilled and unskilled, into industrial unions “to wage effective war on the integrated power of modern industry.”

In their efforts to organize loggers, it wasn’t just conditions in the camps that the IWW protested. They strongly objected to the “job sharks” who supplied laborers to the mills and logging camps. Because working conditions were so awful, employers hired agents to snare fresh bodies, as Hughes and Beckwith put it.

In the winter of 1911-12, the IWW took a stand against the logging companies and their job agents in Aberdeen, Washington.

Off-duty laborers would pass by and congregate near the Sailors’ Union Hall in downtown Aberdeen, where IWW organizers had begun their outreach efforts. The favored spot was near a saloon owned by a city councilman. The City Council didn’t like the IWW, seeing them as subversives, so it passed an ordinance prohibiting street speaking in the locality.

But the City Council chose to look the other way for one group in particular, another group that was interested in the laborers, or at least in their souls – the Salvation Army.

The Wobblies didn’t like this one bit.

Joe Hill, an immigrant from Sweden who had worked his way across the country as a laborer in factories and mines, and on farms and waterfronts, had joined the IWW once he made it to California. He mocked the “Starvation Army” in a song that parodied their hymn “In the Sweet Bye and Bye”:

Long-haired preachers come out every night, Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right; But when asked how ’bout something to eat They will answer with voices so sweet:

You will eat, bye and bye, In that glorious land above the sky; Work and pray, live on hay, You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.

The IWW kept up their protests of the Aberdeen ordinance, suffering vigilante violence in the process. In January of 1912, the City Council passed another ordinance – this time outlawing all street speaking. The Salvation Army, too, had to lie low.

But the IWW wasn’t contented. This was about the principle of free speech as well as organizing workers. They staged another protest, complete with singing, soap boxing, a boycott of local merchants, and a lot of bad publicity.

Eager to avoid the kind of destructive conflict that had gripped Spokane a couple of years earlier during IWW-led protests, the city of Aberdeen reached a settlement with the Wobblies. They consented, finally, to street speaking. The Wobblies moved the free-speech fight on to other cities, and organized a massive strike that closed every wood-working plant on Grays Harbor.

The timber industry eventually met many IWW demands, such as clean bedding and the 8-hour workday, during World War I. According to Hughes and Beckwith:

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

The Wobblies didn’t get everything they set out to get as an organization. They wanted all workers united into “One Big Union.” It hasn’t happened. They wanted workers to unite to overthrow capitalism. Capitalism is still here, a hundred years later (and so are the Wobblies).

But the city fathers in Aberdeen became afraid of them. Lumber company owners were afraid of them, and so were Chamber of Commerce managers. The U.S. Army became afraid of them. That’s quite a feat.

References

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

The Smallpox-infected Blankets

Repost from the old site. Oh, how the American Indians love this story! I’ve heard it endlessly. Did you know that the US gave these evil blankets to Indians all over the country, even here in California? Or Hudson Bay traders gave them to Indians in Canada? That those blankets wiped out “generations” of Indians? That the US gave them out to reservation Indians in the 1800’s? That Puritans gave out the blankets to Massachusetts Indians? Neither did I. Ward Churchill said the US Army gave Indians them diseased blankets. He lied, and he should have known better. It’s always nice to track down a myth, or is it really a myth? So let’s track it down. Turns out, Americans never gave smallpox blankets to any Indians anywhere at anytime. Not the government, not the Army, not anyone. So we are absolved on that one. The incident in question occurred in 1763, before there even was a USA, before there even were Americans. And American colonists (pre-Americans) didn’t do it either. It was the British that done the deed, and the one man who is always accused of doing it never even did it. Further, it was in the midst of a horrible and genocidal war (on both sides) called French and Indian War, with which the rebellion is often incorrectly associated. In the aftermath of that war, the area which had been ruled by the French was now ruled by the British. And the Indians, far from reflexively hating every White man around, had previously adjusted well to French rule and were angry about now being ruled by the British. The Indians hated the deal they were getting from the British, who were sawed-off shotgun-type muskets so they could hide them under their blankets. The Indians were horrible and vicious in the course of this war, and the British were too. But it was the British who were really getting pounded. Whole forts were being overwhelmed by 300-strong Indian armies, and after the storming, the Indians would kill everyone in the place, soldiers, women, kids, anyone. The Indians were raiding towns, settlements and schools and killing every White they could find. These were some of the most hard-ass Indians in the history of the Indian Wars. Further, the Indians actually made an alliance of many tribes living in the area during this war, which is incredible, since the Indians usually hated their neighbors so much they would not even ally with them to fight the Whites. In the course of the Pontiac Rebellion, a famous British general named Lord Jeffrey Amherst wrote a letter to his subordinate among the besieged British troops in one of the forts suggesting that they give the Indians smallpox-infected blankets. Turns out that this 5 Another example of a big fat myth/legend/historical incident, that, once you cut it open – well, there’s nothing much there. The tactics in this war were downright terrifying. At one point the city of Detroit itself was contribution to support the continuation of the site.

TNB in Wisconsin

Here. “Typical Negro Behavior”* in Wisconsin. Whenever you hear about something like this happening, it’s always and only Blacks, never any other race. Note that the comments indicate that the crowd was 10 Here is what happened. A group of 50-60 young people gathered outside the mall and raised a ruckus. Then they burst into the main mall door and ran amok in stores for 10 minutes, knocking over and attempting to destroy any merchandise in their path. They also smashed windows. They ran very quickly, so it was hard to stop them or catch them. Within 10 minutes, store owners had locked all of their front doors and security managed to get the punks out of the mall into the parking lot. In the parking lot, the general mayhem continued. A shot was fired, and an armed robbery was reported to police. Keep in mind that this was not a politically motivated riot. They were just destroying the mall for kicks, for fun, for a blast. Could you imagine 50-60 young Whites gathered outside a mall in the US, firing guns and committing armed robberies, who then burst into the mall and run amok in the mall for 10 minutes, trying to destroy any merchandise in their paths, and smashing any windows they could find along the way? I can’t imagine it, and I’ve never heard of it. Not only that, but I’ve never heard of any other race doing such things. Even Hispanics don’t stoop this low. Polynesians? Nope. Asians? Forget it. Name one other race that acts this way. One. This is exclusively Black behavior, from all I can tell. If someone can produce evidence of non-Blacks acting ever acting this way, please do so. *Typical Negro Behavior and its less pleasant related phrasings is in ugly term. For one thing, it isn’t necessarily typical Black behavior. But as it has evolved, TNB has come to mean the worst possible stereotypical Black behavior. It is in this sense that we will use it on this site. We are not trying to imply that the worst Black behavior is by any means typical for your average Black person.

So I Caught This Fish…

I gutted it, dried it in the sun for a few days, then I soaked in a vat of lye for several days…why, I dunno, because I’m insane I guess…and then I ate it, like an idiot. And I must say, it tasted…weird, but…it was…edible…I guess. But why would anyone… Eat such a thing?

Idiot Latino Politician Wants to Boycott Arizona, But Can’t Find it on a Map

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQp8M0bkarM]

I actually feel sorry for this woman, because, her stupid Latino tribal politics aside, she’s a good liberal Democratic Supervisor from Milwaukee. There are also a lot of comments calling her fat, but for an Hispanic woman of her age or so, she’s not really fat. She’s just normal. Past a certain age, fat is simply normal for US Hispanic women. The Hispanic guys could care less, and past a certain age, most of them are fat too.

Latino bullshit politics aside, I like Latino politicians, and here in California, I usually just go down the list on my ballot and vote for all the Latinos and against all the Whites, because the Latinos are always liberal, and the Whites are usually conservatards. If she was running in my area, I would probably vote for her, in spite of the fact that she’s stupid. Have some sympathy for stupid! Come on! If you start hating all the stupid people, you’ll hardly have anyone to talk to, and you’ll be home alone, smarty pants! And what’s so smart about being a shut-in?

On the other hand, I want to whop my liberal sister over the head with something, maybe a frozen burrito.

Here she is at a Milwaukee county meeting arguing that the county should boycott Arizona because Arizona is being all mean to her good folks. And hey, it’s true.

But halfway through the spiel, she has a stupid attack. She declares that Arizona’s law would make sense if Arizona was on the border with Mexico, but since Arizona is quite a ways from the Mexico border, the law is simply outrageous. Yeah, Arizona is quite a ways from the Mexican border, sure. For hundreds of miles, it’s like zero inches from Mexico! She even suggests that people use Google to check out about the law. She should have used Google herself to figure out how to read a damn map of her own damned country.

Later, a Republican White dude chimes in to give her a geography lesson and say that he supports Arizona Whites cracking down on Mexican burrito-biters, I mean illegal aliens.

I wanted to do a face palm when I saw that. I actually cringed. This is so embarrassing. It’s like someone went down to the local Taco Bell and picked up some random Latina, threw her in front of the podium and asked her to give a retarded speech. OK, so she’s fat, stupid and liberal. It could be worse. She could be fat, stupid and conservative. Then she could change her name to Rushette Limbaugh and get her own radio show.

My dear liberal politicians, please do your homework if you’re going to give a speech. The conservatards have practically cornered the market on stupid, so how are we going to beat them? Do stupid at a loss and drive them out of the stupid business? Give it up.

I wonder why she couldn’t find the state of Arizona on a map. Maybe it wasn’t on the map. Just look at her. Maybe she ate the state of Arizona. She looks like she could have.

There, I made a fat joke!

Sorry hun. Lay off the chimichangas hermana, and keep the liberal faith. Si se puede!

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.

Derrion Albert Beating Death Video

The video has been removed following discussions with WordPress staff. Try here instead. This video shows the melee on the south side of Chicago in which groups of Black youfs from two different schools, all future NFL players, engaged in a fight in the streets which resulted in the death of Derrion Albert, a 16 year old boy said to be an honor student. The fight occurred on Thursday, September 24. The video is not that bad; it just shows a fight. After Albert goes down, his prone body is blurred out. This sort of thing happens all the time in Chicago, but the fact that an honor student bought it this time has promoted a spate of articles. Albert is said to be an innocent bystander who just accidentally strolled into the middle of the brawl or was accidentally caught up in it. That is certainly possible. The brawl took place as students were getting out of school and the streets were blanketed with students. When a brawl takes place in such a situation, obviously a bystander could happen to get caught up in it. However, I have reviewed this tape extensively, and I conclude that Derrion Albert may not have been so innocent after all. Although the cellphone video is not the best and I don’t have the necessary tech to slow down videos or review frame by frame, after repeated viewings, it seems that Albert deliberately ran into the middle of the fight and then participated in some sort of fighting. The fighters on the other side seem to have retaliated against him for this. One hit him in the head with a large plank of wood. After that, he falls to the ground, but gets up quickly. As soon as he gets up, he is immediately punched in the face and hit again with the railroad tie and goes down hard. This time he stays down. At least one person comes up and kicks him in the head several ties when he was down. Somewhere in this rain of blows, he suffered enough injuries that he was killed. Bystanders quickly surround him, keep people away from him, and then cover his prone body with some sort of a white sheet. I don’t think this kid deserved to get killed, and he may well have been an honor student. But I’m not so sure, looking at the video, that he’s so innocent. Right before he gets hit with the board, it looks like he tries to punch a member of the opposing faction. The fight occurred in SW Chicago in the 300 block of West 111th Street. My mother grew up around 65th Street in the 30’s and 40’s. Back then, the area where the fight occurred was White and safe, but not anymore. It’s now a heavily Black ghetto, but there seem to be a lot of Whites and Hispanics in the area too. The fight occurred around Fenger High School. This is a notorious ghetto school with tons of problems and lots of violence. The fight was between two groups of youths from different areas, one from the Altglen Housing Project and one from an area known as the “ville.” Altglen is a notorious project. This is where Obama did some of his earlier community organizing work. His claim to fame there was asbestos removal at the project. This area is not far from where Chicago wants to host the 2016 Olympics. At this rate, they may as well call it the Gladiator Games.

American Vice: Mapping the 7 Deadly Sins

Here, a fascinating series of maps. Your assignment, just to piss PC Idiots off, is to analyze the maps in terms of demographics and race. Greed is highest on the East Coast, in California, in Washington State and Oregon, in Arizona, in Texas and around Chicago, in lower Michigan, in Florida and in the Rust Belt. These are all places where there are concentrations of wealth. The measure was based on “Average income compared with number of people living below the poverty line.” What this means is that this is where extremes of wealth and poverty exist. They exist in Arizona, California and Florida because of mass Hispanic immigration. Hispanics can probably only create societies with extremes of wealth and poverty, and the Hispanic elite which has settled in Florida has created the most outrageous and reactionary mirror of a Latin American banana republic shithole you could imagine. Why? Because that’s what they do. That’s what they create in Latin America, so that’s what they are going to create when you import them to the US. In California and Arizona, there are still a lot of rich people, mostly rich White people. This has recently been combined with the insanity of importing millions of Mesoamerican urban poor and peasants with an average 5th grade education. Predictably, they have created mass poverty and slums wherever they have settled. Combine this with the rich Whites you get greed on the map. I have no explanations for the high greed coefficients around Chicago, lower Michigan and the Rust Belt, but there is a lot of Black poverty and there are a lot of wrecked cities in this region. I can’t understand the high readings on the liberal White East Coast or in Washington State/Oregon either. Interestingly, the South, including the Black Belt, scores low on greed. Maybe there is not much money to go around? The next map is Envy, or the Ripoff Map. It’s a map of theft. Predictably, it’s high in Arizona, central California and Washington State. Extremes of inequality cause tons of crime, especially theft, but you can never get a conservative to admit this basic fact of human nature. The South, including the Black Belt, has tons of theft. Presumably, Blacks are doing a lot of this stealing, but I am curious to what extent Southern Whites are thieves too. I have always heard that Southern Whites also have a high crime rate. In that respect, Southern crime may be more of a regionalism than a race thing per se. Also lots of ripoff in lower Michigan and Rust Belt. We do have lots of Blacks there, lots of wrecked cities and abandoned industry, along with extremes of wealth and poverty. That sounds like a recipe for Ripoff Central. Also quite a bit of ripoff in eastern Oklahoma and NE Texas, which I cannot explain. The Wrath Map, or violent crime map, is most interesting. Once again, high rates in Central California which are not explainable. Arizona has lots of violent crime, possibly due to Hispanics. So does New Mexico, and I cannot explain that. So does Southern Missouri, East Texas, Eastern Oklahoma, Tennessee, Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina and  Southern North Carolina. Yet Mississippi has little and Alabama has much less than the rest. One is tempted to say “Black Belt”, except that I have always heard that those wonderful Southern White folks have always had a very high violent crime rate. In particular a high homicide rate. And it’s been that way for 200 years or so. I chalk it up to culture. Southern Michigan has some violent crime, but the Rust Belt does not. Go figure? There’s also quite a bit of violent crime being committed those White redneck mountain men in far Western Montana. Huh? So much on these maps hardly makes sense. Next up we have Sloth, and this map doesn’t tell us much except that Americans are not particularly sloth-like, nor are they all that workaholic. In the Yellowstone region, we find the laziest folks of all, what with all that elk hunting and flyfishing in the rivers. That includes Western Montana, where the homicidal herds of Whites roam. I guess when they are not shooting each other, they are practicing on elk and deer? The Gluttony map tells us little except that Texas is full of fatties, steer-shaped guys and gals wearing outsized beltbuckles and deep fat-frying anything no longer moving. Appalachia is full of unhealthy eaters and so is the Washington DC area, except for Michelle’s organic garden I guess. Now for my favorite subject: Lust! This is a VD map, unfortunately, not a Get Laid Map. One would think that wherever you have lots of queers you have tons of  VD, but it doesn’t show on the map. Instead we get the South. And indeed, it does look something like the Black Belt. I know Blacks like to screw a lot, but how about Southern Whites? Are they all prim and proper, going to Church every Sunday and Bible Study during the week? One wonders. There are some strange anomalies on there – the Black Hills, NE Arizona, until one realizes that these are Indian reservations. Indians like to screw a lot? I never knew. I thought Indian maidens were all shy and reserved and proper. We also have tons of uncontrollable sex maniacs in East Central New Mexico and across the border in West Texas (Bible Belt). I don’t understand this one at all. Once again, we have lots of evil, this time Sex Evil, in NE Texas, which I don’t understand. Lot of Black folks there? Lot of screwing in southern Michigan, once again a lot of Blacks. Thaaat’s all, folks!

James Loewen's (Sundown Towns) Ethnicity

James Loewen’s ethnicity is the subject of speculation among White nationalists. Loewen is the author of Lies My Teacher Told Me and Sundown Towns, and he has a Sundown Towns project up on his website. He’s extremely liberal, but most sociologists are like that nowadays. I do support his Sundown Towns project and the book sounds great, but then, I’m not a White nationalist. As far as I am concerned, anyone can live anywhere they want to, and indeed, housing charters are illegal, as they ought to be. I am not so sure of the wisdom of distributing Section 8 Ghetto Blacks all over nice towns and cities, but I do not think that that is Loewen’s project. One thing I disagree with Loewen on is that White Flight is always a symptom of White racism. It can be, but generally, it is not. If Blacks as a group acted like Asians, I doubt if many would have a problem with them. Blacks claim people hate them just because of how they look, but I doubt it. If they acted like Chinese people, how many would hate them for their dark skin and African features? Get real. Black behavior in the aggregate, particularly among young Blacks, especially among young Black males, is the cause of much racism against all Blacks in the US. The assimilated types pay with racism for the sins of the Underclass. Most Whites, at least here in California, are pretty reasonable these days, but no one in their right mind wants to live with ghetto types. I wish Loewen and his crowd with acknowledge that. One thing that Loewen is wrong on is that in his Lies My Teacher Told Me he suggests that the Olmecs of Mexico may have come from Africa. No sensible anthropologists promote this theory, and in fact, it is insulting and even racist towards Amerindians of the Mexico, implying that they are too incompetent to create a great culture, and that such expertise would have had to have been imported from outside. The African looking features on Olmec statues are actually Mexican Amerindian looking, especially the flat faces. Africans have marked prognathism as a group, and Mexican Amerindians have faces that are nearly flat on a prognathism scale. They only appear prognathic to us Whites because are extremely non-prognathic on the prognathism scale. That is, Whites score about -2 on the prognathism scale (receding lower faces) whereas Amerindians score about 0 (totally flat faces). Because they are more prognathic than we are, it is assumed that Amerindians are prognathic, while we Whites are not. It’s just an illusion. Such a myth is common among Latin American Whites. I have a chart that shows this, and maybe I will upload it later. About Loewen’s ethnicity – I have an email to him, but he may not respond. He responded to me earlier though, when I sent him a mail about his Sundown Towns project. I just did 20 minutes of research on the guy, and I am almost certain that he is a German Catholic. Loewen is either German or Jewish, but his Mom’s name is Winifred (German, not Jewish), he teaches at a Catholic University (How many Jews do that?!), he comes from Decatur, IL (few Jews, probably lots of Germans), and his phenotype appears to be Middle German or High German. He has a classic German face that few if any Jews have. Further, he appears to be tall and angular. Another classic German type that few Jews share. Specifically, that phenotype appears to be either Nordic or Noric (cross between Nordic and Dinaric), if I am not mistaken. I have an email to him, but he may not respond.

The Death of Detroit

Repost from the old site: Racists and White nationalists (in practice, identical) like to blame Detroit’s problems on the fact that it is full of Black folks. This is what happens when you have a Black majority city, in the US, Hell, anywhere, they say. I was wondering about it myself for a long time. How about another look at things? From a Detroit Free Press article, now a dead link, so I am going to violate copyright here, and the article is 10 years old anyway:

A Historian Dissects Detroit’s Trouble

Thomas Sugrue, native Detroiter, historian and author of The Origins of the Urban Crisis , has spent 20 years in major cities in the United States and in London. He came to the Free Press in the summer of 1998 to talk about the conditions that created present-day Detroit, and the implications for journalists. These are excerpts from his talk. Anyone who has spent time in cities like Detroit in America’s former industrial heartland can’t help but be struck by the eerily apocalyptic landscapes that are so common as one passes through these places. I asked a simple, but very difficult question: “Why?” After digging around in the papers of unions and business, civil rights organizations, census data, city records and countless newspaper articles, I arrived at the conclusion that follows: Detroit’s woes began, not in the 1960s with the riot, not with the election of Coleman Young as mayor, not with the rise of international competition and the auto industry’s globalization, they began amid the steaming prosperity and consensus of the 1950s, and in an era about which we have very little to go on apart from hoary shibboleths and cliches.

A THREE-PART STORY

Three sweeping changes transformed the city. These three things, occurring simultaneously and interacting, dramatically reshaped the metropolis of Detroit and other metropolises like it. First was deindustrialization, the flight of jobs away from the city, something that began unnoticed and unheralded in the 1950s. Next was persistent racial discrimination in labor markets. Racial discrimination remained a very persistent problem despite decades of civil rights activism and some improvement in attitudes and beliefs. Finally was intense residential segregation, a division of the metropolitan area into two metropolitan areas: one black and one white. Any one of these forces would have been devastating, but the fact that all three of them occurred simultaneously and interacted with each other proved to have devastating consequences.

WORKPLACE DISCRIMINATION

World War II was a great moment of opportunity for working-class Detroiters, black and white alike. The city was a magnet for workers coming from other parts of the country. African-Americans had been pretty much closed out of the industries that provided skilled jobs, but that pretty much ended during World War II. Only 3 percent of auto workers in Detroit were black in 1940. By 1945, 15 percent of the city’s auto workers were African American. Detroit, then, became a magnet for black migrants who heard about these great opportunities. But the reality for black workers, even in this window of opportunities, was a great deal more complicated and harsher and more frustrating than those statistics would lead us to believe.

DEINDUSTRIALIZATION

One of the supreme ironies of post-war Detroit is that, just as discrimination was under siege, just as blacks found a small window of opportunity in the city’s labor market, that job base began to fall away. First, beginning in the late ’40’s, and especially in the 1950s, began a process that has continued right up to the present. Jobs began to move out of places like Detroit to low-wage regions in other parts of the United States and the world. Companies in Detroit began picking up and moving their production to rural Indiana and Ohio, increasingly to the South and, by the 1970s and beyond, increasingly to the Third World — places where wages and other standards were lower than they were in Detroit. At the same time, industry in Detroit was changing from within. There was introduction of automation, of new, labor-saving technology within the factories. The consequence was a dramatic decline in the number of manufacturing jobs, solid, blue-collar jobs, the jobs that made Detroit the city that it was. Between 1947 and 1963, a period of unprecedented national economic prosperity, Detroit lost 134,000 manufacturing jobs. This is not the ’70s. This is not when there is any competition from Germany and Japan and Korea for automobiles. These are jobs that were picking up and moving to other parts of the country, or these were jobs that were being replaced by machines. Workers who had come to Detroit during World War II, seeking opportunities, found their choices seriously constrained. The workers who suffered the worst were African Americans, and they suffered because of seniority. African Americans, because they didn’t get their foot into the door until the 1940s, were the first to be fired. So, when companies began moving out of Detroit, the burden was borne disproportionately by black Detroiters. So, in the midst of the 1950s, 15.9 percent of blacks were unemployed, but only 6 percent of whites were unemployed, so we’re talking about black unemployment two and a half times the rate of white unemployment.

RESIDENTIAL DISCRIMINATION

The third and, indeed, probably the most pernicious force was residential discrimination by race. The city was divided into districts by race, divided by invisible lines. These invisible lines were drawn in a whole bunch of different ways by different groups. The federal government subsidized housing development for whites through the Federal Housing Administration and Home Owners Loan Corporation. But federal policies prohibited making loans to risky properties, and risky properties, according to federal standards, meant homes in old or homes in racially or ethnically heterogeneous neighborhoods. It meant that, if you were a black trying to build your own home or trying to get a loan to purchase a home, you had many obstacles to face, whereas if you were a white it was really quite easy. Real estate investors reinforced these invisible racial lines by steering black home buyers to certain neighborhoods and white home buyers to certain other neighborhoods, and stirring up racial anxiety when neighborhoods were along that invisible boundary. In one west-side neighborhood, in the late 1950s, there were more than 50 real estate agents working a several-block area trying to persuade panicked whites to sell now and sell fast because “they’re moving in.” Real estate agents even went so far as to pay African-American women to walk their children through all-white streets to encourage panic among white homeowners. Also reinforcing these invisible boundaries were the actions of ordinary people. There were more than 200 violent racial incidents that accompanied the first blacks who moved into formerly white neighborhoods in Detroit. If you were the first black to move into a formerly all-white block, you could expect, certainly, for your house to be pelted with rocks and stones. In one case, a tree stump went through a window. Regularly, vandals would break 20, 30 — every window in a house. Arson was another popular tactic. As newspaper reporters, if such an incident were happening today, you can be sure that you would be covering it, but until 1956, there was not a mention of any of these incidents in Detroit’s daily newspapers. They were off the radar of the major dailies. This process of housing discrimination set into motion a chain reaction. Blacks were poorer than whites and they had to pay more for housing. They had a harder time getting loans. Hence, they spent more of their income on the purchase of real estate. They were, by and large, confined to the oldest houses in the city, houses that needed lots of repair work. Many of their houses deteriorated as a consequence of them being older, not being able to get loans and folks not having all that much money in their pockets. City officials looked out onto the poor housing stock in poor neighborhoods and said, “we should tear this down.” Moreover, the fact that housing stock was old and in many cases deteriorating in black neighborhoods provided seemingly irrefutable evidence to whites that blacks were irresponsible. “We kept up our property, why aren’t they keeping up their property? Finally, this neighborhood deterioration seemed to lenders definitive proof that blacks were a poor credit risk and justified disinvestment.

CONCLUSION

To talk about Detroit’s problems beginning in 1967, or beginning with the election of Coleman Young, or beginning with the globalization of the 1970s is to miss the boat. The pattern of workplace discrimination, of the massive loss of jobs, of the residential balkanization of the city into black and white — this was already well established by 1967. It wasn’t Coleman Young that led to the harsh racial divisions between blacks and whites in metropolitan Detroit. It was there, and had been festering for a long time. It wasn’t the riot that led to disinvestment from the city of Detroit. Disinvestment had been going on very significantly for years. And it wasn’t globalization that led to the loss of jobs. That loss of jobs was going on when the auto industry was at its very peak.

IMPLICATIONS

We focus on changing the attitudes and motivations of individual workers, rather than challenging larger discriminatory practices. We have a policy mismatch, a gap between the reality that I have described and the policy recommendations to try to address those problems. The premise of welfare reform is to put welfare recipients to work. The problem is that the areas with the greatest job growth in the metropolitan area tend to be the farthest away from where the poorest folk live, in the outer suburbs largely inaccessible by public transportation. So there’s a gap between the reality of jobs and job loss and a policy solution. Another major one,is downtown revitalization and tourism: “Build casinos and they will come. You need to deal with the deeply rooted problems I’ve described: job flight, racial segregation, discrimination. We need to think about providing poor people with access to secure, well-paying jobs, wherever those jobs might be. We need to begin thinking more creatively than we have with the real problem of racial division in our city and in our nation. Conversations on race are not enough. We need to deal with the reality of economic and residential division.

From the Google link to Sugrue’s book, also apparently a dead link, but I copied the text anyway:

The Origins of the Urban Crisis, by Thomas J. Sugrue

Once America’s “arsenal of democracy,” Detroit over the last fifty years has become the symbol of the American urban crisis. In this reappraisal of racial and economic inequality in modern America, Thomas Sugrue explains how Detroit and many other once prosperous industrial cities have become the sites of persistent racialized poverty. He challenges the conventional wisdom that urban decline is the product of the social programs and racial fissures of the 1960s. Probing beneath the veneer of 1950s prosperity and social consensus, Sugrue traces the rise of a new ghetto, solidified by changes in the urban economy and labor market and by racial and class segregation. In this provocative revision of postwar American history, Sugrue finds cities already fiercely divided by race and devastated by the exodus of industries. He focuses on urban neighborhoods, where white working-class homeowners mobilized to prevent integration as blacks tried to move out of the crumbling and overcrowded inner city. Weaving together the history of workplaces, unions, civil rights groups, political organizations, and real estate agencies, Sugrue finds the roots of today’s urban poverty in a hidden history of racial violence, discrimination, and deindustrialization that reshaped the American urban landscape after World War II. In a new preface, Sugrue discusses the ongoing legacies of the postwar transformation of urban America and engages recent scholars who have joined in the reassessment of postwar urban, political, social, and African American history.

See also The Fire Last Time, from the Washington Post last year, for more along the same lines.

Bad Place to Visit, Wouldn't Want To Live There

Repost from the old site. This article has produced a tremendous amount of controversy, angry comments, and even, oddly enough, virulent hate mail. I guess I hit some raw nerves. I stand by my comments that these cities are some of the worst in the world, and, in doing further research on the Net, have found only further support for my thesis. Some of these cities, such as Bogotá, for instance, have large wealthy districts that are apparently quite pleasant. If one is rich, one can make a nice life just about anywhere on the globe. But this is not important – what is important is how the majority live. The title is a play on the line, “Nice place to visit, wouldn’t want to live there”, said about many less-than-desirable tourist locales. This post is about the worst places on Earth to visit, and probably to live too. The ratings were based on research done on the Internet in various places, including here and here. I’m going to focus on the places that are dirty, smelly, crime-ridden, trashy, rip-off havens, unsanitary and dangerous (Third World), and avoid places that are merely depressing, unsightly, rude, etc. (First World). Why? Because I live in the US, and those Third World qualities are going to be the most disturbing to me. I’m also avoiding active war zones because everyone knows they are horrible. To be fair to the “Third Worldists” out there, I noted that many people slammed various places in France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Finland, South Korea, Ireland Italy, the US, Great Britain and Australia for various reasons, mostly because they are said to be unfriendly, depressing, tacky, cheesy, boring, etc. Detroit seemed to top the list as worst US city, along with Newark (though it had one fan), East St. Louis and New Haven (though some liked New Haven) were runners-up. Various small towns in the Rockies (especially Idaho) and Texas also were listed. For some reason, a lot of people hate Vancouver, BC in Canada. To my thinking, many of the horrible cities below point out the catastrophe of Latin American, Indian, Indonesian and Philippine capitalism. In much of Africa, capitalism doesn’t seem to working very well. For all its faults, impoverished Cuba certainly does not resemble any of these Latin American hellholes in any way, shape or form. I don’t think that capitalism in the First World is failing, but looking at many of the cities below, it’s hard to argue that capitalism is doing anything but failing in those places. Some of the winners in the Loser Destination Contest: Colon, Panama: A dirty, crime-ridden disaster of a city. The most dangerous city in Latin America, full of residents who seem like they would just as soon knife you as say hello. Other than the free trade zone, the entire city seems to be sprawling slum. Colon has no redeeming qualities. This city topped many worst lists. Guayaquil and Quito, Ecuador: Guayaquil is horrible. A stinking, steaming, downright dangerous heap of a city with miles of slums. With armies of glowering gang members, this place is dangerous even in mid-day. There are garbage dumps everywhere with corpses laying out in plain sight and guns going off all the time. Quito is similar. Guayaquil topped many worst city lists. Johannesburg, South Africa: How sad that this country now has one of the worst violent crime rates on Earth. Although popular with tourists, this city is downright dangerous. This city also topped many worst lists. This blog supports the Mandela government, but the problems of this tragic nation seem insurmountable. ***** Lagos, Nigeria, or the whole country: This city, and even the whole country, seems to top everyone’s list. Garbage is everywhere, the city stinks, the poverty is horrible, animals are slaughtered on the streets, and it seems that at least half the population wakes up every morning thinking, “Who can I rip off today?” Up to 9 Nigeria has what must be the worst government on Earth and the country is rated the second most corrupt on Earth. The national airlines are dangerous and not recommended. The ripoff attempts often start as soon as you land at the airport and won’t let up until you leave. It’s best to assume that most, if not all, Nigerians you meet in Lagos are out to rip you off in some way or another and then proceed from there. The city is full of impostors, and you really do not know if anyone is really who they say they are. The police and Customs officials are all crooks and so is 9 Most bank and post office employees are also crooked. Imagine waiting in line at the post office, and a group of swaggering gangsters with fake ID’s strut in to pick up their stolen goods reshipped from overseas. They go straight to the front of the line ahead of everyone else, pick up their stolen property, and walk away laughing, having paid off the Post Office clerks. Welcome to Nigeria. There are Internet cafes all over the city, where 150,000 full-time Internet scammers ply their trade in plain view of anyone to see, and the government doesn’t bat an eye or lift one finger to stop them. In many cafes, 8 The scammers started out with the famous 419 email scams but have now branched out into lottery, romance, auction, roommate, orphanage and check-cashing scams. The scams are continuously evolving, and Nigerian con artists are widely acknowledged to be some of the best in the world, as they have been practicing the art for decades now. On highways outside of Lagos, you can see numerous vehicles wrecked on the side of the road, or even in the middle of the road, some with dead bodies still in them or beside them. Thieves pick through the wreckage and rifle the corpses looking for stuff to steal. All of the roads are dangerous, as armed robbers often set up roadblocks to shake down travelers. Nigeria is now a world center for counterfeit pharmaceuticals, credit card fraud and drug dealing, and a district of Lagos, Oluwole, is now a world center for top-notch forgery. The FBI and the US Merchant Risk Council recently came to Nigeria and inspected 40 packages coming into the country from the US to check for stolen goods. 39 of the 40 packages contained stolen property. When the agents arrived at a Lagos neighborhood and tried to arrest an 18-year-old boy for reshipping scams that targeted US merchants, much of the neighborhood – up to 100 people – rushed out of their homes to defend the local punk from Big Bad Whitey. Although the country is awash in oil, the power goes out all the time because the government power company is so crooked. The power company has either stolen all of its own budget money or the power comes in, but the crooked company resells it on the side. As with elsewhere in Africa, Whitey is blamed for all the troubles here. Hatred of Whitey is higher in Nigeria than in much of the rest of Black Africa and the White visitor will definitely feel it. The degeneration of Nigerian society is complete, and the culture appears near collapse. Mobs lynch thieves in the street and kill them in public for as meager a crime as stealing a cellphone, yet crime rages on anyway. Anyone can just up and say they own your house, put it on the market and sell it and you are out a house. Law enforcement, courts and anything resembling government seem to be nonexistent. ****** ****** Lima, Peru: When they tell you to visit Peru, they don’t mean the nightmarish capital. There are teeming slums as far as the eye can see, horrible crime (although not a lot of violent crime), pickpockets everywhere, and on top of all that, the sun never comes out. The fog mixes with the smog and the filthy streets to make a toxic brew. Lima made many worst lists. But it has its fans, and the upscale Miraflores district is said to be nice. The execrable Shining Path took up their nihilistic, deranged war in this country for a reason – because Peru is a rotten heap of a country. ****** ****** Medan (Sumatra), Jakarta, Surabaya, Indonesia: Jakarta is a reeking city with terrible pollution, open sewers and wrenching poverty. Medan seemed to top many lists for worst city on Earth, though it has a few fans. It’s hot, dirty and polluted, with factories, thieves and leering, menacing men everywhere. There is also nowhere to stay, not that you would want to stay anyway. Besides Medan, the rest of Sumatra is much better. The river running through Surabaya is so polluted you might vomit walking across the bridge. As you suppress your gag reflex, you will look down and notice that people are actually washing their clothes in this river. ***** ***** Mumbai, Patna (Bihar), Calcutta, all large Indian cities, India: Indian cities are very dirty and teeming with some of the most miserably poor and wretched people you will ever see, but at least there is not a lot of crime. The Hindu religion keeps crime down because believers fear they will be punished by returning in the next life as something terrible, like one of the huge rats you see scurrying about. Mumbai has pollution that is so bad that people actually get lung cancer from breathing the air. Mumbai, a stinking and sometimes dangerous city, made many worst city lists. Patna is the sorry capital of Bihar, the poorest state in India. It’s dirty and miserable, and it’s almost impossible to even get a taxi to get you out of town, which means it’s hard to leave the place. Calcutta is generally agreed to be one of the worst cities in India. ***** Guangzhou, Chengdu, Shenyang, China: Deadly pollution, mostly from coal. Bucharest, all of Romania: Stalinist pollution covers the whole country and everyone seems depressed. Bali (in particular Kuta Beach), Indonesia: Hopes so high, reality so low. It seems everyone is out to rip you off. Surly locals hungry for money. Dangerous roads, nightmarish traffic, rude, leering men. When it rains, the sewers flood into the streets. Very high crime rate, hustlers everywhere. Most of the rest of Indonesia is pretty nice. Kuta is a tourist trap gone to Hell. **** Manila, Philippines: A crime-ridden hellhole. There are armed guards everywhere, especially in front of banks due to constant bank robberies. Their nemeses, criminal gangs armed to the teeth, roam streets filled with prostitutes and transvestites. It’s a town where everyone seems like they are out to rip you off in one way or other, and the hotel workers and cab drivers are all crooked. The latest advice is to have your Filipino friend meet you at the airport and head straight to their place, thereby avoiding all the ripoffs and con artists that seem to descend on every tourist. Traffic is horrible, and pollution is so bad it kills people. But some people don’t mind it. **** Gdansk, Poland: Combine a high crime rate and daylight robberies with totally crooked, thieving officials, and you get this Polish city. However, a number of others said it’s just fine. **** Mexico City, Villahermosa, Mexico: Mexico City is a dirty, polluted city suffering an insane, surreal epidemic of street crime, especially violent crime. Add 20 million people, stir well, bring to a boil, cover with a lid of otherworldly smog, and simmer. Reportedly, tons of human waste are blown into the air every day, and much of the population has constant respiratory infections. The sewer system is reportedly above ground and more or less runs through lots of neighborhoods where many people are residing. Villahermosa is a Mad Max-style, violent, crime-ridden disgrace of a city. There are stabbings and shootings galore here, even with a 10 PM curfew in place. ***** Tangier, Morocco: This is a dangerous place with lots of street crime. That’s unusual for a North African country, but Tangier is so close to Europe that it is almost a part of Europe. ***** Cairo, Egypt: Cairo has horrible pollution, smells terrible, there is trash everywhere, nothing works, there are armies of miserably poor people and it boasts some outrageously awful traffic. In the souks there are huge rats and wild, mangy scavenging dogs running about in plain sight. There seems no escape from aggressive, pestering hawkers. On top of all that, all the Customs officials are criminals. The crime rate is fairly low, though. Thank President Hosni Mubarak. 25 years ago, Cairo was one of the great world cities. ***** Bangkok, Thailand: This gigantic city has pollution so bad you need to wear a mask over your face. However, some folks like this city and say it has many positive attributes. ***** Brindisi, Naples, Italy: No one seems to like Brindisi. It’s a sad, dirty, polluted and ugly city, with hostile, brawling, drunken locals, hungry stray dogs, belligerent drivers, horrible traffic, and miles of soul-killing tenements. You would think that despite all of that, being genuine Italians, they could still manage to make a decent pizza. Forget it: even the pizza is terrible. Brindisi topped many worst lists, although it has a couple of fans. I had never even heard of Brindisi and had to look it up on a map. It’s located in southern Italy on the East Coast, southeast of Naples. Naples has a great deal of crime, and many think this city is overrated as a tourist destination, although others say that, despite the drawbacks, it has its joys. All of southern Italy has a lot of crime, but it’s mostly property crime. ***** ***** Athens, Piraeus, or the whole country, Greece: Greece, especially Athens, gets mixed reviews. A lot of people really hate Athens; others don’t. The detractors say the city is dirty, ugly, depressing, polluted, and covered with garbage and traffic. I was surprised that Athens made the list, as I had always thought it was a wonderful city. The port city of Piraeus is a nasty place. The whole city smells like a giant sewage treatment plant, and the ocean offshore has a sickening color to it. ***** **** Suburbs of Paris, France: These tragic towns, full of hostile Arab immigrants angrily refusing to assimilate to French culture or join French society, are a sign that the French model is not working well, at least for some folks. There is a terribly high crime rate here, and cops and firemen often won’t go there because they get attacked as soon as they show up. These mournful towns are packed with angry, unemployed young Arab men who like to seriously riot every year or so, or even more often if the mood strikes them. Lately, they have been staging mini-riots every night. If only 100 cars are burned, that’s a good night. Otherwise, Paris, of course, is one of the world’s great cities. But that doesn’t mean you might not walk into a subway station reeking of urine and see junkies shooting up in plain sight. But still, Paris is a must on any serious travelers’ list. ****** Brussels, Belgium: As with Paris, the districts with many Arab immigrants are quite dangerous and unpleasant, but the rest of the city is as nice as any big city. Abidjan, Ivory Coast: With one of the worst crime rates in Africa (although it has plenty of competition), this city topped many worst lists. ***** Bangui, Central African Republic: One of the worst cities in Africa, as bad as Lagos. The crime rate is totally insane. The locals will try to steal everything you own and even a contingent of armed guards will not be enough to protect you. Your hotel room will feel like a war zone. This fiendish city made a number of worst city lists. Lonely Planet’s guidebook more or less tells you to avoid this city altogether. Here is a harrowing report of a visit to Bangui. ***** Bamako, Mali: Mali has one of the worst governments in Africa, admittedly a race with a lot of competition. Bamako is a sick joke of a town, where the tourist surcharge is rigorously enforced, and the ridiculous, potholed streets are undriveable by any vehicle. Guatemala City, Guatemala: A totally dangerous, dirty, polluted, terminal patient of a city, full of scary, heavily armed teenage soldiers. The soldiers are there to keep the teeming, crime-ridden slums that stretch as far as the eye can see, from overrunning the place. But this city has a few fans. Belize City, Belize: This sweltering, miserable, impoverished, crime-ridden, very dangerous city is built on a swamp, with a jungle for a backyard. The beggars are aggressive and even menacing, and shady characters shadow you on the streets as you walk about. Cops are nowhere to be seen. This is one of the worst cities in the Americas. But the rest of the country is a great place to vacation. ***** Sao Paolo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Sao Paulo is the industrial engine of Brazil. This major city is full of garbage and very dangerous. There are hustlers as far as the eye can see, chaotic streets that render maps useless, not enough cops and Godawful traffic. Rio de Janeiro, the popular tourist destination with the killer skyline perfect for any postcard, is a deceptive place. It’s a very dangerous city with lots of violent crime. Street gangs armed to the teeth regularly shoot it out in military-style wars with the cops. Death squads of off-duty cops funded by local businessmen roam the streets at night, murdering homeless, drug-addicted street kids and petty criminals with impunity in a sickening “social cleanup” campaign. There are pickpockets and muggers all about, often in menacing, youthful gangs (especially on the famous beach) and they frequently operate in broad daylight. A dystopian horrorshow of a city. ****** Nairobi, Kenya: Unfortunately, this city is seriously crime-ridden. Even locals admit that violent crime has reached catastrophic proportions. Caracas, Barquisimeto, or the whole country, Venezuela: The crime is very bad here, sadly, and there is garbage everywhere you look. This blog supports Hugo Chavez, but crime in Venezuela is a tragic, long-standing problem with no quick fixes. Guinea-Bissau: There is no water, no electricity, no place to stay, and the only hotel is half-demolished. San‘a’, Yemen: In a Dickensenian touch, children are actually chained up here in order to beg! Moynaq and Nukus, Uzbekistan: These two cities broiling in a merciless desert have been ruined and turned into ecological dead zones by Stalinist pollution. ***** San Pedro Sulu, Honduras: This sad town has a horrible amount of crime. Swarms of locals will attack you on the bus, trying to steal your luggage. You will have to fight them off if you wish to retain your suitcase. Like the rest of this wreck of a country, it’s full of US gang members gone home to Honduras. People here are very poor and desperate. If you can make it to the nice part of town and afford to stay there, though, you can be quite safe. ***** ***** Dakar, Senegal: According to some, this large West African city has horrible street crime – it is very dangerous. They say if you don’t have armed guards with you, don’t even go outside your hotel room. However, others report that they spent a week there and found it to be safe, in fact safer than many American cities. Violent crime is reportedly rare, and the country is one of the most stable in Africa, and has been that way since independence. ***** Port Au Prince, Haiti: This filthy, degraded, extremely dangerous and desperately poor mess of a city is best avoided at all costs. It sports open sewers, enslaved children, riots, killings and lots of other fun things. This blog did support President Aristide’s efforts to improve the tragedy of a nation called Haiti. Lome, Togo: Criminals are as common as mosquitoes here, walking around fearlessly in broad daylight in this terrible city full of miserable people and crooked taxi drivers. ***** Istanbul, Turkey: The 20 The rest of the country is a great place to visit, has many fans and is one of the world’s top tourist destinations. Best bet for Turkey is just to head to the tourist spots and blow off Istanbul altogether. ***** Phnom Penh, Kampuchea: This city has become a very dangerous, crime-ridden place. The gangs of little girl prostitutes add a particularly poignant touch. ***** Bogotá, Colombia or really the whole country: Bogotá is one of the most dangerous places in the Americas but there seems to be agreement that Colon, Lima and Guayaquil are worse. Really, all of Colombia is dangerous as Hell, to be honest. This comment about Bogotá was recently rebutted by a Bogotán blogger, with more comments here. His post aggressively taking issue with this entry is in Spanish, but my Spanish is good enough to get the gist of it. Also I am getting a lot of comments coming in from Bogotáns on the Internet aggressively objecting to the content. The sole issue that these Defenders of Bogotá are taking issue with is my contention that the city is a very dangerous place. To be honest, Bogotá used to have a truly horrible reputation for crime, but in recent years, there has been a huge effort put into cracking down on street crime. For some more agreement that Bogota is dangerous, see Bogotá is scopolamine. This drug is used by crooks to disable their victims so they can rip them off. It is sprayed in the face, dumped in your drink or spiked into a cigarette. Bogotá hospitals receive an incredible 2,000 scopolamine victims every month, or an astounding 66 a day. The drug knocks you out and can cause medical problems. Colombia has one of the world’s worst road systems. Many roads are not even marked. Drivers are reckless and many cars don’t have headlights at night. Cows have a tendency to wander into the road. Taxis are totally dangerous and are best avoided, if possible. Women are advised to avoid all taxis at night. Anyone is advised to avoid any taxi that already has someone in it. In many cases, this is a criminal accomplice of the thuggish driver. In addition to getting scopolamine sprayed in your face, another popular scam is the “jump-start”: you are told that the taxi has stalled and asked to get out and help push. As you do so, the taxi driver leaves with your luggage. Buses are also best avoided. Thieves haunt the buses, waiting for you to fall asleep, at which point, they rip you off. Certain bus lines are frequented by thieves offering drugged gum, sweets, food and cigarettes. After the drug knocks you out, they rob you blind. In addition to theft and druggings, kidnapping and extortion are also rife on buses. In view of all of the above, it is nothing short of amazing that all of these Colombians are angrily protesting my characterization of their country as dangerous. Or perhaps they doth protest too much? ***** Managua, Nicaragua: This dirty, crime-ridden, dangerous disaster of a city has a bombed-out look about it. This blog supports Daniel Ortega and his Sandinista Party and prays that they can ameliorate this mess. ***** San Salvador, El Salvador: See Managua. Full of dangerous former LA gang members. Death squads roam the streets, slaughtering gangsters by the dozen, but for every one you kill, it seems five more pop up in his place. This blog supports the FMLN’s efforts to reform this ruined land, but the crime here has become so terrible, one wonders if anything short of an act of God could make things better. In fact, I used to make contributions too the FMLN’s weapons fund via an FMLN agent in Los Angeles during the 1980’s. ***** ***** Detroit, New Haven, Newark, Gary (Indiana), Hammond (Indiana), USA: Detroit topped all lists as the worst city in the US. An ugly, dangerous, depressing and filthy city with a downtown that looks like a war zone – a despairing district surrounded by miles of crumbling, abandoned industrial buildings, torn-down fences and rusting cars. Newark is similar, with few to no redeeming qualities. It’s a frightening, polluted city with a postwar look of miles of weedy, trash-strewn vacant lots where crumbling apartment buildings have been torn down. It’s also a dangerous city with a high crime rate. New Haven, despite the presence of Yale University, is similar. There are legions of homeless, begging drug users clogging the streets, and the crime rate is very high due to hordes of crack-dealing gangs shooting it out on the streets. Congress and Columbus Avenues are notorious for drive-by shootings, drug dealing and muggings. It is reportedly the HIV capital of the East Coast due to IV drug use. A lot of the more respectable people have been moving out for some time now. Although much of the city is quite ugly, New Haven does have its bright spots, thanks to Yale. There are nice parts of town, parks, trees, etc. Gary is yet another postindustrial Rust Belt train wreck of a town. A grimy town full of abandoned factories, overgrown lots, rusting fences, graffiti, barred windows and vomit. Go downtown and see tall buildings all boarded up, with no vehicles in sight and unhinged stoplights swaying in the wind – for all practical purposes, a ghost town. This was once a vibrant, working-class city, and now it looks like Road Warrior. Hammond is similar, a suicidally depressing city lined with shuttered factories on the shores of Lake Michigan. Yet another Rust Belt post-industrial ruin. ***** Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic: A collapsing, dirty, crime-ridden hellhole. Osaka, Japan: I never would have thought that this city would make the list but according to my friend Tumerica, she says it is the worst city she has ever lived in. I tagged her with the title of this story. In blogging, tagging mean you are supposed to write on the topic – kind of like, “Tag, you’re it.” I will let her explain why Osaka is such a crappy place in her post here.

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

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

Factory Farms

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

Industrial Style Pollution

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

Polluted Water Supplies

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

Sick Rivers

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

Pfiesteria; the “Cell from Hell”

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

Bad Odors

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

Dangerous Gases

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

The End of the American Family Farm

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

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

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

Economic Impacts

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

Political Corruption

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

Criminal Behavior

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

Smithfield Invades Poland

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

Polish agriculture

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

Polish Foods

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

North Carolina Comes to Poland

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

The Tyranny of Monopoly Capitalism

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

Corporate Pig Factories Produce Massive MRSA Outbreaks

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

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

Exactly.

The Recrudescence of Lake Aggasiz

Why is Fargo, North Dakota flooding? I’m not happy with the current explanation, that a massive snow melt combined with ice jams in the Red River have combined to put the river 22 feet above flood level in a frighteningly flat and painfully wide flood plain. The result is bizarre – a huge prairie lake with with sunken civilization islands here and there, dotted with towns and cities somehow barely spared behind towering dikes. But historically speaking, such a vast lake of the prairies is something the land knows too well. Hence, my preferred explanation. Not meteorology and hydrolics, but instead, a haunting. From 8,400 years ago, the ghost of the greatest lake that ever existed returning to stalk the frozen plains.

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